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Well, the alternative is believing you're just being disingenuous, which is more insulting imo.
You seem to define a lot of things according to how you personally feel about them. JK Rowling definitely considers herself a feminist, and on every single issue except trans women, she is probably on the same page as you. Yet you feel comfortable asserting that she is not a feminist because you are a third wave postmodernist feminist.
My opinion is that you are in fact a woman because you have "titties and estrogen" and that woman is not purely a social construct. You can disagree, and maybe there is some way you could prove me wrong, though I doubt it. But it doesn't mean I cease to consider you a person.
Agree to disagree? I don’t think I’m giving the impression of being honest and sincere, I think I am being both lol. That you struggle to understand how I can sincerely have my beliefs is one thing, but saying at best I’m inexperienced and at worst I’m a liar, well, Idk what to say other than “think what you want” and “that’s not very nice”.
I highly doubt JK Rowling and I are on the same page about every single issue except trans women. She probably doesn’t agree gender roles are a social construct, since she’s a TERF. She also likes to deadname trans women on Twitter; digging into the myriad of opposing sub-issues in that would be too long.
To be clear, my statement regarding the fact that you are naive or insincere concerned specifically your claim that "feminism is feminism" and that you don't consider there to be divisions or different schools of thought within them. You may genuinely believe that, but it's so obvious that these divisions do exist (and that other feminists are very aware of them) that it just seems kind of silly to claim you are following the One True Feminism and everyone else is either also on the same team as youor they've got it wrong.
... Have you ever actually talked to a TERF?
They very much do believe that gender roles are social constructs. That is their primary objection to men claiming to be women! They consider sex to be a biological reality, and gender roles to be social constructs, and from their point of view, trans women willingly adopt, play act and reify gender roles while claiming that they are based on some innate property. It's trans women who claim that wearing a skirt makes you a woman, and being a woman makes you want to wear a skirt.
Even if this is true, while I'm perfectly willing to have the Rowling debate again, it's irrelevant to whether or not she's a feminist, unless you think being a bad person (according to your ethics) means someone can't be a feminist.
I just feel like if I said something along the lines of “I think you’re being obtuse/pedantic/ignorant/childish/naive about this topic” to someone on here I’d be justifiably moderated, so it’s tough to feel like I’m getting dealt a lot of “you’re a troll, you don’t really believe these things”. But, as I said, the moderation on this site is not for me. I don’t want to bring it up a lot.
I’d retort to Mr. TERF that if gender roles are social construct as we agree they are, then there’s nothing wrong with a Western socially-construct man decided he wants to be a Western socially-constructed woman, because it’s all arbitrary in the end. A trans woman wants to identify with the Western social constructs that define a woman, how is that different from a Hindu deciding to be a Muslim? I technically consider myself to be non-binary because I don’t believe in gender. But, I’m also very comfortable with the aspects that make me a Western socially-constructed woman so much that I’m okay calling myself one despite not really believing in it. I admit I might be sounding a little confusing. I struggle sometimes to find an appropriate way to explain my opinion on gender since I consider the whole thing arbitrary and think everyone is actually a non-binary meat computer with either titties or balls.
There's a difference between "I think you're being naive" (there are a lot of ways to say "You're wrong" and most of them are allowable) and "You're a troll" (which I just modded someone for saying!).
As @FCfromSSC said, framing is very important here. If you are upset at being called naive, well, noted, but no, I would not normally mod someone for calling another poster naive. To me, that does not register as an insult like "stupid" or "liar" or "troll."
Okay, are we having the trans debate again? What if Mr. TERF says gender roles are socially constructed, but penises, vaginas, upper body strength and size are not? And therefore people with penises should not compete against people with vaginas in competitive sports, or be housed with them in prison, and sex crimes committed by people with penises should not be statistically grouped with sex crimes committed by people with vaginas such that we see headlines like "Woman convicted of raping toddler" when the "woman" in question is a person with a penis? Because that is the TERF argument in a nutshell. Not "Men shouldn't be allowed to wear dresses and call themselves she/her."
I'd agree with Mr. Terf that gender roles are socially constructed but the physical body is not. However, I don't think a person having a penis or vagina is a valid reason to stop them from competing against someone with a penis or vagina in competitive sports. I think what should stop them is weight classes, a principle I understand to already be understood in wrestling, and that has nothing to do with being a woman or man. I have met men the same weight class as myself or lower, and I have met woman with a weight class far above mine. I wouldn't want to compete with a clearly scrawny person or a clearly buff-as-all-hell person since the gap is so big the comparison in competition doesn't hold. And I don't think there's a problem housing them together for the same reason. Women beat the shit out of eachother in prison just as much as men do; house a buff woman with a scrawny man together and I'd see the same result if you reversed the weight class. If a prison houses two people who are clearly unequally matched in strength they're doing a pretty bad job with security and basic common sense.
I dunno, I see a whole lot more of "trans women are freaks in the head for being trans, trans women are clearly much uglier being trans and therefore must hate themselves, trans women are just horny men who want to peep at women pissing in the bathroom, trans women want to convince your kid they're trans to mutilate themselves because deep down they're insecure, xyz" than "trans women are unfairly advantaged in sports and trans women pose a safety threat to their fellow inmates".
Untrue. One data point: in the period 2001-18, 1,251 male prisoners were murdered in US prisons, while the equivalent figure for female prisoners was 7. Based on the size of the US prison population in 2022, that works out at 104.29 murders/100k population among male prisoners, 7.59 murders/100k population among female prisoners. A male American inmate is nearly 14 times more likely to be murdered in prison than a female inmate. This shouldn't come as a surprise given what proportion of the male prison population is serving time for violent offenses vs. what proportion of the female, or the obvious differences in aggression and propensity to violence between the sexes, or the obvious differences in physical strength between the sexes (which are only minimally explicable by differences in body mass).
Even if it was true, there's the obvious fact that female people cannot forcibly penetrate other female people, impregnate them and/or infect them with STDs: only male people (regardless of how they "identify") can do that. I would have thought this would have been an obvious point of concern for a self-identified feminist but apparently not.
Two thirds of your "obvious fact" is completely false. Female people may not be able to forcibly penetrate other female people with a penis, but can easily do so with other things--even restricting yourself to body parts their fingers, fists, feet, etc work just as well. Likewise a penis is not required to transmit STDs since oral transmission is a common infection vector.
The "with a penis" was implied.
Show me the relative rates of STD transmission by penetrative rape vs. other routes of transmission.
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