content warning, I’m going to be glib and talk about misogyny and transphobia in a joking manner - I don’t mean to harm anyone, and I don’t want to upset anyone.
OK hear me out: trans-exclusionary radical feminists, at least the actual radfems who are often middle-aged and still stuck in second-wave feminism, should love gender-affirming care … doesn’t it do exactly what they would love to do to men? Like, a lot of these women are cultural feminists, they essentialise men and women and view women as superior and men as inherently violent, oppressive, and bad. At least that’s been my experience.
So, for example, if a man wants to suppress testosterone and take estrogen, shouldn’t TERFs’ fear about violence from men and the (admittedly simplistic) narrative that testosterone is responsible for that violence and aggression motivate them to embrace enabling as many men as possible to suppress their testosterone and chemically castrate themselves with estrogen?
Even if they don’t believe that makes the man a woman, shouldn’t they believe it’s an improvement?
It just sounds like a revenge fever-dream concocted by second-wave lesbian separatist: a woman goes about secretly injecting abusive men with estrogen to calm them down … it just sounds like a revenge fantasy they would be into.
The plot of The Gate to Women’s Country literally centers around this fantasy of castrating men to make “good” men.
And if that’s not compelling, I know they love the stories about chopping off dicks - come on, if they really believe trans women are a bunch of men, shouldn’t they support access to gender-affirming care like vaginoplasties that do exactly that?
TERFs should support gender-affirming care even if they don’t believe trans women are women. If men are the enemy they should be the biggest fans of chemically castrating and cutting the dicks off men.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
this is operating under the erroneous assumption that modern terfs have any connection to feminism beyond the moniker.
yeah, agreed - TERFs are mostly not feminists
but I do think the anti-trans movement that styles itself as feminist picks up a lot of average people who are like I’m describing, middle-aged second-wave feminists, and they are duped into anti-trans positions. However, the ideological core of TERFs is now anti-feminist as far as I can tell.
I always referred to extreme and misguided feminists as feminazis. TERFs are feminazis with a particular fixation
feminazi is a right-wing pejorative term for feminists, I wouldn’t be using that term (even for TERFs) unless you want to be perceived as right-wing.
Wouldn’t be the first time I made a name for mean folk, only to find out the right-wing have already claimed it. Yeah, if it’s already got a meaning then it’s a bad idea to use it, 'cause it can result in confusion. Like ‘football’.
yes, I think it would communicate the wrong idea to people, that you’re critical but from a right-wing perspective.
It’s also a little confusing to me personally, the way “feminazi” has been used in the past and what it conjures in my mind is an overly zealous feminist who corrects people’s politically incorrect language or something like that, similar in concept to something like how “Social Justice Warrior” was a term of abuse for a while.
It is funny to me that TERFs as right-wingers are actually closer to “feminist Nazis” than the original meaning of “feminazi”, lol
I’m not sure there was ever a legitimate concern about social justice movements in the U.S. being genuinely authoritarian, even if we all don’t like change, being corrected by moralists, etc.
Bigotry is not a logical ideology. It’s an emotional response to confusion and ignorance.
yes, please don’t take my post seriously, it’s meant in jest 😜
if we were being serious, I would claim TERFs don’t qualify as feminists, they abandoned feminism when they started working with misogynist right-wingers (just like the SWERFs in the '80s) and started making essentialist claims about women that most feminists reject. It’s hardly surprising when TERFs like Posie Parker (the woman who popularized “adult human female” as an anti-trans slogan) started off with feminist styled transphobia, and as soon as she started collaborating with right-wingers suddenly she identifies as “not a feminist” and started calling herself a “woman’s rights activist” instead. (I could be getting the timeline mixed up, so take this with a grain of salt - but I think the point still stands about how TERFs quickly become “not feminists” in the name of their anti-trans views. The transphobia is much more important than whatever feminism they might have had.)
