This is a very different post to my usual content, so please bare with me for a moment, but a few blogs (and one extremely irritating Instagram video by a cis woman) have crossed my dash recently that have pissed me off and I need to quickly get this off my chest:
If you’re pretending to care about misogyny then you do actually need to learn about both the differences and the overlap of misogyny targeted towards cis women, trans women, trans men, non-binary people and intersex people (including the added intersections of race, disability etc.) in order to combat all of it, because I’ll regularly see posts on this website that are outspoken against misogyny but which quickly dissolve into radical feminist territories before you can even ask OP if they have anyone other than cis women in mind when they’re making the post.
And no, throwing in a “this includes trans women” does not mean you care about trans women, it just means you’re covering up the fact that your views have more in common with JK Rowling than with anyone writing feminist or transfeminist theory who are worth their salt. If your feminism includes trans women, do you truly care about the issues that trans women face that cis women don’t? Or do you only care about trans women when they pass enough as cis women for you to feel comfortable about your allyship?
In a similar vein, do you care about misogyny when it affects trans men? Or are you more comfortable subscribing to the idea that trans men “chose” to be men and therefore should expect to be treated like the He-Man Woman-Hating Traitors they are? (But, y’know, in a “progressive” way).
Do you care about how misogyny affects non-binary people, and how it intersects with exorsexism, or are you more comfortable with pretending they don’t exist so that your worldview doesn’t need to change as much?
Do you care about the medical abuse and trauma that intersex people are legally forced to face or are you unwilling to truly let go of the sex binary and realise that its categorisation is just as useless as the gender binary?
And most importantly, do you understand how being white makes all of this inherently easier?
Lastly, I do think this website also needs to be reminded that the word “radical” in radical feminism refers to its etymology from the word “root”, in that radical feminism believes that misogyny is the root of all oppression, and does not leave room for any intersections of other systems of oppression. This is why the majority of outspoken TERFs are white, middle class cis women; they refuse to acknowledge any position of power they may have over someone else, because in their mind, they are affected by the only system of oppression that matters.
Unfortunately, a lot of people on tumblr have taken this ideology and decided to turn it into a “trans-inclusive” version, without realising that the whole ideology is rotten to the core. There is nothing radical about radical feminism. It depends on strict definitions and a complete lack of understanding on how intersection works, and trying to make it trans-inclusive ultimately fails when you attempt to place a group of people who— by definition— do not fit into patriarchy’s rigid boxes into an ideology that was built directly inside these boxes and largely tries to uphold them.
You are not “fixing” radical feminism. You are falling for the oldest tricks in the book.
Note: I’ve been analysing how radical feminist indoctrination works ever since it started to become more widely recognised in the late 2010s, so while I don’t pretend to be an expert by any means, I have come across the same type of tactics over and over again for years now, so I’m quick to notice the red flags when I see them.
I’m starting to see a LOT of red flags from blogs that claim to be trans-inclusive, and I need people on here to know how to recognise when that is a lie.
