It really cannot be overstated how this type of traditionalist propaganda has worked its way into liberal and radical spaces through transphobic feminism. It's the same rhetorical trick--not accepting 'womanhood' (defined as reproductive capacity, naturalized as neutral) is 'misogyny.'

There's this common misconception that TERFs "define womanhood in terms of suffering," and it's not true. They are just radical feminist enough to understand that gender is a social dynamic and womanhood constructed through subordination, but they rebel against the full implications of this.

I wish people wouldn't say that TERFs reduce women to reproductive anatomy, because this is actually a сis supremacist project aimed at improving the status of сis women, especially straight ones, by leaning into transmisogyny and shoring up the patriarchal value attached to reproductive capacity.

This is really disgusting, and I feel like the journalistic neutrality here, where gender critical propaganda and narratives are presented and then left unexamined, is part of the problem. It's supposed to look like "reasonable concerns," not like implausible scenarios dreamed up by a hate movement.

I think people who are drawn to the liberal talking point that patriarchy harms (cishet) men too don't really understand that misogynistic men already believe themselves to be the true victims of patriarchal society. It's part of why they insist that women owe them sex and deference.

This is frankly just true and something people should be willing to wrestle with. The power and sense of authority we lack in relation to cis men, we're enabled to seek out within the category of womanhood itself, and this often includes taking a 'noblesse oblige' attitude towards trans inclusion.

I feel like we have to constantly relitigate the fact that heterosexuality is violent and oppressive for women by design, that you are socially coerced into it, that part of what this means is that you are rewarded with social status and proximity to power for conforming and punished if you don't.

Andrea Dworkin said this in 1995 and it could be this week nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin...

All the concern about young men getting 'driven' to the right because feminists are too demanding really says more about the people engaging in this rhetoric--they're the ones who think feminism has gone too far, that men are entitled to a certain degree of power and prestige by virtue of being men.

The craziest thing is that the demand women and girls have for "man/boy who is just a good friend to them" is so intense. It's men and boys endlessly, endlessly fumbling the bag by refusing to see women and girls as actual people. Progressives aren't the problem, it *is* boys. It *is* young men.

Radical feminism doesn't say that all sex is rape, this is just a popular propaganda point used against it by people who don't like what radical feminism actually does: denaturalize heterosexuality and examine the way sexuality is constructed by and around male supremacist power dynamics.

It's desolating to repress for years because I couldn't accept that I was attracted to women as a teenager, and then see conservatives moralizing about how LGBT people need to keep their sexuality away from children. It's not even that they don't understand--it's that their intent *is* repression.

Not long ago a prominent literary magazine published a piece about Andrea Dworkin that speculated that she came to her anti-rape politics because she wasn’t having sex correctly or enough. I’m not going to link it but was pretty egregious—little more than a critical fig leaf for revenge porn.

I hope people who think you can separate 'positive' from 'toxic' masculinity are paying attention to narratives on the right, because it's very obvious that pushing the idea that young men need 'positive' masculine role models (protector, defender) is part of their overarching patriarchal project.

When we say that heterosexuality is a regime, we mean that there's a reason conservatives and their enablers treat it like a neutral and natural phenomenon to impose upon children while acting like sexual and gender diversity is an 'adult' topic that will confuse and corrupt impressionable minds.

Translation of @markwarner.bsky.social: “to win elections, we have got to get more racist and transphobic.” Senator Warner, I am so very ready to vote for whoever primaries you.

Transmisogyny is not motivated by 'misandry.' Ever. It's not about protecting women, even cis women (harm to cis women is in fact considered acceptable collateral damage), it's about protecting the legibility of patriarchal (i.e., heterosexual) categories in order to shore up gender hierarchy.

For most of my life, the dominant liberal attitude was that feminist inquiry into private life was vulgar and dangerous—that nothing done between ostensibly consenting adults could be political. This was naive, and in its hostility to inquiry, it was also anti-intellectual.

It's shocking to me how segments of the queer community will regularly bring up debunked myths about lesbian DV statistics, because even if it's innocent ignorance rather than malice, it does show that the people doing it don't care enough about lesbophobia to even know the stats are misleading.

A lot of conservatives are attached to the idea that *they* oppose sexual abuse and harassment as a matter of principle due to their supposed commitment to sexual ethics, and that this differentiates them from liberals, and the best way to shut them up fast is to ask them how they feel about #MeToo.

It's scary how liberal men will look at antifeminist backlash, say "I can't believe they'd do all of this because women play video games now!" and then instead of taking that seriously, start brainstorming how to lean into male supremacy just enough as a quick fix to keep GamerGate men on the left.

There's a particular legal theory rabbit hole I've been going down while taking a good hard look at the trans panic defense. (I've pulled a lot of insight from asking how transmisogynistic phenomena resemble violence against cis women.) So let's talk about "rough sex" and "nagging and shagging".

A lot of people underestimate how normalized coercion and violence within heterosexuality still is. They'll think it's "feminist" to act like we've fixed heterosexuality, like abuse from men is easily identified and handled and it's women abusing each other that's more likely to end up invisible.

I hate how much resistance there is to the reality that heterosexuality actually is hierarchical by design under patriarchy, that gender inequality is central to how it functions and will be until we actually abolish it, that until then, you can only really approximate a socially equal relationship.

A defense of the claim that the anti-abortion and anti-trans movements are two sides of the same coin, going into issues like shared propaganda styles and the underlying metaphysics that essentializes gendered social hierarchy as a natural state of affairs. lysistrata327.substack.com/p/against-th...

again this is a full scale attack on constitutional government

Watching the federal government push TERF rhetoric about how "gender ideology" (i.e., saying trans people exist) is a threat to women's rights for "obscuring biological realities" is fucking disgusting, nobody's trying to distract from your joint attack on trans and reproductive rights except you!

Today, Trump has: -indicated he'll purge the FBI of everyone who isn't a fanatical loyalist -allowed his crony to seize all government funding in an effective coup -ripped the entire federal government off the internet Today, Democrats have: -done nothing -said nothing -tweeted about egg prices

Honestly the fixation some cishet people have on closeted queer people being intensely homophobic or transphobic out of repression is so disturbing--for one, I don't think it's common for repression to get externalized that violently, but on the rare occasion that it does, people start salivating!

The article itself is disgusting--she thought there was a "compelling public interest" in the allegations themselves, but she didn't actually intend for the story to come with actual consequences attached for Gaiman himself. To be blunt, this is treating rape like pornography for public consumption.

I don’t think it’s possible to overestimate how much resentment and backlash to Me Too has fueled the culture’s rightward shift over the past eight years.

One interesting thing here is that people who say TERFs care too much about 'womanhood' don't distinguish between caring about women's oppression and caring about defending the idea of womanhood as a sort of badge of honor, or they think the former leads to the latter when they're actually at odds.

The moralizing here is so manipulative and sickening, it's so obvious that it's specifically transitioning that is being seen as insufficiently "truthful" and "selfless" because it conflicts with conservatives' neat ideas about what sex is supposed to be.

Something I think is worth commenting on is the shift away from the old school genteel traditionalist image of masculinity--they said they cared about sexual propriety, that they opposed harassment and rape, and so forth, and it was assumed that this was part of their ethics. Until Trump came along.

I think it's okay to say, at a structural level, that we want fewer women to be tradwives, actually. Talking about the coerced choices that are made under Patriarchy will sometimes mean identifying, again at scale, behaviours that are fundamentally submissions to power.

A lot of people think gender critical feminists are trying to reify women as reproductive vessels with their definition of 'woman,' but what's actually going on harkens back to Betty Friedan and lesbophobic exclusion--they're situating specifically *straight* women as the 'true' feminist subject.

Honestly, the fact that according to orthodox Christian teaching, sexual sin is not "worse" than other sin doesn't mean that the Catholic Church's main project in the modern era hasn't involved reinforcing patriarchal power by opposing gay rights and reproductive rights on the global level.

I feel like when a fascist government's pushing for reinforcing the nuclear family, tearing down discrimination protections, using abortion restrictions to force women into dependency, etc., it's time to recognize that civil rights don't eliminate that heterosexuality is about structural oppression.

Men use sexual harassment not only as an expression of desire—though it is that—but as a conscious mechanism for punishing women whose actions they don't like with degradation and embarrassment. It's reasserting those women's low place on a gender hierarchy, with sexuality as an enforcement tool.

Bishop Budde told Time she's received death threats since her sermon asking Trump to show mercy to LGBTQ children & undocumented migrants (time.com/7209222/bish...). That's sadly not surprising given animosity against her by Trumpian pastors & pundits (publicwitness.wordandway.org/p/brave-serm...)

The Trump administration defining sex as determined at conception is not a funny scientific error--it's an ideological declaration that sex is to be considered a deep hidden truth, an essential unchanging reality untethered to any material conditions (except perhaps chromosomes).

Genuinely spectacular watching this administration signal about how sex discrimination is "sex based" and then take down reproductiverights.org. Goes to show that vaunting "biological reality" and actually tackling discrimination tied to sex difference are in contradiction.

Fully adult men are eagerly throwing their weight behind a conservative political project to restrict gendered autonomy and retrench patriarchal notions of sex, family, and societal organization. I'm sorry, but I don't find this distinction meaningful in a world where that's observably true.

I wasn't planning on moving to bsky, since my Twitter experience is very psychologically violent and I was expecting that aspect of it to port over too, but one cross post later I'm feeling a bit more optimistic, so I suppose we'll see.

The thing people need to understand about TERF dogwhistles is that they're not usually phrases that are automatically transphobic. They're generally innocuous on their face, but when TERFs use them, you can sense that they're complaining about trans women without saying so. 🧵