The transphobia itself doesn't come up in this screenshot, but anti-transmasculinity is one conceptual step away from this, and the weapon they'll hand you so you can feel more secure in the 'value' you have under patriarchy is transmisogyny. The logic all just runs together.
This is what 'womanhood as biological reality' is really about. It's teleology, treating it like some sort of social ill if you're not positive enough about the possibility of pregnancy. Romanticizing reproductive capacity becomes 'pro-woman,' any challenge must be stamped out.
It really cannot be overstated how this type of traditionalist propaganda has worked its way into liberal and radical spaces through transphobic feminism. It's the same rhetorical trick--not accepting 'womanhood' (defined as reproductive capacity, naturalized as neutral) is 'misogyny.'
That's just derangement tbh. Radicalization does kinda snap your mind.
I mean, the context is almost always that people think the underlying problem with TERFs is that they are not positive enough about womanhood. I agree that most of the GC crowd (including many of the radfeminists) are very protectionistic, but I don't think that's usually what's being highlighted.
They will get angry when trans women enjoy the trappings of womanhood, but they will sometimes get even angrier when trans women say that womanhood is just subordination. They will interpret every possible relation a trans woman could have to womanhood as misogyny because they're transmisogynists.
They want there to be something wonderful beneath, so they rehabilitate reproduction itself, Catholic style, and refuse to look too closely at how that's socially constructed and coercive too. Or they treat it as glorious and terrible at once, and reframe misogynistic oppression as a badge of honor.
There's this common misconception that TERFs "define womanhood in terms of suffering," and it's not true. They are just radical feminist enough to understand that gender is a social dynamic and womanhood constructed through subordination, but they rebel against the full implications of this.
It's the other way around, it's pro-trans radical feminists who define womanhood exclusively in terms of gender subordination and TERFs who lose their shit over it and throw a fit over how misogynistic it is to not join their fertility cult.
Sort of! It's not 100% about capacity because they use teleology so that they can cover infertile cis women also, but the narrative there is going to be more about how it's a tragic "female" condition so you're deserving of empathy.
Every time people cry "you're reducing women to walking uteruses," they do two things: they give TERFs ammunition to say their opponents are misogynists who think female reproductive anatomy is disgusting, and they divert attention away from the actual goal and primary target of this ideology.
I wish people wouldn't say that TERFs reduce women to reproductive anatomy, because this is actually a Ρis supremacist project aimed at improving the status of Ρis women, especially straight ones, by leaning into transmisogyny and shoring up the patriarchal value attached to reproductive capacity.
Their entire ideology is about prioritizing theoretical possibilities, like women's representation becoming disproportionately trans (something that implicitly relies on the false assumption that trans women have "male" privilege), over the very real vulnerabilities that trans people experience.
This is really disgusting, and I feel like the journalistic neutrality here, where gender critical propaganda and narratives are presented and then left unexamined, is part of the problem. It's supposed to look like "reasonable concerns," not like implausible scenarios dreamed up by a hate movement.
I care about men being sexually victimized, I don't care that a lot of straight adult men are too busy worrying about their masculinity to form meaningful relationships.
Talking about how men get disciplined into being patriarchal subjects is fine, the way people talk about it is almost always MRA adjacent and geared towards denying that men even have real social power.
There's no reason to be going around saying systems of exploitation harm everyone.
You can talk about how men suffer because of masculinity until the end of time, and it's not even completely false, but the catch is that gender is still hierarchical. They're still empowered to see any drawbacks as an affront to the privileges they feel entitled to by virtue of being men.
I think people who are drawn to the liberal talking point that patriarchy harms (cishet) men too don't really understand that misogynistic men already believe themselves to be the true victims of patriarchal society. It's part of why they insist that women owe them sex and deference.
She's not saying that feminism is inherently transphobic, she's just talking about an intersectional issue that objectively exists.
People sometimes don't want to talk about this because there's a tendency on the left to treat intersectional problems within feminism as evidence that feminism is uniquely reactionary (no movement has solved intersectional issues), but you do need to acknowledge it if you want to guard against it.
This is frankly just true and something people should be willing to wrestle with. The power and sense of authority we lack in relation to cis men, we're enabled to seek out within the category of womanhood itself, and this often includes taking a 'noblesse oblige' attitude towards trans inclusion.
The thing about seeing trans women as a secondary victim you can extend some degree of solidarity to on your own terms is that as soon as you don't have the resources to do that (financially, emotionally, etc.), they can become a threat or drain to you instead, and that way lies TERF radicalization.
This is why straight privilege exists for women even though heterosexuality as a structure reifies and facilitates women's oppression--because your value as a woman is tied to desirability (and marriageability) and you're incentivized to guard whatever status patriarchy will afford you.
I feel like we have to constantly relitigate the fact that heterosexuality is violent and oppressive for women by design, that you are socially coerced into it, that part of what this means is that you are rewarded with social status and proximity to power for conforming and punished if you don't.
Michael Moorcock: What do you think about the current shift to the right in US politics? Andrea Dworkin: Here, in blaming and shaming the oppressed, the powerless, the left colludes with the right. There's no reason to look to the left for justice, so people look to the right for order. It's pretty simple. The victory of the right also expresses the rage of white men against women and people of colour who are seen to be eroding the white man's authority. The pain of destroying male rule won't be worse than the pain of living with it.
Andrea Dworkin said this in 1995 and it could be this week nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin...
You can find individual straight men who are sympathetic, yes, though the ones trying to be 'allies' are usually... problematic. A circle of them would be a huge red flag.
This is really bad, though. Guys who are respectful specifically because they're trying to get laid are very misogynistic--they're not meaningfully different than incels, just better manipulators.
This account knows how to diversify--they just tried to call me a TERF and "cis female supremacist" for calling the "young men join the right because of mean feminists" stuff bullshit. π
I'm not sure that's a divide and conquer tactic so much as it's just the same underlying male supremacist project--it's total commitment to reinforcing the heterosexual family unit with male headship and erasing, pathologizing, marginalizing, etc. LGBT people in general. But centrists don't care.
