virginia

(Modern radical feminism should be departed from anti sex work and transphobia, however that is not always the case. It is hard to separate from the theory. I am NOT excusing that behavior, but simply giving history on radfems. I do very much hate anti sex work and transphobia, and I oppose all forms of oppression. Yet it must be said that more time and energy must be focused on anti feminism in leftist spaces. We can absolutely focus on transphobic and anti sex work feminism, and give more time and energy to hating misogynists/anti feminists at the same time.)

I do not want to go into details about the title, I think it speaks for itself. If you need a reference, there are thousands of anti feminist leftists on Twitter. If you need reference, there is Stalin's long oppressive history to read. If you need reference about feminism, read bell hooks. Onto the work!!

I'm tired of the idealist view that the revolution will fix everything. This revolution that many dream of is purely physical. It only aims to end the physical system of capitalism, It aims to end wealth inequality and billionaires. However in living in a capitalist society, capitalism is so entwined with every oppression that we face. It has become ingrained in our mindset, in our society. There are capitalist forces in the patriarchy, in queerphobia, in racism. It is the by-product of living in a system that prioritizes profit over people. And we have internalized those forms of oppression in our society, in our minds.

I can see why some former alt righters may hold sympathy for current people that are still down the pipeline. However at the same time I have no tolerance for hate or discrimination.

I do not care that you "wouldn't like to be treated that way" if you were still down that pipeline. Because you were treating minorities so much worse when you were down that pipeline. If you hold more sympathy to your former friends, then you do to the thousands of minorities they advocate to hurt, you still haven't escaped the alt right pipeline.

Stop calling yourself a leftist if you still haven't escaped the alt right pipeline.

You have to understand how many people you personally hurt, and how many people you are continuing to hurt by excusing your former friends actions.

Stop being "proud" of being a former alt righter, by constantly bringing it up in convos or having it in your bio. It makes us feel uncomfortable when we realize that you're basically saying "I used to advocate for your death but now I don't! Aren't I a good guy!"

And if you care so much about helping those down the pipeline reform, then do it yourself.

Because I'm tired of you pushing aside this problem to other leftists, and mostly towards other minorities/feminists who would literally be the most harmed through their advocation.

If you hold so much sympathy for former alt righters because you escaped that pipeline, then you should be helping those people escape the pipeline. Because if you care about alt righters escaping the pipeline, but don't actually help them escape the pipeline. All you're doing is sympathizing with Nazis.

So don't get mad at us when we prioritize our own health and safety, over helping Neo-Nazis. Don't get mad at us for refusing to be ruthlessly attacked through "helping" people that advocate for discrimination.

Literally anytime a feminist makes some critique that leftist men don't agree with/makes them uncomfortable they immediately labele the feminist as a radfem.....like we can analyze power structures without being radfems. We are not fucking says to **** men, we are talking about how ingrained in our society violence is.

It is internalized racism and sexism that leads people in positions of power/privilege, to label minorities that posted things that made the reader uncomfortable with terms like "radfem" or "a leach to the community". The intersectionality of this also comes into play when the people who are often labeled these terms the most are biopoc queer/gender minorities, who already experience a multitude of hate.

"Why are we attacking people in our own community"/"we will never achieve left unity" is often a talking point that is used to beat around the bush when talking about these issues.

This is especially ironic because those who label feminists as radfems or "leaches to the community", are literally the ones tearing us apart. Especially because actual feminists already receive more hate from right wingers, with misogynistic comments, the label of "feminazi", hate for being anti capitalist, hate for our gender expression, sexuality, and race, the list goes on. Feminists already recieve more hate than many leftists men, because we are feminists. Feminists are already hated by many, and they expand upon that hate by calling us radfems. We are literally hated by both sides.

Some leftists men just refuse to see the need for intersectionality. All workers are not oppressed equally, you as a cis white man do not experience the same oppression that queer bipoc do. You do not experience the same oppression that gender minorities do.

Your leftism or feminism without intersectionality is not leftism/feminism. That is why radfems aren't feminists. And why your ass isn't a leftist.

We are not "attacking" our own community, we are keeping our community a safe space. We has leftists must lead by example, if we want an anti racist and anti sexist society, we must be anti racist and and sexist. We must not tolerate this hate in our own spaces, no matter how miniscule that hate is. Furthermore, we are not "attacking", we are calling out the injustice in our own communities. We are not hurting or exiling those leftists, we are telling them to stop being sexist or racist.

Just because you support anti capitalism doesn't mean you are anti racist or anti sexist. That is something abundantly clear. And just because you support women's rights, or queer rights, ECT, does not mean you cannot be misogynistic or queerphobic.

And just because you aren't as homophobic or sexist as "other men" does not mean you are not sexist or homophobic.

Oftentimes we [as feminists] are hated by "both sides", but chances are if you are a leftist and hate feminists, you are much closer to the "other side" than you are to leftism.

Labeling queer, gender minorities, and bipoc "leaches" and radfems is rooted in racism, sexism, and homophobia. Calling me a radfem is a fucking insult. Because radfems aren't feminists, and I do not want to be grouped with them. Because *you* are the one attacking the community by spreading hate in the first place and labeling us as such terms, we are simply calling it out. Because you are dividing us and insulting us, because our analysis made you uncomfortable/make you question your power structures.

As a proud feminist and someone that has researched the gender bias in stem, more specifically mathematics, I need to admit my downfalls.

My ill thinking. It might seem long ago, and it definitely is, but that is not an excuse. Throughout middle school it always confused me as to why we needed diversity in mathematics. If we all do the same procedures to get the same equations why does it matter where we come from? How do our past experiences shape the way that we do math?

The easy feminist (and phycologist) answer:

It was a form of internalized misogyny-or rather taking in what the teachers around me told me.

Ironic that my middle school social studies teacher said that women shouldn't study mathematics, and I internalized that hate. These comments were often directed toward my woman middle school algebra teacher, in classic boomer fashion, he labeled the millennial generation as lazy. But he had to have known young impressionable minds were listening.

And those young impressionable minds included me, a girl who wanted to pursue math. A girl who's dream job in 8th grade was a statistican.

It's ironic coming from that old history teacher, a man and a female dominated industry, that being elementary education, to tell others that they should not be pursuing their field of study simply because of their gender. If he was not a hypocrite, he would see that if he took his own words to be truth, he should have not been studying the social sciences, he should have not been teaching the social sciences to a bunch of 12-year-olds.

There was a lot of other problematic things with that teacher, he told us that the civil war was simply about states rights, never expanding upon what the states rights were (it is of course states rights to own a slave). But I was young and impressionable and his impact was more than I thought it was.

But enough about him, this is about me admitting my own ill failings. So what was the point of having a diverse mathematics community? If we all do the same equations why does it matter where we come from.

Instead, approach the topic from the idea that if we all do the same mathematics then mathematics is for *everyone*. However, I'm not going to stand here and preach that we all do mathematics the same, as we do not live in a vacuum.

We may eventually get the same answer, but our thought processes are completely different. It's hard for me to explain my train of thought at times, I might be because I'm undiagnosed dyslexic. I would not be a great professor. I can show my work, but I can't say it out loud. I can't write it in words, but I can write it an equations. I can't express my ideas verbally, I struggle with writing them down too (this essay is a testament to that), so how am I to explain my thoughts process? But what I do know is my thought process might be completely different from another's, because of my background.

I'm a feminist and I believe women are not a collective, people are not a collective.

Then why can this sentiment not be expanded to people of other disciples. Why must mathematicians be a collective too? We all do not walk, talk and think the same, so why must our math be the same?

Our past experiences also help us define our areas of research.

Maybe it all does come back to my middle school social studies teacher, because that hate that he instilled in me is the reason why I like to research gender equality. Those ideas that he put in my mind is the reason that I want to dispute them. I strive to always unlearn and re-educate myself.

I like researching gender equality, I like researching feminist politics, I like researching leftism, and I eventually do want to combine those in the future somehow. I don't know how. But our backgrounds do shape our interests, they do shape of what we want to study and our areas of research, and they also do shape how we do math.

Because our backgrounds shape our mathematical knowledge. It shapes our understanding and love for the subject. It shapes our interests and biases and research. Our backgrounds shape the things close to us, what we advocate for and love. It shapes us, thus it shapes our math as well.

To summarize...why does diversity matter in mathematics? Because we are not a collective. Because I am not a collective.

(If this essay might seem to be missing some information to some, you are not wrong! I am currently writing about the discrimination racial and gender minorities have faced for studying mathematics, and how we can overcome this systemic issue. This historic systemic bias also plays a role in why diversity is needed in mathematics, because unpursued talent due to discrimination leads to a weaker mathematics community. Diversity is needed because of our historic failings/mistreatment.)

As a footnote I want to say the inspiration behind the phrase "I am not a collective" comes from a Mexican feminist speech. A place a content warning for the following topics: mentions is sexual assault, femicide, murder, rape

Pride was not a protest. It was a riot. Where queer people threw bricks at cops. Where queer people stood in kick lines in heals, and literally kicked back at cops. Queers bash back. Where queer people bloodied and bruised cops.

Pride was not a protest, they did not sit outside with pick it signs. They did not peacefully yell. They FOUGHT back.

Upholding the patrichary through and through is hard work. That is why upholding the entirety of the patrichary is a choice. We see people like Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro stretch the truth so far in order to fit their narratives. They stretches narratives about queer children, about survivors, about police violence, about race, about leftism. That IS hard work. It's hard work to lie to an audience like that. To make stories fit your narrative so hard.

Tucker and Ben stretches these narratives, and these narratives are often upheld by some main principle idea, the ideology of republicanism. And in that ideology is the strict adherence to the patrichary.

Thus, tucker and ben are in fact stretching a narrative in order to uphold the patrichary. They do so everytime they talk about the woke media, when they talk about protecting children from queerness, when they talk about survivors and police brutality.

Because upholding the patrichary is hard work. It is hard to constantly defend and support a rigid binary and it's oppressive and violent system.

But everytime someone criticizes the patrichary they are met with violence and hate. Because to some, the patrichary is their identity. The power the patrichary gives is their only personality.

But, why try so hard to defend this system it would be much easier to demolish the system to begin with. Because people value the power the patrichary gives them. Because the patrichary "is their identity" (which is just not true).

However do not mistake me, just because some rigid rules of the patrichary and it's binary are hard to completely uphold, does not mean all of the patrichary is.

The patrichary is something also ingrained since birth. It's something we are taught and learned in schools and daily life. Aspects of it are "desirable" to some. Many aspects of the patrichary are in our daily life. It is something forced upon us. However, there are also many aspects that we must stretch the truth to uphold, because it's completely against our nature to believe. So some aspects of the patrichary are easy to defend, and many are hard, which this in turn makes the entire system of the patrichary hard to uphold.

It is something that is hard to break away from. Hard to abolish. Hard to demolish. And that is not a contradiction.

Because people have to fight to uphold the patrichary. But the patrichary is already violence. It is already oppressive. And its defenders utilize it's oppression and violence.

And all we can do is fight back against a system that hates us, ingrained in us, taught and learned to us.

Saw someone claim that "the alt right pipeline for girls is being a radfem" (ie terf, swerf, ect).

This is equivalency false. The alt right pipeline is much fucking larger than any radfem movement. The alt right pipeline and being a radfem are both built upon the violence of the patrichary. However, to claim these are equivalent undermines the violence of alt right/mra movements. And it also disregards the violence radfems perpetrate through their support of oppressive, transphobic, and sex work exclusionary systems.

Radfems do a lot of damage to feminist movements. Radfems are extremely violent to women and gender marginalized people, and sex workers.

Alt right/MRA movements, do all of those same things. And more. They are also extremely transphobic, hate sex workers, hate all women, are extremely violent, ect. They are also more widespread and *accepted* in society. It's a much larger movement.

Some can make claims that radfem movements are an extension/subsection of an alt right movement. This is true. Radfem movements *are* neoliberal movements. They are built upon capitalism, white supremacy, and the patrichary. But it is not an alt right pipeline.

However, to claim that radfem movements are completely equal to alt right movements *in every sense*, is false.

Don't get me wrong! I hate radfems. And I hate alt righters. I want to combat both of these movements at the same time.

But "the alt right pipeline for girls is being a radfem", is false. Especially because it depicts a picture of feminism that is inherently false. Because this claim is originally based upon the idea that "the alt right pipeline for girls is feminism". Much like how young boys fall into alt right movements because they believe in conservativism.

Feminists aren't radfems. Radfems aren't even fucking feminists to begin with. This depiction paints a picture that radical feminism is a pipeline. When actually feminism is not a pipeline, but often something that young girls have no choice in joining, because it's the only movement that gives us justice.

Again I bring up my story: I didn't choose to become a feminist, I experienced violence at a young age and feminism was the only answer.

That is not true for alt right movements. Alt right movements are accepted by society. They are violent and terrible. And all around a system someone chooses to uphold.

If cis men want to be feminists I encourage them.

However, if cis men want to be catered to the entire time, then they aren't feminists.

I do not want cis male feminists who encourage and defend the idea that they are "deserving" of special treatment in my feminism.

I do not want any feminist who thinks they should have the ability to oppress others in my feminism.

I do not want fascists in my feminism.

I am anti patriarchy, we are always unlearning and fighting this system, however at the same time you cannot be engaging in and defending oppression and claim to be a feminist.

If you want to be a feminist the first rule is the be a better feminist.

Don't expect to be catered to.

Don't expect to automatically be the good guy through your engagement in feminism.

Don't expect to sit comfortable and not analyze your own power structures.

Don't expect do nothing and still gain everything.

We all gain something through feminism, libraration from the patrichary.

However, in true liberation, we have to liberate the same people we may be "unconsciously" oppressing.

Cis men gain something from the patrichary.

White women gain something from the patrichary.

And those "gainings" are built upon the oppression of other minorities. We must give up these "gainings" if we truly want to be free.

It's more complex then a trade off.

That's why people value their "gainings" even if it at the cost of their true liberation. Because they value the power they have over others more than the oppression they, themselves and others, are facing.

They value that power more than the liberation they could experience.

"We have nothing to lose but our chains", but some of us also have to give up hold on the chain we have on others. "We have nothing to lose but our chains", but some people have more chains to lose, and some people have more chains they have to give up hold on.