Status Updates From Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Pol...

"[As} Bryn {Kelly} reminds us, “Figuring out how to live together is hard. To exist in community with people who constantly piss you off is exhausting, but ultimately: worth it.” Most non-transfeminists are not enemies. In all kinds of intergenerational feminist and lesbian communities, it often happens that someone says, “Hey. Did you know you hurt me? Can we talk about that?”—and is heard."
a moving chapter, 10/10

"[... Beans] Velocci writes, “what sex ‘really’ is, if it really is anything, doesn’t matter.” [Sex} is not in itself the reason anything happens; rather, it is pressed into service as a concept rationalizing oppression. Defining women is not and has not, historically, been remotely necessary for feminism to proceed, and until recently, it was hardly ever feminism’s game."
!!!

"[It] might almost be entertaining to watch [Janice] Raymond careen neurotically in and out of the foothills of a realization [...] that solidarity between trans and non-trans women is logical. “It could be said that all women who conform to [the feminine] are transsexuals, [...]” she writes. Well, sure! But in that case, she is willing [...] to say [...] that cis feminine women are disgusting too—so there."

"This can’t be happening. This woman is insisting that Beth Elliott not be permitted to perform because Beth is [trans]… The vote is overwhelmingly in favor of permitting Beth to perform. She begins … but that small but vocal anti-Beth group makes so much noise she can’t be heard. I don’t know when I’ve ever been so scared….Beth begins to play, though I can’t understand how she can even do it. She is shaking so bad."

crying throwing up learning that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a terf

"[The 'Let Women Speak'] rally in Melbourne [...] was “attended and supported by white supremacist groups, who marched the streets repeatedly performing the Nazi salute.” Remarkably, J. K. Rowling responded to these headlines by condemning not the fascists but the anti-fascist counter-protestors, one of whom had poured tomato juice on the rally leader (this was, according to Rowling, “Kellie-Jay being assaulted”)."

getting owned by ezra klein of all people should be too embarrassing to come back from

"Says one [Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising (PAAU)] member while invading [an abortion] clinic in 2023, 'We have no moral or ethical obligation to acknowledge the property lines of a business that murders people [sic] for profit.'"
The "sic"🤌🤌 clock it girllll

In 2019, a group of Muslim feminists protested a conference in Frankfurt at which [Alice] Schwarzer was pontificating on the headscarf (an item of clothing she has likened to the swastika and Nazism). Footage circulated in which Schwarzer exits the building and approaches the women, only to [...] exclaim—when one of them tells her not to touch her —“I thought it was only men who aren’t allowed to touch you!”

"This is how xenophobic [...] politics become synonymous with women’s rights. {Female} migrants [...] are loaded down on arrival with “How to Live in the Netherlands” starter packs that presume [...] a regressive, sexist starting point [on the male migrants' part] that needs to be “enlightened” [...] (even as the feminist host society enrolls female arrivals in hyper-traditionally “sexed” forms of low-paid work)."

bari weiss mention lol

"Part of the awfulness of sexual violence is the humiliating character of the fact that one can feel so reduced, in the semiotic and material context of layered male-supremacist history, by a weaponized tube of flesh. MacKinnon, though, treats this humiliation as objective. To read MacKinnon, you’d think strings of cum on a tongue were, transhistorically, bullets to the soul."
just gonna leave this here

re the last update; a little far fetched imo but also somewhat prescient (can't wait to get to the last chapter (the terf chapter), atp every other thing feels like it's pointing towards that lol)

[Donna Haraway] argues that, quite unlike Marx’s approach to proletarian unity, [Catharine] MacKinnon’s feminism “achieves its end—the unity of women—by enforcing the experience of [...] radical non-being.” [She constructs] “a non-subject,” [and] does “what Western patriarchy itself never succeeded in doing, [manufacturing] feminists’ consciousness of the non-existence of women, except as products of men’s desire.”

That wasn’t all: [Andrea Dworkin] further contended that colonizers knew to enslave Africans because they had already enslaved their wives. “The whip, used to cut the backs of white women to ribbons, was now wielded against Black flesh as well.”
🤦‍♂️

"Nestle received a call to let her know [...] that if [she wrote] about butch-femme relationships [...] now in any positive way, [she was] on the ‘enemy list’ … a ‘reactionary,’ ‘heterosexually-identified Lesbian,’ ‘believer in patriarchal sex.’"