Gender Critical transphobes who claim to be feminists know what a monster Tucker Carlson is. But they embrace him when he goes after trans people

@Bakunin
Not for transphobia but some feminist you call “TERFS” seem not just trolls obsessed with transgenderism. They can be real feminists and progressives opposed to gender self-identification as harmful to autistic people and others. One can also argue against sex-change surgery or non-binary thing on the basis of self-acceptance.

I’ll assume Good faith for now, so please elaborate:

• Harmful to autistic people how? What others? It always strikes me as odd that autistic people are judged exceptionally influenced by supposed peer pressure in this specific case. This conflicts with most scientific findings regarding autistic people and peer pressuer.
• About the self-acceptance thing… A lot of assumptions are made about what the ‘true self’ is, in that case. Only about 4% of people who transition detransition. Of those 4%, about 4% (so about 0.0016% of all people who transition) detransition because they feel they were wrong about their gender identity. The vast majority of those who detransition do so because either their family, friends or society at large rejects them and they go back into the closet. The vast majority of those who transition are much happier this way and feel more themselves. Many of them are more interested in facial reconstruction surgery than vaginaplasty because people want to see themselves reflected in a mirror. So why should we argue against such surgeries from the view of self-acceptance? Why should we consider ‘self-accpetance from the societal standard’ superior to ‘self-acceptance through self-idnetifiaction’?

Interesting look at where the general public are on these issues even on “TERF island”.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/sep/22/majority-of-uk-public-agree-with-liberal-views-on-race-and-sexual-identity-annual-poll

As always, those claiming to represent a silent, moral majority are lying.

@Lard:
 
One can also argue against sex-change surgery or non-binary thing on the basis of self-acceptance.

How? What does “self-acceptance” mean here? Because if it’s the opposite of transitioning or being non-binary, it sounds like you’re defining it as “everybody has to be satisfied with the body they currently have and not try to change it, regardless of how it makes them feel,” and how do you keep that logic from extending to tattoos, piercings, haircuts, prosthetic limbs, going to the gym, etc? 

@Cyborgette:

Out of curiosity, which of those bullet-point items began to occur when you socially transitioned, and which did not until you started hormones?

I’m particularly interested in one of the items near the middle — can hormones, or even just socially transitioning, cure alexithymia?!

@opposablethumbs:

Where is Elaine lately??

@Crip Dyke:

(Remember Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a woman?”)

You mean “Aren’t I a woman?” Truth never spoke AAVE; her first language was Dutch. The most widely-circulated version of her famous 1851 speech at the Women’s Convention in Akron, Ohio was an account twelve years after the fact by Frances Gage, which seems to have thrown in some embellishments:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ain%27t_I_a_Woman%3F

@Lard

i would argue that you know fuck all about trans, non-binary, and autistic people and aren’t really in a position to be speaking about what is and isn’t harmful to them.

@Vicky P
We do. Or at least as much as we do most speeches from that era.

@Dave: Thanks for that link. So much more powerful in the original. Set my hair on end.

@Crip Dyke and @Cyborgette: applause

@All: I said a week or so ago that “Lard”s name must reflect what’s between his ears.

(I know the brain is over half fat, but it’s all shot through with neurons and such. His doesn’t seem to be. Go away, concern troll who knows nothing and doesn’t want to learn more.)

The discussion about waves of feminism brings to mind fighter aircraft and archeology.

By which I mean, people will describe an aeroplane as being 1st to 6th Generation; but those labels are pretty fluid, and there’s a lot of wriggle room in the definitions and criteria.

Similarly, Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age. Ok maybe in general terms; but again it isn’t that clear cut.

That’s the thing with labels generally I find; they’re handy shorthand, but they can’t convey all the nuances.

@Jono:

Just so you know, this is how the paper defines 4W feminism:

Fourth Wave Feminism: The period marked by an increased use of social media and the internet to push for social changes. Academics generally mark this as period as beginning somewhere around 2010-2013 to present. Some themes are advocacy for more diverse representation in decision making, such as legislation, education, and so forth, and accountability for people in power who engage in sexual misconduct. (Dastagir, 2018)

Although like any good academic Elizer has complex and thoughtful epistemological and organizing theoretical frameworks, the distinctions made between her own approach and that of others doesn’t on its own give rise to a whole new wave of feminism (just as the uniqueness of my own constructs didn’t give rise to one). Though I’m not done reading the paper and though it appears to be good work, the existence of a 4W is assumed by the paper, not proved by it, and the work Elizer cites to ground that assumption is work with which I’m familiar.

I’ll report back at the end, if you like, because some interesting stuff may very well come up in her interviews and theoretical interpretations of them, but so far the justification for an actual 4W is merely (heavily paraphrasing here):

Someone previously said that there was one, based on the fact that 20-25 years has passed since the last new wave was declared and based on the fact that the internet is a new, cool communication technology that permits easier organizing.

But if mere time passing is enough to distinguish waves, then the first wave would not have lasted from the 1840s to the 1920s. Nor would there be a “gap” from the 1920s to the 1960s in US feminism.

And if new communication tools were enough, then either the invention or, at latest, the widespread distribution of the telephone would have necessitated another wave.

I love the energy which new feminists (and you can be “new” at whatever age you first embrace learning about and acting on feminism) bring, but I’m highly skeptical of wave theory generally (there was not a gap in feminist activism from the 1920s to the 1960s in the USA) and claims of 4W feminism’s birth in particular.

When I look for a fourth wave I want to see something as different as 1st wave from 2nd wave — the distinction that originally motivated the “wave” model in the late 1960s (1968 was when it hit the press in a widely noticed way, but some scholars have noted that the metaphor existed before that date). And I note that no one ever said that one of the defining differences between 1860s feminism and 1960s feminism was the availability of telephones.

The current advocates for a distinct 4th wave have yet to show me anything that qualifies as a novel way of looking at the ethics of behaviour or a new way to evaluate whether something qualifies as sexist. The 1W and 2W have such differences. The 1W pointed to specific differences in law that called out women for different treatment. Although their issues went farther than that, to include temperance, abolition, sexual freedom, and opposition to war, the fundamental philosophical assumption was that if women were equally included in the democratic processes of the state, the issues of women would be solved. And indeed the suffragists acted on these ideas, being the moving force for Prohibition in the USA. In many ways is was prohibition, not the passage of the 19th amendment in 1920, that killed the 1W. Prohibition did not end drinking, did not end drunkneness, did not end violence in the home. Participating in the democratic social contract did not end the evils the women suffered.

As a result, there was a need for an entirely new feminism, one that addressed violence, sexual assault, and social inequalities (that included but were not reduced to only still-existing legal inequalities). Existentialist feminism from deBeauvoir fit the bill, and Jewish feminists had brought it with them from Europe after WW2.

Although we tend to think of 1920 – 1964 as a “gap” in feminism, the truth is that socialist feminism (which was never credited as part of the 1W) was tremendously active during this period. All those women labor activists were in fact feminists. The response by women to the Triangle Shirtwaist fire was led by socialist feminists who targeted their activism at business owners and the exploitative relationship between capital and labor. As such it did not fit into the model of contractarian feminism celebrated as 1W in the formulation of the late 1960s.

And it’s no surprise that this “silent wave” was overlooked: the truly insane McCarthyism had diminished since Eisenhower left the Oval Office, but socialism was still a dirty word in 1960s USA. For political reasons the newly coined “second wave” was positioning themselves as inheritors of the mantle of the glorious and victorious 1W. (This is also part of why the 1W is typically defined as ending the moment the 19th Amendment took effect, rather than acknowledging that 1W groups had plenty of plans for activism after that, and that enthusiasm for action remained high in the early years of the 1920s, only ending when it was clear that the feminist priority of legal prohibition of alcohol was creating far more damage than any of the original problems it intended to solve.) Socialist feminists (also called “labor feminists” by some) were crucial to surviving and recovering from the Great Depression. They are, in fact, critical to the history of the USA more generally, not just the history of USA’s feminism. And yet they did not appear in wave theory at all, not even when they were continuing to work, successfully, in advocating for women and families for an entire generation after the 1Wers had given up their activism in disarray and confusion over the fallout of their largest movement success other than the vote itself (which was always viewed as a means to other ends, like Prohibition). With the utility of having the vote questioned given the failure of the Prohibition political project leading to the collapse of feminist activism based on contractarian ethics, and with “socialism” being a tainted and politically counter-productive word, you can see how the 2Wers might want to portray feminism as having ended in 1920 but having been resurrected in 1964.

But however you view the PR aspect of omitting socialist/labor feminism from the wave history and however you view the rosy depiction of 1W feminism ending in the great victory of the 19th amendment and then retiring with honour, there’s no denying that there were huge differences in philosophy and approach between 1W and 2W feminisms. “Consciousness raising” is a notable case in point.

Ultimately 3W feminisms are distinguished from 2W feminisms because the existentialist roots of 2W feminisms always demanded a unified and essentialist view of “woman”. What we now call 3W fractured that view. Women of colour feminists had been practicing a difference-aware feminism for many decades, but over the course of the 2 decades from 1980 to 2000 is when the larger feminist movement finally got it through their heads that white women with disabilities might have different needs, issues, and ability to access power than white women without, same for poor white women and middle class or wealthy white women, again with queer women & straight women. As these white women realized that their own differences were actually relevant to their feminism, they became more receptive to the idea that, yes, race also creates unearned and undeserved power differentials between women of color and white women.

This seems fairly obvious to us, and to many it might not seem as relevant and important a difference as one can see between the 1Wers and the 2Wers, but even though there wasn’t a 40 year gap that allowed for the distinctions to be represented as clear breaks (after all the thinking of many 2Wers evolved to be more and more 3W in nature, and so we had and have a mix of 2W and 3W thinking still active, albeit with 3W thinking now dominant) the magnitude of the challenge to the theoretical underpinnings of 2W feminism which posited a universal experience of womanhood justifies the new 3W label. Existentialist feminism simply does not allow for womanhood to be anything other than universal. That’s the core of existentialist thinking about gender: that there exists an essential truth that all women share that can be the pivot point around which all women can join, thus gaining community leverage which can be used for change.

The 3W denies that there is a single universal core truth of womanhood. While we can see evolutions in thinking where feminist women maintain their 2W activist priorities while slowly engaging in less essentialist and more inclusive thinking, the 2W’s philosophical underpinning itself simply can’t co-exist with 3W thinking about how the experience of being a woman changes with other circumstances, many of which (race, religion, etc.) can creates nodes of intersection where analysis can help shed light on the needs and experiences of relatively large groups of women all at once. (Though of course these groups can be subdivided to reveal more complicated intersections occupied by smaller groups.)

The long, long conclusion of this comment is that I am still not convinced by the people who have been claiming the existence of a 4W, because I haven’t seen anything that distinguishes a 4W any more than a couple decades (insufficient based on 1W lasting from 1850 – 1920) a new communication technology (insufficient based on the introduction of the phone for personal organizing and the radio and TV for mass communication) or other, even less convincing assertions. (One woman was famous for claiming she had invented the 4th W to describe moderate feminists who go to church. She maintained that the 4W label was necessary because 3W feminism was hostile to religion and therefore moderate, church-going feminists were something new and incompatible with what had come before.)

I really thank you, Jono, for leading me to this recent paper. And I’m going to finish it. And I was serious that I’ll report back again if you’re interested in hearing what I think of the original research. For my purposes here it was enough to read the first 40 pages to understand what she meant by 4W and why she was using it, but I do know that leaves a lot of her wisdom unrevealed.

I am, however, also quite aware that I’ve gone on for a long fucking time about my opinion of what constitutes a “wave” of feminism (which is only mine, though I’m far from the only feminist skeptical of claims of a 4th wave). If people don’t need to hear me report back on the original research in this paper, then I’m content to leave things here.

Oh, and for the record, even though I roll my eyes at claims of a 4W because I have seen too many essays advocating recognition of a new wave based on what I consider to be insufficient reasons, I actually don’t oppose anyone claiming 4W as an identity. I mean, if it gets people excited and organizing, that’s great.

I am a huge academic dork for feminism, but not everything is about academic darkness, and if the 4W label is useful or uplifting to people, I say go for it.

I’ll roll my eyes in the corner, but hopefully y’all can ignore me and go for it anyway.

@Lard

Yeah, dissenting views on trans folk aren’t welcome in progressive spaces for the same reason we don’t welcome things like “Maybe black folk just genetically are inferior, that’s just science!” Bigoted nonsense is bigoted nonsense. And the knots that people twist themselves into to somehow justify their flavor of bigotry is just so damn tedious. Ain’t no one got the time for that.

@Alan

Boudiccan Destruction Horizon would be an absolutely fantastic name for a band.