#core posts

i find it upsetting and frustrating that you believe that me being gender-critical, skeptical of transfems' reasons for transitioning, outraged at male patterns of misogynistic thinking and aggression within the transfem community, and prioritizing other female people in my politics and advocacy, means that i fully ideologically generalize about transfems or consider them "evil". most of the time, i do not care about them, outside of finding their very choice to transition or identify as women subliminally misogynistic and upsetting. when they are sexually or physically violent, manipulative in their aggressively anti-feminist rhetoric, stubborn in their refusal to engage with feminist theory and critique as soon as it makes them feel a bit bad or uncomfortable; whenever they are cruel, outwardly misogynistic, or abusive towards the female people within their own community, i get angry. i get incredibly, righteously angry. and i still don't think they're evil unless they are genuine, dangerous, unrepentant abusers. i think they are male people raised in a misogynistic world, people that don't want to inspect their behaviour because it's uncomfortable, taxing, and not beneficial for them. if we step away from the specifically trans context for a while - a vast majority, if not all, men are misogynistic. sometimes it makes me and other women say "men are evil". in a way, they are; in a way, they're not. they're not because they are simply people with bad politics they benefit from. in another way, they are, because they are perpetrators and enablers of unspeakable amounts of hurt. y'know?

you sent me this because of a post i have already given the context for; women in my community had gravely mishandled a personal account of a transmasc that had survived severe intimate partner abuse at the hands of a transfem. that is why my post is heavily focused on the sex-based dynamics within the trans community. i don't think transfems are the only people to ever hurt transmascs; but i am horrified at the oversaturation of violent misogyny and DARVO-like rhetoric aimed at transmascs by "transfeminists", considering that transmascs like you would indeed, more often than not, consciously seek out transfems to be in community with. there are detrans women on radblr with horror stories to tell about what was done to them when they still identified as trans men. of course we are going to be talking about transfem perpetrators of misogynistic violence against what we see an incredibly vulnerable group - not because transmascs are "naive", "infantile" or "poor helpless weak girls", but because the trans community and its rhetoric can become an isolating force. it is why we have transmascs reaching out to rad-leaning spaces and seeking to talk to other people like them, dysphoric and trans-identifying but disillusioned, to finally be able to air their grievances with the trans community at large

for further context, due to my sexual orientation and past nonbinary identity, i have had way more personal relationships with transfems than with what you would call cis men. my personal experience with sex-based interpersonal dynamics comes so much from my time within the trans community; for the longest time, relationships between "men and women" felt like it wasn't even about me at all - except of course it was. and at the end of it all, i don't violently hate men and i don't violently hate transfems; at the same time, i cannot help but empathize with women that do. there are women with traumas so much more visceral than mine. i won't ever ask them to feel differently about their oppressed state.

my current approach to any male person is one of fundamental distrust. i don't think they're ontologically evil; but, specifically with transfems, i have seen way too many "transfem supremacy kink" posts to ever feel baseline comfortable around one again until given a good reason to. you may find it an unfair generalization; for me, the "vocal minority" is representative of a mindset that can lurk undetected in any male person and, if left unexamined, lead to covert and overt misogynistic mistreatment of women like me. my (at the time transfem-identifying) ex was never Aggressively misogynistic towards me, but recontextualizing our relationship with what i have seen other transfems say about my body and my physiology did help me realize he was definitely objectifying me in ways that came extremely naturally to him, just because my body had long before been sold to him as a fantasy and a tool towards sexual gratification. his sexual conduct towards me was misleading and manipulative, and while i don't think he is an Incredibly Evil Person, i think he's full of shit and has always been full of shit and i resent the fact that his bisexuality + "gender questioning" will probably shield him from the need to examine his own mindsets and behaviours pretty much indefinitely, all while he rotates in liberal circles that claim to take "cishet" men to task. i think it's egregious and simply spitting in my face, all after i was basically tricked into entering a relationship with a guy and thinking it won't be anything like a relationship with a guy. so yes. it makes me mad. i don't have much "patience" for that i suppose

(as a side note; you've mentioned you are critical of pornography. have you seen the "b*tch with a Deathly Hallows tattoo gets DP'd by two tr*nnies, call that reparations" tweet? why does that porn video exist? why is there a demand for it? why do the same dynamics - double penetration of the female body as an act of degradation, domination and retributory violence - persist, even though the penetrators don't identify as men? why is it celebrated by the transfem porn consumer? what does it tell us about the sex- not gender- based dynamics present?)

all of this may sound like "transmisogynistic drivel" to you, but this is my honest answer as to why i treat transmascs and transfems differently. not because i think transfems are evil and transmascs can do no wrong, but because i am now painfully aware of how sex-based dynamics are perhaps complicated but never erased through transgender identification and transition. because of that, in my feminism, i center female people, and de-center men and males. i don't need to have "patience" with transfems because they are, at the end of the day, just... ultimately uninteresting to me. i will talk about what i perceive as harmful practices whenever they affect women/females, i will definitely make it part of my politics to not spread hateful propaganda or misinformation about a comparatively vulnerable group of male people, but overall, they are just not my concern. i don't think that makes me impatient towards them. i think this is just drawing a boundary of not ferevently advocating for my oppressor at the cost of not dismantling my own oppression.

regarding your friend: i am glad to hear you feel this understood by a person in your life. that is a wonderful, meaningful thing. i also do not think this has to factor into politics of sexism, sex-based oppression and female liberation. you feel kinship and solidarity with your friend based on your experiences of gendered presentation; you feel that a lot of your struggles based on gender non-conformity and trans identification overlap; i absolutely do believe that. i do not think that changes the greater societal structure of sex-based oppression, and i don't think one axis of relating and shared struggle negates all the other aspects of your experiences. lesbians and gay men can feel a great sense of solidarity, for example; a feminist lesbian woman may have a gay male best friend; they may have felt the exact same pain of rejection when being disowned by their families; they may have both suffered religious trauma, or homophobic hatecrimes; it would not, under any circumstance, make it prudent for that feminist woman to dismiss other women talking about the unique ways gay men are misogynistic and benefit from patriarchal systems of sex-based oppression, including their access to women's reproductive capacities via surrogacy, for example, just because her best friend is just a very solid guy. (to make it clear: i am not saying this just to indirectly call your friend a man for shits and giggles. i hope, if you are indeed reading this, you can see the point of the parallel)

re: radical feminism as a theory of thought and a political movement

i find it interesting that you said i might want to reconsider "labeling" myself as a radical feminist; i think treating it as a label is a complete and utter conversation killer. what do you understand about radical & second-wave feminism as theories, practices, movements, schools of thought? you might understand quite a lot, but in that case i don't know why you would treat it as a label, or think my beliefs are in some way eclectic rather than holistically developed based on the same underlying basis that radical feminism rests on

radical feminism is liberatory feminism; it concerns itself with female liberation; to work to liberate the female class, one must recognize said class as oppressed and subjugated. what is the basis of said oppression? an oppressor extracts a resource from the oppressed, and as far as said resource exists and is seen as desirable or even necessary, it will benefit the oppressor to keep the oppressed subjugated. that is why the oppressor class cannot be trusted to define the terms of the oppressed' liberation; in fact, any genuine liberatory movement will face intensive push-back due to its aim to disrupt and dismantle the existing structures of oppression

i am genuinely very very glad that you recognize the pornography industry as profoundly evil. here are the questions i would ask you: what makes it evil? what makes it destructive to the well-being and status of women and antithetical to female liberation at large? and, ultimately, why does it exist? whom does it serve, how does it perpetuate the exploitation and subjugation of women, how does it fit into larger systems of oppression?

if we were to follow all of the more heinous assaults on the privacy, soundness, health, dignity, safety and autonomy of the female body down to their root, we will find just that - the female body, and the heteropatriarchal relations of the sexes. and we will see that reproductive and sexual control, coercion and access are the very top prize the oppressor class would hate to give up. radical feminism will ask us to analyze every shape and form of the shackles and trace them back to the root relationship at the core of every form of abuse and subjugation ("who benefits from this?"); and ultimately, it would be insufficient for me to give up the rest of this awareness and class consciousness for the sake of any more liberal but sex industry-critical version of feminism. i undeniably want to practice discretion and rationalize every single aspect of any particular movement for myself, but i frankly just do not agree that i can criticize pornography effectively in isolation from a radical awareness of female subjugation & radical commitment to female liberation

i don't think radical feminism can be "hijacked" by transphobia. either of the two things is true: we define "transphobia" as the recognition of the biological sex over gender identity and how it must take priority in every conceivable political context whenever the rights of the female class is concerned (in which case radical feminism is "transphobic" by default); or we define "transphobia" as violence and discrimination (via denial of housing, employment, medical care, social neglect) against trans-identifying and transitioning individuals; in which case, as radical feminism concerns itself with the interests of the female class, i don't think any genuine form of it has space - and any genuine involved feminist activist the time - for campaigning against a group of people rather than for women. or, at the very best: radical feminism is not any more "hijacked" by transphobia as the fight for trans people's physical safety and dignity is "hijacked" by misogyny. we simply find ourselves in a situation of intense polarizing culture war in which the demands of the trans community have become unrectifiable with the interests of the female class, and the resulting tension has grown into what you perceive around you: mutual culture of mockery and harassment. i don't really interact with any women who are big into mockery and harassment. i imagine you could probably say the same for your own circle.

i understand what you mean when you say radical feminism cannot be "inclusive" of transmascs' issues: you probably conceptualize those issues through the lense of how much you value gender identification, recognition, and the freedom to transition and be respected in your transition. as a very neutral statement: i think it is okay for a viable, productive, and important political movement to not be inclusive of those needs. radical feminism does indeed have a specific view of trans identification and transition - one that is important to me and my politics - and that does not have to be a bad thing. ideas are not automatically violence. ideas are also not laws, and even though you are probably used to associating radical feminism with general trans-critical groups (many of which are fairly conservative), the way i see it (and you can definitely correct me), we actually represent very little threat to your bodily autonomy even if you define said autonomy as the right to transition. there are no radical feminist politicians. there are no radical feminist lobbyists. people pulling the strings 90% of the time are conservatives that love the heteropatriarchy and the gender hierarchy. this is why you see conservative detransitioners so often and radical feminist, leftist, gender-nonconforming homosexual detransitioners not at all - except for radical feminist spaces

but to the point of radical feminism not making space for your specific political goals;the same could be said about, for example, religious women. a Muslim woman who faces the pressure in a Western country to not wear her hijab will not feel represented by the radical feminist critique of Abrahamic and generally male-supremacist religions, especially the restrictions forced on women within religious countries and communities. she may feel hurt and angry that her fight for religious expression (which is undeniably colored by racism and xenophobia) is not something radical feminists would want to soften their critique of misogynistic religions for. she may say we do not represent her, so we are not for All women / females

at the same time, in another context, radical feminist fight for single-sex services for survivors of domestic violence would provide the same woman with a shelter that her community will know is a single-sex space. that means that once she leaves the shelter, she can be re-absorbed into her religious community instead of punished for the "indecency" for sharing living quarters with a male person of no relation to her. in that way, radical feminism can fight for that woman's safety and continued access to her religious community she may financially and physically depend on, without having to soften its political goals of dismantling religious patriarchal control. is it really all that bad, for a movement to exist without catering to every other goal and demographic? the trans rights movement is dismissive of and often detrimental to the interests of the female class. does radical feminism have to go, but the trans movement stay? how come?

i don't think it does any of us any favours to pursue a movement that makes everyone feel good or - even - supported in our every decision and choice. in fact, i had to face the discomfort of unpacking the reasons and, most crucially, effects of my own past nonbinary identification, in order to engage with radical feminism meaningfully. i didn't come to it because it was easy, comfortable and felt nice. i came to it because it was meaningful, eye-opening, connective and made sense. and it provided me with something i never had before in a true, uncensored way: female class consciousness and female solidarity.

i find it most meaningful to find solidarity with other females on the basis of our sex. i have changed my mind about my "gender" before. i find it infinitely more personally productive, invigorating and important to build solidarity on the basis of my immutable traits - the body i was born into - than my changeable and maleable, cultural context-dependant ideas of myself

to that last point of class consciousness and solidarity:

on my feelings towards radical feminist women and on-line communities

i found it very tragically ironic that you imagine that i have to be "patient" with people i disagree with strongly within my own community; so much so that you imagine me struggling for a different/"better" one. the reason is, ever since fully and passionately divorcing myself from queer online spaces after the response to the Collective Shout campaign (i don't know if you've heard much of that rumble) and seeing the worst of the worst of what the trans community specifically had to offer, i have stated multiple times that i cannot imagine the perseverance and patience it takes to continue trying to carve out a space within that community in which, for example, rape culture is not tolerated.

am i more patient for "tolerating" mean, brash, unempathetic women with a female class consciousness, than you are patient for intentionally sharing a community with people that celebrate pornography as part of "queer culture" and promote "trans rules of engagement" to shield perpetrators of interpersonal sexual harm? we both have reasons for the causes we prioritize and the circles we pursue. is my choice really profoundly, fundamentally that more unthinkable than yours? i deeply respect people active in the trans community that push against the worst aspects of it; it's something i couldn't do, i don't have the resilience for that; if you don't have the resilience for the worst radical feminism has to offer, that is fair enough. but i think it's disingenuous to say i somehow am dealing with more of inappropriate / unethical/ dangerous communal conduct than you.

and another element of it is: you probably surround yourself with people that don't advocate for pornography as a human right or promote rape apologism. i have seen the worst of yours; similarly, you must have seen the worst of mine. i will not at all, under any circumstances, deny that you may have suffered genuine misogynistic abuse from women that posit themselves as gender-critical radical feminists. i won't "no true scotsman" this.

i Will say that radical feminism is a movement and an ideology, not an identity, so i think we have slightly greater control of who we award the "title" to. being critical of the trans community is definitely not enough to qualify, and there is a persistent drive to lump us up with people who are not at all practicing feminist politics - even if they attempt to label themselves in such a way. but, yes - i have heard accounts of women being subject to awful treatment by other women from online radical feminist communities; and i am sure it happens offline, too.

i do, however, fully reject the following two notions: a) that radical feminists are exceptionally, uniquely misogynistic; b) that i myself am in some way special or an exception.

there are women rotating in this sphere that i don't think hold true to feminist principles in many crucial ways. i would not call them radical feminists at all. there are women on here that hold to radical feminist theory, but whom i strongly dislike and condemn and would not sit at a table with for other reasons, or for how they go about their feminist stances. there are women on here that have said things that upset me viscerally and made me feel less safe in the world. and then there are also women on here that are some of the very best people i've ever met (which, let's face it, will always be subjective). and there are women on here that are complex and messy and growing and learning like i am learning. literally: what is more normal than that?

here is what is most important to me: every single time i saw an upsetting display of petty misogyny on here, the push-back and clap-back were immediate. someone was there to put her foot down and say "this is not a feminist action, this is harmful and we should not stand by it". i could still feel deeply hurt, shaken, upset by such a display, but either me or another woman would say our "no" and get resounding support from others. not all, but many enough for me to know i am not crazy nor alone.

how do you expect us to practice politics if not in community (with free open entry, because how could we stop a woman for putting "radfem" in her bio even), and then by regulating said community, having communal conversations, re-aligning ourselves with our principles consistently? what is the alternative here. do you really see me reaching out to other women with requests and suggestions and criticisms of the communal conduct and think i am fighting a futile battle and need to be guided into the light, despite other women agreeing with me in response?

it is fair - because of the inter-communal tensions and the culture war and, let's face it, mutual propaganda campaigns - for you to feel personally, targetedly, hatefully victimized by the online (and/or offline) radfem communities. there are people within the community right now that can attest to having been hurt during their time of trans-identification. i won't deny the pain of that. however, there are also women on here that have been stalked, harassed, subjected to misogynistic assault, sent countless rape threats, ridiculed for specific and intimate details of their trauma - because they are "TERFs". i myself have also participated in the complete dehumanization of these women. not to this extent, but by gleefully stating that i wish for them to die, for example. a lot of them are lashing out in response - though of course not all response is justified and proportionate. a lot of them have conditioned themselves out of empathy for males of any stripes after years and years of manipulation and being made to sacrifice their own safety, sanity and well-being for the sake of men who supposedly needed their allyship and loyalty more than these women needed basic respect and human decency. it's not going to be pretty on here.

i have seen people in the trans community mock child sex trafficking survivors. that does not make me think you, the person sending this, are evil or uniquely patient. you probably have not seen as much of the worst of the worst. if you saw it, you'd probably go, "what a freak. that's not me or my friends. i want nothing to do with this." perhaps a small part of you would think, "this is really bad, but i understand why they would say this, because that's a TERF and they probably feel existentially threatened by her very presence."

radical feminism is a movement and a framework, and i do not perceive it as in any way inherently hateful or discriminatory. radblr is a social space. it's imperfect and it's absolutely full of traumatized women that are fighting for their right to speak their minds in a word that is actively, aggressively silencing them. and, yes, trans issues are one of the most high-tension, high-emotion topics here at the moment - but i want you to know women on here get absolutely vicious with each other for a plethora of other reasons. i have seen women express egregious sentiments towards each other, be cruel, uncompromising in truly bitter, damaging ways. almost every single time, i could trace it back to the violence we experience at the hands of men and the society at large. we police each other with absolutely neurotic, compulsive frevour, because we know how the failure of one of us would be used to undermine the rest of us. everyone is desperate for a caricature of a feminist: too ugly, too bitter, unprincipled, hypocritical, secretly yearning for beauty / male attention / etc etc etc. a feminist who stops being one after a good dicking. every single thing we do, as women, as feminists, as women of whatever sexual history and orientation, is filtered through the lense of worst-faith, most degrading, most oppressive projections of the male ego.

it's not feminist, to harass and hound and hurt each other as well as anti-feminist women (for radical feminists, that would include trans-identifying females, nonbinary and transmasc alike) to prevent the un-preventable, which is: being dismissed, mocked, degraded, fetishized, objectified by our oppressor. i am not excusing it. we should not be doing that, period. but if i am committed to female solidarity, i must attempt to understand it. i must attempt to give it all of the grace women are routinely denied.

i believe that you are engaging in ungenerous generalization of feminist communities by sending me this. you don't have to not be absolutely outraged on your own behalf for any cruel, disgusting treatment you've received. no "but" to add to that. i just don't think your characterization of radical feminism as a whole truly holds up. for example, i could indeed imagine someone on here being disgusting towards a detrans woman - but some of the most powerful and insightful voices i hear on here are of detrans women. have you spoken to them? have you heard much of their own experience in the radfem community? i'm one person, but i'm not a unique person, but my loyalty to and respect for detrans women runs as deep as my affection, care and concern for transmascs. their feminist perspectives are ones i hold as incredibly precious.

i absolutely cannot agree that radical feminists are raging misogynists that are more horrible about and towards women than your average liberal. i would take an angry, hurting, unmoderated woman who is outraged at the lack of class consciousness and solidarity, than a sensitive leftist man that watches porn on Sundays, every single day.

at this stage of my life, i want to focus on class solidarity among female people above, literally, anything else. the most vicious woman who will degrade me for my personal history holds less of a power to hurt me than any man in the world. i want to build community with people that do not yield this ungodly amount of structural power over me. people that don't make my voice smaller. people with whom i feel safe disagreeing so profoundly that i shake with anger and hurt. i want female solidarity. i want female-only communities. i want to know how to build vast, over-arching communities with women who may absolutely fucking hate each other a good amount of the time. i don't think we have any hope of liberating ourselves if we don't get dirty with it, if we don't fight, don't say the horrible things on our minds and process and move through them and decide whether we want to be around an individual woman at all, and if we don't, finding a way to deal with that. i will never condone misogynistic abuse of one woman by another, but it's just a fucking lie that women concerned with all of ours' class interests and physical survival are somehow uniquely misogynistic. at worst, they use ugly words, victim-blame too much, and alienate the most vulnerable among us. is this really worse than the ease with which a man can routinely degrade and objectify the entire female sex with one word or look or click of a mouse? i don't think i can ever meaningfully stop a man from un-personing me. i can call other women out, i can be supported by other women in doing that, and, at the end of the day, i can work with those supportive women to build spaces that moderate for the kind of abuse we all refuse to tolerate. at the end of the day, i want us to be free from men, not from each other. i want us to be able to connect with each other in spite of everything that tears us apart.

it's true that i want to connect with transmasc people. you won't like my way of putting it, but: the experience of radical female gender-nonconformity and unfeminization is incredibly touching, near and dear to my heart, easily familiar. but i cannot pursue female solidarity and liberation by prioritizing that one kind of experience and relationship with womanhood, especially since that relationship is, self-confessionally, fraught. and something i've become increasingly aware of is the experience of brave, secure, confident women that never gave an inch on their own experience of femaleness and never allowed for the simple fact of their visceral existence be redefined. these were the women i had previously neglected, and i want to cherish, respect and uplift them. i am not better than them just for having a more up-close, sympathetic view of the trans-identifying female experience. none of us would have had a ready home to come back to in feminism if these women hadn't held down the fort. i have found my way back to my understanding of my own class condition because of the women that hadn't backed down. if that comes at a price of them being obtuse and careless sometimes, so fucking be it

for context, Scout & i had been radicalized against quite a lot of things mis-labelled as "sex-positivity" (pro-ship, pro-kink, pro-porn, pro-prostituion and sex industry rhetoric, commodified and reckless approaches to sexuality and unbalanced / dangerously casual relationships dynamics) for a really long time, which was already quite isolating in the general queer scene. her introduction to online radical feminist spaces was sparked by her morbid fascination with what was known to us at the time as "swerfs", and trying to figure out how we could come to similar conclusions as a group we'd lagrely deemed "hateful" and "misguided"

i remember the first conversation we ever had that even hinted at her having interacted with the online space at all was from that angle; a kind of... discomforted musing at this "accidental" overlap. i think it was in the same conversation that she introduced me to the fact of gender abolition being a radical feminist concept; we'd talked about our own gender-abolitionist views before without labelling them as such, and it was very new and surprising to me to hear that gender abolition was a feminist idea rather than part of the ~genderfucked~ agenda. after that, we talked about our own conscious as well as unconscious attachment to gender rhetoric, some forms of spiritual essentialism, cultural (Jungian-esque) archetypes and subversion of cultural archetypes, and kind of just mused on it all undecidedly for a while.

i'm honestly not sure when & how the topic was brought up again next, but after that we definitely started moving into the more... "different sides of the fence" territory: Scout having already deconstructed the gender ideology & me still holding very fast and true to my loyalty to the trans community. it took us a really long time to find the right way to talk about it; i was holding onto a lot of preconceived notions of what any particular statement meant and implied, i'd absorbed a lot of content from trans creators that was dedicated to challenging conservative and mislabelled quasi-feminist narratives - which meant i had very strong gut reactions to words like "adult human female", "chemical castration" and so on. it all just felt like... dogwhistles.

mostly though, what was creating a lot of difficulty was that we both were very desperate for a sense of respect, which was hard to do when, inevitably, one of us had to turn out to be "wrong" at least to Some degree. Scout had a hard time dealing with the idea that her recent de-conditioning was in any way misguided, or the urgency and strength of her newly formed conviction "disproportionate"; i was deeply resistant to the idea that the end goal of the conversation was implied to be me "giving in" and recanting all of my firmly held beliefs that i had thought were rooted in open-mindedness, compassion, solidarity and care; and, obviously, there was also the question of my own nonbinary identification at the time. i didn't want a conversation to happen in which, as i suspected, the other person, my closest person, would think me naive, misguided, misinterpreting my own personal first-hand experience, not believe the validity of my own understanding of myself. and for Scout, again, her recent realizations were also filtered through a renewed and firm new understanding of her own experience, through the lense of feminist class consciousness; and my appeals to the interests of another group at the expense of her hardly-won understanding of her own vital safety, interest, self-knowledge and investment, felt like an accusation and a violation (from what i understand about her side of things; she has now read through my draft of it and approved of how i have presented her end of it all)

what made it hard for a long time was that i, inevitably, was coming at it from a place of feeling, while Scout wanted to engage me in critical analysis. i can think back to and remember the things she'd said that i now know were softened expressions of her genuine belief, uncomfortable concessions in an attempt to respect and validate my own reservations. she tried patiently talking through every possible template anti-"TERF" argument with me, and even engaged with me in my attempts to argue in favour of "nuance" in understanding the trans-identified male condition (because, obviously, that was always going to be the biggest hang-up). despite her best attempts, my inevitable resistance came from the idea that i was being interpreted as unnecessarily sentimental, while she presented some purely logical rationale; we are also both, ultimately, huge softies that had built a lot of our relationship on waxing poetic and entertaining various idealist notions, and constructing beautiful fantastical as well as philosophical narratives in our heads, so it was confusing and lonely to suddenly feel alone in that and to be asked to switch to a much more pragmatic analysis of the material condition of sex-based oppression. and as far as i understand it, for Scout the process was: she tried to be rational, careful, considerate and measured in validating my own reservations, while also gently challenging them, but in that she also felt very limited and silenced and tone-policed; so when even her gentle prodding still resulted in me freely expressing my sentimental emotional reactions, which she didn't feel encouraged to do in return, the only accessible emotion was frustration. ultimately, we felt very distant and very isolated in our emotional experiences, and things repeatedly escalated into unregulated fights

what ultimately helped a lot was getting to understand the heart of her pain, anger, defiance, the urgency of her need to break down and apart the thing that'd been hurting her. i remember the moment of "breakthrough" for me was when she expressed her raw distress, instead of trying to carefully plead with me to reconsider and re-sensitize myself to harmful misogynistic rhetoric.

i believe we were going through the https://terfisaslur.com/ archive and were having some issues with me having a very hard time recognizing threats of physical violence as explicitly misogynistic; basically questioning whether cathartic tweets about wanting to punch a political opponent in the face were like, uniquely and disproportionately targeted at gender-critical women, vs just how people signal their allegiance. obviously, my insensitivity to violent imagery was leaving Scout befuddled, frustrated and isolated. when we switched over to threats of sexual violence - explicit rape fantasies (="terf-breaking"), dehumanizing language directed at the female body as a way to disparage a "political opponent" - that obviously became harder to stomach and ignore. however, i was also stuck in a loop of retroactive reasoning: "the reason why transfems film amateur porn of themselves jerking off in women's bathrooms is because their presence there is so severely stigmatized; they wouldn't feel compelled to compulsively eroticize their 'abnormal' 'deviant' bodies and their 'trespassing' if conservative men didn't fetishize said bodies & gender-criticals didn't mischaracterize them as shameless perverted fetishists!", that kind of thing. so seeing them lean into explicitly masculine, sexually violent fantastical roles in response to women who were ready to call them out on that, felt... like something i was still, despite my genuine discomfort, repulsion and upset, compelled to at least partially rationalize through what i bet Serano and Chu have already tried and theorized about lol (i am yet to read their stuff).

so the breaking moment was when i was forced to radically re-direct my empathy for the Complex and Tortured Dysphoric Experience - when Scout pointed at an example of a shameless, gratuitous rape fetish post describing the female body in the most degrading, objectifying, disgusting ways imaginable, and emphatically told me: "This makes me dysphoric." that really shook me up, because - yep. if i held the (alien and mythologized to me) dysphoric experience as profoundly complex, agonizing, and as such deserving of all the possible accommodation and consideration, i had no excuse to dismiss something that was hurting and triggering my partner in such a way, just because it was potentially rooted in another group's supposed dysphoric torment. and Scout had told me in no plain terms that what she had perceived left her with very little doubt about whether her experience, her perspective, her input and - ultimately - her right to live in her body without getting triggered into a state of despair , would not be taken into any consideration by trans-identified men. and seeing the rape fetish posts, i believed her. at that point, i had to give up my compulsive need to constantly center the interests of a group i thought deserved every tiny bit of grace, good faith and nuance, if i wanted a chance to actually respect my closest friend and her own visceral and painful experience.

i think this is where we started figuring out a sustainable strategy for our future conversations. final terms of our conversations were:

We fully, consciously, verbally agree that we mutually respect each other's analytical skills and capabilities, that either of us may have perspectives to share that the other may be lacking, and that, even if I ultimately agree with some part of what Scout would explain / disclose to me, she is similarly open to me course-correcting things wherever I sense a bias or an inconsistency; we are starting a big old melting pot of ideas, and aim to come to a genuine mutual understanding, rather than force either one of us onto the preferred side of the fence;

Whenever Scout expresses something challenging, hard, controversial, that I immediately wish to dispute out of a protective or self-defensive urge, I instead take some time, pause, rephrase what she has just told me back to her, to make sure I hear what she is actually saying and contextualize it properly, rather than reacting to a buzzword or a simplified bad-faith interpretation; and, most importantly, acknowledge exactly why it is personally important to her;

Even when the things she says are so challenging and controversial that they make it very hard for me to hold space for them, I let her finish, and let her words exist at least for a bit in an unchallenged, uncompromised space; when she wishes to express any amount of pain, frustration, desperation, her feeling gets breathing room, without the external pressure to immediately be softened and retracted for the benefits of remaining sufficiently trans-supportive;

I get the same - if she gets to clearly express she finds something nonsensical and stupid and dangerous and annoying, I am welcome to express that about any part of radical feminist ideology or the gender-critical agenda I encounter; we are allowed to feel strongly and disagree as we figure this out, as long as we do not force each other to pretend we Don't find something ludicrous and unfair.

with that mutual agreement in place, we started being able to make more gradual progress as we talked about the things that Scout felt were the most urgent for her to bring up. the mutual emotional frustration was still present, but we at least found a way for conversations not to spiral out of control.

first things we talked about were the glorification of violence, including sexual violence, against radical feminist women; sexual coercive pressure and "the cotton ceiling" rhetoric (it was my first time hearing the term and it made me incredibly uncomfortable and hypervigilant; the rhetoric itself took some untangling to actually radicalize myself against i am afraid); the objectifying and dehumanizing quality of the transfem gaze evident in the rape fantasies constantly openly shared by them through every possible venue; and Scout's bone-deep frustration at the way trans gender ideology clashed with and erased any possibility for unquestioned female gender-nonconformity. the latter was a bit harder for me to get on the same level with (partially because i myself still felt very resonant with the nonbinary identity / rhetoric / space), but we were at least able to talk about it without outbursts of anger on my end (something i am very much not proud of)

at some point we got to a stage where i also started feeling insecure at the idea that she was repeatedly taking my hand and guiding me through select examples of things that supported her point of view; it felt a bit limiting, curated, like i didn't have access to enough informational input or the time and space to make my own conclusions when presented with a piece of evidence. on Scout's end, it was ultimately motivated by the anxiety around wanting to be able to comment on the things she presented to me: she wanted me to know exactly what and how she'd taken away from any phenomenon, why she interacted with the source, how and in what capacity, and to highlight her own analytical process rather than any surface-level reaction. at the end, when i very strongly expressed my need to be able to read through things at my own pace, think about them without being presented with someone else's conclusion, and not feel like i am not allowed to peek behind the scenes, we agreed that she would compile a list of resources for me and mark any she would like to be able to elaborate on to Some degree before i jump in; and the rest would be entirely up to me to explore in whatever order i wanted. that is when we entered a somewhat-prolonged stage of me slowly reading up on things in my own time, moving through private emotional reactions, formulating my own thoughts, comments, crticisms - as well as admissions, concessions and renewed perspectives; and we would at times touch up on it and touch bases and talk through things a bit. and Scout felt a bit more at liberty to share gender-critical thoughts and observations in a more casual manner, now that we had a more established way of navigating those conversations

i will leave some of the resources she sent me & i used here, because i do think they are very valuable :)

On Hurting Trans Women by Kitty Robinson - definitely definitely helped with the empathy hurdle

Fair Play for Women - i think a very good conversation starter; i have a few bits of criticism with some statements / ways of presenting information that they have, which i think is a good thing in conversations with the right person. A serious, statistics- and legislation-based resource that is also not unfalliable means the materials are helpful, stimulating and encourage autonomous analysis and conclusions. Their 2018 report on single-sex domestic violence resources especially was both eye-opening and challenging in all the best ways and gave me actual pause even as i'd scoffed at some other things i'd read by them prior, i genuinely strongly recommend it

A Dialogue Between a Trans Woman and a Feminist Who Isn’t Just A Figment of The Trans Woman’s Mind | Jane Clare Jones - awesome. very good representation of the way radical feminists may approach conversation around and with dysphoric males w/o giving an inch of ground on the realities of sex-based oppression. firm in ways that are challenging for a committed trans ally, but reasonable and setting fair understandable boundaries that are pretty hard to argue with

What is "detransition kink" & why does it matter? | Medium by Kitty Robinson; sobering look at the prevalence and acknowledgment of sex-based condition and dynamics even within the trans community itself

YOU TOLD ME YOU WERE DIFFERENT: an anthology of harm | by Kitty Robinson | Medium

@/kittyit's queer rape culture tag (this one was left till i was sufficiently warmed up BUT definitely contributed a lot)

and all of this took, again, months and months and months. my private quiet research was quite drawn-out. but another thing that i feel contributed so much was seeing Scout come into a sense of greater and greater comfort and confidence as she moved through the world with a more developed and acute feminist consciousness. she expressed new thoughts, sentiments and observations; she asked questions that, while at times subconsciously uncomfortable in how unapologetic they were in the centering of women and criticism of men, made me reconsider some parts of our lives that i'd gotten used to just taking for granted; and she very obviously felt more comfortable in her own skin. we started talking about our own relationship as a same-sex one more, we contextualized it more in the context of the history and tradition and language of women loving women. all of that also was an emotional, rather than rational, input. i was allowing myself to react more strongly to trans identified men's misogyny; and i was allowing myself to react strongly and positively to my partner asserting herself as a woman in a male-dominated world.