Masculinity is not the problem, the class domination of women by men is.
Butch lesbians and gnc women who you read as masculine are not the problem, men are.
This is all incredibly obvious and a classic feminist insight, and the fact that we have strayed so far form this framework is shocking and terrifying.
I also think its imporant to point out unhealthy masculine taught traits and such though because I’ve been with many butch women/ masculine nb people who have adapted abusive behavior because it is viewed in our society as “acceptable masculine behavior” and it is a disservice to our community to allow abuse to continue to exist because you would prefer we didn’t talk about it/ you think men are the only problem
And the people who have always been the most vocal and insightful about this are…. butch women! Who *surprise surprise* live the every day reality of being gendernonconforming and the amount of violence that results in, and who also live the every day impact of the pressure to perform societies fucked up version of masculinity to have their gender recognized.
The current, identity politics infested, version of conversations about butch experiences as ‘masculine privilege’ is a massive failure. Being gendernonconforming doesn’t come with privilege and it is not something that genderconforming people can provide hot new insights on. Give me the complex understanding of butch experiences from the mouths of the butches that live it.
The new framework being pushed is, in my opinion, a redfem created one in an attempt to rhetorically trap trans/nb people in as oppressors and create an offense against their identities just for existing.
But when you actually get down to it, the problem overwhelmingly is still the patriarchy and toxic hyper masculine standards, which is upheld and enforced by cis men.
Sounds about right. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time TERFs poored their hate into typical identity politics in order to devide and conquer & accusing population groups that face violence because of their gender of somehow having ‘male privilege’ is kind of their core thing.
Okay, first off, OP is most certainly not a TERF. And I strongly respect Alyesqe’s analyses and insights re:Marxist feminism and the trans experience are incredibly valuable. However, I kinda have to disagree with her here.
The subjugation of women in a capitalist society isn’t just about controlling the means of reproduction. It’s about coding a whole set of labor activities (including, but not limited to reproductive labor) as freely exploitable or at the very least, devalued, while also painting certain human behaviors, instincts and ways of being (those coded as “feminine”) that are dangerous to the maintenance of capitalist social relations and ideology as weak, bad, or wrong.
This latter part is the most important insight of transfeminism. The marginalization and devaluation of behaviors coded as ‘feminine’ is a fundamental part of the patriarchy’s function in a capitalist society, and those coded as women can certainly engage in the emphasizing of masculine-coded traits via toxic masculinity so they come at the expense of feminine-coded traits and thus perpetuate interlocking systems of marginalization.
For all your long words you completely misread my post. I did not call OP a TERF. I was speculating that the people who say that butches have ‘male privilege’, the people Alyesqe was disagreeing with, might be intentionally or initentionally repeating a theory started by TERFs.
And to respond to your overly complex content:
The patriarchy under capitalism relies on a combination of rigid gender roles and a devaluation of femininity. It needs to keep women in a feminine gender role and it needs to devalued that gender role at the same time.
The Patriarchy relies on the idea that women are inferior, that femininity is inferior and than women can never be masculine
and that those society labels women at birth can never be anything else and those society labels men at birth can never be anything else. It requires all these ideas to function and it punishes any deviation from those ideas.
As a result, the patriarchy punishes women who value women, it punishes women who value their femininity and it punishes women who value their masculinity
and it punishes anyone that does not identity with the gender they were assigned at birth. They all threaten the foundations of the patriarchy.
We can argue all day about whether feminine women are contributing to the system of gender roles by being feminine or masculine women are contributing to the system of masculinity by being masculine, and who is reproducing and reinforcing the most of societies values by existing, but it’s personality manicuring
that isn’t bringing anyone any closer to bringing down the patriarchy.
It has value to examine your own relationship to gender, to internalized gender roles and internalized sexism, but it’s best done from the perspective of comrades stuck in the same system. When we work out the ways in which internalized oppression is creating harmful behavior in our own communities we are doing healing work and it matters so much, but we must not confuse that work with our fight against the system and we must not use the same language that we use to fight the system to make enemies of each other. When we do this it boils doing to arguing in a cage about who is doing the most to please the guards instead of plotting a break out.
QueerAnarchism 