Two People Are Standing In Front Of You. One Is Male, And Says “I Want To Share A Space With Her”.

This one was a workout for my brain 🧠

By: Me 😊

Reblog this to show support of curious women secretly reading “terf” blogs. You can ask us questions, we won’t out you. You’re our sisters :)

bisexual women did you know you can just.. prioritize yourselves? you dont exist to be the lgbt foot soldiers. you dont have to defer to non-bisexual people's ideas about your experiences. you can dedicate your time and energy to things that concern specifically bisexual women it's fine it's not a sin

I guy in my fyp said today

“Actions taken by men are favors and actions taken by woman are duties”

And I have been just sitting staring into space for about an hour now.

Because this applies to every aspect of woman’s life. Every single one.

I knew this. I just hadn’t given it the proper sentence.

We should always talk more about the emotional manipulation and gaslighting that comes from being women under the patriarchy. Violence and threats only go so far to oppress women. The rest of the trap is the way that patriarchy has managed to trick women into keeping ourselves down, without us ever noticing it.

Take this paragraph:

Like Buffy, do we feminist women turn to mediocre men who can express messiness so that we don’t have to? Does it make us feel stronger, more powerful, or more competent by comparison—but also keep us measuring our worth in relation to others rather than to ourselves? The strong woman/bad boyfriend phenomenon reminds me of how I felt when I first began interacting with transgendered (male-to-female) women at book signings. The women whom Amy Richards and I met during the Manifesta tour often came with a critique that the book had no discussion of transgender rights. I felt terrifically defensive—obsessed with the way the M-to-F pre-op women would dominate the evening, often with just their physical bigness. I hated the way they invaded a woman-only space, seeming to merely endure our reading so they could get to “their” part of the evening. “They wouldn’t—couldn’t—do that if they had been born women,” I seethed. “You don’t see female-to-male pre-operative men heading to the Harvard Club to demand inclusion. Why is it always women who have to make more space and take in everything?” But as I learned more about the history of transgenderism and met more transgendered people—M to F and F to M and points beyond—I revised that interpretation. I wonder now if it offended me that these women could be aggressive and take up space while I still thought I couldn’t. - From Look Both Ways: Bisexual Politics by Jennifer Baumgardner

From a question about mediocre men that immediately brought TIMs to mind, this feminist woman automatically felt righteously repulsed at men forcing their way into a female-only space, who clearly didn't care about female issues, and only endured discussions of women's issues and thoughts so that they could bleat about themselves instead.

Instead of her accepting what she knew, the fact that TIMs act like men because they're men, and TIFs act like women because they're women, she flipped a switch, threw in that she met a range of trans "and points beyond" people, and suddenly, TIMs taking over women's spaces and demanding that everything be about themselves became her own moral failing.

Again, this last line:

I wonder now if it offended me that these women could be aggressive and take up space while I still thought I couldn’t.

Critiques of her understanding of feminism aside, from the above text, she knew what men are like, and she was right to seethe. And yet, patriarchy is so strong that women will tie themselves in knots to be seen as acceptable to others, because of the teaching that men always matter more.

In her case - and in quite a lot of other cases, from women who won't really even think about feminism across whatever spectrums there are, I would wager - there will be this underlying idea that these men that claim womanhood are simply somehow better women than they are, and that is why those men deserve support and love and kindness over everything else.

Because those men are the kind of women that actual women are telling themselves that they should aspire to be. That actual women are failures, and the fakes are somehow the real deal.

Those women can tell themselves that it's about being unapologetic and loud and forceful about their individual needs - but it's another manipulative trap. Women can never become like those brave TIMs. As soon as they try, they're called TERFs, remember?

Look at the number of women who spend so much time defending TIMs, whether they're trans identified or not. Of course they do. They've been taught that the best of women, the most vulnerable of women? Those better "women" are all male.

Why do I say all this in regards to the trans issue? Because we're living in a time where numbers of women have genuinely been gaslit into believing that men can be women, in such a relatively short space of time. That men somehow can become biologically female through saying a few words out loud.

If that doesn't tell you how effective the psychological abuse of women is under the patriarchy, I don't know what else will.

One of the things that feminism needs to better grapple with is the difference between systemic and interpersonal issues.

The biggest reason that a lot of women push back from feminism with their additions to #NotAllMen is because those women know and love men who aren't rapists and who aren't physically abusive. It's entirely natural to rail against something that you see as attacking someone that you love.

When feminists advocate for single-sex schooling to protect girls, there's an automatic push back and outcry over the very real bullying that goes on in girl-only schools that have had long-lasting impacts on ex-students.

Glossing over the abuse that mothers put their daughters through often gives the impression that anything that counters any women-supporting-women narrative has to be stamped down on and ignored, or at worst, even denied, for the good of feminism.

It's far too easy as feminists to see criticisms like the above from women and then dismiss them, or repeat more statistics and then get frustrated at those women or call them handmaidens, instead of engaging and understanding why they're railing against what's being said.

No, not every single man is a raping woman-beater, but there are a ton more male abusers than female abusers, and a ton more female victims than male victims. That's a systemic issue, and we need to fix it. That doesn't make those loved fathers, brothers, cousins, friends or partners suddenly monsters out of nowhere.

No, female-only schools aren't perfect and there are bullying scandals in all schools, that doesn't excuse the individual abuse that victims have been through, but in general, they're safer for girls, and girls achieve higher grades than in mixed-sex schools, which is important to discuss and improve on.

No, abuse victims shouldn't be silent over what they've been through, and female abusers deserve to face justice. Continued cycles of abuse and female socialisation and mental illess etc might explain some of the abuse, but it doesn't excuse it. The point of feminism is to free all women from patriarchy, so that even the worst of the worst of women don't suffer with misogyny, not coddle the evil and the abusers just because of their sex.

There is so much difficult nuance, and there's too much reliance on the systemic to the point that the interpersonal is completely erased. It stops individual women from seeing anything in feminism that's useful to them. If they have counter-examples to any systemic issue, then they'll use those personal examples to dismiss that there's a systemic issue at all. If they're met halfway and the systemic vs the interpersonal is explained, then there's a much better chance that they'll pay attention or even go away to think about it to eventually become feminists, too.