I Saw A Post Asking About Whether There Was A Woman Or Women In Your Life That Changed Your View About

every woman thinks she's evil and irredeemable for making a few avoidable mistakes while every man goes about his day thinking he's normal after having emotionally tortured at least 5 different women

Not all people who identify as trans are "bad."

As a feminist, I feel grief and anger about the girls and women that identify as trans who are really (in no particular order):

Lesbians or bisexuals who hate/fear their same-sex attraction (and are sometimes pushed into a trans identity by parents who hate same-sex attraction)

Autistic (and otherwise neurodivergent) who are made to feel like they "can't be real women" because of it

Suffering with an eating disorder

Traumatised by abuse

Doing the only thing that they think they can to rebel against deeply misogynistic gender roles

Caught by social contagion and fear being ostracised by their peer group if they don't conform to the current fad

As for men, I do pity the boys and men who are gay/bisexual struggling with their same-sex attraction and otherwise go through something similar to the girls and women above, and who feel that they can't be "real men" in some way, so feel forced to adopt a trans label for themselves etc.

The trans people who are inherently bad are the men who "identify as women" for fetishistic, misogynistic and anti-LGB reasons. The straight men who call themselves "lesbians," the straight men that intimidate bisexual women into identifying as lesbians, the men who are desperate to push into female spaces, etc etc etc - the men who, in short, use women of all kinds as nothing but props and objects to validate them and their porn addicted fetish, and the men who prey on vulnerable teens to push them down a trans path for their own sick and twisted pleasures, too.

If you see feminists criticising trans people and immediately identify with the abusive men that gleefully talk about triggering women abuse survivors by forcing their way into women-only crisis centres and fantasising about swinging their vile penises around, or who eagerly push into women's bathrooms hoping to find a woman that they make uncomfortable because it brings them joy, then trust me, that isn't a feminist problem.

As per your response to someone else: if arguing on the internet with women suddenly makes you want women who are sex trafficked - women that have done nothing to you, who are a mere hypothetical to you - to "get raped and die," then yes, you are bad. Personally.

You couldn't even try the "I don't have to care about feminists" point to argue back. Instead, you rushed straight to an abusive, narcissistic "if a feminist doesn't bend the knee, then that means that I'm justified in hating and wishing the worst things on all women, especially the most vulnerable women."

You don't want feminists to care about you. You just want a twisted excuse to continue to hate women.

I'm so utterly baffled as to why women don't want you in our spaces. It truly is the greatest mystery of our time.

TERFs be like “no no, I don’t hate trans people, I’m not transphobic, I just think all trans people are inherently bad!” And it’s like did someone forget to tell the TERFs that that’s literally what transphobia is. Regardless of if you believe you have “reasons” for it.

I embroidered a Monstera leaf as a gift.

Here it is twinning with the Monstera in the gift receiver´s house 🥰

See how close I came to running out of green thread under the cut:

It was so close, I´m glad I made it 💗

Thank you! I'm currently reading (Un)kind by Victoria Smith on a recommendation from here, and it's incredible just how much weaponised kindness from female socialisation has weakened us as a class.

I think it's also important to remember that few women would even recognise throwing other women under the bus for "acceptable feminism."

I know that I was abused, and when I was safe, I sought out therapy. It was that work with my therapist that allowed me to see just how bad it was. When she first mentioned that I was made to constantly question my reality, that sounded absolutely absurd. To cut a long story short, with her help, I ended up realising that I didn't just "need a little support," I had CPTSD and the abuse was horrendous.

Going through that shifted my perspective about feminism. Patriarchy and female oppression is that abuse, but on a global scale and spread across every woman in different ways.

The reason that I mention all that is that abuse survivors sometimes can't see the abuse that they're going through. They don't even register that they're avoiding words or phrases. They might not even recognise how much of their perspective has been deliberately warped by their abuser(s). It might not even occur to them that putting themselves first is even an option.

When that's scaled up and made much more subtle, and the patriarchy works to whisper more manipulation, it's not a surprise that there are a fair number of women who are trapped by "be kind!"

Feminism is only kind to women. We can choose or not to be compassionate and supportive of men, but the point of feminism is to be technically unkind by taking away things that men have felt entitled to for so long. It's not a surprise that the patriarchy is obsessed with ensuring that we know that we're supposed to be the kind ones.

The greatest trick of the patriarchy was to teach countless generations of women to be kind.

We can talk about statistics all day long, but the weaponisation of our compassion is what keeps us on our knees.

When we see studies about violence, the immediate reaction is but men can be victims, too, and examples like that are why the false ideas of the patriarchy hurts men, too and feminism is for everybody are so prevalent. Women have been so broken down by generations upon generations of manipulation through be kind that is feels wrong, that it feels psychologically painful to centre ourselves.

Instead of women being able to come together and fight for our rights as one, this malicious forced compassion makes us sideline and silence ourselves, with the reward being tricked into feeling like I'm a good and selfless person. When women dare to centre ourselves and put ourselves first reasonably, then we're gaslit into believing that we're being selfish, cruel and even violent, and when other women snap and snarl, tired of our treatment, then they're entirely dismissed as being any modern version of hysteric.

Men like to hide behind the idea that we're the manipulative ones that psychologically damage, but without a thousand generations of men reinforcing that we should think again and actually have kindness and compassion for others, women as a whole would be able to see through the blinders of oppression.

After all, to be anti-prostitution has been reframed as hating sex workers.

Fighting against systemic violence and rape against women is ignoring male victims and supporting female perpetrators.

Protecting female-only spaces is excluding a vulnerable minority's right to exist.

Few ordinary women want to be made to feel like they're hateful or cruel. As soon as we talk about women's issues, examples of individual men are brought up, and women are tricked into talking about them by either proving how kind we are ("of course I don't want anyone to be raped, male victims deserve help!") to distract us from our issues and re-centre men again, or women dismiss that obviously malicious call for compassion ("feminism isn't about men, sort your own issues out!") and then men use it as a reason as to why feminism is evil, because anything without kindness and compassion is wrong.

Women need to be taught that it's not unkind to put ourselves first, and that men use our compassion against us.

In feminism, our kindness and compassion must be reserved for our fellow women.

Women can be kind and compassionate to men in their private lives if they want, but that isn't part of feminism - and they need to be reminded that they won't get that kindness and compassion returned.

Like Velvet...

Bristol, Vermont

Weird question but since you're bi and not dating men, do you still allow yourself to fancy them?

Absolutely! I feel zero guilt for feelings of attraction. I spent way too long feeling awful for being bisexual to play that game. If I see a man I find attractive, I enjoy the sight. I don’t pursue relationships with men because of the risks related to domestic relationships with them, but if a hot guy is in a movie? If I see an attractive man at the park? I don’t try and police the natural attraction I feel. Nor do I feel guilty.

Same with women. I no longer torture myself for seeing a beautiful woman and feeling attracted to her. It’s not automatically predatory or objectifying to just feel my feelings. Nor is it a betrayal of my politics or lifestyle to feel attraction to men.

It bears stating from the onset that feminism is a broad church. There are splits and schisms within it, usually pertaining to what constitutes useful, meaningful action towards women's liberation. It is, however, to put the cart before the horse to start by placing into these furrows. One does not have to be a feminist to become one of the 'hounded', though to be feminist at all arguably requires agreement with the trio of Core Beliefs that follow. For the sake of both clarity and brevity, these three Core Beliefs are identifiable as the beliefs that are at question when a woman – feminist or not – is targeted for opprobrium in the gender wars.

Core Belief 1: Women are materially definable as a class of human being. That means that the category definition of 'woman' describes those humans who are adult and female. The only criterion for being a woman is to be a female girl who survives into adulthood. No other criteria are necessary: no personality traits, no interests, no adornment or style of dress, no mandatory life choice must flow from this definition. This is the realm of category definitions and not value judgements.

Core Belief 2: Women (as adult female humans), are culturally, legislatively and politically important, with their own sets of needs, rights and concerns. On the basis of being female, such women assert the need in particular for female-only spaces, sports, and other services on the basis of privacy, dignity and/or safety – or, simply, in recognition that equality and social justice cannot be achieved where males and females are included together with competing interests in whatever space is under discussion.

Core Belief 3: Where social, cultural or legislative trends are under way – ones that may diminish women's rights and/or liberation – then women have a right to meet and discuss freely that which affects their lives profoundly. As such, when women's events are protested disproportionately via attempts to shut them down or to intimidate attendees, the women involved will respond with even more rigorous calls for debate and reassertion of their right to freedom of speech and assembly.

– Jenny Lindsay (2024) Hounded: Women, Harms and the Gender Wars, pp. 1-2.