Ahem. For the past week or so, my mind’s been getting messed with by people who are idiots when it comes to race and gender. Not all of them the usual suspects of FUX Snooze, either. So I’ll beg your pardon pre-emptively if I ramble or explode along the way.
Where to begin?
Well, I’ve unfriended some Facebook friends, and been unfriended too — and all of these ex-friends and un-friends had one thing in common: They staunchly refuse to get a grasp on what gender actually means. They claim it’s a binary (actually, it’s a spectrum), and are trying to erase it and replace it with an actual binary called, merely, SEX. Only two options available: Male and Female, assigned at birth, immutable. Intersex people, if acknowledged at all, are only grudgingly done so (mostly as “rare exceptions” — awful white of you, sisters.) They thus stubbornly refuse to accept trans women as women. They even believe, absurdly, that trans women are part of some Men’s Rights plot to infiltrate and eliminate all women’s spaces with the wave of a willy. Uh, no. Actual MRAs, like themselves, are all “ewwww, trannies ICKY!” Ironic, no? They claim to stand up for the most oppressed, but actually, they are the meanest kids on the feminist playground when it comes to women who get killed for being trans as well as women, and they are perversely proud of that.
Several of my friends have been viciously purged, too. All for the same reason. And yet, these women call themselves radical feminists. The most sisterly of the whole feminist sisterhood! Whoopee!
What could be so radical, or so feminist, about excluding an entire category of women from consideration AS WOMEN, simply by falling back on the (false) binary sex assigned to those women at birth, I do not know. I do know that they are incredibly hostile to even the slightest challenge to their simplistic received wisdoms (which all seem to come from some very outdated and elaborately stupid books of theory) and that their skins are so thin that the merest poke of intruding reality makes them explode.
They’re also downright snarky about trans women’s allegedly “fake” gender (which is actually their real one, coming out from behind a lifelong wall of the very toxic masculinity that self-styled radfems ironically claim to be trying to dismantle). And snotty as hell about “women’s lived experiences” (completely ignoring the actual lived experiences of a woman who has been forced by society to occupy the body and mannerisms of a man). Apparently, you’re not a real woman to them unless you were born with the full standard set of female parts — because, in their rigid, sex-essentialistic binary view of things, only those girls born with proper girly bits have the requisite “female energy”.
Oddly, these same “radicals” glorify good ol’ apple-pie motherhood as one of those “lived experiences”, chock-full of “female energy” that all “real” women allegedly share. Which is ironic coming from them, after all the decades feminists have spent campaigning for birth control, body autonomy, abortion rights, and the right to forego motherhood altogether if one so chooses. (Guess I’m a fake woman for going on the Pill, and later having my tubes tied, and choosing to be the mother of nothing except maybe creativity and cats. Thanks so much for all that validation of my lived experiences, sisters.)
Most ironic of all, they’re vying so hard to be lefter-than-left and feminister-than-feminist that they’ve somehow come out on the far right. They’re so transphobic — oh sorry, “gender-critical” — that they actually get their “scientific information” about trans women from Lifesite, one of the most unscientific, anti-woman sites there is. Some are so scared of people taking hormones for therapeutic purposes (ahem, irregular periods here) that they’re even now campaigning against the Pill, and again relying on odious anti-choice sites from the Religious Reich (which are full of outdated and false information) to make their “scientific” case for them. Incidentally, a lot of tinfoil-hatted MRAs share their pharmacophobia (because drugs are “emasculating”, natch!) with this particular brand of “feminist”. Ironies, like bigotries, tend to cluster!
I’ve lost count of the number of far-right articles and websites I’ve seen them toss at others in their desperation to beat back real, radical social change. In addition to the Religious Reich misogyny of Lifesite, there was Alex Jones’s Infowars, which hurls shit at feminists every chance its flying-monkey crew get. I’ve even seen VDare — a notorious white-supremacist site — used to back up their transphobia. (I guess I shouldn’t be so shocked, in retrospect; this same bunch of so-called radical feminists also bristled against the phrase “white feminism”, which was coined to make clear that we’ve still got a long way to go on matters of racial equality, justice, and liberation from all manner of racism. Now why would they not welcome a reminder of THAT?)
In short, these former friends won’t be missed, at least from where I sit. On the contrary, my Facebook feed smells fresher without their ideological dungheaps on it.
What really clinched the decision to unfriend, for me, was a spate of ideological diarrhea which takes a remarkably similar line about race, trying (and failing) to tie it in to the gender mess somehow. And all of it was prompted by the outing of Rachel Dolezal, the white professor and former Spokane NAACP leader who claimed to be black. This was followed by a lot of smug “gotcha” spitballing about how, if racial identity could not be faked, then why wasn’t that also true of gender? Why wasn’t anyone screaming about Caitlyn — oh sorry, “Bruce” Jenner having the temerity to pass “himself” off as a woman? (Coming from people who pooh-pooh all talk of intersectionality, this issue-mixing is downright rich.)
Of course, as usual, they own-goaled themselves. While they were all so busy chasing their tails around their own little misguided interpretations of gender (and, no doubt, batting away all well-earned charges of their own unexamined racism), they completely ignored what any genuine radical feminist, white or otherwise, should be aware of in the Dolezal case: the fact that Rachel Dolezal’s white biological parents were also religious home-schoolers of a strict (and horribly abusive) kind. That her own biological brother was a molester and a racist, and no doubt protected, much like the notoriously transphobic Josh Duggar, by those same abusive parents. The same who later piped up just to out Rachel as fake-black when some hate mail she allegedly received was being investigated by the authorities. Not to excuse any of the wrong (and possibly illegal) things she has done, but let me just say this: If those were my parents, I’d be tripping all over myself to get them the hell out of my life, too. So yeah, I’m not a bit surprised that Rachel Dolezal tried to disown them in the most radical way she could think of (and indeed, in a radical way most of us would NEVER think of): by trying to pass as a person of another color.
And neither am I surprised that the awfully white “radfems” of my acquaintance again missed the point, and sided with what really are all of feminism’s sworn enemies. By sniping at trans people’s cross-gender “passing” and taking cheap shots at “transracialism” (which is not a thing, much less one related to transgenderism), they pretty much convinced me that they are nobody’s friends. When your “gender-critical” viewpoint on trans people and abused women starts to smell just like the overt bigotries of ‘winger idiots like Keith Fucking Ablow and Michelle Fucking Duggar, or tinfoil hatters like Alex Fucking Jones, I don’t even want to be in the same room with you. You’re not a radical; you’re not a feminist; you’re not anywhere on the left anymore. Take off your false “radical feminist” identity, and fuck off. You may as well cop to being a far-right woman-hating racist, because that is the group you have joined forces with.
And if that is your ideology, then maybe you should heartily approve of what Dylann Storm Roof has done in Charleston. He invaded a historic black church. He shot blacks. He killed blacks. Most of them were women. And he did it because, to paraphrase what he himself said, black men rape white women. How killing black women is supposed to stop interracial rape, I don’t know. His imagination is a drug-addled pornographic fever swamp of antebellum southern racism. No doubt he was hoping for some kind of “racial holy war” to break out in the wake of his terrorist deed, and for more gun-toting whites to go on more anti-black purges. He has three Confederate flags on his South Carolina licence plate, and two flags from colonial, white-rule Southern Africa on his jacket. (I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if his browser history, like that of my so-called radfem acquaintances, shows a lot of visits to Christian right and white supremacist sites. Politics, strange bedfellows, etc.!)
And if you don’t want to endorse his actions, you might do well to sit down, wake up, knock off the defensive jibber-jabber, stop looking to far-right extremism for your justifications, and finally face all the oppressive -isms and -phobias you’ve internalized so very well. Have you forgotten that these systems were put there to keep women and non-white people in “their” place, which is squarely under the bootheels of white men? Have you forgotten that just like trans women are doing now, lesbians and black women have had to fight for inclusion as women and feminists, and that the movement is better for having them in it? Need I remind you, sisters, that it won’t lift ANY women up when you throw other women under that ol’ bus?
If the best you can do to back up your so-called radical feminism is to flail your arms and spout viewpoints identical to those of the most reactionary, racist, and antifeminist of all conservatives, you’re not just doing intersectionality wrong; you’re doing radicalism and feminism both wrong. And if you want to do it right, you need to fight that sexist, racist, transphobic bigot in yourself. Otherwise, you’ll end up losing a lot more than just a slew of friends who have, collectively, gotten sick of your shit.
Happy Juneteenth, BTW.
