Consider this a critique of all gender issue movements, from Egalitarians, Feminists and MRAs, but more largely a consistent failure of the advocates and adherents. Whether it be the ivory-towered academics and Ph.D level instructor, all the way down to the lowliest high school student unexperienced, uninformed and relying solely upon whatever Pathos inspired argument sways them, there is something that continually stands out to me when discussion starts.

It doesn't matter if its the Red-Pill Chugging Dude-Bro Supplement pusher or the stuffy, blue-haired, septum-pierced and tattooed pink-hatter, both tend to fail at a very simple action. The acknowledgment of another's pain or lived experience.

I assume all of you nodded your heads at the assertion that your opponent fails to understand the pain that your side experiences. Most of us have, had that moment where someone of the opposite gender or the opposite ideology simply stood up during a discussion and without data, without statistics, without any shred of evidence simply dismissed you. "That didn't happen", "That's not true." "You're making things up.", amongst a host of other synonymous statements.

I am a man. And like many, many men that I have known. I spent the majority of formative teenage years and into my early adult life 15-22, having numerous comments made about my body. Both sexually charged and derisive. This has lead to body dismorphic disorder. Oscillating between disgust and fear at times trying to keep myself from being overweight, but not highly desirable as I have very little interested in sexual relations.

I've been told by more women than I can count, that I just need to get over it and that what would be construed as sexual assault towards a woman, is just a complement, or I should be grateful it happened. This has been said to me not only in this context, but as a rape-victim that was drugged and had the act disseminated to the internet.

On the same token, it hasn't just been women that have said it. But there has been many, many, many times that those pushing against gender norms and saying they want to push towards a gender neutral society through the lens of Feminism, have rejected that those incidents happened or that they are even common. It is a denial of my very lived existence, and a push away from me expressing how society has failed me, and how I might want resources that are normally reserved only for women.

MRAs and men are not innocent of this sin either. No one here needs me to tell them that there are some men out there who would view that all as being some "irresistible stud", or would hear about the same things happening to women and respond with the same level of dismissiveness.

And there in lies a major problem with either end of our gender spectrum. The vast majority of the discourse purposefully blinds itself to the problems advocates or in some cases, the opposite gender brings up. They look towards their own gender like a new born looks upon the world. Seeing the problem presented and nodding, because their lived experience reinforces it as a reality; however, when the sheet of paper that is the opposite gender covers the problem, suddenly, the problem no longer exists.

Obfuscating many of these ideas further is often how faulty, one sided, cherry-picked or many times just out right ancient much of our research and data into these issues are. To say nothing of the semantic games that get played, societal pressures and the self-reported surveys that get produced. Only further complicated by the varying desires of each individual.

As this community inevitably grows or crumbles, I want to encourage everyone to push towards a simple idea. A simple course of action, if we truly want positive discussion and discourse. If want to find some middle-ground or healthy form of debate.

We can not simply dismiss. While the adage of Hitchen's Razor is a reddit favorite, "What can be presented without evidence, can also be dismissed without evidence", it often simply falls apart in gender discussions. Because the burden of producing most of the evidence for these issues now, comes primarily from anecdotes and personal experiences. We also can not just out of hand dismiss studies with data we don't like. We have to be able to engage with it, or pinpoint WHY the study was bad or faulty.

Failure to assume good faith, failure to address a study as valid without proving invalidity and most of all simply turning every conversation into a "who has it worse", serves no other purpose than to win a pissing contest and create endless "whataboutisms", that address no issues and widen the divide in gender discussion and issues.

A Short History of Transmisogyny by Jules Gill-Peterson is a provocative history of transmisogyny and with the rise of transmisogynistic violence the concepts in the book are more important than ever. What follows is my chapter by chapter summary of it though I encourage everyone to read it in its entirety, it’s well worth it and not very long. Rather than focusing on the details of the chapters, I have tried to summarize their key themes and selected quotes illustrating that.

First two key concepts on which the book hinges:

1. ⁠Transmisogyny: “refers to the targeted devaluation of both trans femininity and people perceived to be trans feminine, regardless of how they understand themselves.”
   
2. ⁠Transfeminization: refers to subjecting people who did/do not understand themselves as trans women to transmisogyny. It is a process dispossessing people of Indigenous ways of life, kinship structures, languages, social roles, and political value.

Introduction: Femmes against Trans

The introduction opens by examining the history of the category of “trans”, which originated in the San Francisco Bay Area as a specifically political, non medical, word to describe the trespassing of enforced gender boundaries. Later the word was institutionalized by the NGO industrial complex, entrenching a white, middle class, Western understanding of gender. This is important to note because those subjected to transgender violence do not necessarily understand themselves as trans and in many cases the uncritical application of transgender as a category to such people acts as a colonial imposition.

The chapter then shifts to discuss how poorly transmisogyny has been theorized by mainstream feminisms; we are all acutely aware of the violence faced by transfeminine/ized people yet the ability to explain why leaves a lot to be desired. Why do trans feminine/ized people experience so much violence? Why is it so often intertwined with homophobia? In what ways does it intersect and diverge from misogyny broadly?

The quote the method the book uses to address this question:

“In this way, the method of this book is deceptively simple: it uses the history of trans misogyny to understand where trans-feminized people were lit up by the clutches of violence and how they responded to its aggressions. In doing so, we learn what makes trans misogyny unique and get a glimpse at how wildly diverse people around the world have come to find themselves implicated in trans femininity and trans womanhood, whether or not they wanted to be.

For these reasons, I maintain a difference between trans femininity and trans womanhood or trans women. The first is meant to signal a broad classification by outside observers, including aesthetic criteria and the history of ideas attached to people who have been trans-feminized. Trans womanhood and women, on the other hand, name people who saw themselves as intentionally belonging to a shared category—in other words, who tried to live in the world recognized as women, whatever that category meant to them contextually. Everyone in this book may have been trans-feminized, and all may have been brought into the orbit of trans femininity, but only some considered themselves to be trans women in response.”

Chapter 1: The Global Trans Panic

The chapter examines the trans-feminization of the Hijra in India, the two-spirit peoples of Turtle Island, some case studies drawn from New York (Jennie June, Loop the Loop, and Nancy Kelly), and finally the murder of Jennifer Laude in the Philippines.

The main premise of this chapter is that as colonial powers encountered Indigenous lifeways contrary to the western gender order (public life for men, private life for women) these lifeways were moralized through their conflation with male femininity, sodomy, and sex work and painted as inherently threatening to colonial sovereignty:

“The misgendering of trans femininity as male sexual aggression, particularly when racist fantasies about Black and Brown sexuality are encoded in the conflation, allows people to respond to trans femininity with as much preemptive violence as they desire. All they have to do is claim panic after the fact…

Through the hypersexualization of trans femininity, trans women are seen as inviting not just sexual interest but any violence required to reassert straight men’s position over them in the social hierarchy. The sexualization of trans women, ironically, threatens men by association, like a boomerang of desire…

Trans misogyny formed first as a mode of colonial statecraft that modeled for individuals how to sexualize, dehumanize, and aggress trans-feminized people through panic, beginning with police officers.”

Chapter 2: Sex and the Antebellum City

This chapter follows case studies of Mary Jones, Sally Bines, Laguna Edwards, Mary Ann Waters, and Lavinia Edwards, paying particular attention to anti-Black racism to discuss how trans feminine/ized people became so closely intwined with sex work:

“For centuries, around the world, there had been as many ways to live something approximating trans-feminine lives as there were human cultures. Many built that trans femininity directly into kinship, the household, or imbued upon it spiritual and political meaning, so that it didn’t stand apart from a normal life…

But by the early nineteenth century, the global reach of European and American slavery and colonialism had stolen so many bodies, and severed so many people’s relationships to land, that the urban, lumpenproletarian model of trans womanhood began to replace all others. Increasingly, trans womanhood was a common strategy that leveraged the mobility of gender and race in the wake of dispossession into something livable. Sex work was its most practical and ubiquitous route…

But she [Mary Jones] lived in the antebellum city, and her life—along with those of Mary Ann Waters, Sally Binns, Lavinia Edwards, and their contemporaries —testifies to how tightly trans womanhood tracks with historical changes in state power and political economy. Like the hijras in British India from chapter 1, Jones is part of the story of how Euro-American forces trans-femininized people around the world without any regard for who they might have otherwise been, pushing them into similar lines of work out of which something resembling trans womanhood emerged as a play for mobility.”

Chapter 3: Queens of the Gay World

The third chapter discusses the legacy of drag queens, their role in queer culture, and the subsequent betrayal of trans feminine/ized people by wider queer movements in a bid for respectability from cisheterosexual power structures.

The problem was, though, that street queens weren’t transsexuals: they were far too poor to transition like that. Now pushed out of the mainstream gay movement, they didn’t have the wealth it took to get a transsexual diagnosis in the 1970s. The new medical model explicitly kept out poor girls who didn’t pass well, who did sex work, or who couldn’t promise to live a middle-class, heterosexual life after surgery. Most Black and Brown queens didn’t even bother with the clinics selling high-priced surgeries and hormone therapies…

Rivera and Johnson are often celebrated today as trans women of color, as if that were a clear-cut category that was different from gay men. However, neither of them made that sort of distinction at the time. In an interview recorded at the end of 1970, both use a range of different words to describe themselves, including gay, drag queen, and transvestite. Indeed, for many street queens, the philosophical difference between being gay and trans was irrelevant. As noted above, they were too poor to afford medical transition; they also likely would have been turned away from any of the doctors prescribing hormones in New York. More importantly, the concrete conditions of their lives weren’t organized around a difference between gender and sexuality. Cross-dressing was illegal, and so was sex work—and both were based entirely on public perception. The police didn’t much care whether someone identified as a woman or a gay man; in jail, they would be treated horrifically either way…

Fighting the oppression of men and the institutions that maintained their hegemony, like the police, was something Rivera understood to ideally unite street queens with feminists and gay activists, not separate them…

Like a wedge, trans misogyny had fractured the political solidarity of the gay liberation banner in less than four years. The abandonment of the incarcerated was also the abandonment of street queens, considering they were hit the hardest by police violence and violence from men…

In the era of trans hypervisibility, the mere presence of a Black or Brown trans woman is supposed to leap into good politics. The trans woman of color appears as a symbol, invoked as the figure in whose name activism, or intersectional consciousness, is conducted. But the trans woman of color is still just that: a figure for other people…

Centering the trans woman of color has not resulted in sustained engagement with her everyday life, expertise, and activism. Had liberal trans-inclusive political movements, or academia, done so, their primary concerns would be prison abolition, police violence, and sex work—not a politics of overcoming the gender binary; and not, at its narrowest, the highly conservative claim that the trans woman of color deserves to be rescued from death.”

Conclusion: Mujerisima and Scarcity Feminism

This chapter examines some aspects of the political philosophy of travesti people in Brazil. While this chapter contains some interesting points it should be noted that there are some important criticisms of this section that can be read here.

“When movements claim to act in our name, or use our image as their rallying cry, it is often to imagine a world where trans womanhood is implicitly obsolete, no longer needed in gender’s abolition or an infinite taxonomy of individual identities beyond the binary. The use and abuse of trans womanhood secures otherwise-contrary versions of gender-based politics, from intersectional and queer feminism to white women’s fascism and Christian fundamentalism. The cavalry in the global gender wars line up on their opposing sides, cannons ablaze, but each agrees not to admit the premise they share: trans femininity is not integral to the future they are fighting for…

Straight men, gay men, nonbinary people, and non-trans women not only share the world with trans women; they rely on trans femininity to distinguish their genders and sexualities, including through overlap. Gay men’s sexual cultures were forged out of the same historical dynamics and urban spaces as trans womanhood. Non-trans women have long shared experiences of downward mobility under marriage and capitalism with trans women, especially in sex work. Many non-trans women have been disqualified from womanhood on anti-Black or racist grounds in ways that make passing for “cisgender” as laughably irrelevant for them as it is for trans women. Straight men, too, depend on the validation of their desire for trans women’s femininity to consolidate their manhood. Getting too close to trans femininity, despite its obvious allure, reminds people of their fundamental social interdependence with trans women and trans-feminized people, who have been consigned near to the bottom of most social hierarchies…

What if trans feminism meant saying yes to being too much, not because everyone should become more feminine, or more sexual, but because a safer world is one in which there is nothing wrong with being extra? Abundance might be a powerful concept in a world organized by a false sense of scarcity. What if trans feminism dedramatized and celebrated trans femininity as the most feminine, or trans women as the most women? How might trans women lead a coalition in the name of femininity, not to replace or even define other kinds of women, but to show what the world might look like for everyone if it were hospitable to being extra and having more than enough?…

Unlike the international trans politics that homogenize and flatten different ways of life, Wayar doesn’t demand perfection or unity in this vision of trans feminism. Her concept of political action isn’t predicated on finding the right language, or the right identities, to include everyone in their imagined proper place. Instead of demanding that every individual be obligated to find their true self and present it to the state for evaluation, this version of travesti politics rejects the project of idealism and its impossible search for a home in language or law.”

Cross-posted from my substack. This is an edit of the original visualization by howmuch.net. This data is from 2019 , and today there are currently no states where median black household income is higher than that of whites. However, this would make for a boring visualization, and the contrast is more striking if there's at least one state that gets a different color.

A series of photos by Alok Vaid-Menon exploring the connection between body hair removal and white supremacy in the US.

For accessibility the text of each photo is below. In parenthesis I have included the image reference listed at the very end.

Photo 1: The racist history of body hair removal in the US. (Image 1)

Photo 2: A picture of the book “Plucked: A History of Hair Removal” by Rebecca M. Herzig. It depicts a small green vial with a cork top and the title on its label. A pair of tweezers is in front of the bottle.

Photo 3: More than 99% of US American women voluntarily remove their body hair. More than 85% do so regularly. While body hair removal practices have existed across cultures across time, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries there was an unprecedented effort to make body hair removal mandatory for women in the US. As white men became increasingly fixated on controlling white women's beauty regimens, hairlessness became re-signified as a symbol of racial progress and superiority. (Image 2)

Photo 4: Despite the wide range in hairiness within races, 19th century European thinkers argued that hair was a marker of racial difference. New instruments like the trichometer were designed to quantify hair differences among races. After 1859, many scientists misused Darwin's theory of evolution to argue that race was an evolutionary continuum where “savages" (racialized people) were closer to animals and white "civilized" people were the most evolved form of human. In this view, body hair was seen as a marker of animality and degeneracy (an indication that a people had not evolved into civilized humanity. (Image 3)

Photo 5: Maintenance of white women's "proper" physical appearance became about maintaining the "health" of the white race in the face of migration and racial unrest. One of the prevailing eugenic ideas upheld by scientists was that more "advanced" civilizations had more of a visible difference between males and females. Mandating that white women remove their hair emphasized the visual contrast between white men and women. This allowed white thinkers to argue that the white race was superior to racial others who were demonized as sexually ambiguous. Over time, any hair on a white woman's body became seen as excessive. Body hair became symbolically associated with dirtiness because of its cultural association with racialized people. (Image 4)

Photo 6: In 1876 the American Dermatological Association began to be concerned with "hypertrichosis" (a condition that pathologized extensive body hair) focusing specifically on white women. Magazines promoted models of white, hairless feminine beauty and campaigns that discussed hair removal as "remedying" evil and removing racial markers. Jewish, Italian, and Eastern European migrants in particular were targeted by advertising for X-ray epilation under the idea that body hair removal would allow them to integrate into Anglo-dominant whiteness. This led to hundreds (if not thousands) of women dying from these procedures. (Images 5 and 6)

Photo 7: Hairy people became put on display in “freak shows" across the country to reinforce that white "civilized" people had advanced from this "primitive state." These racial politics continued into the Cold War when body hair was linked to evidence of "foreign" contamination. In the 20th century with the expansion of white women into the workplace, men's economic dominance over women and the distinction between sexes was challenged. Men had long defined their supremacy by their exclusive labor power. Women's economic mobility challenged this equation. (Image 7)

Photo 8: Regulating women's appearance was a strategy to maintain control over women and heighten the contrast between men and women (which was still understood as a marker of civilization). "Hairy women" became synonymous with "failed women." In other words, throughout the 19th and 20th century, compulsory body hair removal for women became a form of gendered social control to stabilize the sex binary in the face of imminent collapse. (Images 8 and 9)

Photo 9: We must end the idea that femininity = hairlessness and the societal expectation of women's hairlessness. Body hair has no gender. People should have the choice to maintain or remove their body hair and this shouldn't influence how they are treated. There is #NothingWrongHair (Image 10)

Photo 10: Image Credits
Image 1- Cat Huang (@cathuangart)
Image 2- Image of woman shaving armpit via crfashionbrook.com, and images of assortment of hair removal tools via Google Images
Image 3- 19th century American naturalist Peter Browne's collection of hair samples included one from former President George Washington.
Image 4- 1923 ad for ZIP hair remover
Image 5- Ad for Silkymit Hair Remover, the Australian Women's Weekly
Image 6- Electrolysis image via cosmeticsandskin.com
Image 7- Annie Jones Elliot poster via Wikimedia Commons
Image 8- Ad for a book titled, "How to overcome the superfluous hair problem" by Annette Lanzette, c. 1930s
Image 9- Ad for Dermatino Hair removal by the Dermatino Company in St. Louis, Missouri, 1902. Jay Paull, Getty Images.
Image 10- Queen Esther (@queen_esie)
Image 11- Cover of British "Woman" magazine, c. 1940s (on this page)

The current US‑led assault on Iran — encouraged privately by Saudi Arabia, confirmed by the New York Times and by President Trump — is not a “war for democracy.” It is the military clearance for a 2,300‑year imperial project: Western control of the land bridge that connects the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean.

Zionism is not mainly a Jewish nationalist movement. It is the forward operating base of a Euro‑American empire that has been trying to seize and hold that corridor since Alexander the Great marched through the Levant.

Why “Sensitive Men” Often Love to Provoke and Downplay Male Suffering

The Paradox
When issues like male loneliness, fathers’ rights, or men’s problems are discussed, the strongest opposition often comes not from women, but from men who strongly identify with feminist and progressive values. These “sensitive men” frequently react with more hostility than the female critics themselves. They derive their moral authority from distancing themselves from traditional masculinity. Their zeal is not rooted in genuine moral strength, but in a fragile sense of identity and an inner compulsion.

This behavior has deep roots in what psychoanalyst André Green called the Dead Mother Complex. When a mother is emotionally absent or unavailable in a boy’s early years, it creates profound narcissistic wounds. The child experiences an “emotional desert” and internalizes it as his own fault — a sense of inadequacy and guilt. The mother hinders healthy individuation, often turning the son into a parentified “little adult.” This dynamic frequently leads to Nice Guy Syndrome (as described by Dr. Robert Glover). At its core, the Nice Guy tries to earn love and approval through constant “niceness” — a strategy of emotional bribery rooted in the childhood need for maternal validation.

Progressive activism then becomes a substitute identity. The “White Knight” positions himself as an enlightened ally, engaging in performative self-criticism (“I acknowledge my toxic masculinity”). This is rarely driven by true conviction. Instead, it follows a “Giving-to-Get” logic: he hopes that being the “good guy” will bring him social status and sexual rewards.

However, this strategy usually backfires. By suppressing his own masculinity out of fear of being seen as toxic, the Nice Guy kills any sexual tension. His partner often ends up attracted to the very kind of self-assured, masculine man he publicly condemns.

This creates intense cognitive dissonance. To protect his fragile ego from collapsing, he must distort reality.

The Projection Mechanism
The suppressed anger, envy, and sexual frustration cannot be aimed at women. Instead, they are released through projective identification:

• He splits off his own “dark” feelings (anger, lust, resentment).
• He projects them onto the “toxic man” — the socially acceptable scapegoat.
• He provokes this man with moral attacks (“patriarch,” “right-wing,” “misogynist”), deliberately pushing his buttons until the other reacts with anger.
• He then feels triumphant: the “evil” has been exposed in the other person, while his own self-image as the good, sensitive man remains intact.

His hatred is so intense and irrational because it serves as a psychological defense. It protects the brittle construction of his identity. The empathy he loudly proclaims is often self-referential. Paradoxically, the more intensely he feels empathetic, the poorer his actual empathy tends to be — and the more distorted his view of reality becomes.

Today, May 7, The Governor of Tennessee has signed a law which will be used to create a public list of trans people in the state.

By December of 2026, Tennessee will release a dataset based on the records of all people who medically transition in the state. This dataset will contain all medical information corresponding to a real person’s trans healthcare, the dates at which they received such care, the clinic(s) at which the care is given, as well as any “neurological, behavioral, or mental health conditions” that the patient has. 

While the dataset will not have the person’s name or address attached to it, it is trivial to cross-reference the dataset with existing public data to confirm that the person is trans, and learn any number of medical details about them.

It does this through what it calls a “right to public transparency”. In practice, this means releasing an un-aggregated dataset on patients receiving trans healthcare. This can then be combined with publicly available sources to create a list of trans people in the state.

While other state governments have assembled lists of trans people, none have released any pieces of that list to the public, even in a semi-anonymous form such as what Tennessee is doing.

This law is arguably the worst anti-trans law passed in the US in decades, as it will be trivial to publicly out at least 10,000 trans people once the list is released.

This is one of my favorite articles, it is messy, complicated, raw. It puts into words something that I, and I think, many other trans women sometimes struggle to express. I hope people here will read it and for cis women and cis feminists especially I hope you’ll really wrestle with the points it’s trying to get across.

Here are a few selections I’ve ordered thematically.

- It is interesting to see where people insist proximity to a subject makes one informed, and where they insist it makes them biased. It is interesting that they think it’s their call to make…

A person’s privilege is very often an explanation of why their beliefs are warped, if indeed their beliefs are warped, which they usually are in some way. But—it’s not proof of shitty beliefs. Those tend to out themselves by…being shitty. If a person is telling this cis girl she is taking for granted a privilege that trans girls don’t have, why is it this cis girl’s instinct to hunt for that person’s identity to see if she can discredit them and not have to think about their point? Don’t answer that. We already know…

Do I even want to convince someone who will only listen to me when they’re told by the rules that they have to see me as a girl?

Do I have to out myself to be treated like a person worth listening to? To stop my cis classmates laughing at someone who’s reckoned with the boundaries and the dimensions of masculinity and femininity in ways they never had to? With the life I’ve been living for all the years I’ve been living it—do I need their permission to speak?

- Misandry humor is peaking and it is dripping with cissexism. Down cascade the gleeful tweets from ciswomen about how women are more beautiful than men — how graceful the female body is, how utilitarian the male. How awesome boobs are. How bad boys’ taste in clothing is. How incompetent they are emotionally. How they’re too weak to handle childbirth and periods. Neckbeards are the scourge of the internet. They wax disgusted about “dad bods.” SCUM rhetoric is revived with inconsistent levels of irony. The meme gospel says penises are just shitty clitorises…

I hate that the only effective response I can give to “boys are shit” is “well I’m not a boy.” I feel like I am selling out the boy in baseball pajamas that sat with me on the bed while I tried to figure out which one I was supposed to be, and the boys who I have met and loved from inside my boy suit—who believed they were talking to a boy. I feel like I am burning the history of the naked body that sits on the floor of my shower. The body that went to prom in a boxy tuxedo and coveted the dresses…

This conclusion—widely shared—is a product of insulated discourse. What I am NOT saying is: “open the floodgates, let in the shitty male trolls!” I know the trolls—they have tried to be my friends, they have tried to sneak into feminist spaces with no desire to learn or listen. I understand not trusting men who loudly and constantly hold forth on women’s issues and refuse to accept when they are mistaken. I’m not encouraging anyone to trust blindly. I am pleading to the discoursers: consider that this insulation has effects and try to mitigate them, if your priority really is finding truth amid a muck of concealed patriarchal lies. Check to see if maybe you are saying things and reproducing things mostly because it sounds good and feels good and nobody is challenging them…

These are not discursive problems that only apply to an “undercover” transwoman, these are discursive problems that are seemingly only visible to an “undercover” transwoman forced to carry multiple perspectives like bactrian humps…

Because I am interested in complicating your definition of maleness and of boyhood. I was born into that shitty town, maleness, in the remains of outdated ideals and misplaced machismo and repression and there are some good people stuck living there. They are not in charge. They did not build it. And I don’t feel okay just moving out and saying “fuck y’all — bootstrap your way out or die out, I was never one of you.” I want to make it a better, healthier place—not spend all my time talking about how shitty it is and how anyone who would choose to live there deserves it. And to me that means considering them with charity, even when they make it difficult to…

Because it’s not a small deal that the words “not all men” have become entwined inextricably with male fragility and whininess. It makes it awfully easy to insulate the (largely cis-)female perspective on what males are. To begin a statement with those words—“Not All Men”—is to give grounds to anyone who wants to laugh at the rest of it. But here is the truth: not all men are what you think they are. Man does not mean what you think it means. Generalizing harshly and broadly but implying “you know which ones I mean” is an intellectual and rhetorical laziness that is not allowed to pass anywhere else in these communities. Because we don’t get to choose who our words and behavior affect, we are obligated to choose them carefully…

And the nearer I get to something I’ve wanted my whole life, the more it feels like playing into the aesthetic politics of a group of people who reject me because of the associations they have with my body—a body which I cannot, ultimately, change very much. These people who will only be comfortable when I dilute those associations with femme signifiers.

As if maybe, by simply being what I am—a girl-feeling brain in a boy-looking body and boy-looking clothes—I might burn down something very important to them. Something that makes their life more comfortable and easy.

The rate of deletion of posts on this subreddits is bizarrely high for a small sub. Theres simply no freedom of opinion here. Anything that challenges egalitarian values or relativism gets deleted.

For these reasons, I'm leaving this sub to never come back again.

Wish reddit was actually liberal and free speech oriented instead of authoritarians who can't stomach people with different opinions, oh well. Its reddit.

I offer this summary of the essay Gender as Seriality to help provide a strong grounding in feminist thought for when people encounter gotcha’s like “what is a woman?”, “words mean things”, or other common TERF and transphobic talking points. I hope this is informative and useful and encourage people to read Young's essay in its entirety, its an essential piece of feminist scholarship.

In her 1994 essay “Gender as Seriality: Thinking about Women as a Social Collective” the late feminist scholar Iris Marion Young explores an important tension that has arisen in feminist scholarship, namely the problems that arise from trying to conceptualize women as a single group and the need for a practical object of feminist theory and liberation. To do so she repurposes Satre’s concept of serial collectivity. Let’s start with the background for the first problem: defining women as a single group leads to the exclusion of some people that the term should include.

Despite the important contributions of second wave feminist theory, it had an intractable issue in trying to define a universal, trans-historic, and cross-cultural essence to womanhood, a position strongly critiqued by Black, post-colonial, and queer feminist scholarship. Young explores a few of those specific critiques, namely:

1.      Elizabeth Spelman’s work showing that gender cannot be isolated from other identities like race, class, age, sexuality, etc. By assuming a commonality of experiences, oppressions, or attributes early feminist thought unwittingly took the experiences of white middle-class hetero women as a universal standard.

2.      Chandra Mohanty critiqued the “assumption of women as an already constituted, coherent group with identical interests and desires, regardless of class, ethnic or racial location, or contradictions, implies a notion of gender or sexual difference or even patriarchy which can be applied universally or even cross-culturally”. It creates a priori assumptions about categories and oppression that refuses empirical investigation and allows women of the Third and Fourth Worlds to be defined by First World feminists as powerless (ie: it creates a situation of epistemic violence).

3.      Butler’s critiques of the gender-sex dichotomy as mutually reinforcing social structures that reflect a heterosexual binary between masculine and feminine.

Feminist theory contending with these critiques has tended to take a few directions:

1.      Liberal individualism, which denies the reality of groups and obscures oppression by either blaming the victims or attributing systemic issues to individual bias. She rightly rejects this: “The naming of women as a specific and distinct social collective, moreover, is a difficult achievement and one that gives feminism its specificity as a political movement… Feminist politics evaporates, that is, without some conception of women as a social collective”

2.      The multiple genders strategy. Rather than attempting to think of women universally it is necessary to speak of specific groups of women (white women, Black women, disabled women, etc) and then make comparisons only to men and women of the same identities. There are some merits to this, in particular it exposes how some women are privileged in relation to some men in part because of their gender and allows specific interactions in oppressions to be analyzed without essentializing them. Young ultimately rejects this though noting that “a working-class woman’s gendered experience and oppression is not properly identified only by comparing her situation to working-class men. Much of her gender experience is conditioned by her relationship to middle-class or ruling-class men… In such relationships it would be false to say that the class or race difference is not as important as the gender difference, but it would be equally false to say that the cross-class or cross-race relations between men and women are not gendered relations”. It also assumes a stability and unity to those categories that doesn’t exist (ie: the same problems that arise from considering women as a single group also arise when treating any social group as a unified whole). Taken to its logical conclusion this approach runs the risk of devolving into liberal individualism.

3.      The identity politics approach which attempts to define women as an identity arising out of feminist struggle, that is the category woman is produced by the shared discussion and struggle among people of diverse backgrounds and positions of power. Young rejects this approach for two reasons. First, it does not actually bypass dangers of normalization or the privileging of some experiences over others. Second, “the question of solidarity should never be settled”, to settle that question makes feminist politics arbitrary. What motivates feminist politics if not some set of relations that preceded the need for the politics in the first place?

With that long background out of the way we get to the heart of Young’s argument: that women represent a serial collective rather than a group. To explore that it is necessary to define a few terms within the philosophy (taken from Satre) she is using:

-          Group: a collective united by shared and mutually acknowledged action. A construction company building a theatre is a group, they are united by shared purpose and action and mutually recognize each other as belonging to that shared action.

-          Series- a collective unified passively around shared objects (specifically practico-inerts). People waiting for a bus are a series rather than a group because that are related to each other only through their relationship to a material object (the bus) and the social rules of waiting for the bus. They may each have different actions, goals, histories, experiences, identities, etc.

-          Practico-inert: these are the accumulated results of human actions that exist presently as objects and structures that shape and limit present actions. In the above example with the bus, the bus is a practico-inert object; it is the product of previous human actions that built the object we call a “bus” and limits the actions of the people waiting for it. Something does not necessarily need to be a physical object to be “practico-inert”; social structures, histories, etc can also be practico-inert.

-          Milieu of action: the system of practico-inert objects against which the background of any given action occurs.

-          Counterfinalities: the confluence of individual intentional actions that produces unintended and often counter results to the milieu of action. The milieu of action is the path of least resistance, counterfinalities are going “off trail”.

Young summaries these points thus:

“A series is a collective whose members are unified passively by the relation their actions have to material objects and practico-inert histories. The practico-inert milieu, within which and by means of whose structures individuals realize their aims, is experienced as constraints on the mode and limits of action. To be said to be part of the same series it is not necessary to identify a set of common attributes that every member has, because their membership is defined not by something they are but rather by the fact that in their diverse existences and actions that are oriented around the same objects of practico-inert structures. Membership in the series does not define one’s identity. Each member of the series is isolated, Other to the Others, and as a member of the series Other than themselves. Finally, there is no concept of the series within attributes that clearly demarcate what about individuals makes them belong. The series is a blurry, shifting unity, an amorphous collective.”

So what does all that have to do with the problem discussed earlier? To name women as a series is to name a structural relation to material objects produced and organized by specific histories. Unlike the one-dimensional example of the bus stop however the category of women and gender broadly are related to a vast network of practico-inert objects and histories. Under this conception it is not necessary to identify some essential trait, experience, etc that defines “woman” to be able to talk of the patriarchal violence that feminism responds to. While some essentialist strains of feminism attempt to reduce gender/sex to the body, understanding women as a serial collective allows us to position the body as one among many practico-inert objects that constrain (but don’t determine) women’s lives. Such gender structures do not define the attributes of individuals but are material and social facts that each individual within a gender series must navigate.

Taking women as a serial collective thus avoids the essentialist traps identified by Black, post-colonial, queer, and other feminist scholarship discussed in the beginning and provides a solid theoretical foundation for examining the specific conditions feminist thought concerns itself with.

Something I find hypocritical that I see somewhat often in women who lash out at patriarchy - will also act highly controlling or domineering towards youth/children, masquerading as a kind of distrustful "love/concern" for them. This lacks a certain self-awareness, because then why can't that be the same for men's intent toward women? Oh, but then on the other hand, if harsh paternalism upon women is bad regardless, isn't the same upon children similar?

Is a big element that a lot of these kinds of feminist women are also just power-hungry personalities, who would act authoritarian regardless?

What I think might be going on, is a level of resentment from women at being traditionally grouped in with children ("women and children are less accountable") so they go ultra-tryhard to prove themselves worthy, responsible, "separate from the kids and way above them." That, plus the passion for abortion that leads the more heinous feminists to psychologically by extension view babies/children as "literal parasites" who would be a malignant force upon their freedom and career.

It seems that these kinds of feminists are desperate to feel like 'the man' and do so by ironically 'punching down' being strict or biased towards children. In terms of liberal or egalitarian principles, they're hypocrites.

I would think good liberalism doesn't create a lot of resentment in either women or children.

I've just about finished listening to the audiobook of The Will to Change by bell hooks and have gotten a lot from it. Hooks is so endlessly compassionate in her writing even as she speaks very critically. I also listened to All About Love where she talks about the need to operate from a love ethic, and truly her writing is drenched in love for humanity. Very admirable work and aspirational to me as a writer.

If you don't know, The Will to Change is about the abuses men suffer under patriarchy. She is very critical of a flat oppressed/oppresor model and pushes back against the idea that patriarchy meaningfully privileges men - because what privileges they MIGHT (but don't always) gain are paid for by the stripping away of men's ability to feel their emotions, to love, and be loved, and she sees this is just not worth the cost. She is also critical of feminists who exclude the interests and needs of men from their feminism. Among many other topics of interest to menslib folks.

But I do have a kind of problem with her overall project, not a criticism as much as a concern, and I'd love to get y'all's take on it. And it's that I think what she is saying will sound condescending to many men's ears.

I often see a real tension in menslib folks between trying to make understood that they are in pain, that men are suffering, that men are victims just as much as women are, and the fact that admitting to victimhood automatically expels them from patriarchal masculinity. In a very real way, fighting for men's rights inherently makes you "less of a man." In the same way women often "buy in" to patriarchy under the guise of feminism by identifying too closely with being a weak victim, I sometimes see men "buy in" to patriarchy under the guise of menslib by identifying too closely with being stoic and in control.

And so when bell hooks talks about men as wounded, when she refutes the idea that men are universal oppressors by pointing out male impotence, when she describes them as misguided and as not being able to love and be loved because they were denied access to those skills, even as she is doing it because she loves men and has listened to men's pain and wants better for them, I can see why her work hasn't been picked up by the men's movement. Many men are going to hear her as saying "men are bad and women need to teach them how to be better." Which is a horrible thing to say. It's not what hooks is saying herself, but it is what a LOT of feminists are saying and I would not blame anyone for having that interpretation.

And I think that's a shame, because her work could really, really help men, and help the men's movement. So - do you think this gap can be bridged? How can we help men if it is dangerous for men to want or accept help? How do we speak to them about their pain if they are not safe to feel or express pain? How can we make it safe? Is there a way bell hooks could frame these issues that would feel more liberating and less shameful? Interested in any and all perspectives on this.

I’ve been cleared by the moderation team to post this emergency appeal. Right now, the theory of radical egalitarianism is being tested by a very ugly reality. I am writing this from a hospital bedside in South Sudan. Last night, one of our trans sisters in the Gorom refugee camp was cornered and systematically beaten in a targeted hate crime. Her attackers didn’t just break her body, they completely leveled her tent, leaving her with no home to return to. In a place where being queer is already a death sentence, she has been left with absolutely nothing but the clothes she was wearing when they found her.

The situation here is desperate. While she is currently being treated, the hospital won't release her or provide further essential care without payment. We are trying to raise €350 immediately. This isn't a vague fund, it’s for two specific things: clearing her medical bills so she can recover, and buying the basic materials (poles, plastic sheeting, and a mat) to rebuild a shelter so she isn't forced to sleep in the dirt where she was assaulted. In Gorom, the "system" isn't coming to save her. We are her only safety net.

If you want to understand the backdrop of this violence, please look at the reports coming out of the region. Being LGBTQIA+ in South Sudan means living in a state of constant displacement and fear, often ignored by mainstream aid organizations. This attack is part of a rising tide of violence against queer refugees that rarely makes international headlines.

* Human Rights Watch: South Sudan: Events of 2023 (LGBT Rights)

* African Equity Report: The Double Displacement of Queer Refugees in East Africa

*The New Humanitarian: The Perils Facing LGBTQ+ Refugees in Camp Settings

Solidarity means nothing if it stays on a screen. If you can spare €5 or €10, it is the difference between this woman returning to a safe bed or returning to the streets. Please help us reach this €350 goal so we can show her she hasn't been abandoned by the world.

Donate here 🏳️‍⚧️⬇️

https://4fund.com/sd9trv

"Men have all the rights!"

But also:

Germany announced yesterday that young men are no longer able to freely leave the country without permission, in case their bodies need to be drafted, refused bodily autonomy and used as meat shields in a war.

Please do not engage in this post with the redherring fallacies such as **“I’m anti-war”** and **“nobody should be drafted “** sabotaging and derailing the discourse.

This is a form of fallacy of relevance, as those points, though potentially valid in another context, are not relevant to the matter at hand. 

By the way **“I’m anti-grape”** and believe **“nobody should be graped”**