MKantor

almost none of the reasons why i support abortion rights have anything to do with babies. really it’s more about the fact that I think the government shouldn’t be able to force you to lend all your organs to someone else and change irreparably in the process. is a fetus a person? I don’t care! If it is a person, I don’t want anyone to be forced to host one against their will! If it isn’t a person, guess what? Nobody should be forced to host one against their will! What’s a soul? What’s a person? When does life begin? IRRELEVANT! A world in which the government can force anyone to manufacture an entirely new human body at the cost of their own is not a world I want to live in!

I don't want my tumblr to be filled with gender critical posts. I don't want to be talking about the trans problem every single day. It's exhausting. It's stupid, and it's not what I want to focus on. I want to focus on women! But I'm not allowed to because these idiots and their religious zealots are everywhere!

I talk about female foeticide and infanticide in india, i get told using the term female will trigger anti-transphobia filters. I talk about how the Nakoshi of Satara are still struggling in spite of the thousand positive articles the media churns out. People tell me it's too "niche" to care about. I talk about how gender is an oppressive social construct that has never once benefitted women, I get told I'm "harming" my oppressors. I talk about how physical expectations for women often leave them weak and frail, and I get told it's not a good topic as it may make broader males feel less feminine. I get told being against the makeup industry is anti trans because it helps them pass i get told being against revealing clothing is bigoted because women like being hyperaware of every breeze that passes them and that it helps transwomen stand out from the rest of the male population. Calling drag a bunch of men profiting off of misogynistic caricatures is homophobic and transphobic.

And they wonder why we focus on this problem. Because until this goes away, we are not allowed to meaningfully discuss the main axes of our oppression - our sex, the gender imposed upon us, and the idea that men and women are somehow different in any non-biological way.

Stop talking about misogyny, stop talking about sex based oppression, stop talking about anything not directly relevant to western feminism, stop talking about women as a collective, stop talking about men as a collective, stop talking. You're a woman. Your thoughts will need to be peer reviewed by a man first.

Sometimes it just makes me deeply, helplessly angry that we don't even have a word for women that doesn't originate from "wife man". And then I get into a spiral of realising over again just how powerful language is, and how immensely saturated it is with both subtle and overt misogyny. And THEN I get into a spiral of how unbelievably long "women" have been subjected to misogyny that we literally don't have a word for women that doesn't position us as property of men.

Like y’all it’s not an accident that the aspects of womanhood which are constantly emphasized today as vital to the “identity” are the ones that men can access if they choose to.

Men can buy makeup, can wear clothes marketed to women, can participate in beauty rituals typically required of women, can have tendencies towards “feminine” things. Some men can do these things and be read as women in some situations. These experiences are held up as innate to womanhood, as some sort of “feminine identity” despite the fact that they don’t even apply to many women.  These things are not innate or inevitable, are actively harmful to women, and many of us choose to discard them if we are in a position to do so. But we have men musing genuinely that because they liked dresses and dolls as a kid, or have some notion of “feeling like a woman” (based only on the limited experiences of ours they can access, again) they were a woman all along.

You know what’s not held up as important to womanhood? Having a female body, facing issues related to female reproductive health, and undergoing female socialization as a child. These things are facing lashback for being suggested to be experiences of women at all. Why? Because men cannot access them. They do not happen to men. And because they don’t happen to men, they aren’t valued, they in fact need to be silenced for interrupting the views some men have of themselves as being women.

The parts of womanhood that men can access, the physical trappings of it that they themselves forced on us, are the important parts. The parts they can’t access must necessarily be denigrated as unimportant, no matter the impact these aspects have on the lives and wellbeing of women. It is the only way their misogynistic ideology can work.

OP hitting the nail on the head.

if any of y’all are looking for some anti-gender content that’s actually from an empathetic feminist perspective rather than a homophobic conservative perspective. I recently found this channel and she COOKS:

also btw the fact that activists used the suicide of a child who had major mental health issues after being sexually abused by her father as a way to try and push laws that will allow males in female spaces is fucking disgusting. y’all are so goddamn weird for that

x

Cunk on Earth 1x04

i cant think of anything more humiliating than describing myself as woman to one of those people who thinks of 'woman' as an identity rather than a physical state of being. like yes im a woman but that doesnt mean anything about me it doesnt tell you anything at all about who i am or how i feel and im certainly not whatever the fuck YOU think a woman is. i just happen to have a pussy dont be fucking weird about it.

This was posted on the r/askFeminists subreddit a year or two ago. I think it’s a really good summarization of some of the major holes and contradictions in trans ideology. I come back to this post every once in a while, so I thought I’d post it here. Here is the link for the comment section that peaked her.

I think this is one of the most notable parts of that whole dumpster fire of a comment section. Trans women literally think they’re oppressed because… they’re criticized. To them, a cis woman criticizing them is on the same level, or worse, as actual women being raped, stalked, killed. The idea of criticism being oppression is so excruciatingly male. It’s just another way trans women behave the exact same way as other men.

Who’s got the Dworkin quote how men treat women’s words as worse than men’s physical violence?

This is a great example piece.

radfems reblog this if it’s okay to inbox you for a casual chat sometimes. I need more friends on here, I’ve had a radfem blog for like 6 months but haven’t made any acquaintances really

I was hesitant to write this post, but I want to talk about why so many women and teenage girls are getting double mastectomies.

The justification a lot of trans people use for elective double mastectomies is that "top surgery" helps people feel comfortable in their bodies. Traditionally, this surgery was restricted to transmen. In the recent decade, however, nonbinary identified and even non-trans identified women have been getting mastectomies. I remember clear as day when my coworker (who identified as a "cis" woman) told me that at 18 she was planning on saving for top surgery. I myself got my breasts removed when I identified as nonbinary, having been on testosterone for 2 years.

It's important to remember that no person is born wanting surgery. Society creates conditions that are hostile to women, GNC, and gay people, and this hostility encourages a dissociated state. The body is removed from the mind - instead of the body being an intrinsic part of your personhood, a mechanism through which we experience the world, it instead becomes ornamental. This is perfectly represented by all forms of non-reconstructive cosmetic surgery, which risk people's health for entirely aesthetic reasons.

So, why do teen girls want to remove their breasts? For those of who experienced unwanted sexual advances from a young age, the answer is intuitive. Breasts are inherently sexualized. They are not seen as a vital organ that contributes to bodily function and health, but as a decoration, the only purpose of which is to attract men and feed babies. In this way, a woman's breasts do not even belong to her. When men openly gawk at a woman without a bra, when relatives grope at her as a pubescent girl, when we are exposed to an endless stream of hyper-sexualized images of women with their cleavage out, a message is sent loud and clear: existing in a female body is unsafe.

I want to make it very clear that an elective mastectomy and the practices of breast ironing are very different, but there are commonalities in the attitudes behind both. Breast ironing is done to pubescent girls in order to "prevent" her being sexually assaulted or harassed by men, sometimes including male relatives. When I hear stories of girls in the West starving themselves and binding to hide their chests, I can't help but see similarities. When I was binding and restricting calories as a 15 year old, I would have said I was doing it so that I could pass as a man. But I would have been lying to you. I was lying to myself. I didn't hate my breasts because I was "born in the wrong body." I hated my breasts because they were used to justify my sexualization. From my perspective they put me in danger.

We often hear that women's rights in the West have been secured, but you need only look at the war on women's bodies to see that that is a fantasy. When young girls constantly receive the messaging that your curves and boobs WILL attract men and that you will be objectified for it, many will try to opt out.

Take Liv Hewson, for example.

She says herself that her anorexia was a manifestation of "gender dysphoria," but the question remains - where did this dysphoria come from? Why would anorexia develop as an outlet for it? What makes more sense: a young woman was born hating her body and her breasts because she has a gendered, non-female soul, or that same woman hates her body because she has been conditioned as such by a patriarchal society, the same society that encourages extreme self harm and body modification through a multi-billion dollar cosmetic industry?

Gender dysphoria in young women needs to be demystified. It's not special, it's not unique. It is NOT evidence that she needs invasive surgery or steroids to feel comfortable in her body. It is evidence that she is in pain. In order to address the rising rate of transition in young women, we must first acknowledge the conditions that nurture this form of self-hatred.

Transition IS a feminist issue. It is just as relevant in Western feminism as tackling the beauty industry, female sexualization, and violence perpetrated against women through porn. All of these issues are deeply interconnected. When we approach dysphoric women with compassion and encourage them to perceive their bodies as a part of themselves that deserves to remain intact and whole, rather than as their enemy, we take a necessary step towards female liberation.

I can’t believe “fake gamer girl” was an actual concept guys thought existed literally the most unfuckable guys who have ever lived were convinced girls were faking being interested in loser nerd hobbies to impress them

“Because the idea that we all have a muliplicity of gender identities is also about absolving men of thousands of years of terrorism and oppression against us XX chromosome havers. Why should I assume my oppressed has good intentions because of their clothing? Because they got surgery? Does that make a trans woman any safer than any other male under patriarchy? Or is that just a safe illusion so you don’t have to deal with the reality?”

Female centric movie recs.

ULTIMATE female centric movie rec of mine:

*this includes if you've gone back and forth. so if you went from straight to bi to gay to bi to gay, that's 5 times

The people who are voting “3-5 times” are the sort of people who think demisexuality is real.

Like. If you read “you can’t change your sex” but hear ‘your sex defines how you must live your life’ that’s a problem you need to deal with because male and female aren’t lifestyles