#factfem

You know the Radfem "Personality types" right? You know like Nicefem, Factfem, Rudefem, Freakfem? I think they are not so much "Personality types" but rather "Stages". I call it

The Stages of Radfem

They are not necessarily but often in this order.

(Also they mimic directly the Stages of Grief. (Coincidence?))

Peak trans/ Peak Patriarchy - the moment you see through the bullshit, often paired with the feelings of shock, despair and Depression (the "no hope for women" stage but also the learning stage where you gobble up everything you can learn about Feminism)

Nicefem - you wanna discuss with others but you think you can convince them with beeing nice to them, the Stage of Denial, you still think society cares about (for example) rape victims because they say they do (they do not)

Factfem - you realized that beeing nice gets you nowhere plus you've gotten your first insults and deaththreats, you think "surely they will listen to facts if I tell them about it" , the Stage of Bargaining

Rudefem - you just don't care anymore, stage of anger, you lash out, why should you be nice to them if they are assholes to you?

After over a thousand responses in just two days, I’m posting the results! I’ll leave the survey open to new responses just to see what happens over time. I also want to note that as this was anonymous it’s not perfectly reliable or accurate; I addressed some of the most common complaints in this post and I’ll say more in future posts. There were 33 questions and this post only contains the first 7 written out, plus a link to the results in google forms. I’m still working on transcribing the other questions :)

Age

59.8% of respondents are in their 20s, 30.4% are under 20, 8.1% are in their 30s, and the rest are over 30. This is definitely skewed by the fact that older gc/radfems are much less likely to be on tumblr, but still interesting.

Sex

Some people were concerned about the fact that this survey was open to men. However I don’t think this ended up messing with the data too much because only 29 men responded.

Sexual Orientation

39.1% of respondents are lesbians and 37.4% are bisexuals. 13.6% are straight, 1.1% are fully asexual, and 1% are gay men. 7.8% are unsure or questioning.

Transgender Identity

18% of respondents are dysphoric females (males are 0.4%), 3.5% are detrans females, (no detrans men), and 1.5% are trans identified females (males are 0.3%). 76.3% fit none of these descriptors.

Race

75.8% of respondents are white, 7.4% are latina, 4% are black, 3% are middle eastern, 2.9% are east asian, 2.5% are south asian, 2.2% are indigenous, 0.4% are pacific islander, and 9.4% are mixed (though this number is probably higher because many people wrote in their specific racial mix). Recently I changed this question to allow people to check multiple options, so the graph is unreadable.

Religion

47.4% of respondents are atheist and 24.7% are agnostic. 10.4% follow a female-centric religion. 6% are christian, 2.1% are jewish, 1.7% are pagan, 1% are islamic, 0.5% are hindu, and 5.9% follow a different religion.

Country

It’s impossible to list every country and it’s percentages but the most common ones are the US (50.4%), the UK (10.9%), Canada (5.7%), Australia (4%), France (2.2%), and Russia (1.9%). Some people complained that the survey was america-centric and I apologise for that, as I am from the US myself. [The key is also kinda useless in the picture because there are so many options it can't display]

~~~~~

These are just the basic demographic questions but I wanted to post them now because it’ll take me a while to transcribe all of the data. If you don’t want to have to wait another day you can see the responses here.

BONUS FUN:

I find it interesting that such a high percentage of respondents are vegan/vegetarian compared to the general population

Cats win! Not that it's a competition I guess ;)

You’ve been all over my posts so I’m just going to consolidate into this one. I’m tired of scrolling past your long and quite frankly boring responses. This post will be divided into sections. If you’re going to respond please say something interesting. However I doubt either of us will ever change the other’s mind. These are kind of like closing statements and I doubt I’ll make anymore major responses because I’m trying to stay focused on offline things.

1. Unanswered Questions

There are some questions and statements in my reblogs that you conveniently ignored.

Definition of a woman? You responded with some generic bs that very clearly isn’t an answer. I’ll be more specific, what should the dictionary definition be? Any ideas?

If I don’t feel like a woman am I allowed to identify as one? You said you weren’t going to humour this question but it is applicable to me and many other gc women. I definitely don’t have any internal feeling of womanhood, or any gender. Does this mean I have to be agender? Is the female gender label restricted to a certain feeling? Or is there absolutely nothing that women have in common?

What is the feeling of womanhood? You kind of answered this but I have a follow up question. You say the feeling of womanhood is enjoying being perceived as a woman. If I feel indifferent to this does it mean I’m not a woman? Additionally, many women feel uncomfortable with being perceived as a woman because of the misogyny associated with the label, does this make them men?

2. Inaccurate Statements and Lies

I don’t believe any “TRAs” define women by gender roles

You may not but there are many who do. It’s also important to point out how deeply ingrained gender roles are in society; you can’t stop them by just saying your choices exist in a vacuum. I’m sure you think I’m just making this up for fun, so here are some examples ;)  x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x

So this whole…thing is dishonest from the start. Gender does not replace sex.

In another post you said that laws should be based on gender instead of sex. So which is it, either gender isn’t replacing sex or it is. When feminists talk about sex based oppression they’re called terfs. When gay people say their attraction is based on sex they’re called transphobic. When people were saying that only females get cervical cancer, they were called violent transphobes. Gender is absolutely attempting to replace sex as the basis of legal protections, safe spaces, political movements, etc. Two of the top post on my blog are more extreme example of this. x - x

BONUS: You’re saying TERF rhetoric

3. The “Questions” Post

You seem very confused about how to define biological sex and to some extent I understand that but you have to stop playing dumb. There must be some way that doctors are able to identify the sex of a fetus before it’s even born in the vast majority of cases, right? And before you try to say I’m just ignoring the existence of intersex people or trying to deny science, I’ll point out that I have watched and read a lot of “sex is a spectrum” stuff. I understand that DSDs exist and that biology is complicated. Our disagreement is mostly not over the facts but over how to define them. I know that however I explain it you’ll pretend you don’t understand it, so instead I’ll just link you to some other sources that explain it more in depth. x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x

A third sex—and many creatures have more than two—does not necessarily mean a third gamete. Mostly this question is a childish distraction, but if you were to use a strict, gamete-based definition of sex the answer would be “none”.

So all infertile people are a third sex? To be female you have to be able to bear children? And you call me regressive, yikes. This can be debunked with the same sources from above but I wanted to feature it in my post because I want people to know that you think there’s a third sex.

I made a quick little chart to compare all the things gender has been compared to! The difference is that while many are socially defined, gender is socially constructed. If someone never interacted with other humans, they would still have a skin color, have or not have specific abilities, have a sexual orientation, and be male or female. They would not have an observable gender identity.

1 - You refuse to humor my questions about being a woman who doesn’t feel like one, however this is not in bad faith; I do want to know what you think. Many gc/radfems, including myself, and many women in general do not have a specific feeling of gender. This is especially true for gnc women, who often feel a disconnect from the feminine gender role and subsequently, the feminine gender. The solution is to realize that there are no standards to conform to to be a woman, no clothes or interests or feelings, just the biological reality one is born with.

2 - You say “the feeling of womanhood is enjoying being called a woman” but what does that mean? It’s circular reasoning, a fallacy called begging the question. How do you know you are a woman? If I gave up being a terf on tumblr, how would you advise that I identify if I don’t think I feel like a woman? My current plan was to just pick the mogai flag with the prettiest colors, but I’m thinking maybe there’s more to it than that...

3 - See my explanation above. Sex is comparable to race or disability or sexuality; gender is not.

4 - You say genders are social classes. If they are indeed social classes, they are unnecessary ones that reinforce oppression. They are undefinable when not based on biological sex or gender roles. The other example of classes I can think of is wealth. Wealth classes have obvious divisions, you can’t just identify into more money. Gender has nothing that is shared by every woman, man, or nonbinary, so you can just identify in and out of classes. Additionally, if there are like 100 genders, are there 100 classes? 

4. The “Biological” Sex Post

Gender does not replace sex

Then why are TRAs trying to say sexuality, legal protections, bathrooms, spaces, political movements, etc should be based on gender instead of sex? You keep contradicting yourself; you should talk to your fellow trans activists because many would disagree. Also see my response in part two.

A number of points here aren’t factually wrong but simple (*simply) irrelevant

So you would agree that biological sex is important and that it is relevant to many conversations? Then why were people getting mad about this?

Or this?

On to the specific examples. This post is long enough already and I’m not going to spoon feed basic biology to you because you’ll probably just ignore it. I referenced a variety of sources earlier. I’ll just reference Invisible Women since it’s an amazing book.

1. This first point is, appropriately enough, true in isolation; it just doesn’t support Paradox Institute’s argument. Listing it leads the audience to believe that truth is on their side, but PI do nothing at all to justify that.

So nothing here is true? They’re just lying? Here are their sources btw.

2. Generally irrelevant, but not entirely biologically accurate, either. It isn’t that ‘male’ and ‘female’ are categories intrinsic to nature that produce small, motile and large, immotile gametes respectively; ‘male’ and ‘female’ are labels we assign (generally, but not always) according to gamete size.

So it’s not relevant that one sex has the ability to carry children or menstruation or get an abortion? It’s not like there’s any issues women face specifically for that, right? So we assign the labels male and female to gametes. If you want to play semantics, sure, we created the words, but the gametes themselves already existed. Not really sure what you’re trying to say here other than disagreeing for the sake of disagreeing and moving some words around. Are you implying that the categorizations of gametes are subjective? Are you saying there’s a spectrum of gametes?? Are eggs just big sperm and sperm just small eggs??? Genuinely have no idea what the fuck you’re trying to prove here.

3. Whatever your opinion of evolutionary psychology, this does not preclude gender. (On the contrary, we ought to include gender in our understanding of cultural development with respect to sex.)

The only gender in history was gender roles, and both were tied to sex in most cases. Sex absolutely came before gender and is more integral to our existence. In any time before the last few decades, gender and sex were basically synonyms.

4. Entirely a straw argument. And, to the contrary, precision greater than two sex categories would be beneficial (i.e. specific sex characteristics, history, endocrinology etc.).

Obviously doctors don’t just diagnose based on sex, they factor in medical history and other traits. Precision is irrelevant because it still focuses on sex not gender. If it’s “entirely a straw argument” why did someone else reblog your response with this?

Speaking as a member of a medical family, the medical one fucking OFFENDS me.

Blood type HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH GENDER. Or biological sex! Both are totally irrelevant! And medication dosage is determined by AGE and SIZE. A 25-year-old 160-pound person with a penis needs the exact same dose as a 25-year-old 160-pound person with a vagina. In fact, possibly LESS of a dose, if the person with a penis is 5’10” and the person with a vagina is 5’5”. (The taller person may be underweight.)

This is just. UGH. I could scream.

@prismatic-bell​ this is one of the funniest and dumbest replies I’ve ever gotten. First of all “member of a medical family” tf is that lmao. This reminds me of that post where the “medical worker” tra turned out to be a garbage collector guy. I have no idea why you brought up blood type when it is literally never mentioned in the original post. Strawman much? Fucking obviously blood type isn’t affected by sex, and you’re completely missing the point if you think gender has anything to do with this. Medication dosage is decided by age and size, yes, but also biological sex. This is like basic medical science, dumbass. Mandatory reading from Invisible Women as punishment for your stupidity crimes:

People called her a terf for this :)

5. How sports are best divided is a far broader question than this point implies. We could, for example, segregate sports by relevant physical attributes (as is already the case in some sports) rather than by sex or gender. This point also presupposes (but does not justify) that a woman having an advantage in women’s sports by dint of being trans is significantly greater than an advantage any woman might have by dint of her natural attributes (which, empirically, she does not) and hence would be unfair. That said, enforcement of “female” sports is already marred by racism and perisexism.

You agree sex and gender are different, yes? So then why should males be in female sports? You’re trying to distract me with that stuff about physical performance and whatever. Focus on the question at hand, should males be allowed into female sports? We cannot eradicate sex-segregated sports because female athletes will be even more systematically disadvantaged. If you were truly a feminist you’d understand that female sports are the result of the movement you claim to support. More Invisible Women facts plus some interesting info about the plough hypothesis:

6. Simply untrue. Excluding trans women from statistics about women on the basis that doing so would affect those statistics is arbitrary at best. Those statistics may change, but that does not mean they are unsuitable or inappropriate. The exclusion of any subset of women can be justified in exactly the same way.

Nope! Stop trying to use women of color and intersex women as justifications for why we should let men pretend to be women. You’ve seen the hundreds of receipts of trans women committing all sorts of male violence. Has anyone found anywhere near a comparable number of trans men doing similar things? They have not, even though if trans men were truly men they would be much more violent.

7. The majority of single-sex spaces are, functionally, just as much single-gender (owing to the traditional equivalence of ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ and to the majority of the population being cis. Trans people have been using spaces appropriate to their gender for decades, whereas concerns about them doing so are based on speculation and hypotheticals rather than fact. (Aided, as with a lot of bigotry, by bad and manipulated statistics.)

I’ve spoken about my opinions on the bathroom debate before. If a passing trans person uses the bathroom of their choice I don’t really care, but there have already been many examples of men making women uncomfortable in their bathrooms, or worse. Making all bathrooms gender neutral is by far the worst idea, but unfortunately that seems to be where we’re headed. More Invisible Women, just for fun:

8. This is the worst red herring, exploiting violent misogyny for the sake of argument. It is another straw argument, too, since—even ignoring trans-positive feminism in practice and assuming trans people act only in self-interest—trans people are concerned with addressing such injustice.

Sure, many trans people are supportive of feminism. But we can’t effectively dismantle the patriarchy if we can’t accurately describe the (sex-based) oppression involved. Women are routinely silenced when talking about our biology, even when there is no “transphobic” language involved. “Trans-positive feminism” also often reinforces misogyny by supporting sex work and porn, and by shutting down analysis of things like femininity and makeup because “some women like it.” See also from trans activists: misogyny racism homophobia + lesbophobia

9. Similar to (7) there is no consistent distinction between sex and gender across law. Even so, this is another red herring as it is possible to recognise both sex and gender in laws and policies. Some laws already do (at least functionally, if not explicitly).

You can deny it but the TRA train is leaving without you and they’ve been clear about their goals. As you’ve seen in this post, gender is intended to replace sex. Those who bring up sex-based issues are silenced as “terfs” who deserve the hatred thrown at them.

[^^^ for context]

First of all, congrats on being an anti-feminist. Y'all talking so much about "veiled terf rhetoric" you forget the trans movement is full of anti feminism.

To address the first bit about how "defining women by their reproductive organs" is reductive and misogynistic (this is deliberately misunderstanding how systems of oppression work btw), see this post.

Secondly, I agree! Trans women have a right to safety, support, and acceptance. That doesn't mean they're women and that doesn't mean they get to erode women's sex based protections.

To address the third bit asking "why does it matter" see this post.

Finally, you asked for statistics and sources. You very easily could have googled it, but I'll make it just a little but easier for you <3

Wikipedia comes up first, and I know many people will point out it's not a reliable source on its own but it does include quite a few relevant sources in an organized way. Some highlights:

✨ more sources ✨

US Bureau of Justice statistics

Domestic abuse is a gendered crime

Are men more violent than women? (Hint: yes)

Men, women, and murder

Looking objectivey at studies conducted shows women receive shorter prison sentences than men for the same crime, distortion of the true rate of female sexual and domestic violnce offenders among more. How does this fit in with a radfem view of men (as a whole) despising women?

(please understand that this isnt a 'gotcha' of any kind but as someone who is studying science at university level I simply cannot ignore evidence if it does not confirm my admitedly pro woman bias)

I found this reddit post (from an biased subreddit) BUT all claims were properly sourced:

Moreso, I could not find single study that found women were punished harsher than men.

However since most judges, police officers ect. are men I dont believe these studies support the idea that women are oppressing men, but it definetely does support that men have a pro female bias contrary to the belief that men hate women.

You may say "well its because gender stereotypes have women being preceived as less responsible for their actions." or something to that affect, but surely if men HATE women as much as radical feminism claims that would not matter.

(Note: if you're going to be mean to me for asking questions or are going to make claims that are not sourced, do not bother commeting.)