#ex-terf

[lettucedloophole]

i think it's easier to agree with terfism in concept, that a woman is just an Adult Human Female and this is actually liberatory rather than regressive & confining.

but in practice, in terf spaces you'll find:

cis women sexually harassing each other (some even talked about wanting to rape women, but since they weren't Male it was a-ok. certainly not as much of a biggie as a trans woman peacefully existing online, anyway.) there is also so much shaming of formerly prostituted women, rf or not, & rape/dv victims.

weird racism and nazi shit! much like the rapey people mentioned above, while some terfs wouldn't outright support racism, they'd tolerate it and follow "white supremacist feminists" or "radical feminists" making anti-semitic jokes (cough cough. radfem hitler) some terfs thought they were weird privately but there was no move to push them out of terf spaces like there was with Transfem Lesbians Existing.

this is also racism & nazi shit... when women's march changed their logo, there was a huge backlash in terf spaces about how this silhouette–

–was male, or meant to be a trans woman. of course, a lot of people were like "that's racist because some woc have that nose type." i saw two responses to that argument-- 1), it was actually the brow bone which was male, so it wasn't racist, and 2) women's march did this on purpose to make terfs look bad (and? it worked lmfao.) i was shocked at just how openly, insanely regressive this was, and it illustrated a point to me about terfs-- they will throw women under the bus who look masculine (like, any woman who could've had that silhouette) to keep the trans moral panic fueled.

more on throwing masc (cis) & other women under the bus-- i saw terfs who'd spent time in those spaces for a while began to question if muscular women in wrestling were "real women" or if they were "a man pretending to be a woman." trans women were made fun of for their "male" features, which of course, weren't male specific. they mocked vaginoplasty & dilation to get to trans women, thereby also insulting the cis women who did those things (which, they seemed to either not know about or just didn't care.) at one point, a cis tirf was talking about her experience getting harassed as trans in the bathroom and a bunch of terfs ganged up on her to call her a liar. so, believe women until it goes against your political agenda i guess? and, for that bbc article on cis lesbians feeling pressured to sleep with trans women, they literally interviewed a cis lesbian who'd been accused of rape multiple times, including in bathrooms. but trans women are the actual rapists, right?

one thing that's very sad is how woc in these spaces will see things like, nazis coming to terf events and being Allowed to stay there and plead for the movement to change, as if... anyone cares about woc here? terfs don't care about masc or non-white women considering how their rhetoric negatively impacts both.

crazy amounts of terfs claiming they just care about trans people and don't want them to hurt themselves, thennn calling trans people mutilated freaks & posting pictures without consent, even of minors, of surgery results good and bad.

and concerning the last point, this is just some contradictory things i've seen in terf spaces concerning cis women & afab people, but really the transmisogyny should be enough to stop your support of it. even if terfs managed to liberate all afab people somehow, trans women's well-being is important by itself. i just think these contradictions i've seen personally work nicely to poke holes in terf ideology.

[genderqueer-rat]

spent about an hour and blocked about 59019283 terfs because one so lovingly reblogged a post I made a month ago stating that I hope all those young radfems I blocked perviously had learned better.

but in all of that slog blocking and blocking and blocking, I found a little hope, the sliver of light that I had been yearning for in the post I originally made: a couple of people who were ex-terfs, people who had been indoctrinated when they were teenagers and had grown up a little and discovered the beauty in other human beings and were actively educating themselves and fostering a genuinely loving community that focused on breaking down all of the things they had been tought by terfs and reevaluating them.

at least, after all that bs blocking I found a little joy.

[romijuli]

It’s kind of a shame that “Catholics worship the saints and Mary on the same level as god” is the prevalent thought among non-Catholics because “Catholics treat the saints and Mary as a divine call center” is both more true in my experience and INFINITELY funnier

EDIT okay look. Listen. I’m GOING to fucking block you if you start religious discourse on this fucking post. I’m not even Catholic anymore, I wrote this up thinking like two people would enjoy it. I do not care. Stop.

[jodistorian]

they match <3

[krissiefox]

[myyouthtragedy]

and now middle eastern Muslim women are so in denial that their religion is just shitty they start listening to those western muslims

[feminist-bitches-only]

Hey @ trans inclusive radical feminists, how do y’all beat the terf accusations while also talking about sex based oppression as a form of misogyny? I literally highlight my support of trans people in my bio and my pinned post and just got hit with a terf accusation :/

[nervoustragedyluminary]

"no don't transition! please stay a dysphoric teenage 'girl' forever that's when you're most attractive to me! " 🤢 like SOMEONE is acting predatory here and it's not trans people 🤦

[gothicroses]

jk rowling liked this:

this is not feminism considering the taliban hates women. jk rowling is not a feminist and im so sick of terfs acting like she is. then again terfs and radfems aren't feminists 😘✌

also that women made this tweet as well:

jk rowling really needs to research better

[samwisethewitch]

Something I've been thinking about lately: In conversations about being intentionally child-free, I see a lot of people talk about how much they resent constantly being told that they'll change their minds someday. And yeah, that sucks. When you tell someone that they'll regret their choices or go back on them someday, you're telling them you don't trust them to make their own decisions. And that's a dick move.

But what I see left out of a lot of these conversations is the fact that some people do change their minds about kids, and that is also okay.

People change. Our priorities and our values change. Someone identifying as child-free at 20 and then realizing at 30 that they actually do want to be a parent doesn't invalidate other people's decision not to have kids. It doesn't even invalidate that person's previous decision. They're growing. They're changing, and that's okay. Healthy even.

When I was 18, I felt very strongly that I would never marry and never have children. For me, this was a reaction to growing up in a religious environment where women were second-class citizens, and what little autonomy/independence single women had immediately went away when they got married. And once you had kids? Well, once you had kids, your personal life was officially over and your identity now started and ended with being so-and-so's mother.

If your only model of marriage and parenthood is a nuclear family where the husband is in charge and makes all of the decisions while his wife does all of the housework and childcare and not much else, OF COURSE you wouldn't want to get married or have kids! My thought process at 18 was basically, "Well, I want to have my own money and make my own choices and have an identity outside of being a mom, so clearly the family life isn't for me."

I'm 25 now. I'm married. My husband and I both kept our own last names, and we maintain separate bank accounts. I have a job that I'm good at, and a lot of people know me from my work. I still have my own money, make my own choices, and have my own identity. None of that went away when I got married. All that's changed is that I have a partner and best friend that I decided to do life with, and we had a ceremony and signed a piece of paper to make it official. We're not quite at the having kids stage yet, but it is something we both want someday.

Me wanting marriage and kids now doesn't invalidate my decision at 18. When I was 18, focusing on my education and career was absolutely the right choice for me. I needed to be able to focus on myself without considering how it would affect a spouse or kids. Eventually, I realized marriage and parenthood can look a lot of different ways. I realized I can decide what they look like for me. I don't have to follow the model I grew up with. And I realized I do want raising kids to be part of my life, just in a way that looks different from what others might expect.

This is a process a lot of people go through, especially women and femmes. If you're in the middle of it right now, just know that you're allowed to change.

And of course, a lot of people don't change their minds. A lot of people who identify as child-free at 20 still don't want kids at 30, 40, or 50. I've met people in their 80s and 90s who never had kids and don't regret that decision. My point here is that some people changing their minds about something doesn't mean it's not a good option for other people.

(And, let's be real, unfortunately a lot of people go the other way: they think they want kids until they have them. That's way more complicated because now there's a whole human person involved who is dependent on them for care and this definitely deserves its own post, but the best advice I can give is if you're young, you need to give yourself time to figure out what you want before committing to anything.)

[lettucedloophole]

i'm confused what you mean by "sex is a social construct" and "the categories of male and female don't exist outside of society", because of course those categories do exist outside of society, in mammals and other animals. sex is *described* by language, as all phenomena are, but not constructed by it. if sex is socially constructed, then so is carbon, glass, rocks, and trees.

a good way of determining if something is a social construct is to remember that socially constructed ideas change over space and time. for example, take the female gender role and its expectations – the expectations placed on a woman in China in the 1840s would be very different from those placed on a woman in Scotland at that time (social constructs vary with space). further, both of these would be very different from the expectations placed on women in either of those countries in 2023 (social constructs vary with time).

this is because sex roles are socially constructed and thus subject to change. but how does this apply to sex itself? the 1840s Chinese woman is observed to be female at birth. the 1840s Scottish woman is observed to be female at birth. the 2023 women are observed to be female at birth. there is no change to the sex category over space or time, there is only change to the social expectations applied to that sex category (this is gender aka sex roles).

it seems like your whole idea of sex as a construct is entirely based on conflating sex roles (i.e. gender) with sex itself. it's important to remember that they're different things. sex exists naturally regardless of human opinions on it, and in fact vastly pre-dates humanity (so does not meet the definition of social construct), whereas sex roles/gender is placed upon us by external societal forces (so is very much a social construct).

here are some previous posts i've made explaining that concept. i hope these help! i will supplement them a bit by replying to some other parts of your post.

i think the female sex and sex role are interchangeable, so the change of gendered expectations throughout time and diffierent cultures would prove womanhood as a construction, imo. the part where we disagree is that the female sex can be separated from sexist ideas.

the fact that you compare human afabs to animals first, concerns me as a feminist, because in the animal kingdom the abuse of female animals is commonplace and concepts like consent don't exist. we're not animals, and i choose not to let our fate be to give birth to men to populate the human species. i would rather abolish sex through the negation of pregnancy, the creation of artificial wombs, rather than preserve our reproductive differences which lead us to the same level of freedom as animals.

exaggerating the difference between men & women does us no good; by enshrining those differences in nature we make them & patriarchy permanent. we have more of a choice as people than animals do, we can make the choice to abstain from sex, or change sex as transsexuals do. and i know you don't think trans people change sex, but they do disrupt the binary & permanence of sex, which is good and necessary for feminism. and their social conditions and bodies clearly change as a result of it. as the xenofeminist manifesto said, "if nature is unjust, change nature."

[annabelle--cane]

not saying that people who got out of hate groups are, like, cursed to have evil corrupted souls forever, but if that's you then maybe you Shouldn't to be the one to try and make "balanced" takes about problems within the group/community you used to be in a hate movement against

[dearest-k16]

why does my scepticism about religion have to be a result of satan's manipulation like. my brain did it by itself. give me some credit, dude.

[youre-my-worst-nightmare]

People who expect others to memorize their neopronouns and actually use them seriously think the world revolves around them, huh?

[apostateoverrubies]

I'm glad that women are waking up and learning to decenter men from their lives but they need to realize that they should get rid of God too because not only is He no different but He plays a big role in why men are raised like that and why women are taught to suffer through shitty relationships.

God shouldn't be the only man in your life. He shouldn't be a man in your life period. Throw Him out like all the others. He ain't worth shit and His son ain't worth shit.

[p2ii]

[Start Video Description: a tiktok by user nusularay.

a clip of a tiktok featuring Ali Dawah plays, captioned "Why body count affects women more?" He is sitting infront of a mic, looking of-camera. He says;

"[...]Because men are created polygamous, Allah had to put in our fitra-"

the video is cut of and stiched to user nusularay's account, a black woman in a yellow shirt sits on camera, she says;

"you know what i have a different take on this, let's assume hes right, let's assume that Allah created this man polygamous. And also cater to that need by allowing them to have up to 4 different wives, lets assume he's right.

So Allah created men polygamous with a polygamous nature, and also catered to that need by, you know, you can have 4 different wives if you want to.

Interesting how Allah has also created some people to be gay or with the nature to be gay but they have to repress and deny those aspects of them, whereas god has catered to straight man to allow them up to 4 differet wives because of the nature that he also created them as.

you see how that dosnt add up? how god can cater to one nature whilst disregarding the rest. I think people forget that god being the infinite energy has never written any book, god has not written the bible; god has not written the Quran, god has not written the Torah, nothing. People have -excume me- men have, and im not saying those books have no knowledge and wisdom in them, those books have alot of wisdom, but men wrote those books; Which makes sence for all the inconsistencies god because we're inperfect beings trying to create a perfect that there is.

I just find it interesting how Abrahamic religions act like they have god all figured out, 'this is who god is', 'this is what god allows', 'this is-' god is an infinite energy, how do you have god all figured out? That is what i find interesting"

the video ends with the tiktok end card

/End Video Description.]