Radical feminism by definition is a philosophy that emphasises the patriarchal roots of the inequality between men & women. One of its many facets is recognising that the patriarchal invention of gender is maintaining that invention of inequality, that gender is something you are socialised into since birth. In this society women, or biological females, have been socialised into femininity, below men, biological males, who have been socialised into masculinity. To put it simply the radical feminist stance on the whole two genders issue is that there are only 2 genders we can be forced into but in a truly equal society there would be none & the only distinction between men & women would be just that, the biological differences. Our personalities would completely be our own choice, rather than stereotypes forced onto us through the system that is gender. This leads us to the conclusion that “man” & “woman” isn’t something we can identify as but it’s rather something patriarchal society identifies us as, if that makes sense.
This conclusion then leads us to the reality that you can’t identity in & out of genders. Socialisation isn’t your individual choice to make. It’s even in like the root word of ‘socialisation’: society.
To people who choose to recognise gender, as well as (what) it’s defined as, the thought of people transitioning between genders isn’t possible as gender is just the result of stereotypes that you’re forced into due to your biology since birth, & regardless of what you do to your body you’re always going to be biologically the sex you were born.
To radical feminists being a woman is tied to the oppression females experience due to our sex; an experience biological males will just never have. The bottom line is we don’t believe anyone can transition in & out of power dynamics.
Just like someone who is black cannot transition into whiteness & claim the power that comes with being white & vice versa. Just like someone who is poor can’t transition into a billionaire & claim the power that comes with being in the 1% & vice versa.
This has made trans activists come up with the term TERF (which stands for trans exclusionary radical feminist). Personally, I don’t care about the term all that much. At worst it’s a silencing tactic used to silence women from speaking up about our oppression, but by no means is it a slur, or anything that horrible. Another thing, people who use the term to describe my form of feminism need to recognise that, historically, feminism wasn’t formed to include anyone other than females. Only in recent years has the goal of feminism shifted from female liberation to an extremely vague notion of equality that everyone needs to be a part of, but that’s a whole other video. The entire history of that shifted (us).
Radical feminism wasn’t intended to include anyone other than females in the first place, so if anything the ‘trans exclusionary’ part of ‘TERF’ is redundant, because it wasn’t meant to include males.
Recently however, I’ve seen the term TERF thrown around very liberally. People that simply recognise the existence of biological sex have close to no clue about radical feminism or being labelled as TERFs.
Fairly liberal feminists like Laci Green are being called TERFs for simply saying that men have penises & women have vaginas with no actual political motives behind this statement, which, like, God, that’s obvious. That shouldn’t even be politicised.
FFS I’ve even seen Donald Trump labelled as a TERF. Yes, the Donald Trump whose platform doesn’t view women as fully autonomous human beings – that Trump is a fucking radical feminist to these people. God!
To trans activists a TERF is anyone who doesn’t fall in line with their post-modernist gender politics (&/de/re)construction of reality – of biological fucking reality.
This proves that the majority of trans activists simply do not understand what radical feminism is, whether that be because they blacklisted anyone who actually is one, or because they haven’t left their intellectual echo-chamber in so many years, I honestly don’t know.
Language is used to articulate thoughts, and obscuring the basic definition of concepts like ‘radical feminism’ is pushing us further & further away from actual progress. Because if we don’t have the language to describe our movement surely we won’t have the language to describe our goals & we’ll remain stagnant as a society, as we won’t know what to strive for, since we can’t articulate what we want as a society going forward.
there doesn't seem to be anything here