fandomsandfeminism:

vaspider:

hadeantaiga:

melidammit:

hadeantaiga:

Y'all gotta learn the difference between “TERF rhetoric” and shit that is just… literal actual feminism. TERFs are feminists, so they’re gonna occasionally say shit that is actually feminist. They’re just gonna throw transphobia on top of it.

Wanting women to be able to exist with leg hair and no makeup isn’t TERF rhetoric, that’s feminism.

Wanting women to be able to “exist naturally” isn’t TERF rhetoric until you begin defining “natural” as “female”. Then it’s TERF rhetoric.

“You’re not a real woman unless…” is a profoundly anti-feminist line of thought. I’m not sure terfs actually are feminists at all.

They are. We cannot deny this. Radical feminism is a real part of feminist history and current feminist theory, and TERFs are part of radical feminism.

I know it’s seductive to say they’re not “real feminists”, because then you can pretend feminist theory has never been problematic and never had bad actors, but the truth is that they are indeed feminists, and have caused damage in the name of feminism.

The No True Scotsman fallacy is real and walks among us.

This is *important*

Plenty of the things TERFs say sounds good and cool and feminist- because it is! But then they *keep going* with some transphobic/bioessentialist garbage.

But it’s too easy to hear the first half and think “oh well thats good” and so you don’t really hear the second half. It’s how they go stealthy and try to radicalize other people- and you NEED to be able to acknowledge that sometimes they are saying normal feminist things so that you can recognize when they use that as a ladder to the garbage.

inrainbows:

caainhurst:

sonnywortzik:

“Trans women are willful women; women who have to insist on being women, who have to keep insisting, again and again, often in the face of violent and repeated acts of misgendering. Any feminists who do not stand up, who do not wave their arms to protest against this misgendering, have become straightening rods.”

— Sara Ahmed, “Living a Lesbian Life”

Those who have to insist on being women are willful women, and the arm becomes your resource, something that can lend its hand in a battle to be. Trans women are willful women; women who have to insist on being women, who have to keep insisting, again and again, often in the face of violent and repeated acts of misgendering. Any feminists who do not stand up, who do not wave their arms to protest against this misgendering, have become straightening rods. When I ask for a revival of the militancy of the figure of the lesbian feminist I am imagining lesbian feminism as in a fundamental and necessary alliance with transfeminism. Transfeminism has also brought feminism back to life. And can I add here that an anti-trans stance is an anti-feminist stance; it is against the feminist project of creating worlds to support those for whom gender fatalism (boys will be boys, girls will be girls) is fatal; a sentencing to death. We have to hear that fatalism as punishment and instruction: it is the story of the rod, of how those who have wayward wills or who will waywardly (boys who will not be boys, girls who will not be girls) are beaten. We will not be beaten. We need to drown these anti-trans voices out by raising the sound of our own. Our voices need to become our arms; rise up; rise up.

the second bit of text is also from living a lesbian life.

:

An interview with a trans man named Peter Alexander, taken from the British Pathé archives. The interview was filmed in 1937.

[Transcript:] As the years passed on, it became very evident that the male side, and the male personality, was becoming dominant. So, after seeking medical advice, I decided to cast aside women’s clothing for those of a male. Although I no longer use lipstick and powder, which would be rather ridiculous when one has to shave every day, I don’t blame the modern girl for using it. But seriously, I do not consider that woman is inferior to man, as she has huge responsibilities, and a definite purpose in life. I left New Zealand because of the publicity which followed me wherever I went. And I hope to go to London at a later date. And when I return to settle down and marry here, and continue with my musical career. And finally, I have one advantage over you other chappies, and that is, I know both sides to every little ordinary story. [End transcript.]

I love his interview because he takes the time to defend the inherent worth of women, and separates his gender identity from his feminist perspective.

I feel the same way as Mr Alexander did. My transition has nothing to do with politics, or my view of womanhood. I think womanhood is beautiful, nuanced, and precious. I did not choose to be transgender, or to be a man. I did not choose my gender dysphoria. I also won’t apologise for being a trans man!

I tried, for a very long time, to be my assigned gender. I wasn’t capable of it. It was destroying my mental health. But that doesn’t mean I have a low opinion of womanhood, or women, or girls.

I think being a woman is wonderful. If you are a woman. I was not. So it nearly killed me. But! I recognise that I am a statistical exception. I recognise that many women have layered, complex, and unique experiences of their femaleness, and they will never arrive at the same conclusion I did (that I am a man). And I think valuing gender non-conforming women, and butches, is essential in promoting LGBT+ equality.

I am proud to be a trans man, and I am also proud to have been assigned female at birth.

floozys:

floozys:

my feminist goal is not to convince men that girls are of value, my feminist goal is to achieve a future where the judgement of our value isn’t in the hands of men. 

and this goes for, especially goes for, trans girls, girls of colour, disabled girls and LGBTQA+ girls. 

girls, all girls, and if you believe otherwise don’t reblog this.   

shatterpath:

hedwig-dordt:

drst:

gehayi:

galacticdrift:

spikesjojo:

1. Open a bank account or get a credit card without signed permission from her father or hr husband.
2. Serve on a jury - because it might inconvenience the family not to have the woman at home being her husband’s helpmate.
3. Obtain any form of birth control without her husband’s permission. You had to be married, and your hub and had to agree to postpone having children.
4. Get an Ivy League education. Ivy League schools were men’s colleges ntil the 70′s and 80′s. When they opened their doors to women it was agree that women went there for their MRS. Degee.
5. Experience equality in the workplace: Kennedy’s Commission on the Status of Women produced a report in 1963 that revealed, among other things, that women earned 59 cents for every dollar that men earned and were kept out of the more lucrative professional positions.
   
6. Keep her job if she was pregnant.Until the Pregnancy Discrimination Act in 1978, women were regularly fired from their workplace for being pregnant.
7. Refuse to have sex with her husband.The mid 70s saw most states recognize marital rape and in 1993 it became criminalized in all 50 states. Nevertheless, marital rape is still often treated differently to other forms of rape in some states even today.
   
8. Get a divorce with some degree of ease.Before the No Fault Divorce law in 1969, spouses had to show the faults of the other party, such as adultery, and could easily be overturned by recrimination.
9. Have a legal abortion in most states.The Roe v. Wade case in 1973 protected a woman’s right to abortion until viability.
10. Take legal action against workplace sexual harassment. According to The Week, the first time a court recognized office sexual harassment as grounds for legal action was in 1977.
11. Play college sports Title IX of the  Education Amendments of protects people from discrimination  based on sex in education programs or activities that receive Federal financial  assistance It was nt until this statute that colleges had teams for women’s sports
12. Apply for men’s Jobs   The EEOC rules that sex-segregated help wanted ads in newspapers are illegal.  This ruling is upheld in 1973 by the Supreme Court, opening the way for women to apply for higher-paying jobs hitherto open only to men.

This is why we needed feminism - this is why we know that feminism works

I just want to reiterate this stuff, because I legit get the feeling there are a lot of younger women for whom it hasn’t really sunk in what it is today’s GOP is actively trying to return to.

Did you go to a good college? Shame on you, you took a college placement that could have gone to a man who deserves and needs it to support or prepare for his wife & children. But if you really must attend college, well, some men like that, you can still get married if you focus on finding the right man.

Got a job? Why? A man could be doing that job. You should be at home caring for a family. You shouldn’t be taking that job away from a man who needs it (see college, above). You definitely don’t have a career – you’ll be pregnant and raising children soon, so no need to worry about promoting you.

This shit was within living memory.  I’M A MILLENIAL and my mother was in the second class that allowed women at an Ivy League school. Men who are alive today either personally remember shit like this or have parents/family who have raised them into thinking this was the way America functioned back in the blissful Good Old Days. There are literally dudes in the GOP old enough to remember when it was like this and yearn for those days to return.

When people talk about resisting conservativism and the GOP, we’re not just talking about whether the wage gap is a myth or not. We’re talking about whether women even have the fundamental right to exist as individuals, to run their own households and compete for jobs and be considered on an equal footing with men in any arena at all in the first place.

I was a child in the 1960s, a teenager in the 1970s, a young adult in the 1980s.
This is what it was like:

When I was growing up, it was considered unfortunate if a girl was good at sports. Girls were not allowed in Little League. Girls’ teams didn’t exist in high school, except at all-girls’ high schools. Boys played sports, and girls were the cheerleaders.

People used to ask me as a child what I wanted to be when I grew up. I said I wanted to be a brain surgeon or the first woman justice on the Supreme Court. Everyone told me it was impossible–those just weren’t realistic goals for a girl–the latter, especially, because you couldn’t trust women to judge fairly and rationally, after all.

In the 1960s and 1970s, all women were identified by their marital status, even in arrest reports and obituaries. In elementary school, my science teacher referred to Pierre Curie as DOCTOR Curie and Marie Curie as MRS. Curie…because, as he put it, “she was just his wife.” (Both had doctorates and both were Nobel prize winners, so you would think that both would be accorded respect.)

Companies could and did require women to wear dresses and skirts. Failure to do could and did get women fired. And it was legal. It was also legal to fire women for getting married or getting pregnant. The rationale was that a woman who was married or who had a child had no business working; that was what her husband was for. Aetna Insurance, the biggest insurance company in America, fired women for all of the above.

A man could rape his wife. Legally. I can remember being twelve years old and reading about legal experts actually debating whether or not a man could actually be said to coerce his wife into having sex. This was a serious debate in 1974.

The debate about marital rape came up in my law school, too, in 1984. Could a woman be raped by her husband? The guys all said no–a woman got married, so she was consenting to sex at all times. So I turned it around. I asked them if, since a man had gotten married, that meant that his wife could shove a dildo or a stick or something up his ass any time she wanted to for HER sexual pleasure.

(Hey, I thought it was reasonable. If one gender was legally entitled to force sex on the other, then obviously the reverse should also be true.)

The male law students didn’t like the idea. Interestingly, they commented that being treated like that would make them feel like a woman.

My reaction was, “Thank you for proving my point…”

The concept of date rape, when first proposed, was considered laughable. If a woman went out on a date, the argument of legal experts ran, sexual consent was implied. Even more sickening was the fact that in some states–even in the early 1980s–a man could rape his daughter…and it was no worse than a misdemeanor.

Women taking self-defense classes in the 1970s and 1980s were frequently described in books and on TV as “cute.” The implication was that it was absurd for a woman to attempt to defend herself, but wasn’t it just adorable for her to try?

I was expressly forbidden to take computer classes in junior and senior years of high school–1978-79 and 1979-80–because, as the principal told me, “Only boys have to know that kind of thing. You girls are going to get married, and you won’t use it.”

When I was in college–from 1980 to 1984–there were no womens’ studies. The idea hadn’t occurred in many places because the presumption was that there was nothing TO study. My history professor–a man who had a doctorate in history–informed me quite seriously that women had never produced a noted painter, sculptor, composer, architect or scientist because…wait for it…womens’ brains were too small.

(He was very surprised when I came up with a list of fifty women gifted in the arts and science, most of whom he had never heard of before.)

When Walter Mondale picked Geraldine Ferraro as a running mate in 1984, the press hailed it as a disaster. What would happen, they asked fearfully, if Mondale died and Ferraro became president? What if an international crisis arose and she was menstruating? She could push the nuclear button in a fit of PMS! It would be the end of the WORLD!!

…No, they WEREN’T kidding.

On the surface, things are very different now than they were when I was a child, a teen and a young adult. But I’m afraid that people now do not realize what it was like then. I’ve read a lot of posts from young women who say that they are not feminists. If the only exposure to feminism they have is the work of extremists, I cannot blame them overmuch.

I wish that I could tell them what feminism was like when it was new–when the dream of legal equality was just a dream, and hadn’t even begun to come true. When “woman’s work” was a sneer–and an overt putdown. When people tut-tutted over bright and athletic girls with the words, “Really, it’s a shame she’s not a boy.” That lack of feminism wasn’t all men opening doors and picking up checks. A lot of it was an attitude of patronizing contempt that hasn’t entirely died out, but which has become less publicly acceptable.

I wish I could make them feel what it was like…when grown men were called “men” and grown women were “girls.”

Know your history.

So this, too, is what they mean saying “make America great again” and/or the good old days.

REBLOG FOREVER.

boxingcleverrr:

inkskinned:

How often my conversations about feminism have spiraled into requests for assault. I say, “Women don’t need men to defend them,” and am asked, “Can I punch you, then?” And I say, “Women belong in movies and video games and everything,” and I hear terrible things, unprintable slurs and demands for my assault, the threatening of a young woman to shut up: What they would do to silence me. The things they’d shove between my teeth. I say, “Men cannot threaten any woman they disagrees with,” and I’m told, “Women are just as cruel. Am I not supposed to respond in kind?” In my inbox today I have deleted sixteen messages asking for my life. When I say, “Your virginity only means what you want it to mean,” I’m asked, “If you believe in sexual freedom can I fuck you?” When I say “All it takes to be a woman is to want to be a woman,” I am asked, “So if I just say that I’m a woman, can I watch you in the shower?” As if women stand shadowy behind each other in our private moments. As if being woman means sexually assaulting each other.

Part of me - cynical, unwilling to be frightened, says that it might be a nice dose of reality. My shower where I am naked but my hair becomes streaky and thin, where my body sags, where my makeup smears. To witness a woman less than sexy, legs akimbo while shaving, pulling up flab thighs to reach the underside. Part of me dares them to punch me because I fight to win and am small but I’ll kill a man if he touches me. Once I dropped a U.S Marine. Part of me, hellfire and ice queen - says come on, then. You want a fight? Come fight me.

But more is scared. More timidly deletes messages, makes sure my name is hidden, doesn’t answer the endless antifeminist comments. The insertion of men and their opinion on simple things like “I teach children to ask before hugging.” When I close my eyes sometimes I wonder if they’re right and that scares me. How much am I going to change when my voice only echoes around me.

Why are you angry. Why are you angry. What do you think we are taking from you? If it’s not already equal why would equality frighten you.

The ancient art of being a woman and trying to get your voice heard: the gentle suggestion, the peaceful comment. The quiet listening to another opinion and the fact we must acknowledge it before we can continue. That I must educate, be sweet, be feminine in my feminism or else it’s “invalid.” I must present my declaration as a timid thing: “Women maybe should be part of more things.” And then the apologies: of course I don’t hate men, yes I like plenty of things with men in them, no I don’t think women are better. And then the explanations: women are people, here is the number of women in media, here is the number of dead women in media, here are the number of shows led by men. And then I brace for it. For the bullying.

Every time I speak it’s from a flinch. From “maybe this isn’t always the case but for me it is.” From please listen. From less demanding. God forbid I state factually that men are violent. If I speak about our fathers and brothers and the cycle of anger unfolding. God forbid I suggest that just once we should cut the bullshit and treat women well without pandering to men about how that helps them. What if I say “Men shouldn’t hit anyone. Hitting isn’t an answer.”

I’ll tell you what happens. The post was up for four seconds with three notes. The message I get is “If hitting isn’t allowed I’ll just go ahead and shove a gun down your throat.”

Why are you angry. Why are you angry. What do you think we are taking from you?