Emma
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Emma
@torkrk.bsky.social
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Reposted by Emma
sloanelysbeth.bsky.social
if you terfs actually spent time reading radical feminists instead of selectively quoting them you’d realise, very quickly, that ‘gender critical’ is just bigotry rooted in patriarchy.

here is catherine mackinnon:
Much of the current debate has centered on (endlessly obsessed over, actually) whether trans women are women. Honestly, seeing “women” as a turf to be defended, as opposed to a set of imperatives and limitations to be criticized, challenged, changed, or transcended, has been pretty startling. One might think that trans women—assigned male at birth, leaving masculinity behind, drawn to and embracing womanhood for themselves—would be welcomed. Yet a group of philosophers purporting feminism slide sloppily from “female sex” through “feminine gender” straight to “women” as if no move has been made,[4] eventually reverting to the dictionary: a woman is an “adult human female.”[5] Defining women by biology—adult is biological age, human is biological species, female is biological sex—used to be criticized as biological essentialism. Those winging to the Right are thrilled by this putatively feminist reduction of women to female body parts, preferably chromosomes and reproductive apparatus, qualities chosen so that whatever is considered definitive of sex is not only physical but cannot be physically changed into. Women are not, in fact, subordinated or oppressed by our bodies. We do not need to be liberated from our chromosomes or our ovaries. It is core male-dominant ideology that attributes the source of women’s inequality to our nature, our biological sex, which for male dominance makes it inevitable, immutable, unchangeable, on us. As if our bodies, rather than male dominant social systems, do it to us. It is as if Black people’s melanin content is the cause of police violence against them, rather than the meaning police attribute to their appearance (racial markers in this instance) and the law and culture of impunity for their actions. If women’s oppression is defined by what defines women, and that is our sexed biology as this group defines it, the very most we can change is the excesses of male power. Never male power itself. Sexualized misogyny also works through anti-transgender bigotry in specific ways. The core dynamic of sexualized misogyny is the erotization of disparities of power, typically through gender, so that to be male or masculine is to be elevated as the actualizer, the allowed sexual perpetrator (or disallowed and hyperpotent when raced Black), the initiator, the consented-to, the independent doer. To be female or feminine or feminized is to be denigrated, made into sexual target and prey, rendered available for sexual access and use, defined as the dependent done-to, ever looking for a man for actualization or survival, so the whore by nature. All this is socially, ideologically, attributed to the biology of sex. That it is natural is its most fundamental social idea. Second, the notion that trans people are living in a fantasy, are imposters, while women assigned female at birth are living in material reality, and are the only real thing, is central to the so-called feminist anti-trans position. But sexuality, however social, is material, and trans people are sexually defined, objectified, violated, and living (and dying) in it at major rates. Their subordination and abuse, which includes abuse as trans, as women, and as trans women, is no fantasy. It also includes sexual abuse as trans men, feminine men, and trans nonbinary. The notion that their transition is somehow unreal, a grand deception, a disjunction with reality, lurks deep in the muscle memory of transphobia. In part, some people react badly to the success of many trans people in living their identified gender, that is, not being read. Gender being a learned behavior in any event, all women have to learn it, and pay a material price for our success or failure.
December 28, 2024 at 12:13 PM
Reposted by Emma
bertsbooks.bsky.social
Take a look at bookshop.org - they’ve got as big a range as Waterstones and it supports indie bookshops with its profits.
Bookshop: Buy books online. Support local bookstores.
An online bookstore that financially supports local independent bookstores and gives back to the book community.
bookshop.org
October 5, 2025 at 7:04 AM