#matfem

[jimberoschwezer2]

"Materialist" (more like bioessentialist) tansfeminists are going to lose their souls over the concept of "amab cis woman" or in other words ''twTcw'' (trans woman to cis woman)

If transitioning from manhood to womanhood is socially possible, why isn't transitioning from trans womanhood to cis womanhood (and vice versa) possible too? Could you explain without resorting to terfy arguments ?

[girl-spiral]

documenting my spiral into insanity

[cusperfem]

my opinions on things, ask for more if you want:

- porn is exploitation of women

- misogyny is real,misandry is not

- agp/aap is real and exists

- transition should not be taken lightly

- gender is real but not in the gender identity blah blah way, but in the way that it is a hierarchy

- castrate men (joke? But the more I read about them the more I detest them)

I would call myself rad-leaning or materialist+socialist-leaning but I am always learning and open for suggestions

[lago-morpha]

Ferguson, Michaele L. (2010). Choice Feminism and the Fear of Politics

[radiomanique]

Les TERFs, leur discours, et en quoi les discours "matérialistes" en France et notamment sur Twitter commencent à y ressembler un peu trop

Ceci est une version longue et en post du thread que j’ai fait sur Twitter, dans le contexte du débat sur un streamer Twitch trans qui a fait une vidéo sur les TERFs, et sur sa légitimité en tant qu’homme trans à aborder le sujet. Au sein de ce débat, certaines personnes, qui tenaient un discours proche de celui des TERFs, ont réfuté ces accusations par le fait qu’elles sont des femmes trans, d’où un disclaimer important : ce post n’a pas pour but de "traiter des femmes trans de TERFs", mais de faire une critique à mon sens cruciale de la rhétorique ML/WG/matfem/radfem, qui n’est pas spécifique aux meufs trans sur Twitter. TW transphobie très violente, biphobie, sexisme etc. Ceci est une analyse.

1 / La naissance du mouvement TERF

Le terme TERF est apparu en 2008 sur un forum tenu par des "féministes radicales" ou radfems, pour séparer les radfems qui excluaient les femmes trans des autres. L'idéologie est, en elle-même, née avec la 2e vague du féminisme, dans les années 70 : elle est directement liée à l'avènement du séparatisme lesbien et à celui du lesbianisme politique, le noyau idéologique en étant le même, en simplifiant : "homme = mal, prédateur, femme = pure, à protéger".

On notera la perméabilité de ces discours envers les essentialismes d'extrême-droite: on notera également, et c'est important, que considérer toute proximité avec l'homme comme sale, c'est aussi la naissance de la biphobie, en plus de la transmisogynie. Les TERFs, au fil du temps, ont repris cette idéologie et l'ont développé pour dire que les femmes trans sont des prédatrices qui "violent le corps des femmes en se le réappropriant et réduisant la vraie forme femelle à un artéfact" (Janice Raymond, The Transsexual Empire), et que les hommes trans sont des traîtres à leur genre ("les lesbiennes qu'on a perdu") et qu'ils sont endoctrinés à mutiler leurs corps, avec souvent l'argument de la désirabilité ("des seins qui n'ont jamais connu la caresse d'un-e amant-e", Allison Bailey de la LGB alliance). Le livre "Irreversible Damage" inclut l’argument de l’autisme comme une raison de plus d’empêcher les transitions des "jeunes filles autistes" qui sont mal à l’aise avec leur genre à cause du patriarcat.

Je tiens à souligner, si ce n'était pas clair, deux choses : la première, il s'agit là d'un développement à l'extrême de l'argument de base du masculin comme répugnant (cf. l’argument très misogyne de la désirabilité perdue d’un homme trans) et prédateur. La 2e, il est indéniable que les hommes trans sont profondément affectés par les discours TERFs (on pensera au livre "Irreversible Damage" qui est une pierre angulaire du TERFisme, au sujet... des hommes trans), donc dire qu'un homme trans n'a pas le droit d'en parler est erroné et indécent.

2 / La proximité des discours matérialistes avec les discours TERFs

Cette partie est à replacer dans le contexte de l’existence, sur Twitter, d’un groupe appelé les mean lesbians (ML) et watermelon gays (WG), parti à la base d’un groupe d’amis et dont la portée politique s’est répandu au cours de l’année 2021. Ce groupe, bien que plutôt présent sur Twitter, n’y est pas exclusif, et de nombreux espaces queers en France sont affectés par ces rhétoriques.

A la base, les ML/WG/matfems (appelons-les MF pour l'abréviation) ne sont pas un groupe politique et n'avaient pas vocation à le devenir ; c’est leur principal argument contre les critiques de leur idéologie, nier totalement l’existence du groupe politique lui-même. il est indéniable cependant qu'actuellement un consensus idéologique s'est formé parmi les membres du groupe. En partant du principe que la réalité matérielle précède l'idéologie (par imitation de la dialectique de Marx :

1. Les catégories de genre sont immuables à l'échelle sociétale et l'appartenance à l'une ou l'autre des catégories par l'apparence précède une autodétermination ;

2. L'hétérosexualité est un terrain d'oppression et il faut la combattre (reprise du lesbianisme politique des années 70)

3. Les oppressions se réduisent à l'exercice brut, quasi mathématique, de différences extérieures de privilèges.

Sur les débats twitter, ça se traduit grossièrement par :

"Il faut transitionner de façon visible et subir la transphobie pour être trans" (cf. 1 & 3)

"La biphobie n'existe pas mais est encourageable" (cf. 2 (en analysant la bisexualité comme hétéro + homo)) & 3)

"Les hommes trans ne peuvent pas parler de féminisme" (cf. 1 & 3).

Le problème avec cette idéologie, c'est que les 3 points susnommés sont totalement, mais alors totalement, perméables au TERFisme. Sans mentionner de façon individuelle les quelques personnes qui sont passé de l'idéologie MF à l'idéologie TERF, le féminisme MF n'a pas vocation à anéantir les normes genrées, mais à se positionner dans une supériorité morale de pseudo-réappropriation de celles-ci. Le concept de devoir transitionner complètement et adhérer totalement aux classes de genre pour être pris au sérieux est compatible avec l'idéologie TERF, pour laquelle le monstrueux est tout ce qui sort de la division genrée de la société, qui justifient leur dégoût biaisé des personnes trans par cette non-appartenance aux divisions de sexe.

Le fait de placer les relations lesbiennes entre deux femmes comme pures, souhaitables, et au-dessus des autres, colle à la réutilisation par les TERFs des lesbiennes, et correspondent au même noyau, "mâle = mauvais et sale".

Le fait de dire que les hommes trans ne peuvent pas parler des terfs, parce que, et je cite, "tu as voulu être un homme, assume", c'est une reprise quasi IDENTIQUE de l'argument TERF comme quoi les hommes trans sont des "traîtres à leur genre", car ils ont quitté la catégorie femme, à protéger, et qu'ils sont devenus monstrueux.

La citation que je reprend est un tweet d’une matfem concernant le débat en cours à l’écriture de ce thread.

Mon but final, en faisant ce post, c'est d’expliciter en quoi le rapprochement MF-TERF n'est PAS un ad hominem ni "traiter une femme trans de TERF", mais une critique du discours sous-jacent.

Je tiens aussi à mettre en garde toute personne en construction politique contre ce genre d'idées : peu importe combien les MF attaquent moralement, leurs idées restent réactionnaires. les 3 points susmentionnés sont compatible avec les TERFs, et la pente est glissante...

Critiquer de pipou pour ridiculiser et infantiliser tout opposant intellectuel, c'est pas un argument, c'est un ad hominem. réfuter toute critique par "vous êtes transmisogynes" ou "vous êtes lesbophobes", c'est bas au possible.

Je tiens à finir le thread par une remise en contexte très importante : l'idéologie MF, tout comme l'idéologie TERF, est centrée sur une conception blanche, bourgeoise, valide des classes de genre, et que leur analyse en est très limitée. Leur conception de la-femme à défendre correspond à l’idéal réactionnaire de la femme, et leurs erreurs, évidentes même au sein de milieux privilégiés, sont encore plus apparentes quand on parle de personnes racisées (dont la relation au genre et aux normes de genre est forcément très différente), ou dont l’accès à la transition est conditionnée par la précarité, ou des personnes handicapées pour qui l’humanisation nécessaire à l’assignation de genre est parfois absente…

En guise de conclusion, je vais revenir, quitte à passer pour « pipou », sur le point le plus important : reprendre les discours réactionnaires en se positionnant comme réaliste, matérialiste, c’est exercer et projeter de la violence, qui n’a rien à faire dans nos espaces. Ce genre d’idéologie est dangereuse, et vouloir passer pour « les bons queers » ne vaut pas de jeter sous le bus tous ceux qui ne rentrent pas dans des assignations, pour le coup, hors-sol, et très, très loin de toute réalité matérielle.

[mmsoniaaa]

i still cant wrap my head around that sex and race are social constructs. any black marx/matfems wanna recommend me essays/books about it? i dont know where to look for

[maowives]

Hello! I've just published my brief(ish) essay about my current working hypothesis about the Extant Gender Ternary ("there are only three genders!") and how it relates to the process of Faggotization / the policing of the Gender Subaltern Class.

I attempt to use a Marxist-Leninist framework applied to a materialist feminism to assess what the actual nature of gender which exists under the current gender regime is.

Please give it a read and a share/reblog, if you feel so inclined! I also welcome good faith comments, questions, and critiques. Please try to come into this essay with an open mind! I suspect that some of the things I say are going to be rather controversial, including to other transgender women, but I think that my analysis is both cogent and, hopefully, valuable.

[Also! The Substack link is accessible, and has a voice-over from yours truly for visually impaired audiences! Or if you just want to hear my pretty voice read my own writing lol.]

[homosexuhauls]

radblr and friends, does anyone have any good fiction book recs? good lesbian fiction is especially hard to weed out from the crap, but anything woman-focused (and woman-authored of course) is welcome

[transmutationisms]

Thoughts on wittig?

lol i remember when she was au courant on here fifty quote posts a day from 'one is not born a woman' tagged matfem. extremely popular with a certain demo of tme lesbian invested in arguing that lesbianism is inherently not cis. a lot of the problems with her basically boil down to a failure of her own vision: although she argued gender was contingent and created rather than 'natural' and determined, her actual analysis of this is limited to an understanding of 'womanhood' as basically a domestic relationship to an individual man, leading to the idea that womanhood can/should be rejected by eschewing such relationships. it's a really poor way of trying to understand how gender is enforced and how people respond to gendered roles and demands. like it's very obvious this has nothing to say to or about trans womanhood and it doesn't even capture the breadth of cis lesbian experience (france, famously a country in which there are no economic or material penalties for not being heterosexually partnered with children,)

when she was popular on here i remember reading some of her short fiction and it was also endemic to those pieces that the analysis only held on the assumption that the female body = the cis female body, is reproductively capable, &c. like again she gets quoted as though she was radically challenging biological determinism but it's quite clear from her work beyond a few pithy lines of 'one is not born a woman' that this was never really her intent or within her scope, she was at best ignoring trans gender/sexuality and at worst an outright transmisogynist, and her account of 'materialist' analysis of gender is so painfully limited it becomes little more than a series of individual heterosexual pairings that one can opt out of by engaging in different sexual behaviour.

[stackslip]

from time to time i check twitter again and i see that people have revived the 2018 tumblr matfem sensibilities believing they're gonna save feminism while really only being a bunch of shitty bullies who argue they have a wittig-given right to talk shit about bi women online because they've decided biphobia has "no material basis" and that lesbians are incapable of being cis bc the basis of womanhood is to be "available to men" which lesbians aren't (but bi and straight women are. this is very feminist to say women are available to men). anyhow I fully expect them to post dworkin and co while arguing they're not reactionary in the slightest and continuously bullying people online and then the friend group falls apart as they exile each other one by one for being too degenerate or too close to manhood or some shit (with vulnerable trans women being the first to be discarded). it's just a repeating pattern by this point

[velvetvexations]

Hiya, just wanted to let you know that mephorash person has been radfemmy in the past, you might wanna search “radfem” and “matfem” on their blog. You don’t have to use taa/tae or whatever I think that’s not how oppression works at all - a transmasc

Hm! I did wonder about "abolish gender" in his header, but "not HRT" made that seem much more reasonable.

I can't seem to find anything that's like, "get a million miles away from me" searching those tags. Like, deriding choice feminism is Dumb and Counterproductive, but I think within the reasonable limit to tolerate, so I won't block him or tell him to not interact as of right now. A lot of the rest of the immediately visible language on his blog is gibberish to me. Someone who might know more or is more perceptive might be able to chime in and let me know if there's something I'm missing. For the time being I'm willing to assume good faith and allow him to exist in my vicinity if he so chooses pending evidence of more noxious radfemmery.

Anyway, that being the case I originally put TAE in my about to parody TMA/TME out of spite and there it shall stay doing that out of spite.

I'm very pleased, however, to have been right about the whole affected/exempt system being inherently terrible, though! When I saw him saying it I had felt bad using the term in a sarcastic way like that if there were actually valid uses for it (in which case I was going to take it out, because a valid use still wouldn't be using it as an identity marker - then I'd just be doing the same thing I get mad at the TMA/TME folks for). Probably not ideal that was me taking a moment to check my ego and remember that people knew better than me, but damn, I couldn't miss if I tried.

[perestroika-hilton]

Thinking abt how insane the optics of lesbians aren't women are but still the matfems stuck on here for several years. Like we have examples of societies where lesbians are treated as entirely separate from women and quite a popular demand is to be included in womanhood

[heterophobicdyke]

real talk how do you deal with lesbophobic hetfems who call lesbians with any disagreeance to radical feminism men? i'm a lesbian before a matfem, can't be a rad atm bc I sometimes mentor males in my current role and have too low confidence in the market to seek another role, and feel like i just constantly see hetfems call non-rad-aligned lesbians men, be they "too" vocally goldstar, jump the gun sometimes calling out what appears to be lesbophobia when it's actually just a misunderstanding between how terms are used in rad-aligned vs regular online communities, etc.

it's like these women are legitimately gunning for lesbians at all times, rad-aligned and not, feminist and not.

I think a woman can be a radical feminist and mentor males for a job - we need money, haha!

How do I deal with “radical feminist” homophobes? Hmm. I remind myself (and them) that being a radical feminist doesn’t magically fix someone’s homophobia and that radical feminism even has its own history with unique forms of it, deployed with radical feminism as the excuse, such as “political lesbianism” or viewing gay men as more perverted than straight men (Jeffreys dies on both of these homophobic hills).

Once I’ve reminded them and myself that radical feminism doesn’t remedy homophobia and sometimes is used to justify more of it (usually with the belief that misogyny is the worst/only form of oppression so women can’t oppress men or each other on different axes), then it’s easier to not feel like it’s a worse betrayal because I’ve stopped expecting more from radical feminists. Radical feminism’s core goal of eliminating male supremacy is not inherently homophobic, but certain theorists orthodoxically upheld as disciples in the radfem bible have said some really homophobic things, justifying it as their “interpretation of radical feminism,” because Big Shock, non-lesbian women are homophobic as fuck 🤷🏻‍♀️

In short, how I handle it is by lowering my expectations and acknowledging that homophobic women are just as bad as homophobic men - they just enact that homophobia in socialised ways: male homophobia is often more physically violent and female homophobia is more emotional/psychological. All forms of abuse are equally harmful - psychological abuse is no less harmful than physical violence. Sometimes psychological abuse feels worse because of the plausible deniability, too. It can drive us insane.

With that, I hold them accountable for homophobia. I explain the problematic behaviour. I defend lesbians and gay men. I might not get through to the homophobic woman, but I might be inspiring the lesbians reading on.

[lago-morpha]

this is so disgusting. fuck off tumblr I'm not even 18 yet. "accidental anal" you mean rape?

[febfemcels]

basic info just so it's out there<3

21 ; they/them ; febfem ☽☾

american sex worker (both irl & online)

marxist TIRF (also influenced by matfems, marxfems, & prolefems)

idrc if TERFs interact but i'll block you if you just want to harass me instead of actually conversing like a grown up.

i'll make a better pinned later with more of my specific takes below the cut xp

[lettucedloophole]

hi apologies if youve alr made a post abt this (if u have, then maybe u can add a link to that specific post?) but i just wanted to ask for ur perspective bc this is smth i keep getting hung up on and i rlly only trust u to answer:

why would abolishing gender be harmful to trans ppl if transphobia stems from emphasis on traditional gender roles, and the abolishment would further their focus on relieving dysphoria thru physical sex change instead of relieving it by having to conform to sociological femininity and masculinity as a means to adapt in this patriarchal society?

thank you for taking the time to read and answer this <3

no worries! i haven't made a post about this before since no one's asked, but i'll answer it right here for you.

the answer is, it wouldn't be harmful. abolishing gender would ultimately be the best for everyone, but especially lgbt people & women. however... the contextualization of this point is what makes or breaks it. let me explain--

trans people have a negative reaction when people discuss abolishing gender not only for the same reason cis people might (a kneejerk reaction to protect the status quo), but also for the very valid reason of wanting to defend transness in a transphobic society. it's the same reason why some gay people will react negatively to the fact that homosexuality is a social construct, and therefore cannot be innate; most people use this argument to justify homophobia & patriarchy.

the thing is, to abolish gender, sex must also be abolished as it's the primary method of naturalizing gender. sex is a social construct-- it's not natural. however, terfs and any garden variety conservative will reify gender through the naturalization of sex. they'll say, "cis women and men are natural, but trans people aren't. therefore, they must be eliminated." similarly, "heterosexual people are natural, but gay and bi people aren't. therefore, they must be eliminated." eliminated can mean killed or, forcibly dissolved into the "natural" categories via bullshit self-loathing propaganda.

a really easy way to understand why this is so upsetting to trans people is just comparing their situation to gay people or women's, really, as they are so similar. if you walked up being like "wow i cant wait for gays to be abolished<3" ofc people will assume you mean it in a homophobic sense rather than a complicated, radical feminist sense, and if you're focusing on the abolition of minority groups in particular, it does likely stem from bigotry. not saying that you've said anything like that lol, but those examples are the best way i can illustrate the point.

also, everyone on the internet hates radical feminism, so regardless of how eloquently you explain your point & how sensible it is, if you associate it with radical feminism people will ignore what you say, misinterpret you so severely that it seems deliberate but could very well be internet stupidity, and also throw tomatos at you. 😭 radfems, matfems & a handful of marxist, anarchist, intersectional fems + womanists are the only ones i trust to not be covert antifeminists.

last p.s.: we don't know what a society outside of patriarchy looks like. assuming people will continue getting sex changes assumes the existence of a natural sex binary, though it's possible people may change "sex" characteristics as they please. trans people's issue is not only being forced into gender roles, but a hatred of transness which puts them into a catch-22 regarding survival under patriarchy-- they're "reifying patriarchy" if they transition, but plagued with dysphoria, martyrs to a post-patriarchal world centuries away from us if they don't. perhaps, a similar scenario would be if you told a gay or straight person to simply see people as gender/sexless and to experience attraction, to give affection as though we lived in a post-patriarchal society-- it just wouldn't be possible, and for the gay person who is particularly vulnerable under patriarchy, it would more likely be traumatizing. dworkin put it so succintly in woman hating...

i hope that wasn't too repetitive or long, i just wanted to be thorough. admittedly, this is kind of a loaded answer if you aren't familiar with sex as a social construct, so if you have anymore questions, feel free to ask!