Scott Madin

I don't really love how "feminism" has become a punching bag for the right AND the left, such that when we say "Cruella isn't feminist" a lot of people think it's witty to say "well, she is for certain KINDS of feminists."

I know the problems with the No True Scotsman fallacy, but at the same time it feels very bad/unfair that Fake Feminists who are only interested in perpetuating new versions of the patriarchy but with them in charge get to be treated as a valid, indeed common, form of feminism.

One of the reasons we came up with TERF as a term, for example, was so that TERFs couldn't forcibly associate trans-exclusion with mainstream feminism because fuck that, capital-F Feminism isn't and shouldn't be trans-excluding, even if some feminists are/do.

I'm trying to figure out whether we do this to other groups. If I say that Disability Activism isn't about excluding disabled people, I don't get a chorus of "corrections" chirruping "well, Autism Moms do...." because we recognize they aren't living up to principle.

But if I say Feminism isn't about X, a lot of people--and a lot of them appear to be cis men--want to "correct" me that there are bad feminists who betray the cause. Which...I know that. I don't need cis men to tell me about community problems within feminism.

I would actually like white cis men to work on their own community more and let others deal with the bad cis women. It's not like there's a shortage of people willing to criticize terrible takes from cis women.