#i spent some time today going through terf blogs and notes

[farmerlesbian]

Radical feminism is not synonymous with transphobia and it’s frustrating to watch people encourage blacklisting an entire school of feminist thought because it is associated with fringe groups. It limits discussion on real political conversations that are in many cases embraced by trans people like myself such as freedom from sex/gender distinctions. The movement was also essential to including lesbians in feminism who had been intentionally excluded by heterosexual liberal feminists. Fringe groups on the internet should not prevent us from engaging with real feminist theory. Other words/phrases on your blocklist are real dogwhistles created by people in that fringe group, so I understand blocking them, but radical feminism is an actual academic and political school of thought that is not necessarily dominated by transphobic voices and I don’t think we should encourage censorship, especially because it is not inherently harmful like transphobia.

i don’t personally know that much about different schools of feminist thought and theory, i just know these are the tags that are used on tumblr which is the website we are on, and how they self-identify in ways that are easily identifiable and filtered. i hear you and you’re probably right that it sucks to have the term co-opted. by blacklisting / filtering the terms i suggested, the posts still show up in your dash, they’re just hidden and you can super easily still look at what the post says with one click, so it doesn’t feel like censorship, just a way to have a big warning “this post may have content from a TERF”. it is a reliable way to identify them like it or not. you can then go from there and investigate what they’re putting on their blog to see if they’re transphobic as well to make sure. the vast majority of blogs identified specifically as “radfem” or sometimes even “terf”, much less often the full “radical feminism”.

also fwiw i’ve never missed out on any actual non-TERF posts about radical feminist theory on tumblr by having radfem and stuff filtered. idk maybe i don’t follow the types of blogs that’d be talking about it but it simply has not been a problem for me. i’m not getting like false positives lol it’s pretty consistently accurately identifying TERF created content on tumblr