J.K. Rowling uses Harry Potter wealth to fund anti-transgender organization
andros_rex @ andros_rex @lemmy.world Posts 98Comments 1,854Joined 2 yr. ago
andros_rex @ andros_rex @lemmy.world
Posts
98
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1,854
Joined
2 yr. ago
TIRFs are not opposed to maleness. TERFism is a conservative psy-op that started when Mary Daly (who wrote magical divine goddess mother bullshit) and Janice Raymond (who accidentally kicked off trans studies by outing and harassing a trans woman named Sandy Stone - The Transexual Empire leading to Stone’s The Empire Strikes Back)
TIRFism recognizes that there is an axis of oppression that lies at the roots of imposed sex roles. The vast majority of women over history have been unarguably subject to men. Many women live in systems which are focused on controlling their sexuality, and are often barred and restricted from certain activities - due to both explicit and encultured messages.
The ideal TIRF society eliminates gender as a restriction. If anyone had actually read Andrea Dworkin, instead of taking Rush Limbaugh’s pastiche of her work at face value, they would find the TIRF society is one where gender is essentially just self expression. If we got rid of “man” or “woman” - maybe girls in Afghanistan would be able to go to school, or maybe sex wouldn’t be understood as a defilement of women (which I think is deeply connected to the problem of rape - rape is less an act of sexual desire and more a desire for subjugation that is tied to sexual power through this messaging that we desire to eliminate.)
The project of the TIRF is ultimately that the only way to truly end sexism would be to understand all humans as fundamentally ambiguous, to not hold anyone to any kind of sex role.
This is the fundamental irony behind the TERF movement. Rather than reject the gender and sex binary, they reify and enforce it. Daly was a wacky Catholic theologian who turned God into a mom, and decided that women were just special magical spiritual beings. This devotion to some kind of divine womanhood is common among the lesbian separatist types (it’s really disturbing seeing that space have the same deranged arguments of the 70’s…)
The problem is that TERFs are just not feminists. If Rowling cared about women, she wouldn’t be finding these women who realize that they can get their 15 minutes by intentionally throwing a boxing or fencing match. TERFs gleefully team up with the same groups that attack women’s reproductive health care - which I view as the most critical feminist issue at the moment (along the world wide surges in fascistic ideologies - which do tend to be expressions of a threatened male gender role, attempting to reassert those boundaries. The goddamn President is a serial rapist.)
That’s probably confusing and elaborate, there’s a lot of theory behind what I’m saying. I’m happy to answer or clarify, I think a critical part of countering this shit is to stop letting Rowling and the alt right redefine the term feminist.