Amnesty centers trans rights on International Women’s Day.

Trans rights are women’s rights are human rights. It’s that simple.

No. Women’s rights are women’s rights. We get to have our own rights, and we get to keep the emphasis there just like any other subordinated group. Imagine a poster that shouted

TRANS RIGHTS

ARE

BLACK RIGHTS

ARE

HUMAN RIGHTS

Wouldn’t that seem like the usual clueless white people changing the subject problem? Wouldn’t it seem like an obnoxious intrusion into someone else’s struggle in order to talk about a different struggle that is more fashionable right now?

Women’s rights are women’s rights. Trans people have other concerns, and they don’t always overlap with women’s concerns, to put it mildly. … Read the rest

Meghan Murphy is doing a talk at the Vancouver Public Library in January.

So, naturally…this:

Statement regarding Feminist Current Event

This is not a VPL endorsed event. It is a room rental. While we don’t agree with the views of Feminist Current, we are committed to upholding free speech and intellectual freedom.

Statement here: https://t.co/iRh6YrTwyw pic.twitter.com/L1947xj1Vf

— Vancouver Public Library (@VPL) November 28, 2018

Let’s read the statement:

Vancouver Public Library (VPL) is aware of concerns that have been expressed regarding an event with speaker Meghan Murphy scheduled for January 10th at the Vancouver Public Library.

VPL is not endorsing, or hosting this event; it is a rental of our public space. VPL has zero tolerance for discrimination and

Originally a comment by iknklast on Those theorists whose lives are most directly affected.

I hate the idea of no longer calling myself a feminist, but I also hate the idea of being associated with this brand of repressive ideology. Maybe we just need to invent a term that can let people know we stand for equality without having to take on all this baggage.

I am also white and feminist; I suffered my entire life (and still do) from the whims of people who believe that gender is essential, and that I therefore am some sort of grotesque mutant who isn’t a woman at all – but not a man, either, because reasons. As a teenager, I was … Read the rest

Originally a comment by Myrhinme on Those theorists whose lives are most directly affected.

I recently decided to stop identifying as a feminist. This was a big decision for me but the recent developments in feminism have bothered me too much. There was a time that I would have said that any woman (and even any man) who supports equality is a feminist. I was puzzled when I heard women who often talked about equality saying that they were not feminists. I assumed it was because of negative stereotypes.

In recent years, feminism has become fashionable and I was glad to see young women becoming engaged. I still am glad that young women want to stand up against sexual … Read the rest

Hey, what do you know, feminism is no longer a movement for the liberation of women, it’s a movement for the liberation of everyone. All lives matter.

At least that’s according to this genius. She explains that there are two kinds of feminism, one of which is the boring dreary old historical kind that was about the liberation of women, and the other of which is the hot new kind that’s so much better than that.

There’s also another way that “feminism” is used and that’s to refer to a broader movement. So “feminism” might also refer to what we do here at Everyday Feminism: the fight to end all kinds of oppression. So this may or may

Originally a comment by tiggerthewing on The limits of internal self-perception as the sole arbiter of truth.

I agree that the the Baby Boomers as a demographic is a pretty useless classification – especially if they extend the label up to 1964.

I was born in 1957 – late enough that I never had to risk polio (the vaccine was already available) but early enough that I had to suffer most other so-called ‘childhood diseases’. Late enough that I was vaccinated against tuberculosis; and with a father young enough that his life was saved by antibiotics when he caught TB in his teens; but old enough that his mother died of TB a couple of years earlier. Early enough that … Read the rest

Jindi Mehat at Feminist Current on liberal (what in the US would be called libertarian) feminism.

She started out as a libertarian feminist herself.

For me, then, and for liberal feminists today, the individual is queen. Any choice a woman makes is, by definition, a feminist choice because choosing is a feminist act. Even choices like pandering to the male gaze or self-objectifying must be applauded. As a result, I often engaged in decidedly unfeminist behaviour while uncritically wrapping myself in a comfortingly progressive label.

The other really important word for this view is “agency.” If you question the “choices” of other women, you’re denying their “agency,” which is “paternalistic,” and thus the opposite of feminism.

It’s a … Read the rest

Meghan Murphy last June: The sex industry’s attack on feminists.

Pornographers have long defended the products and practices of their extremely profitable industry as “free speech,” even as they sexualize male power and violence against women. Similarly, defenders of prostitution, which they strategically call “sex work,” frame the movement for its legalization and normalization as liberatory.

But they don’t want free speech for their critics. Last March

a number of prostitution lobby groups threatened to boycott a conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, that had secured the renowned journalist and Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges as a keynote speaker. Because Hedges had written an articlecalling prostitution “the quintessential expression of global capitalism,” these groups attempted to no-platform Hedges and would

A reader has been asking me about the second and third waves of feminism, and my energetic agreement with Meghan Murphy’s rebuke of knee-jerk disdain for the second wave. The reader was wondering about my insistence that the third wave did not invent intersectionality, because he had read in many places that it had – that is, that 2 wave just didn’t know from intersectionality until 3 wave came along.

Nope. 2 wave was aware of the issue of being too white and middle class all along. There were huge arguments and splits over the issue all along. There were huge arguments over lesbians’ place in the movement all along.

That’s not to say that 2 wave was brilliant at … Read the rest

Meghan Murphy has a sockdolager of a piece explaining that no feminism isn’t anything and everything but rather is something particular and substantive, so no you’re not a feminist just because you wear stilettos or have a platinum card. She offers 9 items that actually do make you a feminist, a better feminist than people who lack them.

First is being a woman.

There are male feminists of course, and since we need all the feminists we can get, maybe especially among men, I think it’s important to emphasize that, but her point is that men don’t fully get the female experience.

2) Understanding that feminism is not a feeling or an identity, but a political movement

And a set … Read the rest

Josh Spokes just reminded me that Twisty Faster exists and we should all be reading her.

On the performance of femininity for instance.

Author Kat George’s article is titled “Six Things That Definitely Don’t Make You a Bad Feminist.” Like everything published on the internet these days, it is a list.

The gist of her list is that performance of femininity does not conflict with feminist activism. It includes permission for feminists to change their name when they get married, to get waxed, and to let dudes pick up the tab.

The revolution has succeeded at last! All the problems are now solved. Just call everything “feminist” and see the waxy yellow buildup disappear.

But see here: if feminists who