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Incredible that the author simultaneously wants the deconstruction of women's social roles but is also a TERF. Sorry! Treating people as if they are not different on the basis of sex is going to... require treating people as if they are not different on the basis of sex! To be clear, I think this a good and desirable thing but it is equally clear to me that it is trans people and their allies that are doing the most to bring this world about. Directly challenging the association between biology and certain forms of social relation. "Leftists don't want to emancipate women because they don't see the necessary connection between biology and womanhood!" The piece is full of contradictions like this.
Leftist women don't want to emancipate women because they do see the necessary connection between gender and privilege brought on by scarcity.
Going all the way would remove that, and they have a pretty good thing going (this is why I see this kind of 'leftism' as a fundamentally conservative privilege-preserving movement at society's general expense).
The problem with freeing and protecting women from men is that you must also free and protect women from women. And until the women who want freedom understand the actual threat (and the women worthy of freedom do understand this; the propaganda about men being the real evil exists specifically to confuse these women about this issue, it's not actually intended for men) they'll make no progress in that area.
Huh?
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This seems the opposite of the mainstream trans appeal? It's mostly not gender abolitionists because the desire to transition from one gender to another reifies rather then minimizes gender differences. If men and women are to be treated the same then what exactly are trans women asking for?
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The standard TERF position for decades has been that sex is a biological reality, but gender should be abolished. The unique vulnerability of female bodies as compared to male bodies necessitates certain accommodations like female-only spaces, but most aspects of “gender roles” can and should be done away with. You could argue that this is a fine line to walk, but I at least think it’s internally consistent.
This of course ignores that "gender roles" exist to protect women due to the "unique vulnerability of female bodies". The actual TERF position is thus that women shouldn't have to suffer restrictions due to this unique vulnerability and the restrictions, ie "gender roles", should fall primarily or exclusively on men.
Well, the actual, true, final TERF position is that women should live in lesbian communes and men should go fuck off in a ditch somewhere.
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My understanding of gender-critical feminists/TERFs etc. is that they chafe against the ancillary gender roles and social expectations assigned to female people by virtue of their biology, pointing out that the fact they're female doesn't imply that they should be expected to be good at cooking, shouldn't be expected to stay home and look after the children, shouldn't be expected to wear skirts and pink clothing.
Trans activists turn this on its head by actively reifying the ancillary gender roles and arbitrary social expectations, particularly those assigned to female people. Rather than claiming "you are a woman, therefore you have to wear skirts and pink clothing", they claim "I like wearing skirts and pink clothing, therefore I am a woman". They thereby reduce the status of "woman" to the ancillary, contingent gender role, the very thing the radical feminists are seeking to abolish. Radical feminists want to deprecate the ancillary, contingent gender roles altogether; trans activists want to elevate them above all else. Perhaps these goals aren't quite antithetical but they certainly aren't aligned with one another.
Another way of framing it is that radical feminists think that, when assessing a person's identity and the role they should play, our society places too much emphasis on immutable biological traits over individual characteristics. Per the OP, they would rather be seen as e.g. a scientist first and a woman second, rather than as a woman first and a scientist second. All well and good. But there's no conflict between asserting that our society places too much emphasis on immutable biological traits over individual characteristics when assessing people's identities, and recognising that acknowledging the reality of immutable biological traits is still necessary and unavoidable. Outside of gender medicine, virtually all of the major flashpoints in the trans culture war are domains in which immutable biological traits are obviously more germane to the discussion than individual characteristics: when it comes to one's likelihood of committing a sexual assault, being male (or not) has far more predictive power than basically any other trait; in most tests of strength, speed and/or stamina, virtually any male person will have an insurmountable competitive advantage over any female person (despite your repeated claims to the contrary). It's like the radical feminists are saying "our society places too much emphasis on immutable biological traits" and the trans activists are saying "yeah, we shouldn't acknowledge biology at all!" and the radical feminists are like "no, just because our society places too much of an emphasis on biology doesn't mean it doesn't matter at all". Just because you're a libertarian who thinks that there are too many laws doesn't mean you want to abolish the prohibition on murder. There is a happy medium between "excessive emphasis on immutable biological traits" and "denying that immutable biological traits matter at all, in favour of self-identification above all else".
This is somewhat right, but misses that there's a weird way they are able to internally square the circle, even though it's externally baffling. And that is that gender has a near-infinite number of possible meanings and takes on whichever actual meaning it needs to at the moment. Skirts and liking pink are part of the female gender role, but not necessarily because not all women like them, and some men like them. Wanting to cut off your dick is a sign that you are trans, but not all trans people want to change their body. I've even brought up the point that "if sex is your body and gender is your mind, why is getting surgery called "gender affirmation surgery" if it's changing your body?" and was told that breasts are "gendered." Which is ironic when you consider that they often complain that "woke" means too many things.
There's gender identity, gender expression, gender performance, etc. and new permutations will be added as needed. Simply put, they want society to not impose patterns onto people. They want people to be able to choose any number of these and impose society to engage with these in whatever way the individual wants, and without any of the negative impositions.
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Well, yes. The RF stands for "Radical Feminist", lest we forget.
The TERF position is that the treatment of "woman" as a salient category based on societal attitudes and cultural roles rather than one based on sex necessarily reinforces those roles and attitudes. Thus saying that a male is a woman is at best meaningless and at worst actively harming the cause of feminism.
It's not my position, but it seems to be a self-consistent one.
I don't think the TERF would agree.
By analogy: Alice wants to abolish religion in general but the Catholic church in particular. Bob wants to pass a law affirming that those born Protestant are allowed to identify as Catholic if they'd like. Do you understand why Alice would be upset with such a law?
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I’m not convinced you can treat people differently on the basis of any hard to change property. Human society values roles and creates hierarchy or several. My physical appearance marks me out as a member of dozens of such groups whether or not we want this to be true. I’m female, im white, im American, im working class, im Christian. All of these things a person can find out quite quickly simply by looking at me, and they do and will always color how im expected to behave, the places I can go, and so on.
I'm not sure how one would find out you are Christian "simply by looking at you".
Or American. It's not an ethnicity, and even Native Americans can be ambiguous.
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I agree that this is currently true, but it seems far from clear this is inevitably true. In different times and places people with the same characteristics you describe have been treated very differently. It does not seem likely to me that we happen to have stumbled on the way such people will be treated forever more in our present time or place.
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