Passionate Opinions

Thank you for sharing your experience, anon. There are similarities between your story and my own; there are some aspects of radical feminism I still agree with, as well as some that I don't fully agree with but think are worth exploring. Transphobia is not one of those.

Obviously, leftists are not immune to cultivating sexist beliefs. Trans rights advocates are not immune to it, but only in the same sense that radical feminists are not immune to it. There are people on the left who believe that, by virtue of being on the left, they cannot possibly unintentionally uphold systems of oppression. (Though I would argue that leftists, more than any other political "side", are the most diligent about examining how they operate in the world and the biases they may be playing into.)

To any reasonable individual, it should be evident that the solution to misogyny on the left is not to ally with conservatives who know that they're misogynistic but also think that misogyny is a good thing.

And yet.

Trans people are not your enemy. We do not want to uphold gender conformity, suppress your sexual orientation, strip away the freedoms of women, or any of the primary problems your feminism seeks (or should seek) to abolish. You know who wants to uphold those things? The conservative transphobes who will happily shake your hand and use you as a mouthpiece while pushing their own policies of gender conformity, misogyny, and homophobia, which hurt all of us.

“Gender critical” is what the ideology is called, hon. I am no longer inclined to believe that it is, as it claims, particularly critical about gender. I don’t take the names of ideologies at face value.

Does the pro-life ideology actually prioritize life? No, they’ve demonstrated quite the opposite, in spite of their name.

I won’t be directly responding to anymore gendercrits on that post. I don’t have anything to prove to them, and trying to pick from the several responses I’ve gotten to find the ones worth my time is a waste of spoons. Instead, I will condense some points here and be done with it.

I do love people telling me that I can’t possibly have been gendercrit at any time in the past because I “don’t understand” their arguments. They really can’t find peace with the fact that I understood their arguments just fine, found a new perspective from which to look at them, and have grown to disagree with them. They can’t imagine someone properly understanding their worldview and still disagreeing with it.

They can’t imagine someone simply thinking, no, your conclusions are wrong. The genital shape that a person exhibits at birth provides no permanent determination about who they will be (ie a man or a woman). Yes, gender is learned, and therefore it can be changed. Upholding biological gender in any sense is playing the game by the oppressor’s terms.

Or they say that I can’t ever have been gendercrit because I don’t talk about sexism enough; I talk about trans people and gendercrits too much. Except I also apparently don’t talk about gendercrits enough? Cool cool.

Nevermind what I’ve posted about abortion rights. Nevermind that I’ve been rallying in the streets about it since the SCOTUS draft decision was first leaked. Hell, I’ve been rallying even harder now that the decision has gone through; I am unfortunate enough to live in a state with a trigger ban on abortion. And nevermind that I actually agree with quite a bit of radical feminism, and that the reason I mainly argue on the point of trans people and what it means to be [insert gender here] is specifically because those are some of the key points I disagree with.