Moony's queer blogging

"The 'God Made Trans People' billboard is stupid! God didn't make me! I'm an atheist!" Okay. The billboard sits along a major highway in Kansas. We can deduce that the target audience is not you—it's the centrist evangelical Christians driving along that road who could probably be persuaded to become allies as long as we choose our words carefully and don't make them feel attacked for not already knowing everything about trans rights issues. Another one I see a lot is, "We shouldn't be talking about how right-wing legislation catches [privileged in-group] in the crossfire when [marginalized out-group] suffers far more!" I know. I agree with you. Which is why you and I are not the intended audience of this argument!

The entire point of rhetoric is to win over someone who doesn't already fully agree with you. In this case, let's say that someone is Jennifer, the moderate center-right mom in your neighborhood who doesn't really know or care about transgender issues but would be absolutely horrified by the idea of her teenage daughter having to submit to an invasive inspection of her body just to be allowed to play soccer. Tell her, "Banning trans students from sports will inevitably subject all student athletes to invasive gender-policing," or "Legal restrictions on gender-affirming care will make it harder for you to access the hormone replacement therapy you take to treat menopause symptoms," and she is more likely to question her existing beliefs and listen to the rest of what you have to say than if you lead with leftist talking points that she already has a calcified opinion about or which she thinks do not personally affect her.

This is an inherently exorsexist and intersexist worldview, in my opinion.

Bigender people are almost always forced to 'pick' which gender they are 'more', or have it automatically assigned for them. Their pronouns may be conditionally respected, but people get very uncomfortable, when a bigender person challenges the concept of man and woman as opposite. Constantly, you see "male spaces" and "female spaces", discourse about which labels are for men (and therefore not for women) or vice versa, and other similar conversations, inherently leave out men who are women, and women who are men. Bigender people are ignored, or spoken over, or pushed to 'pick' a gender so they can be neatly categorized, because man and woman are conceived as two opposite mutually exclusive ends of a spectrum that cannot intersect.

Agender/genderless/transneutral people are similarly erased or forced to pick sides, often sorted into a box either based on what people assume they're 'closer' to based on their physical traits (and i hope i dont need to stress how dysphoria inducing that can be) or told they're transfem/transmasc regardless because, well, "You're still transitioning away/toward something", because people conceptualize agender/genderless individuals as being not truly genderless at all, but as being merely at the center of the man to woman spectrum.

Then there are perisex nonbinary people who identify closely with their agab, perisex nonbinary women/fems afab and perisex nonbinary men amab. Gender essentialists either try to cut these people out of trans identity entirely, fakeclaiming them, insisting they're basically cisgender, engaging in intense transmedicalist rhetoric dressed up in a slightly more 'acceptable' font now that transmedicalism is somewhat less accepted in the community..or they insist that, despite many not being at all masculine, perisex nonbinary people afab are all transmasc, and vice versa.

I consider all of these things to be misgendering! Forcing any nonbinary person toward any binary or gendered term they do not identify with is misgendering! And it's done constantly by other trans people who would rather be openly and violently exorsexist than rethink their gender essentialist simplistic reductive sliding scale framework for how extremely complex societal structures and personal identities work.

It was difficult for women committed to feminist change to face the reality that the problem did not lie just with men. Facing that reality required more complex theorizing; it required acknowledging the role women play in maintaining and perpetuating patriarchy and sexism. As more women moved away from destructive relationships with men, it was easier to see the whole picture. It was easier to see that even if individual men divested themselves of patriarchal privilege, the system of patriarchy, sexism, and male domination would still remain intact, and women would still be exploited and oppressed. Despite this change in feminist agendas, visionary feminist thinkers who had never been antimale did not and do not receive mass media attention. As a consequence the popular notion that feminists hate men continues to prevail. The vast majority of feminist women I encounter do not hate men. They feel sorry for men because they see how patriarchy wounds them and yet men remain wedded to patriarchal culture. While visionary thinkers have called attention to the way patriarchy hurts men, there has never been an ongoing effort made to address male pain. To this day I hear individual feminist women express their concern for the plight of men within patriarchy, even as they share that they are unwilling to give their energy to help educate and change men. Feminist writer Minnie Bruce Pratt states the position clearly: “How are men going to change? The meeting between two people, where one opposes the other, is the point of change. But I don’t want the personal contact. I don’t want to do it…. When people talk about not giving men our energies, I agree with that…. They have to deliver themselves.” These attitudes, coupled with the negative attitudes of most men toward feminist thinking, meant that there was never a collective, affirming call for boys and men to join feminist movement so that they would be liberated from patriarchy. Reformist feminist women could not make this call because they were the group of women (mostly white women with class privilege) who had pushed the idea that all men were powerful in the first place. These were the women for whom feminist liberation was more about getting their piece of the power pie and less about freeing masses of women or less powerful men from sexist oppression. They were not mad at their powerful daddies and husbands who kept poor men exploited and oppressed; they were mad that they were not being giving equal access to power. Now that many of those women have gained power, and especially economic parity with the men of their class, they have pretty much lost interest in feminism. As interest in feminist thinking and practice has waned, there has been even less focus on the plight of men than in the heyday of feminist movement. This lack of interest does not change the fact that only a feminist vision that embraces feminist masculinity, that loves boys and men and demands on their behalf every right that we desire for girls and women, can renew men in our society. Feminist thinking teaches us all, males especially, how to love justice and freedom in ways that foster and affirm life. Clearly we need new strategies, new theories, guides that will show us how to create a world where feminist masculinity thrives.

^^ that last part is why anti-transmasculinity theory is so important. what is the goal but new strategies and theories that guide a new understanding of feminist masculinity (more of the quote under the cut, read the book here)

Why are trans people turning so TERFy when we seemingly agreed that this was all bad? Well, everything is getting more conservative, on account of the climate/environmental crisis and the related decay of capitalism and the rise of fascism as a response. People are scared animals and it is so easy to adjust to this environment by internalizing it, in hopes of surviving it.

With trans people getting turned into a scapegoat and neo-radfems getting massive political platforms, it was inevitable that people would react by internalizing radical feminism and trying to cut out the parts of themselves and their community that are least able to adjust to that. I think its a semi-conscious process of trying to blend in, trying to survive, trying to make sense of what is happening to you and why. Each person has a lot of different preexisting beliefs they are working with to make sense of the world, and we aren't consciously self-aware of most of them. What seems obvious to one person (you cannot rehabilitate radical feminism for trans people, because it is fundamentally structured through cissexism) will not be obvious to another if they are navigating the same issue with a different "map" so to speak.

Survival instincts are not necessarily moral instincts. Resisting conservative, fascism, etc. are not things that always feel conducive to surviving this present moment, especially for people whose worldviews did not have a developed and strong understanding of what resistance and revolution would mean in practice, how the circumstances would feel, and the kinds of material and ideological forces at play.

I think a lot of people are getting more conservative because they are falling back on survival instincts and trying to adapt to an increasingly conservative environment. But, at the same time, they don't think of themselves as conservative, nor do they want to be, and they want their survival instincts to be moral instincts (as I think we would all like!) and that the things they are doing to keep themself safe are also things that are morally correct and effective responses to injustice.

And again, people want conservatism to simply be the product of a character flaw they are better than, not something that anyone can fall into ideologically as a result of both personal choices and belief-environment. We want it to be that becoming a conservative is a conscious process we would certainly be fully aware of if it happened to us. If we could become conservative, either conservatism must be objectively right, or it means that "conservative" is not a unique class of people entirely different than oneself and the left as a whole.

...and you more or less see all of what you said in this description alone, trying to survive a wave of global transphobia by eating and digesting a part of your environment's ideological impetus to survive, regardless of effectiveness or even reason

Why are trans people turning so TERFy when we seemingly agreed that this was all bad? Well, everything is getting more conservative, on account of the climate/environmental crisis and the related decay of capitalism and the rise of fascism as a response. People are scared animals and it is so easy to adjust to this environment by internalizing it, in hopes of surviving it.

With trans people getting turned into a scapegoat and neo-radfems getting massive political platforms, it was inevitable that people would react by internalizing radical feminism and trying to cut out the parts of themselves and their community that are least able to adjust to that. I think its a semi-conscious process of trying to blend in, trying to survive, trying to make sense of what is happening to you and why. Each person has a lot of different preexisting beliefs they are working with to make sense of the world, and we aren't consciously self-aware of most of them. What seems obvious to one person (you cannot rehabilitate radical feminism for trans people, because it is fundamentally structured through cissexism) will not be obvious to another if they are navigating the same issue with a different "map" so to speak.

Survival instincts are not necessarily moral instincts. Resisting conservative, fascism, etc. are not things that always feel conducive to surviving this present moment, especially for people whose worldviews did not have a developed and strong understanding of what resistance and revolution would mean in practice, how the circumstances would feel, and the kinds of material and ideological forces at play.

I think a lot of people are getting more conservative because they are falling back on survival instincts and trying to adapt to an increasingly conservative environment. But, at the same time, they don't think of themselves as conservative, nor do they want to be, and they want their survival instincts to be moral instincts (as I think we would all like!) and that the things they are doing to keep themself safe are also things that are morally correct and effective responses to injustice.

And again, people want conservatism to simply be the product of a character flaw they are better than, not something that anyone can fall into ideologically as a result of both personal choices and belief-environment. We want it to be that becoming a conservative is a conscious process we would certainly be fully aware of if it happened to us. If we could become conservative, either conservatism must be objectively right, or it means that "conservative" is not a unique class of people entirely different than oneself and the left as a whole.

I think she means that radical feminism theorized gender as a social phenomenon in resistance to bioessentialism, which is actually true (although nuanced).

Radical feminists did challenge the idea that gender objective and innate, arguing that much of, if not all, gender in society was socially constructed for the sake of oppressing women. Many radical feminists wanted a society where gender was completely abolished (although only after women as a class could unite and defeat patriarchy). Andrea Dworkin, a very popular theorist amongst radical feminists and anti-sex-work advocate, wrote in favor of sex reassignment surgery (and actually said it should be community funded).

However, many radical feminists (such as Janice Raymond) came to view trans women and men as supporting gender-the-social-construct. Trans women and trans men were seen as adhering to the idea that stereotypes around gender were real and innate. Radical feminists fixate on biological sex as an extension of seeing gender as socially constructed; the argument is that "womanhood" is a tool of the patriarchy used to oppress females, who are bonded together by their shared biological and social reality as a sex and oppressed group. Trans women seemed, to them, to promote the idea that the identity of women was reducible down to dresses and makeup and breasts (thus threatening a sex-based class uprising), and trans men seemed to promote to women that they could escape the burden of female oppression by rejecting the sisterhood believed to be necessary to defeat patriarchy, and attempting to join it.

Even Andrea Dworkin's trans-supportive statements reflect a belief that the categories of "female" and "male" are still real, and also that under an ideal, androgynous society, transsexuals will not be affirmed in their gender identities but rather transsexuality will stop meaningfully existing:

The discovery is, of course, that “man” and “woman” are fictions, caricatures, cultural constructs. As models they are reductive, totalitarian, inappropriate to human becoming. As roles they are static, demeaning to the female, dead-ended for male and female both. The discovery is inescapable: We are, clearly, a multisexed species which has its sexuality spread along a vast continuum where the elements called male and female are not discrete. [...] I have made this distinction . . . in order to enable me to say something very simple: that while the system of gender polarity is real, it is not true. It is not true that there are two sexes which are discrete and opposite, which are polar, which unite naturally and self-evidently into a harmonious whole. It is not true that the male embodies both positive and neutral human qualities and potentialities in contrast to the female who is female, according to Aristotle and all of male culture, “by virtue of a certain lack of qualities.” And once we do not accept the notion that men are positive and women are negative, we are essentially rejecting the notion that there are men and women at all. In other words, the system based on this polar model of existence is absolutely real; but the model itself is not true. [...] There is no doubt that in the culture of male-female discreteness, transsexuality is a disaster for the individual transsexual. Every transsexual, white, black, man, woman, rich, poor, is in a state of primary emergency . . . as a transsexual. There are three crucial points here. One, every transsexual has the right to survival on his/her own terms. That means that every transsexual is entitled to a sex-change operation, and it should be provided by the community as one of its functions. This is an emergency measure for an emergency condition. Two, by changing our premises about men and women, role-playing, and polarity, the social situation of transsexuals will be transformed, and transsexuals will be integrated into community, no longer persecuted and despised. Three, community built on androgynous identity will mean the end of transsexuality as we know it. Either the transsexual will be able to expand his/her sexuality into a fluid androgyny, or, as roles disappear, the phenomenon of transsexuality will disappear and that energy will be transformed into new modes of sexual identity and behavior.

Ultimately, radical feminism shifted increasingly towards bioessentialism often as a result of frustration and exhaustion with the fight against patriarchy, and constantly raising awareness of the violence done by males to females. Many radical feminists were socialists and involved in other radical movements, and were dealing with misogyny in those spaces, leading to a general sense that women had to place their own oppression above all others in order to ever achieve justice. Their major contribution to feminism, "the personal is political," also meant seeing society in general as having a "male culture" where women were constantly suppressed, and that women needed to develop their own culture as a class - and their own spaces, free of men.

And when that is your focus, no matter how much theory you write or read about gender being a construct and males and females being equal and the abolition of gender... you need to be able to divide males from females. When you are still forming a sociocultural identity around sexual characteristics and what you feel symbolically represents those characteristics, you are just doing gender again. And I hope its easy to see how, especially amongst white middle class cis women, especially with a focus on porn and sexual violence and the Penis Of It All, how this critique of gender as a social construct failed to escape bioessentialism.

I honestly don't really quibble with her claim that transfeminism owes a lot of theoretical groundwork to radical feminism. Radical feminism did genuinely contribute a lot to feminism overall, bad and good, and no one should ignore that. But I think transfeminism, properly done, is radical in and of itself, having moved on from the place we were in the 70s. Me personally, my goal for a post-patriarchal world is not necessarily that gender will be abolished, but that social constructs in general will not be reified (treated and believed to be objectively real) like they are now. I hope that, with the material and ideological structures that keep us oppressed removed and new ones focused on justice implemented, we can have our little human games with symbols and feelings and enjoy them without believing they control our lives and are weaponized against each other out of greed.

And, ultimately, if anyone can make trans radical feminism work in a way that meaningfully fixes its problems especially with gender polarity, I do not think it is Talia "calls other trans women straggots" Bhatt. In my opinion, the kind of "trans radical feminism" we need is one which places intersex and nonbinary people at the heart, not in terms of "being the most oppressed" but rather because the next thing feminism needs to fundamentally reckon with on the gender level is letting go on the "gender polarity" and the need to base feminism around a woman- or female-identity and intrinsic nature, which can also then open feminism up far more to cis men and lead the way for a multi-gender resistance to kyriarchy.

I highly recommend Ellen Willis' essay "Radical Feminism and Feminist Radicals" (accessible on JSTOR). She herself was a radical feminist at one point and goes over the history of the ideology in detail, and how it ended up driving away so many feminists who otherwise identified strongly with the "radical" part.

The oppression of women being the most fundamental, oldest, and pervasive form of oppression, and resistance to this oppression must be placed before all else

The root of women's oppression is the patriarchal system itself, particularly rigid sex roles, the nuclear family, and biological division of labor

Men, the dominant political class, maintain power over women not just for material and economic gain, but "psychological ego satisfaction"; men gain something psychologically from oppressing women, and it is in fact this male ego need that leads to the material exploitation, not the other way around

Use of "consciousness-raising" to communally connect personal experiences to political structures (the personal is political)

Rather than seeking legal rights within current system, the ultimate goal of feminist is to abolish sex roles and dismantle patriarchy entirely on an institutional and social level

Liberal feminism is defined by seeking equal status for women within the capitalist imperialist system, especially through achieving legal rights (this is not to say other forms of feminism do not see legal rights as important/helpful, but liberal feminism sees liberation as stopping there). This is the dominant form of feminism in the world today as it was adopted by many "progressive" capitalist nations. I would argue that liberal feminism is partially to blame for much of the backlash to feminism we have seen over the past few years, as it is ultimately pretty toothless to capitalist white supremacist patriarchy due to its need to "play by the rules" and avoid anything too fundamentally challenging to society.

Marxist / socialist feminism is class-centric and sees patriarchy as an extension of working class exploitation. Women's oppression is seen through the lens of labor exploitation, particularly domestic and reproductive labor, and the idea that women can meaningfully experience liberation under capitalism is rejected, as working-class women having equal status with working-class men will still be oppressed. Importantly, many Marxists / socialists have historically seen women's liberation as coming directly from establishing communism, which many have criticized rightly as failing to challenge patriarchal attitudes in leftist spaces and seeing feminism as a "distraction" from the "real issue" of class.

Black & intersectional feminism emphasizes understanding women's oppression, specifically that of Black women, as multifaceted and resulting from intersecting identities & forms of oppression. The Combahee River Collective was a direct response to the whiteness of radical feminism, as well as the bourgeois attitude of a major Black feminist organization, challenging the idea that class and racial and gender oppression can ever be meaningfully separated and demanding that Black working class women (particularly lesbians, who historically were excluded from much major feminist movements) be centered as the most vulnerable rather than placed on the periphery.

A lot of people have distinguished "radical feminism" from "cultural feminism," which is more of the "wombyn divine feminine blood and soil" kind of radical feminism I think people often think of, as opposed to the earlier radical feminist theorists who were more explicitly critical of gender as a construct and called for its abolition. Cultural feminism placed the gender abolitionist goals on the backburner and heavily emphasized bioessentialism and the idea that there are innate values and traits belonging to women and men, and that feminism should be about viewing "women's values" as superior to "men's values" and even separating socially from men entirely.

While many early radical feminists disagreed with cultural feminism, its important to understand that cultural feminism came about because of how radical feminism went about critiquing gender. I would argue radical feminism tried to critique gender's construction but, without doing so from a trans and intersex perspective, meant they remained trapped in cissexism and intersexism and fixated on biology and the idea of objective sex, which allowed for the cultural feminist idea of "women's culture" to become so dominant. Shulamith Firestone, a radical feminist writer, directly stated that women's oppression was based in the biology of reproduction.

Radical feminism also was built up by middle class white cis women, and so a fundamental part of their theory was organizing all women (or nearly all women) along the lines of sex, assuming that all women had basically the same experiences and often heavily downplaying the role of race and class. That + their belief that you can simply replace gender with sex and escape the social construction, that you can say womanhood is made up but that femaleness is real and the basis of "true" feminist identity, directly paved the way for cultural feminism, even as there were radical feminists who disliked how their theory was being used.

This is why I feel that transfeminism, while certainly built on the shoulders of radical feminism, does not need to "return" to its ideas, especially when we just end up recreating the exact same problems that led to radical feminism's failures in the first place. I think the critique of gender and sex born from transfeminism, as well as the critique of capitalism from socialist feminism, and the critique of white and middle-upper class and imperial core feminism from intersectionality, combined can provide so much more useful and timely guidance than reheating Janice Raymond's nachos but with trans women included and trans men... still seen as class traitors loyal to the patriarchy who fundamentally seek privilege at the expense of women

example (from Sharyn Graham Davies's Gender Diversity in Indonesia: Sexuality, Islam and Queer Selves)

The array of restrictions and regulations exacted on women’s behaviour is a key reason why so few females identify as calalai [roughly, a female man], as Puang Sulai, an elderly Bugis man expressly notes: There are so few calalai because women are more nurtured (dipelihara). If a woman goes anywhere she must have a companion (pendamping). A woman’s behaviour is much more strictly controlled than men’s.

also on the Bugis society (from Michael G. Peletz's Gender Pluralism: Southeast Asia Since Early Modern Times)

It is well to bear in mind that Graham encountered only a half dozen or so calalai in the course of her two years of fieldwork—and clearly, she was looking for them—but over a hundred calabai [male women]. This is to say that male-bodied individuals involved in transgender practices and same-sex relations outnumber their female-bodied counterparts by about twenty to one. Non- or potential calalai’s perceptions of the real and imagined psychological stigma, social costs, and divine retribution involved in (or resulting from) adopting the role undoubtedly help explain why it is of such limited occurrence, especially in relation to its male-bodied (calabai) counterparts. [...] In Bugis society and in most other cases for which we have relevant information, males tend to enjoy more power and prestige than females (although considerations of social class and related variables may trump gender in any given context). They do, moreover, typically display their power and prestige in gendered arenas and in specifically sexual contexts, the latter being among the quintessential settings in which we see displays of power and prestige in any society. Displays of male power and prestige are frequently manifested not only in the socially recognized ability to transgress and transcend gender norms with relative impunity (albeit within limits), and to define the terms of and otherwise control female transgression and transcendence in these areas. A second, related set of dynamics has to do with the fact that female transgression is more often noticed, regulated, and disciplined (through gossip, ostracism, explicit censure, and, in some contexts, more focused, physical sanctions) because the relative status honor of families and more encompassing kin groups is often heavily dependent on or otherwise keyed to the perceived moral purity and overall comportment of sisters, daughters, and other female relatives, as is certainly true among the Bugis. These dynamic go a long way toward explaining why, in terms of gender and sexuality, male-bodied individuals are allowed more “play” than their female-bodied counterparts, and why, as a consequence, they are more likely to outnumber them in terms of involvement in transgender practices and same-sex relations. These dynamics also suggest that even when notions of same-sex desire as illness and sin apply equally to males and females, they are more likely to be mobilized against women than men and thus more likely to be internalized by them.

wow thats crazy its almost like that's what i've heard verbatim from various different transmasculine people from intensely patriarchal places where people classed as women experience a high degree of social control. i'll literally never forget that one post of mine where someone commented that the reason there's less overt explicit lesbophobia / anti-transmasculinity in a lot of places is because systemic misogyny already exists to exert control over those groups' gender performance and sexuality, whereas people who are classed as "male" who are gender-marginalized create the need for specific ways of attacking perceived-male gender-sexual deviance.

i haven't seen that one yet. but i would love to remind everyone that never in the history of, at the very least, the modern Western feminist and queer rights movements, have trans men & trans men's victimization by patriarchy ever been centered, and certainly not over cis women's.

Though The Will to Change covers many aspects of patriarchy, the key message is the harm and violence patriarchy enacts on the male personality and being. hooks examines the reluctance of feminism, particularly second wave feminism, to deal with male pain caused by patriarchy or even with men in general. The damage inflicted on women every day, and the oblivious entitlement of men, can make us believe that being born male has no significant drawbacks. However, when we only look at the harm that patriarchy does to women, and try to ‘solve patriarchy’ amongst ourselves, we only see half of the picture. How can we solve the problem if we do not understand the complexity of the patriarchal system? Further, if we exclude men from anti-patriarchal conversations, it is much harder to ask men to change themselves. To say “this hurts others and you should feel bad about that” can only go so far. Many more men are likely to engage with anti-patriarchal battles if they can see how patriarchy relates to them, how it has harmed and damaged their relationships with other people, cut them off from their emotional life and stamped on their own happiness. This is one of the paradoxes of the patriarchal system; to defeat it, we need men to challenge themselves, but they can only do that if we address them and show them how to be a part of the struggle. hooks’ criticisms also often stem from feminism’s rejection and critique of patriarchy without proposing other options. If feminism does not develop an alternative to what hooks calls ‘white supremacist capialist patriarchy’ it fails to create a wider revolutionary perspective. hooks’ and other writers’ critiques of white/middle class feminism provide us with a useful means to evaluate feminist struggle. Through critique we can see which strands of feminism have brought us to a dead end, have been counter productive, or assimilated into capitalist hegemony. One central tenant of Jineolojî is also that a science of women and life is the key to the liberation of society as a whole and so cannot be isolated from wider struggle.

the brochure also talks about how feminist education for (cis) men has been practiced in Rojava and the progress made towards building strong anti-patriarchal consciousness. fair warning for my audience that it lacks a strong trans or intersex feminist critique. that being said, trans people are brought up positively and i think its clear that structurally, this feminist approach is a lot more open to those critiques than other forms (even other forms of "transfeminism").

Many struggled to answer the question about a free man ["How would you describe the role and characteristics of a free man?"]. Others said they either could not or should not answer, that as male socialised people they carried too much emotional baggage and toxic mentalities to really imagine free relations. This idea appeared many times, preventing them from answering questions. The reflections were interesting, but the pattern that emerged also began to look like a defence or an excuse, afraid to take the step to imagine something positive, to try, to create, not just criticise their own identity. This is certainly, an imprint of patriarchy on men, and shows how deep it runs even into discussions about anti patriarchal struggle. Many had more to say about a free woman, or women’s oppression, struggling to acknowledge their own pain and oppression under patriarchy. Some even saw people’s freedom as a competition, meaning as a result of men becoming more free, someone else would become more oppressed. They saw men’s freedom as a danger that ought to be reigned in. We evaluate this as an acceptance of the patriarchal understanding of freedom itself.

I really appreciate their critique of how men approach the questions, particularly the idea that men shouldn't be theorizing about gender or patriarchy, that men's freedom is dangerous to women, etc. and pointing out that these ideas are themselves born from patriarchy. The core theme here is that (cis) men's reluctance to be personally engaged in feminism, to see it as a "women's thing" they are at best allies to, is a roadblock to patriarchal resistance that must be overcome.

Relatedly, in an earlier chapter, a man who attended educational programmes in Rojava, Sînan Cudi, talked about being asked by a woman to think of the positives of men:

At the beginning of our personality analyses, we only focused on confessing our bad characteristics as men. We emptied our insides. It was cathartic, but it was not enough to change. Then, we started to ask: What are our good sides? When a woman comrade asked me this question, I thought for half an hour but nothing reasonable came out. If you put yourself in the position of a subject, at the centre of everything, it is very difficult to answer this question. But if you see yourself as one part of life, as a connected being it becomes possible to answer.

Erika, referencing ebenezer scrooge: You, boy! What day is it?!

yes but now i'm questioning who else you thought the pfp might be about like