Are you under the impression that the term “TERF” was invented in 2008 because that’s when trans exclusion became a thing?
Do you seriously think that a movement that over its lifespan at some point didn’t even include non-white women started off including non-female ones?
“Trans x are x” as a widespread progressive sociological stance is new, I don’t even know if it’s 20 years old, it may be closer to 10, even.
They were here before you, just because you disagree with them doesn’t make them not feminists.
This is a great example of what I meant, btw: progressives act like every protestant denomination, calling eachother “not real christians” not realising they are all the same brand of sanctimonious.
This is all from the perspective of a non-american from a country where thankfully we are still liberal at heart and only entertain some progressive ideas, instead of buying it wholesale, meaning the right has yet to completely cannibalise the government over the mistakes of the left.
You can want everyone to receive equal opportunity and dignity, but people are not equal and will not end in the same place once the race is over. You can’t demand equality of outcome and onboard the most competitive demographic, there is a reason if the stereotype of leftist men is passive wimps. This is completely compatible with prgressive ideas, but it’s incompatible with progressive brains, apparently.
The core idea of intersectionality is that each demographic has its own issues and they manifest differently if more demographics overlap in the same individual (e.g. sexism against white women vs sexism against black women exhibit different tropes and connotations).
This does not mean whoever has the least minoritary traits is the most acceptable target, that is some marxist “oppressor vs oppressed” horseshit and, while it was probably the intended idea, it is massively counterproductive and doesn’t have to be the actual application of the issue.
Men have issues that women don’t have, women have issues that men don’t have. As soon as your movement decides to prioritise one they have lost the other.
The reason this does not happen with race is that no movement in the US can realistically exist politically without white people simply by virtue of how huge the white slice of the demo pie is, and because this whole thing was started by highly educated, economically mobile, overwhelingly white, college grads who live in very specific coastal bubbles, hence the endemic hatred of farmers and factory workers, the actual working class of the US, as hicks and racists, and the lionisation of serving staff like baristas and waiters (the only working class most large city dwellers ever interact with).
It’s just a fucking L on its face isn’t it? “Yes come join the party that thinks men being in power is the problem” fat fucking chance lol.
And when they do join, the parodies write themselves.
I don’t care if you think it’s “just a name” (especially in light of what progs consistently do over “just a name” and “just a statue” and so on) it’s a massive optics L that shows all of the horseshit about microaggressions and non-confrontational language and whatnot are entirely performative.
You have the most obvious othering language in the core ideas of the movement and then complain about microaggressions? And you wonder why people don’t take you seriously?
And while we’re on that:
You can’t have a political movement that does not tolerate dissent and confrontation, or only tolerates it in one direction. See the implosion of the “Unfuck america tour” as a good example of this.
The whole point of politics is to create a critical mass of people who align on some goal to push for it, you don’t have to agree with them on every point, if you had enough people who agree with you, you would be already in the majority and would not need to participate in politics.
Easy example from the last decade: TERFs.
Now, I don’t like TERFs, on account of them being radfems and thus automatically hostile to me due to the circumstances of my birth (i.e. penis), but you know what? I reckon they probably want women to have better salaries and fewer barriers to entry into professional fields.
Let them force themselves into political irrelevance if they refuse to play ball, don’t make a big fucking show of kicking them out of the movement, because then you end up on the back foot of having to explain “trans women are women” to the mass population and the TERFs simply need to say “look at these brainwashed biology deniers, they think males and females have no differences” and you end up eating your own ass in public, when the point is that trans women ought to be treated as women for their own good and a more welcoming society.
(side note: if you are in that brainless chunk of progs who do believe there is no difference between the sexes, I highly encourage you to look at the world records in any discipline with easily measured metrics such as 100m dash and freestyle swimming. Not a single male record is under the women’s record, in some cases every historical male record eclipses the current female one. Males and females are different, this should be acknowledged, and it should not be a barrier to equal dignity in treatment.)
A movement that can’t include anyone but the most in-line and pure of the ideological adepts is doomed to be irrelevant, and on that the progressives have an almost complete lock.
The part that is your standard boilerplate second wave feminism, the only difference is how they define “woman,” which simply hasn’t changed in the last 20 odd years to conform to the mainline progressive position.
They are effectively conservative feminists, which sounds counterintuitive until you realise feminism is old enough to easily fall within the range of things that can have a conservative/progressive split.
You mean like feminism was until the adoption of intersectional sociological lenses by the progressive part of the movement? (and it arguably still is essentialist, just on qualities other than birth sex)
Cause like, Andrea Dworkin, Valerie Solanas, Julie Bindel, they were feminists before a lot of the feminists of today were alive, and they don’t strike me as trans allies.
You’re not wrong, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t feminists, it just means they have different ontological positions that lead them to side with different people.
Often the enemy you know, especially one that appears (but isn’t, in the case of conservatives) on the backfoot can look positively attractive compared to the new and alien.
If anything it should tell you how essentialist and misandrist second wave feminism was that they’d draw the line at male women and female men, and not at cis conservatives.
In brief, my point is: just because it’s not your wave of feminism that you identify with, doesn’t mean your wave doesn’t directly descend from it and that it didn’t pave the way for yours.
Movements change and evolve, society as a whole was not trans inclusive at all until the late 00s, and even then it was touch and go, and it’s incredibly naïve to think that feminism, of all things, would somehow be morally lucky from its inception in the 1800s and never in ~150 years sided with the mainstream on axes other than pushing for women* to be equal to men* (*provided they are the right demographic on every other axis).