imperatorsapphiosa:

meganphntmgrl:

notpitifulchildren:

meganphntmgrl:

there’s this bizarre and specific way radfems manage to talk about even stuff that really is genuine sexist bullshit that still sends up red flags. it’s hard to directly pinpoint but a lot of it seems to center around

• a super-severe tone that’s heavy on very formal-sounding adjectives for emphasis (”utterly failed” instead of just failed, for example)
• referring to women as women but men as “males” (hint: given how many radfems are specifically terfs, this is a dogwhistle for their considering trans women “males” too)
• really bizarre leaps to the worst possible conclusions rather than addressing smaller microaggressions (like jumping from “isn’t it shitty that body types go in and out of fashion and literally nobody can keep up with that?” to “WHY ARE WOMEN SUPPOSED TO JUST MUTILATE OURSELVES EVERY FIVE YEARS WITH PLASTIC SURGERY????”)
• framing fucking everything about standard feminine presentation as hindering, expensive and borderline bodily harm/mutilation (all the way up to things like flat sandals, loose dresses and long hair) rather than just unfair things to expect everybody to want 
• generally framing womanhood as a miserable horror of an existence with no upsides except being smug about not being a man (distinct from “I hate being treated like this just because I’m a woman” type stuff)

they’re not the only ones who ever use these methods (though I think there’s a kind of trickle-down dissemination of it originating there) but if I see a post that includes basically any of these I end up checking the writer’s blog and I think I’ve only ever been wrong like once or twice out of probably dozens of times.

Others I’ve noticed that tend to work in tandem with the above points

• Consensus on there being one Universal Experience Of Womanhood Which Is Traumatic In One Specific Way (ie, suggesting all women face the exact same appearance-based pressures, sexual based pressures, are viewed and treated the same way by men) that utterly discounts factors like race, class, and culture et cetera because, I dunno, useless Margaret Atwood “male fantasies” quote
• Kind of goes with the extreme language/catastrophizing above but failing to properly use the word ‘violence’ - referring to things that are literally Not Violence as violence, the phrase ‘male violence’ which at once plays into Men As Inherently Pathologically Bad, erasing victims of women, and being a TERF dogwhistle to demonize trans women 
• Dismissing genuine mental illness symptoms as Just What Being A Girl Is Like (kind of goes with the womanhood is inherently traumatic bit) - this is like the faux-progressive cousin to dismissing young people with symptoms as Just Teenage Angst, with a lot of it even going so far as to describe things like dissociation/depersonalization or full-on agoraphobia as a natural result of existing as a woman in a sexist society and a universal experience

There’s also the whole thing with exaggerating genuine results of being exposed to sexist social programming into inherent trauma rather than a higher risk of it, which is part of the whole assumed universal experience thing.

For example, I’ve personally never felt like I have to, as a woman, be small and soft and quiet. I’ve always been aware that there are loads of people who think women need to be small and soft and quiet, but I’ve never actually felt like I need to fulfill that to have value. Calling the awareness of that shitty expectation without actual compulsions to meet it “trauma” seems, if anything, extraordinarily dismissive of the genuine trauma of women who have been abused into basing their selfhood around that.

(Ironically, terfs are also real fond of usernames that evoke being small, soft and quiet as a transphobic dogwhistle for “true womanhood”. We’ve reached a phase where they basically seem to come in two primary username flavors- BigBadRadAndMad or SoftPeachyDarling or whatever.)

Non-transfeminine people: please read this, and then read it again, so you know how to avoid terfy posts.