No we failed to make progress because feminists today are either GirlBoss capitalist representational feminists or frothing at the mouth genital inspectors. They quit the field.
They quit the field, but not in the way you're suggesting. Feminism today, whether you're talking about academia or culture at large, has been swallowed whole by wokeism. In general culture, nobody is advocating for women anymore unless it's "intersectional feminism" that's focused on racism or trans rights. In academia, the "genital inspectors" you complain about are a fringe minority at this point. The mainstream of feminists are too busy redefining womanhood, shitting their pants with rage over Kathleen Stock receiving the Order of the British Empire, and finding ways for cishetero people to identify as queer, to bother themselves with the mundane and uninteresting issues of female people.
Expanding the category of gender beyond A/B seems like a pretty effective way of disrupting the gender binary.
Is it, really? What exactly is being disrupted here? Tessa here is playing basketball, she's wearing pants, and she's got a modelling gig modelling women's clothes for a big retailer. Not terribly disruptive, to be honest. Some teenager might think she's "disrupting the gender binary" or "smashing the patriarchy" by getting a bowl-cut and wearing a turtleneck and picking some new pronouns, but I don't see it.
"Disrupting the Gender Binary" sounds like the title of some shitty undergrad seminar that humanities students are required to take.
Also you seem to taking several different and distinct concepts- gender identity, gender roles and gender expression- and mashing them together.
Gender-people can't seem to define gender identity except in reference to gender roles and gender expression, so hopefully you can forgive my confusion.
I guess the question of why this is an area of mutual interest between genital inspectors and crazed right wing freaks has simply never crossed your mind.
There's a difference-a big one!-between associating with people who don't agree with all your goals and associating with people whose values are predominately antithetical to those you claim to espouse.
The Barack the Bomber has things to say about purity tests lol.
Yeah. He was talking about the idea that if they cut loose everybody who doesn't agree with this principle and everybody who disagrees with that principle and everybody who disagrees with the other thing, pretty soon the party would be so small as to be completely useless. For those already pushed to the fringes by the woke mob, that's a serious concern.
I don't recall any woke groups coming forward to aid the targets of Jessica Yaniv's predatory HRC complaints. A right-wing Bible thumper group called JCCF came forward to do that. In an environment where other lawyers were too afraid of being branded transphobic if they represented those women, they were the only ones willing to take it. It doesn't matter that JCCF are Biblethumping dickheads, it matters that those defendants be represented at the tribunal.
I might oppose 19 out of 20 things that JCCF will go to court to fight for, but hopefully the courts will arrive at the right decision, and JCCF being on the right side in the Yaniv battle doesn't carry over to the next case. Court cases are decided on their own merits.
Keira Bell's lawsuit was crowdfunded, I believe. It might well be that many of the people who donated to her were angry Bible thumpers, but so what? It was a case worth taking to court regardless. The "Alliance Defending Liberty" is the US equivalent to JCCF, and I'm sure that I would disagree with many of the things they have been to court for, but they are goin
genital inspectors
I gather you think that's clever. When you say "genital inspectors" or "your precious body parts" or "bioessentialism is degrading to women because it reduces women to their body parts", you're aligning yourself with the view that those precious body parts aren't of particular relevance to feminism. Which is the opposite of clever.
Because the premise that transwomen are a grave threat to the safety and well-being of ciswomen is unproven. Again, take the transwomen in women's prisons thing: the number of sexual assaults committed by transwomen is a small fraction of the assaults that occur, yet your big concern is around that small percentage and not the overall problem of sexual assaults in prisons. Meanwhile, transwomen in men's prisons are assaulted on a regular basis and you say nothing.
It's sounds like men's prisons are dangerous places. Why is it up to feminists to solve the problem of violence in men's prisons?
The number of assaults committed against transwomen is also a small fraction of the assaults that occur, yet your big concern is transwomen. You know who is the target of the majority of prison violence? Men. I never hear wokies advocating for safer prisons for men. Why is that?
I highly doubt that the number of assaults committed against female prisoners by transwomen inmates is small for any reason except that this is a new thing and that so far there haven't been very many trans women in the same prisons as female people. We're still at the thin edge of the wedge on this, but we already have sex assaults resulting from the small number of trans women being put in with female people. The question isn't whether it would happen, it's how many will happen.
And if men's prison is such hell for transwomen, how come it is that so many male prisoners "discover they're women" while they're in prison?
So you want them to be equal, just...separate?
And there's the inane comparison to Jim Crow laws. Just a few more and you'll have my bingo card filled out.
Yes, separate. That's kind of the whole concept behind single sex spaces. While trans advocate talking points would compare this to separate accommodations for black people, that's a shitty argument. Because courts have repeatedly dismissed the premise that segregation by race is justifiable, they've repeatedly upheld the premise that there are circumstances when segregation by sex is justifiable. Washrooms and locker rooms have been two of those.
So prove that there's an elevated safety risk to women by allowing trans people to use the bathroom that corresponds with their gender identity. Don't just do the concern troll "just asking questions" bullshit. Put some data out there.
What's odd to me about these anecdotes is they don't actually speak to the issue of trans people to use the bathroom that corresponds with their gender identity. But you're using it to muddy the waters to say "see, look how those men behave in the bathroom with women! See how putting men in the bathroom with women is a bad idea!"
Those examples should at least help illustrate why we have single-sex washrooms in the first place.
Hard data is difficult to come by. First off, most incidents probably wouldn't rise to the level of a criminal complaint or criminal charges, so where are the statistics going to come from? For example Jessica Yaniv's social media history includes photos taken inside women's washrooms and posts where he complains about not seeing enough "
**** and vag" when he hangs out in the women's locker room, but I'm not aware of any charges against Yaniv for such incidents. Most women aren't going to complain, they're going to just feel less safe and act accordingly. The woman who found herself alone in the showers with the trans woman starring at her was scared to make a complaint to her yoga studio because she was afraid it would seem transphobic. So instead she quit her yoga studio and found herself asking strangers on reddit for resources for doing yoga at home. That's how it's going to go. Not a mass wave of attacks, just women one at a time finding themselves in situations where they feel less safe and leaving situations where they don't feel safe anymore.
-k