#actually can we talk about how the feminism tag on tumblr has so many TERFS ?????? | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

farmerlesbian · 2 years

Note

Radical feminism is not synonymous with transphobia and it’s frustrating to watch people encourage blacklisting an entire school of feminist thought because it is associated with fringe groups. It limits discussion on real political conversations that are in many cases embraced by trans people like myself such as freedom from sex/gender distinctions. The movement was also essential to including lesbians in feminism who had been intentionally excluded by heterosexual liberal feminists. Fringe groups on the internet should not prevent us from engaging with real feminist theory. Other words/phrases on your blocklist are real dogwhistles created by people in that fringe group, so I understand blocking them, but radical feminism is an actual academic and political school of thought that is not necessarily dominated by transphobic voices and I don’t think we should encourage censorship, especially because it is not inherently harmful like transphobia.

i don’t personally know that much about different schools of feminist thought and theory, i just know these are the tags that are used on tumblr which is the website we are on, and how they self-identify in ways that are easily identifiable and filtered. i hear you and you’re probably right that it sucks to have the term co-opted. by blacklisting / filtering the terms i suggested, the posts still show up in your dash, they’re just hidden and you can super easily still look at what the post says with one click, so it doesn’t feel like censorship, just a way to have a big warning “this post may have content from a TERF”. it is a reliable way to identify them like it or not. you can then go from there and investigate what they’re putting on their blog to see if they’re transphobic as well to make sure. the vast majority of blogs identified specifically as “radfem” or sometimes even “terf”, much less often the full “radical feminism”.

also fwiw i’ve never missed out on any actual non-TERF posts about radical feminist theory on tumblr by having radfem and stuff filtered. idk maybe i don’t follow the types of blogs that’d be talking about it but it simply has not been a problem for me. i’m not getting like false positives lol it’s pretty consistently accurately identifying TERF created content on tumblr

#not farmer lesbian content #mod alfalfa #transphobia /#i spent some time today going through terf blogs and notes #it was not pleasant #anonymous #ask farmer lesbian

53 notes · View notes

vampish-glamour · 3 years

Note

You know what's scary? I do understand where radfems come from... I really understand them. This whole bs that the term "female" is insulting to trans women and that even a hairy sasquatch kind of male, can call himself a woman now, without even being trans, is a fucking joke. They really push women into radfem thinking with this.

The only problem is, this hurts real trans people, that really struggle with disyphoria and won't be taken seriously anymore...

And in the end, women suffer once again, but this time it's not because of men, but because of the gender fandom.

I agree. I’ve actually been meaning to make a post about this, so I’ll just give my thoughts here.

I tend to find that radfems, on the very surface, can have good points. Examples being

The word woman has become meaningless and this isn’t okay

People think femininity = woman, and that’s harmful to women

The gender fandom is off the walls crazy

Now despite these not actually being exclusively radfem/terf beliefs… many posts about them are either made by radfems, hijacked by radfems, or assumed to be made by radfems. So it’s easy to end up in the radfem side of Tumblr after a while of searching through tags.

And it’s easy to think “yeah, this is something I can get behind”… because you may think that these points mean the following (and the posts about them probably are talking about the following as well)

Anyone can “identify” as a woman, even if they aren’t actually a woman, and this isn’t okay. (Woman = both cis and trans women)

People think that femininity = woman, which leads to women calling themselves nonbinary if they aren’t feminine enough, or trans women being made to feel like they aren’t passing if they aren’t feminine enough

MOGAI is off the walls crazy

But the radical feminists take these points to mean something else entirely, and the radical part of radfem eventually rears it’s head. Then those points turn into

The word woman has become meaningless because of the evil disgusting trans women who are invading poor cis women’s spaces!!!!

Men think that they’re women because they wear dresses!!!!!

The gender fandom is crazy and by gender fandom I mean not just MOGAI and non dysphorics, but dysphoric trans people too!!!!

And the insanity of radical feminism/terfism really shows through.

But that insanity aside, on the very surface I do understand where they’re coming from, in the sense that I can tell what it is they’re against, and what they’re misunderstanding. I can also understand what they’re angry about… and see where they blame the wrong people (dysphoric trans people).

They seem to often come from a place of thinking that MOGAI and non dysphorics speak for the entirety of trans people, so end up grouping dysphoric trans people in with the she/theys and genderfluids. They look at a genderfluid talking about “sometimes I wear boy clothes and sometimes I wear girl clothes”, and think this applies to a dysphoric trans woman… despite the two being vastly different.

They see one trans woman, often a “non dysphoric”, talking about how awful it is for lesbians to not like male genitalia (which yes, is incredibly homophobic), and then think that this applies to all trans people, despite the majority of trans people understanding that it’s okay for people to not be interested in dating trans people.

They see literal men claim to be trans women while experiencing no dysphoria, and claim that they represent all trans women. So they go on about how these men are ruining the definition of woman (and yeah, I do agree that it’s bullshit that any man can just “identify” as a woman)…but don’t seem to get that dysphoric trans women are completely separate from that issue.

They see a bunch of modern day activists claim that the word “female” is offensive to trans women, or that we need to use degrading gender neutral language like “people who bleed” and “birth givers” to be inclusive to trans people… and assume that it’s actual trans people making these arguments. When in reality, from what I’ve seen most actual trans people are against it.

After looking through radfem/terf blogs and seeing what they had to say, I came away with a solidified belief that modern day “trans activism” is actually harming trans people. Because it allows transphobes like these to form a completely false idea of what a trans person is, and base their bigotry off of that.

They generalize based on the loud majority, and unfortunately the loud majority is the “gender fandom”, while dysphoric trans people are pushed to the back. It’s very clear that radfems haven’t listened to or spoken with actual dysphoric trans people, and don’t understand what being trans actually is. Because of this, I can understand where people get these beliefs about trans people from. Because you have the loud majority claiming that “this is what being trans is!!!” While spotlighting absolute bullshit.

And that’s how they can get sucked into radfem ideology, because they start out with the sensical surface level things, and then get pulled into the more radical beliefs that end up being absolute batshittery.

So yeah, I can absolutely see where many radfems come from when it comes to gender. They have no idea what a trans person actually is, because all they’ve been exposed to is the mainstream activism. The upsetting thing is, that this leads to transphobia that hurts actual trans people in the long run.

I’m in no way trying to excuse the rampant transphobia from radfems. Many of them probably are just genuinely transphobic, and would hate trans people even if the mainstream activism wasn’t a factor.

But I do believe that for many, the mainstream activism is a tipping point. If real trans people were at the front of the activism, and making it known what being trans really is… instead of the crazies who are currently in the spotlight, I think we’d have much less people going towards transphobic ideologies, because they’d have a proper understanding of what being trans is, rather than only seeing the bullshit that is currently pushed. And they wouldn’t be in a spot that allows them to be pushed towards radfem/terf beliefs in the first place.

#I hope this makes sense?#asks #anon

46 notes · View notes