Dear liberal feminists from a radfem sister

Dear Liberal Feminists,

If you are a liberal feminist, you probably see self proclaimed radical feminists like me as the enemy. After all, you’ve been taught to hate feminists like me, yet do you ever wonder why, when all we are fighting for is women’s liberation from male violence, male domination, and male control?

Women make up around 52% of every countries population, when we unite sisterhood is so powerful. You only have to look to the past, to the incredible gains made for women by our Second Wave sisters, to see what can happen when women unite.

Who would benefit from turning us against each other?

In whose interests do you think it is, to prioritize male interests and whims, over female bodied people’s real needs, real oppression, and real concern?

I am not against you but we both know we live in a patriarchy, and though you are probably familiar with that word, you might not realise exactly what it means, what it has done to you, to me, to all of us in society, even to men.

Patriarchy had taught us all to hate women, taught us all too well.

So well, so effectively, even when we are women ourselves, patriarchy teaches us that other women, even when they fight with our best interests at heart, are the enemy, if they dare put female needs over male ones.

Do you really believe a white, middle class trans “woman” born into a male body, and all the privilege that comes with having one, is truly more oppressed than a black working class biologically female lesbian?

The liberal left tells you yes, trans women are more oppressed, the most oppressed. And you follow what they say, and turn against your sisters, sisters who are fighting for your rights, who will always fight for your rights, even though you hate us, spit in our faces and scream TERF at us over and over again.

We are fighting for you because we love you, we love all women, even the ones that piss us off, even the ones that spit and scream in our faces.

We love women because we are women and we have unlearned the lessons of patriarchy which teaches us to hate ourselves.

Loving women is not something our society encourages. That’s why it hates radical feminists so much, because we do love women, and we will fight for women’s interests, over men’s.

So you attack us, following the current liberal dogma, screaming TERF even though somewhere inside, if you really stop and think, you know something feels wrong.

Why does it feel wrong sometimes?

Think about who is telling you to turn against us?

Who tells you trans women are the most oppressed, who screams it the loudest?

Does this sentiment most often and most strongly come from male mouths, or female ones?

Has your movement ever centred ONE thing that exclusively could ONLY effect biological females?

You know, things like child brides, honour killings of Muslim women, female infanticide, abortion, poor girls who are prevented from going to school because of lack of access to sanitary products, Female Genital Mutilation, breastfeeding mothers?

Think about it.

Now ask yourself this question.

Do you really still think you’re part of a truly feminist movement?

The reason for most women’s oppression is our biology, not our gender identity.

This is not to say, some passing trans women, won’t be perceived as having female biology and suffer some, a tiny fraction of the discrimination that born women face from birth.

But even then, they have a lifetime of male socialisation, male privilege, and they still have male biology, a biology our society loves, a body we privilege in nearly every walk of life.

Are you sure your movement really cares about women with female biology?

How can you be sure when they tell you female biology doesn’t exist, that a vagina is not female, that uteruses are just a body part?

Do you believe that’s true?

Do you really believe trans women’s are women just because they say they are?

Do you really, truly believe that a female child in Pakistan could tell her “husband” she was male, and he would not force her into marriage, not force her into his bed?

If not why not?

Is it because of her biology?

Is it because you know, deep down, that saying something doesn’t necessarily make it so, particularly when it comes to ignoring the scientific fact of biology?

Could your father have given birth to you?

If not, why not?

All we are doing, us witches, us TERFS, is trying to keep the hard won sex based rights, and legal protections, our sisters secured for women back in the 70’s and 80’s.

We are doing this not because we hate trans people, because we don’t hate them, nor do we wish them any harm.

We don’t want to stop trans people dressing how they want, or even changing their bodies, if they want, though we don’t want the medical establishment to give harmful blockers like Lupron to children under the age of 16.

We definitely would be the first ones out screaming on the streets if anyone tried to take away the protections and rights that trans people currently have under the protected category of Gender Reassignment, which guarantees them access to healthcare, respect, and protection from discrimination.

We definitely think it would be healthier to dismantle the system of gender itself, which pushes harmful, limiting stereotypes on men and women, than it is to medicate healthy bodies, and cut of healthy sexual organs.

But we can’t stop grown adults doing what they want to their bodies and we don’t want to. That’s not what this is about.

What this is about are the harmful proposed Self ID laws the UK government and many other governments around the world are currently considering. We don’t agree with allowing anyone to self identify and say they are a woman just because they say so..

Because in this patriarchal society, which hates women, and resents the gains towards liberation we have made, we know what is likely to happen if you allow just anyone to say they are a woman.

We know because it’s already happening.

Women can’t say we suffer oppression because of our biology. We can’t state this simple fact or we are called TERFs. You know this is true because this is what you call us yourself.

And soon, it will be hate speech to speak this simple truth.

But will that stop the female genital mutilation, the sexual harassment that women exponentially suffer from because men see female biology and assign lesser value to it, the rapes, the lack of sanitary protection for poor women, the domestic violence, the murder, the many, many degrading pornographic images and videos of people with female biology.

Can you be sure the Self ID law won’t be abused by predators like Ian Huntley, who is now self identifying as Nicola, the name of one of his victim’s mother?

Will making female biology hate speech end all the injustice and oppression biological women and girls suffer from?

Will passing self ID guarantee that predatory men who hate women won’t use it as a chance to trample over the gains born women have made?

If so, carry on doing what you are doing.

If not, you might want to reconsider whose interests you are fighting for when you centre male interests, and place male needs over women’s, over your own.

I know you’re just trying to survive in a world that hates women, people with female biology.

I know it feels good to feel like your the special one, the cool girl, the one who isn’t hated by men.

But they only act like they don’t hate you because at the moment at least you’re useful to them. You do everything they tell you to do don’t you?

Have you tried to see what would happen when you voice a contrary opinion or try to centre your own female needs to Leftie men like Owen Jones?

I think inside you already know.

Do you really think when they won’t even let women organise against our own sex oppression as class, that Leftie men really care about you?

You are a woman after all. And not the kind liberal left guys like Owen Jones like.

You’re have the wrong biology for that I’m afraid.

The worst part is, liberal left is guys like Owen Jones don’t even see trans women as women.

They show that they see trans women as men, by centering them, and supporting them, even when trans women threaten violence to an incredibly oppressed group, biological women and girls.

Leftie men like Owen Jones show that they really see trans women as men when they let trans women tell born women how to identify, telling us we must use the term cis.

Leftie guys like Owen won’t even let born women define ourselves, let alone define anyone else.

That’s how we know they see trans women as men. But they see you as a woman. They will always see you as just a woman.

Because of your biology.

And if one day you need help and support, they won’t be there for you, because they don’t care.

But we care. And we will always be there.

If you think that by selling your sisters out, by turning away from us, or by screaming TERF at us, it will make the kind of men who hate women love you or even like you, you are sadly mistaken.

The only kind of women they will ever like or love, are the kind they really see as men.

If you are reading this, know we radical feminists will always fight for you. But we can’t guarantee we will win, because women are hated, especially women who fight for other women.

We will never give up,though we wish you would join us.

Because the simple truth is, if you and other women like you stand with us, if all women stand with us, we know we could end all this injustice, put a stop to all the oppression.

We know this because we, women are half the population, and we know this because sisterhood is powerful.

Love,

Your radfem Sister

Through our bodies men control women – RESIST

Female bodies are and have nearly always been subject to control by men, and often by other women too.  As if scared of women’s power, throughout the centuries, from America to Afghanistan, society has tried to mandate how women should appear, dress, and how much flesh they should or should not display.

Whatever the standard that is deemed acceptable for the time may depend on a lot, fashion trends, religion, a country’s culture, the mood of the era, even politics.  Nevertheless, there is one universal constant that women’s appearances have always remained subject to and that has remained uniform throughout the ages – male approval.

The cultural codes that underpin what we find both acceptable and unacceptable when it comes to how women look have been hardwired into us by a deeply patriarchal system.

No wonder these “beauty norms” so conveniently line up with male desires.  Whatever the male objective has been in any culture at the time, whether to repress women’s sexuality in the case of Saudi Arabia, or to hyper-feminize it in our Western Society, the beauty norms of any patriarchal culture always reflect male aims for women.

When chastity, purity, and fertile looking, plump flaxen haired maidens were sought after by the men in medieval times, as a way to self-actualize themselves as brave, God fearing knights, women were pressured to conform to these ideals and display modesty, purity, and fecundity in their outward appearance and dress.

When masculinity was threatened with the newfound independence many women enjoyed during the second world war, when, despite the turmoil of the times they enjoyed previously unheard of freedoms with many earning a wage for the first time, the repressive fifties demanded female bodies return to exaggerated and un-threatening hyper-femininity with cinched waist silhouettes, and painted starlet glamour.

In Middle Eastern countries such as Saudi Arabia, Iran and Iraq, where religion is a dominant force, women are forced to cover up their bodies, heads, and faces, lest they tempt men and dishonor their families.

And now, in our Western society, where opportunities for women in education and the workplace have never been so plentiful, society lashes back at women by mandating they starve themselves to the point of death to compensate for all the extra space they are seen to be demanding.

Running through it all still, and always,  the overriding force remains the male gaze, which under patriarchy consistently gets to dictate cultural standards according to men’s desires.

And in the Western world, women frequently do men’s dirty work for them, enforcing and policing other women, and chastising them, lest they step out of line and dare to display an un-groomed bush or stray grey hair.  In other patriarchal cultures like Saudi Arabia, women police other women too, reporting them lest their Burqa be too sheer, or too short, lest they be out in public without male accompaniment.

Of course, it’s incredibly tempting for women to do this as a survival technique, because by carrying out men’s dirty work for them, they win some small shred of male approval.

The patriarchy does like its handmaidens though it will ever respect them.

Although in countries like England and the USA, Western women are not  beaten, imprisoned or publicly lashed if they do not comply with the dress code deemed acceptable by the ruling class -men- women are going along with the madness for fear of stigmatization, ridicule, body-shaming, humiliation, and exclusion from public society.

The psychic cosh is just as overwhelming as the physical one.

Although forcing appearance mandates on anyone could clearly never be right, it wouldn’t be nearly so bad if women were happy performing their prescribed “femininity role”- but the plain truth is they aren’t.

The things women do to their bodies in the name of beauty are not a choice as Liberal Feminism postures but a survival technique, that must be performed to escape ridicule, judgement, and humiliation.

The irony being or course, is that even when women do comply by performing these rituals they still cannot escape the judging eye, a woman can never be too beautiful, too perfect, too thin.

Nearly every woman feels dissatisfied with the way she looks, feels under pressure to be thinner, prettier, less hairy, more scented, to have bigger boobs, smaller boobs, a larger derriere, a smaller waist.

Assaulted by the mainstream media, who frequently shares a bed with that other bogey man, capitalist commerce, women are bombarded with all sorts of impossible and invented images of idealized women that in reality do not represent most women’s bodies at all.

The fashion industry, run by gay men and their handmaidens, who for obvious reasons, have their own personal ideals and muses, send stick thin, starved, boy-hipped models down the catwalk in overpriced garments made from sweatshop labor.

Fashion doesn’t even bother to conceal its scorn of its primary customer – women, with many prominent designers frequently refusing to make samples for the catwalk in anything above a dress size 6,and refusing to sell anything over a dress size 10.

To add insult to injury, the latest trend  is to send male born models dressed as girls to walk the female catwalk shows.  Models, such as the unnaturally beautiful Andreja Pejic widely praised as “looking better than the real thing” by the fashion crowd.

 

The real thing being biological women of course, and the message doesn’t need spelling out, the misogyny is obvious.

Yet a lot of women let this industry which is so blatantly contemptuous of them, of their sex, their bodies, their personhood, dictate to them what they should wear, and worse still, lower their self esteem when they don’t look like a prepubescent boy in it.

It’s astounding, that in this day and age, an industry whose patrons are predominantly women, does not have more female designers and is largely controlled by men, yet  of the handful of women designers there are their attitudes are not much better.

Even the respected designer Stella McCartney, widely praised for her stance against cruelty to animals, and her acknowledgement of the problem of anorexia on the catwalk, still regularly sends women to walk the runways who look like they would benefit from a good feeding.

To compound the problem, stripper culture  has become the new normal aesthetic as sported by celebrities like Kim Kardashian, Amber Rose, and the like, and it frequently gives women both complimentary and conflicting messages to the one the fashion industry sends.

Influenced by the porn industry, stripper culture  seeks to amplify women’s discomfort with their own bodies by making them think their hips are not wide enough, their backsides too flat, their breasts and lips not pumped with enough collagen or silicone.

The cosmetics industry takes a big piece of the pie, making billions every year off of the back of women’s misery, and now the cosmetic surgery wants a literal slice of the action too, carving up female bodies for profit.

Promising everything but the truth – an unnatural appearance and permanent scarring – cosmetic surgeons ply their trade in the back of the same glossy magazines whose sole reason for being is to lower women’s self-esteem enough to make them want to spend.

This fits perfectly in with male objectives, yet now it does not even need to be overseen by men as it has become such a perfectly oiled machine it can run quite well on its own account with its little worker drones, aka women, who can be made miserable enough to supply the hive with plenty of honey, or hard cash.

But make no mistake, it is men who are the main benefactors of all this female body dsymorphia, from the CEO’s of mega-conglomerate cosmetics companies, to the group of lads in the pub who eagerly ogle the next batch of painted dolls who come tottering through the doors like lambs to the slaughter.

Now women are in a double bind, named and shamed as vacuous and vain when they comply and offer their bodies up to be primped, plucked, waxed, and buffed to an unnatural shine, and decried as ugly, fat, hideous, or unnatural, when they refuse.

Men, meanwhile sit there, at the top of the pile, all too ready to discard as irrelevant any woman who does not please whatever gets their sexual juices flowing.  What gets their rev up,  is usually any woman that can preserve the illusion of exaggerated femininity, as it allows insecure males to feel more masculine than in reality they are.

Masculine of course is a bullshit construct comprising a set of traits that in reality, anyone can possess, but that sort of thinking is not allowed under patriarchy, as it disturbs the illusion that only “men” can be “masculine”.

This is dangerous to the status quo as masculinity is considered to be superior, while femininity has been relegated to second class status, which is why they work so hard to force women to adopt it, so they can ensure women remain – second class citizens.

Of course, this feeling masculine is almost as mandatory for males as to be feminine is for females, the difference being of course that for centuries men have willingly  concocted their own prisons, while women didn’t have any choice in the matter for fear of being ostracized, shunned, beaten, imprisoned, or worse

Now though, for the first time in history, and though society much resents the fact, women do have a little more say, though by no means no complete say over their compliance in the grotesque beauty dance.

If female people united together reject the plethora of snake oil creams, sweatshop garments, and slicing and dicing, you can bet that capitalism being subject to whatever is profitable would quickly switch to offering up something else.

Perhaps it might be garments women would actually find useful, clothes that could be worn without the natural female body having to be starved of all flesh?

However, the dance is not likely to stop anytime soon because the subtle message underlying the beauty, diet, and fashion industries is the message that to not buy, i.e. comply, is to be undesirable to men.

Women, having been inculcated since birth to appear desirable and pleasing to men above all else, lose all resolve and open their purses, spending thousands each year on unnecessary creams, lotions, treatments, and  surgeries, that very often do nothing to improve their appearance and even harm it.

The beauty standards dictated to women regarding what is desirable are always male standards, whether they be the waif like, boyish figures heralded by the fashion industry or the exaggerated barbie doll proportions of the porn industry.

Everything from body hair to body fat is subject to male approval.   Whatever the current collective consensus of men decides is desirable, you can bet will become the standard by which women measure themselves.

When Baywatch style breasts were what nearly every man decided he wanted in his bed, hundreds of thousands of women flocked to the cosmetic surgeon in order to obtain the perfect aka fake, Pamela Anderson style physique.

Now, it’s common to find comments left on porn sites by males critiquing women’s breasts, often shaming and ridiculing fake breasts that look obviously fake while simultaneously complaining about natural breasts that are “saggy like spaniel ears” or “flat like a schoolgirl’s”.

The point is, women have never set the beauty standard for themselves, much less decried the fact that there are any standards mandating how we should look at all. Always, the lens is male, even when the viewer is female, for typically we judge women on how attractive they will be to men, no matter whether we are man or woman ourselves.

And anytime anyone dares to question why there are so many societal limitations on women’s appearances, but none for men, they are hushed up with fake reassurances that “it’s what women want” or they “wouldn’t be doing it to themselves”.

Is it what women want?

Do women want to be made to feel they are not good enough, that they are never young enough, thin enough, pretty enough?

Do they really want to feel that their natural bodies are abhorrent and repulsive, that the hair that grows on their thighs and legs is so disgusting it must be regularly stripped away?

Do they too, want to feel that as they get older, they are irrelevant, society having no use for a woman at all, once she has stopped complying with the beauty standards.

Would any sane person want this?

I think not. In fact, it’s against any natural instinct we have as humans to want to subject ourselves to such subordination, such limitation, and such control.

It might not be so bad, if men too, were forced to conform to an equally narrow set of standards that dictated how they must look how broad their shoulders must be, how muscular their thighs.

Yet no such standards really exist, and though obviously, anyone deemed to be “conventionally” attractive gets more attention, including men, males are not penalized for not being aesthetically pleasing. Instead men are free to be old, bald, fat, saggy, and grey haired, and we do not demand their removal from our screens or criticize them on social media when they are these things.

Women too once again are complicit, albeit unwillingly, as we are brainwashed into thinking our wants, our desires don’t matter.  And so, women don’t demand males live up to the muscled hunk of their late night fantasies, or the butch lesbian of their dreams, but instead rush to placate male egos by pretending that an old, fat, bald man is just as desirable as as handsome, chisel jawed heartthrob.

And all the while, women are being silently robbed of something arguably even more precious than self-respect – time – with grooming rituals that force them to spend endless hours plucking, tweezing, creaming, and straightening.

Energy too, is stolen from women, the hours spent shopping, the years spent fretting over their attractiveness, not to mention the slump in energy the body manifests whenever there is the serious deficit of calories advocated by most modern diets.

Between them, the fashion, beauty, and diet industries collectively rob women of their money, energy, and time, scattering their energies so effectively it’s a wonder women manage to achieve anything at all.

These industries shatter women’s self -esteem, tantalizing them with the promise of a pat on the head, by a male hand of course, if they buy.  Then, they snatch hope away by continually brandishing images of stick thin supermodels, and now even boys who can beat them at their own game, so hated are natal females. This all works wonderfully to  reinforce the message that to be born biologically female is to never be good enough, that a natural woman is simply not good enough.

And the constant, endless conveyor belt of plucked and buffed, waxed and carved, passive dolls, carries on, with women sometimes too spent by hours devoted to grooming, or too battered by society’s hatred of their natural state to resist.

But resist women must, for resistance and a resetting of the beauty norms is where true revolution begins, and is a key stone to lay if women’s liberation is the goal, as it should be.

If only 30% of females stopped mandating how other female bodied people should look we would see a vast change in public attitudes to female bodied appearances.

Imagine if that number of people, over a quarter of the population, stopped pushing the fact that natural hair on natural female bodies is repulsive?

If it wasn’t automatically considered so abhorrent by everyone, everywhere in our Western culture, I have no doubt that some women at least, would cease to perform this time consuming ritual.

If there wasn’t such a broad consensus on women’s appearances from the handmaiden’s of the patriarchy,  and if more than an tiny, courageous, handful spoke out against the ludicrous beauty norms, we could go a long way to altering what was deemed pleasing and acceptable for the female form.

Imagine how things might be if that 30% grew to 51%? In a society like this  every woman’s body would quickly be deemed to be acceptable because female bodies would now set standards for themselves.

Men’s attitudes would swiftly follow, whether they liked this or not, since men cannot live without women.

But in this brave new world, where female people embraced and demanded appreciation for all types of women’s bodies, men would be forced to  appreciate women in their natural glory,  once the primped, plucked barbie doll was no longer being so regularly served up.

Most would like it too, after a while, because straight men have always been attracted to women, even in times before we had the dubious blessing of cosmetic surgery, L’oreal, and Size Zero.

The truth is, controlling women’s appearances is not even about desire, though if it were it would still be heinously wrong and completely unacceptable.

It is a convenient way to control women themselves, which is what it is all about of course, since female bodied independence, liberation, and autonomy is a truly scary thing to males.

“If you can’t win an argument with a woman, just call them fat” said one delightful Daily Mail commentator, discussing how to handle women with another, yep you’ve guessed it man.

Says it all really.

Appearance is the psychic cosh which is used constantly against female bodies to hold back female minds.  Just like the prospect of having Santa deliver us a sack of coal was used to make us behave when we wee younger.

If we comply with the beauty standards when we don’t want to it is because we are scared of receiving a sack of coal, aka public humiliation.

Yet the cheap plastic and saccharine sweet momentary distraction of the toys we’ve been bribed with for good behavior can never be sufficient to distract us from our right to be fully dimensional, free people, unbound to express and manifest our energy however we wish, whether that be shaven headed in jeans and a T-shirt or a full hipped and lush size eighteen in a mini skirt and heels.

Appearance and the way it’s presented is strongly linked to personhood, by reclaiming our right to express, look, and be how we want, and by giving other female bodied people permission to do the same we will take an important step towards changing societal attitudes regarding the appearance of women.

Letter to a sick, woman hating culture…

Once upon a time I wanted to be a hero.  I wanted to be brave, like the knights I read about in storybooks who I was told were brave because they were, well knights.

Because they were supposed to fight for what was good and fair, for what was right and just.

I didn’t understand that they were supposed to be male, or question why in those storybooks there were no female knights back then, because I didn’t understand the gender role I was supposed to play.

But the hardest lesson I had yet to learn was that those knights weren’t good at all, that what they symbolized was a system so oppressive that the potential of millions upon millions of bright, beautiful, brilliant, talented people has been squandered for centuries and centuries and centuries more.

The potential of people of colour, gay people, lesbian people, people who refused to conform to the limiting roles that had been placed on them, and of course the massive potential of the female sex.

All this potential squandered simply because it threatened the knights, the false kings, the gatekeepers of our culture.  Because they feared that if they let those people’s talents shine, if they just let them be, then they wouldn’t be heroes or kings themselves anymore at all.

When I was a little older even though I hadn’t realized all this yet, I started to become aware something felt wrong with the world.  I forgot somewhat about the knights because I found some new heroes.

I read about revolutionaries like Karl Marx, and Fidel Castro, I watched reruns of Dr Martin Luther King  speaking, I watched documentaries about Malcolm X and I was moved by the powerful dignity of his carriage, and even though I am a half Mediterranean white person I could somehow relate to the timeless truth of his words about the injustice of lies that attempt to deny people their dignity.

I was inspired, motivated by these people’s actions, by their courage, daring, or in some cases, sheer bravery, despite everything being in their path.  Learning about them made me feel that I too could be a hero, that I too could change the world.

Then the poison set in.

I started to become aware that I had a female body, and what that meant in this society.  I learned I was expected to be certain things, behave in a certain way, dress a certain way, want certain things.

I learned I couldn’t be a hero.

I didn’t like it.

I became frustrated, unhappy, conscious of my body, I dressed in baggy clothes, I had greasy hair, I ate bad food.

Only in books, in words, lost among the pages could I dare to dream of another life, a better life, a life where I could be free to be who I wanted to be, to be myself.

So I decided to look further still, dig deeper, find out what was causing the nagging sense of unfairness, the feeling of slanted inequality that was pricking at my conscience.

All around me I started to grow aware of my supposed place in the world, the role I was expected to play, the stereotypes that are mandatory for every person with a female body.

 

They didn’t look anything like how I had imagined my life to be, those stereotypes didn’t fit the opinionated, bookish, intelligent, undomesticated, selfish, brave, egotistical, untidy, greedy, sometimes over-confident person I was.

I wasn’t passive, meek, subordinate.  I didn’t like pop I liked hard rock.  I wasn’t interested in gossip I wanted to talk politics. I wasn’t interested in babies, I wanted to have adventures.  I wanted my words to have authority, I didn’t want to be sidelined.  I didn’t want to learn ballet though I loved watching it, I preferred holing myself up in my room and playing computer games.

I hated being patronized.

I wanted to create culture, not be created by it.  I wanted to write, I didn’t want to make dinner for anyone.  I didn’t want to be on a permanent diet, I didn’t understand why I was given a smaller dinner than my brother or told to eat salad.  I wanted to eat what I liked.  I was told I should watch my weight even though I was thin, even though I was already so underweight my hipbones used to stick out through my clothes.

I felt like I was cross dressing whenever I wore a dress, I preferred the casual ease of jeans and a t-shirt, or combat boots.  I hated my period because it reminded me I was becoming a “woman”.

Most of all I didn’t know why I was supposed to care what I looked like, why there was only one right way for me to look, when all around me I saw infinite varieties of men, being liked for who they were anyway.

The only thing that fit with my new supposed identity of “female” was the fact I hated sports.  And loved neon pink and unicorns.

As I grew more aware of the self I was told to be, I felt a mounting sense of frustration  .  It felt stifling, smothering, like the real me was drowning but I couldn’t articulate quite how.

If I couldn’t be a hero like Martin Luther King or Malcolm X or Karl Marx because I had a female body then how could I be a hero at all?  If I couldn’t be brave, and lazy, and untidy, and selfish, and loud, and opinionated, and bossy, how could I be me?

After some more exploration I found that there were people who had felt like me, exactly like me, who had raged at the injustice and unfairness of it all.  I found out about great activists like Angela Davis of the Black Power movement, who didn’t bow their heads, not ever, but walked into court with a raised fist when they were put on trial for false crimes. I found inspiring feminists like Germaine Greer and Andrea Dworkin, who spoke about the experience of living in a female body in this society in such immediate and raw terms that it made me feel every woman’s pain.

I found out about George Elliot, who managed to get published and become a respected author by men and women alike, in a century where women were not even allowed the vote, by taking a male name.

I learned about how she flouted convention, wrote books, discussed politics with men, wore pants, took lovers, lived as she pleased.

I knew people in that time wouldn’t have taken her seriously if they had thought she was a woman, so this made sense to me.  I didn’t think then about how much harder it would have been for George Elliot to get published if people had thought she was black because I was indoctrinated by white teachers, by white schooling to learn about white heroes, but I did see that she wouldn’t have been published if people had guessed her sex.

I didn’t really think about white privilege even though I already knew about the racism people of colour had suffered in Western Culture, because I was looking through the warped, surrealist lens of our tilted society, and because I was suffering myself, I hadn’t yet grown the empathy to even try and understand their experience, only mine.

I found out about Virginia Wolf, and Emmeline Pankhurst, about Shirley Chisholm, about Maya Angelou, and I was inspired.  They had female bodies and to me they were heroes.

I felt like I had purpose now, once again, that these people had done so much to change the world, that if we could just make it right, liberation would be just over the horizon.

I started to espouse feminist ideas and found they were quickly met with scorn from all but a few people.  I wondered why these great ideas, which felt so honest, so fair, and so right, and which I knew would deliver to me my complete liberation were constantly being suppressed, ridiculed,  stymied.

I didn’t know then that if you speak a simple truth that denies white men the privilege to be kings in our Western culture they have to kill you.  I didn’t know yet that in any patriarchy, anywhere, men of all colours will have to kill you if you are female because that is what patriarchy is.

I just felt frustrated.

Then I found sex.  I liked sex but I didn’t understand why I was supposed to pretend I didn’t.  I liked girls, I liked boys too but I was only supposed to like boys.

And I was told boys wouldn’t like me if I didn’t do this, think this, be this, act like this, look like this.

Luckily there was a guidebook for how to look, how to dress to win the prize of being liked by boys.  Being competitive I decided to follow it.  It involved daily rituals of plucking, shaving, waxing , tweezing, and counting calories, followed by layers of make-up, and uncomfortable clothes that made me feel self-conscious.

I thought the prize I had been promised would be a compensation of sorts because I liked sex and so did boys.

At that point I wasn’t looking for love.

So I compromised.  I played the stupid games, pretended I was a porn star in bed, didn’t ask for my own pleasure, and I was liked by boys.  After a while I discovered the prize wasn’t all that good, and that I was still bored.

I wanted to experiment.  I had a strange sort of romantic yet not romantic sexual relationship with my best friend, a girl, and found it was better than any relationship I ever had with a guy because I felt like she knew my soul.  I felt like she could see me, like with her, I could be me.

But culture being what it is, she too found boys again, and so we parted, drifting back, lost to the prize that was supposed to be the big compensation.

Sex and fun.  Or for others, love.

It was a distraction for a while, I even fell in love.  It felt good but it also felt painful.  It felt like it should be different but something was getting in the way.  I didn’t feel fully seen.

Nothing could quiet the clamour inside to be myself, to be free of all this, this drag, this role I was supposed to play.  My full potential I felt, was stifled by my biology and the cultural restrictions it brought with it.

I was not allowed to be a hero, only a bit part.  Having a big ego, I wasn’t happy with this.

The only white man I ever admired was Kurt Cobain, whose raw screechy voice articulated the anger I felt.  He seemed, to me, different somehow yet even he succumbed to the neurosis of addiction, tortured by the plague of our broken, sick society.  I loved too, his wife Courtney Love, how her lyrics reflected the ironic, sardonic, stifled bitterness of a class of people oppressed by a society that tried to mandate who they should be because of the biology of their own bodies.

When I found out why I was feeling this way, it felt like a relief.  I wasn’t unnatural, after all, I was transsexual.  That’s what the new information I discovered told me, that I had been born in the wrong body.

This made sense to me since nearly everything I was fit so completely what society was telling me was a male sense of self.  I “came out” and gave myself permission to do and be all I had wanted to do and be that society had told me I couldn’t if I was female.  I even told myself that I was born in the wrong body.

I felt something like freedom.

After a while though, I started to notice that since I wasn’t passing yet, I was still being treated as though I was female.  And that’s when I realized that even though, one day I might pass, what it took to be transsexual in this culture, for those of the female sex, was a denial of one’s biology, of part of one’s self.

No matter how free I felt, no matter how much permission society might give me if I was seen as male, I knew I would not be free until I could claim all of myself.

I was a biological female.  I did not want to be ashamed of that anymore.  Society told me I had a male identity and certainly in this culture, much of whom I am would be considered male.

But is it really?  In a culture where I could be anything I wanted, would I really be so unnatural?

There is nothing wrong with me.   There is nothing wrong with any of us.  There are no square pegs in round holes because the holes have been created by false gods.  False gods that wielded a chisel in my name, who carved out the identity I should have, just because of my biology, when I was not even asked what I wanted to be.

In this culture I have a male identity. But I have a female body.  In another culture, I would just be me.

I do not wish to harm anyone.  I am and I should be, as we all should be, providing we don’t harm others.   In a normal world, we would all be able to sit at a great round table, to respect each other as human beings.

But in patriarchal cultures, in Western Culture, these false gods, these pseudo Kings , in an effort to hobble others that might take their privilege away from them, others that might even outshine them, make them unable to self-actualize themselves through denigrating others, well in that culture, then they have to work hard to silence the truth.

They have to continually work hard to suppress the truth, they know is threatening to burst into voice, they have to work double time to limit, and to restrict, to torture and to humiliate.

Even then, they cannot ignore the truth.  They know they are not Kings at all.  They know the chains they attempt to bind us too are bound to them also.  They must drag the weight around, bear the burden of their own prison.

And they know, too, that they can do all this to us, the oppression, the slander, the centuries and centuries of lies, but they cannot kill the truth.  It simply, is.

Whether a whisper or a mighty roar, somehow, the truth, survives, in the consciousness of those who have humanity, still.

And eventually, when the roar grows to a level they cannot ignore, and the kingdom crumbles into dust, they will have to admit what they have always known, that you can torture, rape, sell, enslave, brutalize, beat, lie, and denigrate human beings, men, women, girls, and children but you cannot break and you can never own a human soul.

To the mighty Kings who sit upon a stolen throne. The roar is coming.  It may not be in my lifetime.  But it will come.

Radical Feminism is better for women AND trans people than LibFem and here’s why…

There is something I’ve noticed from observing and participating in many, many liberal feminist forums, online and offline discussion groups.  A hatred, distrust, and resentment of anyone with a female body, a refusal to admit that biological sex based discrimination exists.

Even though thousands of girl babies are aborted everyday based on their sex in China, even though child brides with female biology are forced into marriages with much older males, LibFem’s continue to mandate biological sex discrimination does not exist.

This is part of a deliberately misogynistic tactic that has infiltrated the LibFem movement by hijacking the word intersectionality.

It stems from a desire to control, humiliate, and squash any form of true agency or female bodied power.  If you are still skeptical that bio sex discrimination is “a thing”, I ask you to consider this.

What is the first insult people fling at an unpopular female in the public eye if people believe she has female biology?

The C word is the crudest way of acknowledging basic biology, it is not an abstract concept it is referencing but female genitalia.

 

And how much more public vitriol is directed at her, than would be had she been born into a male body?  Caitlyn Jenner was awarded the Glamour Woman Of The Year award and the complaints were largely limited to those on the right wing.  Women were not opposed to this largely, neither were men.

Would people across the board have complained more, and in particular natal born men,  if Chaz Bono, (a female born, female to male transsexual) had been awarded “Man Of The Year” for the GQ Awards?

I am not going to answer that question but leave you to think about the answer using not the LibFem mantra that discrimination is based on gender Id and not birth sex but on the basis of what you tangibly know and have experienced in the world.

Inequity for women is mandated by biological sex, in fact gender prejudice stems from this too.  Whether you believe gender is a construct or not you have to acknowledge that the reason people have so many issues with accepting trans women’s  identities is because there is a prescribed mandate in their heads for how a woman should look.

That is the strict gender construct society forces upon the sexes, which tells all people what they should be, how they should act, even how they should appear.

The reason trans women face this prejudice is because of their biology.

Biological sex discrimination is real.  To ignore this fact is to ignore prejudice.

Now, in Liberal Feminism it’s the current rhetoric that women need to work towards equality, but that is far from true.  You don’t have equality because the law says women can go to work, can study, and can sue for sexual harassment.  Equality (aka liberation) is only gained when most of society accepts the idea women’s lives matter. But women can not gain equality under patriarchy because they are always being measured by male defined standards.  You cannot work within a system where you haven’t set the rules, a system that hasn’t been built on what women want but what the male sex wants.

The female sex as a collective can demand liberation from patriarchy and thus gain status respect for themselves, we have the numbers.  But as a collective we are not always stepping up, because of fear of reprisal.  And so, we sleep on our feet, with many of us clamoring for our own chains, upholding misogyny,  resenting other women’s success, throwing other women under the bus to gain brownie points with males, and conforming to misogynistic expectations and ideals for fear of losing male approval.

The LibFem position will never deliver women liberation

Women to embrace the liberal feminist position in the hope for their own liberation.  But the liberal feminist position is doing nothing to challenge patriarchy as evidenced by it’s dogged refusal to acknowledge women can be discriminated upon based on their birth sex.

This is complete nonsense as it actually directly contradicts the liberal dogma, that trans women face more discrimination than natal born women.  I would argue otherwise, though that is not to say that trans women don’t face prejudice, however can we pause and think for a moment and examine why they might face prejudice.

What is being discriminated against?  Their biology.

Trans women too, are actually also discriminated on based on their birth sex, to pretend otherwise is madness.

Do Lib Fems really believe that all trans women are seen by everyone, everywhere as women?  Of course not, so thus they have to face a biologically based form of prejudice too, because society perceives them as men.

 

The liberals answer to this problem is to simply deny biological sex discrimination exists.

But if someone looks at me and sees what they perceive as female biology they will treat me accordingly.

And we treat women we perceive to have female biology with less respect than people we perceive as having male biology.

This is a fact that radical feminism acknowledges. Liberal feminism refuses to admit this truth and actively dis-empowers women from naming, shaming, and challenging the problem.

LibFems have hijacked Intersectionality. RadFems are Intersectional too…

Liberal feminism all too frequently works to silence women, under the guise of intersectionality.  This is actually another big distraction, as radical feminism is also intersectional, but in a different way.  We work on a basis that mandates for all of the female sex, as we understand the simple truth.

We believe, if you are perceived to have female biology you will be treated with less respect than someone who is perceived to have male biology.

Think about it.  Is that true according to your own personal experience?

Radical feminism recognizes women of colour have it harder than white women and in this respect is completely intersectional.

Radical Feminism’s core ethos acknowledges sex based discrimination is a problem

RadFem is not opposed to trans women’s existance, right to identify, or rights to public services, but those rights should not come at the cost of biological women’s spaces meant to provide shelter to those who are vulnerable to male bodied violence. It does not seek to harm trans women but it does seek to dismantle the limiting gender construct which mandates that if you have female biology you must behave, dress, act, think, talk in a certain way.

This actually benefits trans people as they can be whatever they want to be, without any gendered expectations dogging them from birth.  If they then decide to change their bodies, take hormones, call themselves whatever they want, that is up to them but to insist a gendered world is better than an un-gendered one is, in my point of view, harmful to trans people.

I should know, I am a female born person who takes male hormones, and sometimes goes by male pronouns in society.

I would love to live in a world where my natural self was not seen as unnatural because I don’t behave, act or dress the way my biological bits say I should.

No other progress groups are expected to campaign for other causes – why is RadFem?

RadFem does not have to mandate for trans women when our very aim is to challenge the discrimination meted out to natal born women based on their birth sex.

We would not expect the Gay Rights movement to mandate for heterosexuals, however that does not make it opposed to heterosexuals.

I can understand liberal feminists pain.  I understand it is all too tempting to believe that things are changing, that liberation is just over the horizon and can be achieved, simply by ramping up the number of female MP’s in Parliament.

I think women want to believe that gender identity dictates discrimination, irrespective of biological sex, because that means theoretically, we could all be discriminated against in a kind of perverse equality.

In this case they can imagine a world where they can “work towards equality”.

In a patriarchal society however, where men’s interests will always dominate, sadly that will not be the case.

We need to destroy the patriarchy not work within it.

In liberal feminist’s minds, those of the female sex get to believe that someone who has male biology could receive as much discrimination for the same reasons as they do, in the same way, simply for their gender identity as a woman.

They get to ignore the simple fact that they are hated for their biology, a scientific fact, that also marks them out in society as having female biology.

But by doing so, natal born women become complicit in their own silencing, and prevent other natal born women from naming what they know to be the source of their oppression.

 

Liberal feminist women turn a blind eye to the female sex’s current status in society in a misguided attempt to will equality into existence.  Perhaps they think by ignoring the situation, the inequities will go away?

They won’t.  Only by confronting the root cause of misogyny head on and together, will we defeat it.

The root cause is biological sex.

There are some valid issues that LibFem has raised, where  trans woman might have a similar experience of the exact same type of discrimination as a natal born woman.

If a trans woman is perceived by society to have female biology (passes) then she will be treated like any natal born woman, unless people know the circumstances of her birth, which is true.

But it is not true the majority of trans women pass and cannot be true by sheer dint of their biology.  Testosterone is a powerful hormone, which is why it’s much easier for female to male transsexual people to pass than it is for male to female transsexuals.

Neither is it true that trans women have been socialized as females based on their birth sex, with all the experience inequity that intends to bestow.

Yes they have grown up unhappy, dysphoric in many cases.  But that is not the same as being socialized as female.  To be truly progressive is to recognize that different people face different problems, not try to lump them all in together.

LibFem tries to do this but fails because the movement is largely BS.

Trans women are raped, drugged, beaten yes, and again this is where they have a similar experience to natal born women. But the overwhelming prejudice that trans women face is not because they are seen as natal born women but because they are not seen this way.

They are seen as gender non-conforming, and as this is despised by our society, they suffer.

Another reason to dismantle the gender construct, rip it up, and get rid of it

RadFem is the solution.  Why do you think people work so hard to silence us?

We are regularly called TERFs – Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists but we are not advocating hate, violence, or bigotry towards transgender people of any shade or stripe.

We are a movement whose core ethos challenges sex based discrimination and we do not have to work to advance other causes, including the transgender cause.  That does not mean we condone prejudice against those people..

We do not say the Black Lives matter movement should also campaign against capitalism, or include in their core mandate, the enfranchisement of gay people, Muslims, women, or transgender people.

Although in many cases, of course the Black Lives matter movement does support these people’s right to existence, rights, freedom, and liberty, it does not have to mandate for it,  since it’s core objective is to work to challenging race based discrimination against Black people.

Radical feminism is opposed to all forms of prejudice of course.  It supports the gay rights movement, the anti-fascist and anti-racist movement, as well as many other movements working towards social justice.  But it is a movement seeking to challenge sex based discrimination, an all too real issue for the female sex.  It is dangerous to attempt to pretend bio sex discrimination is not a reality.

Radical feminism also gets a lot of unfair criticism, nearly all of which is artful spin, lies and slander, by those who actually seek to promote male sex interests and hate the female sex.

For example, Liberal feminism frequently indulges in the sadistic humiliation rituals of silencing and criticizing white women on the basis of political correctness.  It’s main targets of ridicule are nearly always white women, not white men who are the actual culprits.

Misosgyny underpins the Liberal Feminist movement.

Men get to humiliate, silence and degrade women by telling them to get to the back of the queue.  But women of all colours, have always been at the back of the queue.  To be a woman is always to be considered less important.

Except in Radical Feminism.

Again, think about it.

Radical feminism is not white feminism as many with misogynistic or misguided agendas have suggested.  Radical Feminism understands all women, but it understands that particularly women of colour experience more challenges in our prejudiced society and we seek to change things for the better.

As it recognizes sex based discrimination is a reality, it can work to effect real change by  liberating women as a class of all colours from patriarchy.

The fact is whether the female sex wants to ignore it, or not, the painful truth must be acknowledged.

In a large part of society’s eyes, we are status zero.

This prejudice stems from a hatred of us as a sex class.  Yes there are other, horrific prejudices that exist in the world like racism and homophobia.  But until we build a movement united in one singular aim, to challenge a system that insists on relegating women to second class status, we will never change anything.

If you are happy with that situation, or disagree with that statement, carry on as you are.  If you are unhappy with it, and it resonates with you, there is something we can do about it.

We can really change things if the female sex as a whole are prepared to take action together, by supporting radical feminist causes, getting involved in radical feminist activism, and amplifying the message of what radical feminism is really about.

If you need proof of how much we can change things, look to our radical sisters of the seventies to see what can be achieved when we come together and work to achieve a common aim.

If you think our supposedly progressive society respects women more because more and more women are popping up in every profession, in every walk of life, think again.  In fact, it only furthers the resentment that lurks in the corners of the misogynists minds, it fuels them to make their insults more personal, more violent, more vicious.

This can be seen evidenced by the outpouring of body-shaming, revenge porn, and misogynistic outbursts women in the public eye are subjected to every day online, merely as a side effect of their visibility, a price that must be made for their success.

It’s not just online that misogyny thrives either, even though that’s where it’s at its most honest.  We might not say the vile bile found on Twitter in polite society but underneath the thin veneer of civility, misogyny runs deep, in both men and women.

Women are oppressed into upholding the current system that bestows the lowest status in society on each and every person born in to  female body.  Without women’s support and participation the structure would collapse, whether the men wanted it or not.

There are many reasons why women continue to uphold a system that does not ultimately benefit them, but one of the main reasons is, that from the cradle women are taught to hate other women, to fear them and see them as rivals.

It’s essential that this attitude is taught for the current system to thrive.  Were women to suddenly start supporting each other en masse, to form a sisterhood the way men have a brotherhood, it would be very dangerous to our current society indeed.

Imagine, if it were different.  If misogynistic utterings and limiting gender expectations were criticised and challenged by most women, everywhere, instead of the current situation, where very often they are initiated, or supported by women.

Wouldn’t this world be a better place, not only for women but for people who currently ID as Trans?  If you could be anything you wanted, no matter what your biology, wouldnt that be better than having to combat prejudice that is based on biology, whether you want to ignore the fact or not?

The future is rad, women.