The TERF worldview is that everything about sexism and patriarchy is a logical consequence of "the facts of our biology" The definition of being a man is not getting pregnant and exploiting the reproductive labor of people who can, which is the definition of being a woman
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Anyway her surprisingly intense anger at a stupid science fiction TV show left me with a lot to think about "If men could have babies, they would BE women, and they'd have all the stuff we think of that makes women women, like being smaller and having breasts" stuck in my head
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I have to give credit to my mom in that from a very young age, probably unintentionally, she both raised my standards for science fiction "What if?" scenarios ("The question is what DOESN'T change if you flip X and Y") and got me thinking about feminism and gender
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I mean, I think she's wrong in the end, and the TERFs are wrong, but this conflict reveals where we are as a culture right now - it's the conflict over attempting to imagine the unimaginable
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Again, my mom's not a radfem, she's a conservative, but sometimes I think the difference between the two is how pissed off you feel on a given day
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There's a straight line from "Of course women are the weaker sex due to the biology of childbearing" to "Of course women do all the childrearing because of breastfeeding and hormonal bonding in utero Of course men are worse at those jobs, of course men work outside the home"
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I would argue that as justifiably as trans people dunk on these insensitive cis-feminism bromides ("If MEN had periods the government would mail everyone free tampons", "If MEN got pregnant maternity leave would be in the constitution"), the fact that they exist is hopeful
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The pop feminism mindset that creates these little slogans is opposed to TERFism The people who write them don't have trans people in mind and are as likely to be transphobic as anyone else But they chafe against the assumptions of cissexist society nonetheless
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The hunger to imagine a world where things can be different, to imagine a definition of "men" that ISN'T "rooted in the facts of reproductive biology", to pull the oppressive structures of our world apart, ever so slowly, and rearrange them
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Like, the way these conversations generally go nowadays is someone posts a meme like this, and then a trans man goes "Uhhh trans men DO menstruate and get pregnant" and then the TERFs pile on going "And it didn't change anything, did it? Which proves trans men aren't men!"
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Because as angry as TERFs are about patriarchy their initial impulse is always to surrender to it But leaving aside that out trans men are <1% of the population so asking "Why haven't you changed all of society yet?" is somewhat unfair trans men DO talk about how it IS different
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This is out of my lane to directly talk about and in particular the question "do trans men experience misogyny?" is fraught Trans men are, still, a very small minority in the total population, and one with a wide diversity of experiences, especially in terms of "passing"
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But transition does fuck with how people perceive you and how they treat you - by nature, that's the whole point And transphobia against trans men is not the same thing as misogyny - I would argue the intensity of it from cis women IDed as feminists demonstrates that
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I think it IS possible to imagine a world where "the men get pregnant and still have male privilege", and the ferocity of people's attacks on transition are because they fear such a world and how it would destabilize their worldview
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Just like, contra what my mom (and the writers of Sliders) thought, our world isn't the result of some inevitable evolutionary pathway where everything about "femininity" and "masculinity" ended up a specific way
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You can look at other cultures all over the place where those Lego pieces arranged themselves differently, and doing so upsets people (CS Lewis getting pissed off about papers on ancient Greek homosexuality and yelling "Don't tell me all the warriors in the Iliad were pansies")
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It was perilous for me to start this thread without a conclusion in mind, as I typically do, but I feel weird leaving it without one, so -- I think TERFs should think about what they're defending when they defend stuff like the OP and how it cuts to the heart of their ideology
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TERFs got very, very angry at Andrea Long Chu for, in her initimably trollish way, deliberately "destabilizing" the concept of the gender binary in a way calculated to hit their buttons Saying that to be female is to submit to another's power, to be oppressed is to be female
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I mean yeah sure taking that completely at face value it comes off as a gross sentiment *But it's the exact same sentiment as all the stuff about "If men could get pregnant then bla bla bla"* That's what that sentence means, when you get right down to it
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The bougie cis feminist lady who wrote that sentence didn't have some nuanced, deeply spiritual concept of what "manhood" meant when she wrote it And she'd probably agree it would be stupid to make it about "masculine stereotypes"
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The statement "If the people who got pregnant were tall, muscular, bearded and wore suits and ties, then maternity leave would be in the Constitution" is a... silly fucking thing to say Indeed, as TERFs like to crow, the experience of many trans men disproves it
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Whoever was the first one to write one of these angry slogans about "If men could menstruate..." or "If men could breastfeed..." or "If men could give birth..." was wholesale ripping out the radfem definition of "sex classes" and replacing it *only* with power
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The lady who wrote the OP directly agrees with Andrea Long Chu She's saying "If the uterus-having gestating sex class *had power*, then they would no longer be women, they would be defined as men"
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What's telling, to me, is that this is the logical consequence of TERF ideology and *they agree with it* to keep on sending memes like this but when confronted with it directly they find it very offensive, it cuts to the core emotionally
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"Fuck you! This meme is just to express our frustrations! It's not supposed to *literally mean* that we want a world where men could get pregnant -- or that we want to be 'men who get pregnant' -- and it's disgusting to say that it does!" Okay why though Let's unpack that
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It's tied deeply to the TERF obsession with what they call "passing women" -- the Sweet Polly Oliver/Mulan narrative, the woman who in all ways presents socially as a man and therefore accrues all of a man's power and privilege for herself
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And when they grab a real historical figure to fill in for that narrative -- someone like Albert Cashier or James Barry -- and trans people say "Okay but a more accurate definition for such a person would be a 'trans man'" -- they become incensed
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Assuming all the details historians have deduced about James Barry's life are accurate -- supposing his stretch marks in death really did mean he got pregnant and gave birth in secret -- isn't he exactly what the OP was fantasizing about?
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A man -- a respected doctor and military officer, known to everyone as a man, with all the privileges thereof -- who got pregnant and gave birth? And therefore, speculatively, pioneered the first surgical C-section -- as a man with a man's privilege who "knew how it felt"?
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But that's the whole, like, seething writhing contradiction at the heart of TERFism "Why can't men get pregnant? It'd be so much better if they could!" is this plaintive and fervent desire for the power and privilege accrued with manhood to be decoupled from reproductive biology
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But the idea of this *actually happening* is a huge threat A shock to the system, a cut to the core Like they experience being directly told "Okay, if you want to you can be a man who gets pregnant, and we'll fight to make society respect that" as a horrifying violation
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