exradfem - Tumblr blog

[exradfem]

the resurgence of female separatism will be the fucking death us

[exradfem]

There's a reason why I read Radfem literature to understand it and am sympathetic towards Radfems on an emotional level despite viscerally hating just about everything regarding the details of their beliefs and their political end goals. Their motivations make sense, even though I actively disagree with the manifestation of them.

You live in a world that is not made to support an important aspect of your identity. You live in a world that has traumatized you over and over again. That eats at you. You get angry. You get resentful. You find other people that not only feel the same way but also encourage your anger and resentment. This all radicalizes you. You fall into an echo chamber. You find scapegoats. You center yourself and your trauma above anyone else because you are hurt and scared and are surrounded by people encouraging you to weaponize that pain and fear.

The SCUM Manifesto is objective proof of this in many ways. I think Valarie Solanas was a deeply vile person, but she was also so deeply hurt and traumatized she couldn't imagine any other way of navigating the world than to externalize it all.

Violence begets violence, unresolved anger and trauma encourages extremism.

I think scared, hurt people lash out and hurt others. You personally do not have to engage with people like that. You can think they are vile and horrible. You can protect your own peace and mental well-being. But that doesn't make the scared, hurt people any less human or any less capable of change. Fear and anger and pain live in all of us and it is dangerous when that gets externalized, but it's worth combatting with compassion over more harm in my opinion.

There's a reason why I am so drawn to bell hooks, and my girlfriend placed it really well awhile back when she listened in to me watching a bell hooks talk. It's because bell hooks' ideology sounds like therapy. It's full of self healing and searching for understanding. It acknowledges the pain of the world and says "you can combat this suffering and heal from it without inflicting it onto others - especially not onto others who are also hurting from other directions"

I think there's a lot of meaning to be found there.

[exradfem]

some people will really see elliot page simply existing and feel like it’s their right to say the weirdest shit about him. it’s really incredible (and i mean that in the most literal sense of fucking unbelievable) how openly these people admit that they think we exist solely to benefit them — no lives of our own, no autonomy. as far as they’re concerned, we’re just here to look pretty and have their babies, to decorate and populate their world.

this is why i really just have to laugh when someone tries to argue that transmasculinity is anti-feminist. can’t you see how much our mere existence makes the misogynists short-circuit? how much our transitions go directly against all of the expectations they put on us? transmasc transitions are in such direct opposition to their worldview that they resort to just treating us like we’re dead because our lives simply are not compatible with their version of how the world should be. we make ourselves so egregiously and irrevocably unfuckable to them that they’re actually going around unironically mourning the “loss” of our bodies.

[exradfem]

I'm pretty sure this misconception that's being perpetuated all over is due to your interview with me, and i am sorry that has caused you so much grief.

nothorses simply conducted an interview with me. he is not an ex radfem anymore than literally anyone with lefty friends who spout this shit is.

you can reach out to me. fyi I'm not very fast at responding. but I might be able to help.

I have a question related to terf ideology and you're the only person I know who was involved with rad feminism and left. Are you willing to answer my question? I don't want to put you in a position you're uncomfortable with. Or even send my question directly without confirming first. If you don't feel comfortable, but know someone who is willing to talk about this stuff, could you point me in their direction?

I wouldn't say I was "involved with rad feminism and left" so much as like, radfeminist ideas- which are still currently popular today- were also popular among a lot of the queer & trans feminists I was surrounded by as a teen around 10 years ago. The difference for me is that I've become more aware of what it looks like when it isn't blatantly transphobic, as opposed to then, when I couldn't recognize radfeminism unless it was specifically and vocally trans-exclusionary radfeminism.

I'm still happy to talk about it and answer your questions, I just want to be clear where that line is for me. Folks who have been more directly involved are going to have a very different and uniquely valuable insight, and I don't want to mislead anyone or misrepresent what kind of perspective I can offer.

[exradfem]

ALOK VAID-MENON Getting Curious with Jonathan Van Ness 1x03 (2022)

[exradfem]

following ur post abt 'masculinity' vs 'patriarchal manhood' i think we also need to be working on saying 'gender-/bioessentialism' instead of 'terf rhetoric' re intracommunity issues. esp if the person you're accusing of spouting 'terf rhetoric' is a trans woman. like, a large part of 'terf rhetoric' is wanting trans people dead. the issue that's spilling over is the gender essentialism, not the genocidal aspirations. call a spade a spade.

I very much agree about the "terf rhetoric" thing being applied to shit that is very much not terf rhetoric- like, regular-ass transphobia- but I think we sorely underutilize the term "radical feminism", too.

like there absolutely are people who are just "terfs but for trans people", and even people openly calling themselves "tirfs (trans-inclusive radical feminists)". these are radical feminists. we should be calling them radical feminists, and we should be pointing out the flaws in radical feminism, because too many people seem to think it's a good thing as long as you also say "trans women are women".

and radical feminism is built on gender-essentialism/bio-essentialism! that's the core of the ideology!

but it's different when a conservative is espousing those ideas vs. a radical feminist; it's the difference between "women are meant to make babies and serve men" vs. "women are perfect perma-victims who are in danger every time they interact with or see any man". Both of these are gender-essentialism or bio-essentialism (or both), but they're not the same ideology.

there's this idea floating around that actually, trans people can't be radfems, and radfems are never trans-inclusive. radical feminism is built on gender-essentialism, after all, which is inherently hostile to transness.

and I'd agree that radfeminism is hostile to transness; "trans-inclusive" radfems are not really trans-inclusive in any meaningful way, because their ideology fundamentally disagrees with a myriad of ideas essential to understanding transness: that gender is neither binary nor immutable, and that gender does not necessarily determine your experiences, or who you are.

but they do exist, and they have for a long time. see "baeddelism": it was and has been pretty niche, but the central idea behind it was that trans women are universally and necessarily more oppressed than any other trans person, and that trans women are oppressed by other trans people. specifically trans men, as the original movement generally didn't believe nonbinary people could or did exist. and this was in close relationship with the other core idea that these gendered experiences necessarily determine the kind of person you are: trans women are victims and therefore inherently safe (as long as they look and act a certain way- otherwise they aren't really women at all), and trans men are oppressors and therefore inherently violent and dangerous.

all of this relies on the idea that gender is binary, and determines your experiences and the person you are. it's gender-essentialism, but it's also very much a radfem-flavored kind of gender-essentialism, and the theory was built on and around radical feminist theory.

I don't think you disagree with any of that either, I'm just bringing it up because I think it's important to acknowledge how radical feminism has led to both TERF ideology, and "trans-inclusve" ideologies that, because they are rooted in radfeminism, are also harmful to and exclusive of trans people. it's not just gender-/bio-essentialism, it's the way those things are used, and why they've been successful in certain communities.

[exradfem]

Genuinely, it just comes down to the fact that trans people are an incredibly maligned and marginalized population (as are sex workers).

They are bullies who like an easy victim.

it's fascinating to see people running their mouth about radical feminism who have clearly never actually interacted with radfem theory.

so many times I've seen randoms online try to claim that terfs don't really hate cis men, they just hate trans women. like,, see? this terf worked with a cis man to pass legislature to take away trans rights. clearly they respect men to some extent.

no, absolutely not. just because they're willing to sell out in a second to stop trans rights, does not mean that they don't fundamentally distrust/dislike "males" and want female supremacy. they think every human assigned male is entirely different from them, biologically inferior because of a lack of access to reproduction, and predisposed to anger, violence, and incapable of emotional depth.

they Other men, or rather, who they consider men.

sure, TIRFs exist and claim to have the True, Modern Radical Feminism. they use gender essentialism instead, insisting that this predisposition to abuse is tied to manhood alone, and therefore trans women are safe and trans men are not. but this does not really protect trans women, as any tie to masculinity can revoke their womanhood, and any form of gender essentialism is bad for all trans people.

not to mention that they fundamentally misunderstand radical feminism; it really isn't supposed to work based off of traits like that. the entire ideology is based off of reproductive control, which is biological in nature. TIRFs are simply trying to make this flawed ideology work for trans people, rather than recognizing that any supremacist ideology is based in fascism. (and their entire concept of biology is wrong and colonialist but that's another topic entirely)

back to my point, radical feminism is all about the idea that gender exists solely to oppress females, and that this, the patriarchy, is essentially a conspiracy between all males to maintain access to reproduction.

this is an absurdly simplistic, reductive take that ignores most of human history and an ounce of intersectionality (and don't say I'm the one who stripped the intersectionality. radfems teach themselves that misogyny is worse than all forms of oppression and that male privilege almost always supersedes racism to such an extent that all males collude to maintain systemic sexism).

regardless, it's their primary tenant. and it's the reason trans people terrify them. we blur the lines between male and female. we represent the culmination of the erasure of the female sex.

sound anything like white supremacy to you?

..

tldr; terfs have zero respect or love for cis men, they simply sell out easily. radical feminism teaches that the patriarchy exists to give males reproductive access, and this supersedes all other oppression. they also believe all males are biologically predisposed to aggression and abuse. they hate trans women because they believe this applies to them too.

[exradfem]

also can we talk abt how the anti-queer crowd's blogs are always like. same perfectly curated Cool™ aesthetique and humor and also that these blogs are often like indistinguishable from how terfs curate their blogs. like regardless of identity its that "thin white girl who reblogs the same photosets of 10 thin cishet blonde white women covered in blood whos vaguely pro-trans but has clear radfem vibes that keep you on edge around them, who talk about love and caring for others but also would clearly tell you to jump off a cliff if you did something slightly "cringe" around them" energy. i was around far too many Cool Girls Who Lowkey Bully You For Being Gay and Autistic But Wanna Be Seen As Sweet in public school to not develop an internal alarm system. do yall know what im talking about.

[exradfem]

I notice in your feminism framework image, terf and gender critical are classified as different things, both under the umbrella of radical feminism. What's the difference between terf and gender critical?

Not all TERFs are "gender critical". Some TERFs very much like gender, they just think it should stay attached to sex assigned at birth.

On the other hand, gender critical radfems specifically claim that they hate the concept of gender all together, and want to abolish gender entirely and have everything based solely on sex assigned at birth.

Now, how much an actual GCer leans into that varies widely, because many radfems have adopted the GC moniker specifically to weasel out of being called TERFs. It sounds better in their head to present as "critical of gender" than to be "exclusionary of trans people".

"I hate the concept of gender all together, and I think trans people are perpetuating the existence of gender, therefore they are anti-feminist and the enemy!"

So, some GCers are actually just TERFs and don't give two shits about "abolishing gender", they just like the label better.

But some GCers are genuinely anti-gender and use that as an excuse to be anti-trans.

[exradfem]

Waiting for people to fuck up so you can cancel them, gatekeeping, communities self-policing to the point of self-destruction, debating each other's validity, communities infighting over terminology, fighting over the Best way to exist, trying to define what a Bad Community Member is/does, vilifying those people.

Besties I think we fucked up and internalized the surveillance state or the omni-present judgment of god or purity culture or perhaps just maybe all 3

[exradfem]

One of the things that really confuses me (I'm a cis woman of color) is this doubling down on the idea that Black men aren't oppressed because they're men, they're oppressed because they're Black, gay men aren't oppressed because they're men, they're oppressed because they're gay, trans men aren't oppressed because they're men, they're oppressed because they're trans, etc. It feels like people are being intentionally obtuse. You can't separate my identity as a POC from my identity as a woman. I am treated the way I'm treated because I'm a woman of color, those two things work together. That's where discussions of intersectionality originated. So to say you can separate a privileged identity from an oppressed one is just.... not how anything works?

I constantly see "masculinity isn't criminalized/demonized, Blackness, queerness, transness are" and it's like.... no, that's not how this happens. Marginalized men face specific oppression based on the intersection of their identities. It seems like lately people are willing to understand that for women but not willing to for men and I just don't know how we make any progress if radfem rhetoric has become so pervasive that people are refusing to see lived realities rather than some abstract hypothetical they've come up with.

Personally I think this is due to (white) people seeing and liking black theory that they personally agree with or that makes sense to be applied to their own lives, and then cut out all the parts that are inconvenient for them to have to reconcile. Much like how many, many, many black feminists who are cis women have said "hey, white feminists, stop it with the all men are rapists thing, it actively contributes to black men getting lynched for crimes they didn't commit because it gets weaponized unfairly against our brothers" and white feminists collectively forgot how to read and abandoned their listening skills while still praising other parts of black feminism that talk about domestic violence and sexual assault and oversexualization and reproductive rights and rightly taking black men to task for their continued complacency in this.

The phrase "intersectionality" originated in black feminist theory. I do not trust any white person to fully understand black feminism when they use it as a bludgeon to make the inconvenient bits be quiet. Much of what is on this blog is black feminism. It is inconvenient for white people to have to consider how their words and actions may harm people of color while still lifting themselves up.

As you have said, you cannot separate the "of color" from the "woman" parts of your identity. You are a woman of color. That changes how both sexism and racism works against you in a system that is both sexist and racist. I, in the same manner, cannot separate the "trans" from the "man"- if I were not a man, I would be a woman. I am AFAB, if I am a woman, I am not trans. There is no "you experience this because you are transgender, not because you are a man". In order to be a man, in my body, I have to be transgender*. Just like there is no "you experience this because you are black, not because you are a man". I am a black man. The black experience is inherently, often forcibly, gendered. I can tell you exactly how people treating me changed in a "before" and "after". I can tell you that yes, some of it absolutely stems from the "man" part, they treat me this way because I am a black man.

But people often misunderstand intersectionality to be, exclusively, axis of oppression. And so they say, well learn intersectionality, men aren't oppressed and thus it's not an axis of oppression to combine. But that ignores that some men are oppressed, marginalized men are oppressed and often with a very gendered slant. And it ignores that, like how you cannot separate the "woman" from the "of color", neither can you do that with men.

Men are not the default. They are slightly less than half the population, same as women.

*re: in order to be a man in my body I must be transgender; yes, I am intersex. However I have been out as transgender for 17 years, and discovered I am intersex 6 months ago. So for me, that is very much the case. For other intersex people who were assigned female at birth, that may not be the case. This is something that works on an individual level but cannot be broadbrushed as there are many different opinions among intersex people regarding our cisgender vs transgender status.

[exradfem]

it's always so fucking funny to me when terfs are like "how can you say trans women and women are the same thing! being born as a man makes you different!" because like. yes. trans women and cis women are different. so are black women and white women. and straight women and queer woman. and women from different countries and different socioeconomic statuses. there's diversity in the experience of womanhood? what a wild concept

[exradfem]

TERFs have begun using “hygienic” to mean cis because they’re fucking weirdos who think trans people don’t take baths

I’ve been collecting these screenshots for months to prove my point, this is an actual thing they’re doing and I feel that by now I have enough proof to be making this post. If you see someone calling themselves hygienic in their blog description, that’s what they mean. They mean they’re openly transphobic. And a fucking weirdo who assumes trans people don’t bathe for some reason.

No I’m not censoring the urls, all of these people can go fuck themselves! Block, don’t harass 💙🖤

[exradfem]

It's not at all surprising that the first thing a transphobe will assume is that trans people have a fetish for identifying the way they do.

In one sense, this puts a trans person in the position of delving into all the gorey details in their personal history to prove their humanity. The onus is on the trans person to prove they even deserve to be treated with dignity. But afterward, of course, a transphobe can take the fruedian, unfalsifiable position of "well, it's in your subconscious, and you simply aren't aware of it". There is no answer that a transphobe will accept besides you admitting (whether truthfully or not) that your existance is a fetish.

Additionally, this brings up the sex negative idea that fetishes are moral indicators which determine your worth. It is not only the case that they think transness is a fetish (not unlike a shrink from the 1960s claiming being gay is a fetish), but it's also that anything outside the narrow purview of (cis)heteronormativity indicates your worth or even your humanity. It is no coincidence that people string together being trans with fetishism - you can frame anything a trans person does as a fetish, rather than something a lot of people (cis people included) have done.

The idea that transness is inherently a fetish harkens back to the times where one of the homophobes' strongest cries was that gayness was something that happens to you, and not something you are - that gay people have fetishes for the same gender, that their subconscious is "leading them astray", and that gay people must prove themselves to even be human before they are persecuted anyway.

[exradfem]

do men have resting bitch faces as well or do they not have negative characteristics ascribed to them for putting on a neutral rather than a deliriously happy facial expression

[exradfem]

Multi-millionaire ‘feminist’ JK Rowling has been weirdly quiet.

[exradfem]

God, anyone else remember when everyone understood that the correct feminist position about sports was that women should be allowed to compete with men because they're just as capable? When it was a trope in media to have the mysterious star athlete who just blew everyone else out of the water to take off her helmet and reveal that she was a woman the whole time?

Now people are rabidly arguing that supposed "men" (trans women) have inherent insurmountable biological advantages in literally every single possible activity and cis women are too weak and dainty and unskilled to ever compete and must be protected, and then they try to call themselves feminists who are being silenced as if that's not just the mainstream sexist patriarchal opinion

Anyway, desegregate sports. There was never any reason to separate them by gender in the first place