It’s just women who identify as “radical feminist” but who refuse to accept trans women AS being authentically women. In some cases, it’s very conservative women who want to be seen as feminist, but still hold some conservative views about the gender binary.
I’m personally not a fan of that view point, that the only people who can be women are born with vaginas. Yes, cisgendered women might have had to deal with out and out sexism early on, but transwomen often have to deal with that (especially if they come out early) AND all sorts of other bullshit and they deserve our love and support just as much as any woman.
Contrapoints has a good video on gender identity, which talks about TERFS:
And this one on TERFS (which I’ve never seen, but is probably highly educational and entertaining… edutainment!)
(It’s got some flashy/strobing effects and the usually kind of stuff in Natalie’s videos…)
So, what if one just doesn’t get the differences? Like, I showed traditionally masculine tendencies when I was in kindergarten - running after and kicking boys who’d been picking on my best friend. But to me, even then, that’s what one does when you’re four-five years old when boys are picking on your best friends.
I wanted to do boy things. But I was also attracted to both boys and girls. I didn’t get why girls were not supposed to do boy things. I mean, I caved in - I owned Suzy Homemaker toys and Barbies (never a Ken…that’s interesting, idn’t it?), but I wanted to work power tools too.
And I was daddy’s little girl until daddy found a bigger girl and decided to just be a minimum-requirement father without actually getting a divorce.
So much of it is cultural. For my family’s class and original location, boys are more likely to use power tools, but not exclusively. Ditto for cooking; women do more of it, but men know how and can easily switch over.
And same thing for beating up boys who beat up friends – girls need to be told not to do that. There’s nothing inherently “masculine” about it.
Brené Brown has a good line about it in one of her talks, about how she was encouraged to throw a baseball and play rough and do all the things boys did… until she got better than the boys at them, at which point she was told she wasn’t being ladylike.
You can be eaten alive by your own interiority; you can be swinging a chainsaw into some girl’s face and still believe the real tragedy is your own hurt feelings. That self-absorption is what true evil is.
I thought beating people up was inherently masculine. My mistake. But I myself tend to relate physical violence to be more of something men do, while I relate emotional violence to women, even though I know damn well they’re both capable of both.
I think far more of us don’t than do, honestly, because these are not stated ideas, they are just sort of… implied, baked into our culture, so they’re not always obvious, especially if you’re any level of gender non-conforming (anything from being a tomboy or more feminine boy, to actually being trans). The reality is that none of us really fit into those neat boxes, because they are essentially stereotypes. I think it’s probably confining to some extent to everyone, but that it’s harder for certain people.
Originally it referred to those radical feminists who reject the idea that trans women are women, and that trans women sould be welcome in most women’s spaces, events, etc.
Of course it has been misapplied to libfems like Germaine Greer, to Dirt, to Bev Jo, to Mumsnet, and so on.
Or just used as a generic insult.
They broke up the Daughters of Bilitis over Beth Elliott’s membership, and they boycotted Olivia Records over Sandy Stone’s membership until she resigned. Also trans feminists boycotted the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival over the interpretation of the womyn-born-womyn rule, and terves threatened to boycott over any change, and the impasse led it to close.
I think getting away with beating up people is inherently masculine once everyone is past Grade 2 or so. I just figured that’s where “boys being boys” came from.
Certainly for every man who beats up people, there’s another man who hates beating up anyone.
Marriage has been referred to as legalized prostitution for years…
it’s like when they wanted to bust porn movie makers - everyone involved in making a movie - for prostitution…it could be said that all work is exploitative…and much of it is…
Get rid of the demand. Supply everyone with access to a sex doll/robot/AI thing a la “Blade Runner”.
What about the people who like to be prostitutes? I mean…if one hasn’t lived The Life, how does one truly know?
I have no use for exclusionaries, having been excluded from many things throughout my lifetime.
A friend of mine was a real estate agent and an escort, both part time. She said the real estate job was the less pleasant one, and that she enjoyed being an escort because she enjoyed the sex. For both jobs she was a sole proprietor/self managed (ie: no pimps).
For sex work to stop being the exploitation of women… I see the following changes need to be made. Unfortunately they’re all major things:
Sex needs to come out of the closet, as it were. As a society, we talk around sex constantly, but we rarely talk about details – especially healthy consent and healthy conduct during the act.
That the entire focus is on the exploitation of women, and that male sex workers are such a minority, is telling. Paying for sex should be an equal opportunity activity.
Sex work and everything related to it (okay, not the current association with hard drugs) needs to be made legal. You can’t manage it if you just keep trying to shut it down.
Roughly it means one’s interior life, sometimes as a reference to a mental or spiritual life…
Honestly, this kind of postmodern academic language happened in part because I think the humanities guys were annoyed with not having a specialized language like the hard sciences. Sometimes, the words work and add to a conversation, other times, they just work to obscure things more and make the speaker/writer seem far more erudite than they actually are… (she said, using a $.25 word to sound smart!)
I think that’s their true purpose - so people not familiar won’t know what they’re talking about. ESPecially when it comes to things like law and government, oh and accounting, too!
