TMEs implying that “radfems” are just too radical and that’s the issue with them, are super telling on themselves.
The issue with “radfems” is that there is nothing radical about them. It’s that their entire belief system relies on the colonizer’s pseudoscience, that the material effect of their rhetoric does the exact opposite of radically changing anything: it only reinforces and protects the established patriarchal order of gender, but just applies a tone of distaste to the word “men” and performs outrage of male atrocities and fronts like they’re militant about it so that they look radical. The issue is not that what “radfems” are saying is all technically true but that it’s just not the time and place for it, it’s that everything they believe is a colonizer’s lie, and all they truly stand for is the defense of class society. The mask of their ideology inevitably and without fail rots away until they’re publicly allying with right wing, nazi groups to “curb the transgender mind virus that’s poisoning our girls and creating predators!” knowing entirely what those groups’ plan for women at large is. Of course, the most harmful component of their ideology is the outward violence towards classes of women who are degendered for not matching the colonizer’s definition of a woman: racialized women, trans women, intersex women, disabled women.
The issue isn’t that “radfems” say “kill all men!” It’s that the material effect of their entire ideology keeps men in power. It’s that they are assisting the patriarchy in trying to snuff out the most oppressed classes of women under the guise of defending “pure” girls from sexual deviance and degeneracy. What is radical about any of that? That is what you hear on fox news. That is what Trump ran on. That is the ideology that the colonizer weaponizes against ALL colonized people. This is the ideology that the ruling classes of the most dominant societies in the world have been churning out for generations to do the rhetorical dirty work of everything from manufacturing consent for imperialist invasions and settler projects, to disarming, suppressing, abusing, and enslaving women.
That’s why it’s also very telling when those same TMEs compare transfeminists to radfems… the only comparison you can make between us is that we both ascribe the radical label to ourselves. You are liberals by definition, effectively demonizing the idea of radical politics in the sphere of gender. No, “radfems” aren’t radical, and no, radical transfeminists are nothing like “radfems”. You’re dealing in abstracts and platitudes and equally obstructing any progressive revolutionary change by treating tma people as anything other than one of the most oppressed classes of people, as women whose liberation is not just a requirement of the liberation of all people, but who should be listened to when we tell you who we are and who our oppressors are, and when we tell you what our oppression looks like.
the state of feminism is comparable to western politics in general….. even the furthest right, colonizer, imperialist feminists are deemed “too radical” even in “progressive” spaces, whereas actual feminists applying a materialist analysis to gender and recognizing the complexities of it and the plight of the trans woman and the transfeminine person and the racialized woman are totally and completely rejected from the conversation, immediately stuck with the most damning labels they can think up: they call us terrorists, pedophiles, degenerates…. 98% of feminists in the West might as well be running the white house twitter account.
