I'm FTM and have been looking at radfem stuff for a while. I'm currently separating myself from the trans community due to the harm being done by transfems towards transmascs and women in general.
I keep looking at transfem and transfeminist tags daily, and find that their misogyny is only becoming more prominent, more open, and more supported.
Not only that, but their protection of abusers and predators is becoming a really popular talking point. Pretty much every transmasc I know has been abused or assaulted by a transfem, but they also all profess to not being able to talk about it due to community pressure.
I find that a lot of what's driving me towards radfem thought is my anger at transfems and other males. Is it bad for me to be fueled more by my anger rather than my love & compassion for women? I of course feel a lot of that as well, but my anger feels like such a dominating force in my mind. I worry that this is reactionary instead of genuine thoughtfulness and intellectual understanding of feminism.
anon, i really, really like this ask for a very personal reason, and that is because this was my very first post on this blog:
š¬ 0Ā Ā š 0Ā Ā ā¤ļø 2Ā Ā·Ā i will do my very best to articulate this: it is very easy to claim that those of us that are kink-critical, porn-critical
it's nothing but anger, defiance, divorcing myself from a community that was supposed to be for me, without really a home to come to on my way out.
(the context of it is that what finally pushed me over the edge into re-inventing my online presence and starting to consciously, consistently interact with radical feminist online spaces was, as i've mentioned a couple of times before, the backlash and slander campaign following the Collective Shout's payment processor initiative.)
the thesis of this blog, originally, was to work out politics of sexual assault survivor unrespectability; pushing against the assimilating pressures of the queer community that expects us to meet it on its own terms. this was supposed to be a social experiment, a study, a manifesto, hopefully a chance for outreach; not at all explicitly aligned with radical feminist or dedicated to educating myself on it. this was supposed to be 90% just me yelling every single thing i hadn't been able to yell on every single horrific posts normalizing some of the worst things i could imagine, with the express purpose of talking to people like me, without them having to be feminists or even necessarily just women.
i hold that intention very dearly (and still intend to "say the things that would have helped me feel sane back in the day" whenever i am called to do so); but i also obviously do not at all regret the kind of practice this has become instead. i am, also, still very very much learning.
the best advice i believe i could give to anyone in a similar position is to find your voice and to find a space in which it can be uncompromising. don't soften it, don't moderate it, don't overburden yourself with what you owe to others at this stage. find yourself and hold onto yourself. radical feminism is for you, if you let it be. caring for yourself is exercising the exact kind of care you feel should be propelling you instead of your anger and hurt. we've been holding this in for a while, so, genuinely: let yourself react. process the reaction. don't rush anything beyond it. the right crowd, the right place, the right cause will find you from there. for now, truly, just let yourself be. the anger you feel for yourself and for other transmascs in your community is a radical and precious expression of the solidarity we all intend to foster here. i'm wishing you all of the best, and i'm here if you ever need to talk moreāš»š«
Hell yeah.
There's nothing wrong with anger when people have been harming you, speaking over you, misunderstanding you, verbally and physically abusing you. It's justified rage. Anger is a perfectly reasonable emotion in this situation, and if anger is the only way we can speak out, then that's how we have to do it.
People who try to silence us or who are incapable of listening to us are genuinely just being misogynistic. They'll call our experiences fake, because they hate hearing our anger when we talk about it. They'll say that a woman being angry means she's not rational, and therefore she's wrong. Bullshit.
Find somewhere where you can drop all of your respectability at the door. Even if you feel like you're the only one right now, I promise you're not! Dropping the filter and letting yourself go off the deep end (in other people's eyes) is the only way to find out what you really believe. Anger isn't bad, it guides us to a better place š
