Desert

On one side, again, transgender radical feminists. Since the TERF movement has basically been entirely amputated from the rest of the feminist movement (good riddance), radical feminism has gotten a (in my opinion deserved) bad reputation in progressive circles. It's taken, even when it isn't transphobic, to be essentialist and rigidly structuralist, and its adherents are (sometimes unfairly) stereotyped as cantankerous and isolationist bridge-burners (then again, why did the TERF movement lose every friend it had except the far right?)

Radical feminism and second-wave feminism have been criticized and/or developed on since the 80s at the very least for this very reason. Notably black feminists like bell hooks responded to radical feminism with what would become intersectional feminism, and poststructuralists like Judith Butler began, not soon after, constructing queer theory and queer feminism. Both of these are, if not outright rejections of radical feminism, at the very least polite but firm corrections that the white Anglophone radfem community has broady speaking rejected. To them, it really is that black and white. It really is that rigid. It doesn't depend and it's never nuanced.

Back to Tumblr, 2025. The pressure cooker is boiling. A big post from this week I won't identify expressed anger at the notion that "radfem" has gotten a bad name because of the TERF movement, and implied that radical feminism is the only feminism (and that attacking or rejecting radical feminism is therefore a rejection of feminism itself). It also implied that the label "radical transfeminism" (or trans radfem, or some variation thereof, I can't recall) was inherently transphobic, which I cannot really figure out (I'm sure it can be used transphobically, but I think it's useful to identify that there is a real such movement).

Another tune I've seen repeating over the past several weeks goes something like "Transgender men do not experience unique oppression for being transgender men, only general transgender oppression. The distinct category of transgender women are the only group of transgender people who experience Special Transphobia (transmisogyny)."

This line of thinking is, as far as I'm concerned, so cartoonishly essentialist that you could find it in one of Plato's dialogues, had he known what trans people were. As a queer feminist I'm obviously skeptical of even the categories of "man" and "woman" as fixed ideas or definite categories, let alone the various axes of oppression, marginalization and injustice that exist in the world not, to my mind, as a systematizable checklist of fixed social malus points enacted by the privileged against the victims, but as a nearly incomprehensible cloud of fuzzy, shifting nonsense perpetrated and perpetuated in at least some small ways by basically everyone at all times (but of course by some more rhan others).

Anyways, I'm mostly seeing a somewhat loud and progressively angrier and more insistent community of non-transphobic radfems on here getting more and more frustrated, not necessarily by a principled queer feminist opposition so much as just a very broad bunch of people who for a thousand different reasons find their rhetoric a bit uncomfortable. Perhaps because of their treatment of injustice as if it were fixed facts with objective rules. Perhaps because of their insistence that all injustice can be neatly fitted into a hierarchy from least to most oppressive (rather than, for example, allowing the possibility of ambiguity or injustices being different without one necessarily being worse, or any perspective that finds quantifying injustice less interesting than fighting it). Perhaps just because the internet is full of contrarians with nothing better to do.

I can speak.

I can hear.

I can see.

Who are you?

I am you.

I can jump.

I can swim.

This is fun.

I am you.

You are me.

Who are we?

Who are you?

I am Sylvia.

I am Sylvia.

I am Sylvia.

I am Sylvia.

I am Sylvia.

I am Sylvia.

You are Sylvia?