“If gender is inherently detrimental as the radical feminists maintain and if trans identification occurs in part because gender is rigidly interpreted and represented through normative modalities of behaving, then there will be unceasing dissonance between these two groups.”

— Julian Vigo, “The Left Hand of Darkness”

Following up on last night’s post, “Mental Illness and Radical Feminism,” I arrived at a feminist blog that rejects capitalization:

this is what our oppression consists of and what it is. men get to name it (sex, fucking, knocked up, mother, father) men get to execute it (intercourse, impregnation) and men get to enforce it (rape, heteronormativity, marriage, and legal remedies and lack thereof for sexual and reproductive offenses). note that i am considering rape to be the violent enforcement by men of womens sex role as fuckholes and breeders.

Well, OK, then. Notice the sequence “rape, heteronormativity, marriage” that radical feminism views as equally forms of oppression, assigning women to a “sex role as fuckholes and breeders.” This particular blog, by the way, has an entire category about “PIV” (penis-in-vagina) which is what “heteronormativity” is all about, eh?

By the time a feminist reaches the radical point at which normal sexual intercourse is regarded as inherently oppressive, she has already marched a good distance down the Crazyville Road. Sane, normal people become the Enemy and, in order to maintain her delusions, the feminist seeks out the company of her fellow radicals, who share and confirm these extreme beliefs. The maladjusted thereby exile themselves to a sort of voluntary asylum, where they only encounter lunatics like themselves.

So, RadFem 2013 was a conference in London, which resulted in a gigantic controversy because radical feminists insisted on excluding the “transgendered” from their female-only event, and one of the featured speakers, Australian lesbian feminist Professor Sheila Jeffreys, was about to publish a new book, Gender Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism, that was deeply offensive to the “T” people represented in the LGBT acronym.

How crazy did that conflict become? At one point in April, the venue tried to cancel the event after discovering that “certain language was used and some statements were made about transgender people that would go against our equalities and diversity policy.” Another RadFem conference organizer, Cathy Brennan of Baltimore, was meanwhile all over Twitter announcing “transwomen are men” and comparing them to MRAs (men’s rights advocates). Brennan’s outspoken hostility to transgenders led her to take legal action against a transgender activist:

A Twitter message about spitting led Towson lawyer and lesbian advocate Cathy Brennan to file for a peace order against a transgender advocate.

Phylicia Sampson, a 28-year-old Baltimore resident, and Brennan, 42, were engaged in a heated debate on the social media site when Sampson wrote that she wanted to spit in Brennan’s face.

Baltimore County Distict Court Judge Barbara Jung ordered Sampson to stay away from Brennan’s home and place of employment, and to cease contact, according to the peace order. . . .

Brennan, a former member of the Boards of the Gay and Lesbian Community Center of Baltimore, said she has been a gay activist since 1995, but is of the opinion that transgendered women are male and should not have access to “female spaces.” . . .

Brennan said she met Sampson, a graduate student, through mutual friends in fall 2011, and had invited her into her home on several occassions.

“At some point, we came to a fork in the road because she believes transwomen are women,” she said.

Brennan said Sampson had been sending her a slew of aggressive messages and continued to do so even after Brennan asked her to end their communications.

“I’m afraid of this person at this point,” said Brennan, who added that she has received several death threats for her stance. “I take [threats] very seriously.”

The Competitive Victimhood Derby is ultimately a zero-sum game, you see. There can only be one winner, and the transgender claim to equal victimhood is rejected by radical feminists, who view this as an attempt to usurp their own categorical claim.

It’s like a traffic jam on the Crazyville Road, where two politicized groups of wackjobs are compelled by the implicit logic of their arguments to fight each other for supremacy. Therefore, “equality” as codified by British law is oppressive:

How have men/queers/transactivists been so successful at shutting down female-only space? It stems back to the slow, evolving, way the debate about “equalities” cancels out women’s oppression in favour of “gender-based” oppression. . . . By calling it “gender-based” violence, there is political space to deny the structural power men have over women and claim that violence comes from all individuals, equally.

As radical feminists, we know that the true source of women’s oppression, and other oppressions, are embedded in the institutions, systems and structures of society and that this, together with cultural norms, creates “patriarchy”.

Patriarchy is never going to acknowledge that oppression is enshrined in the very fabric of society. The myth of the state, as a neutral arbitrator, supporting the rights of equally competing interests/groups within society, props up that fabric. . . .

Unsurprising then that the Equality Act 2010 has been used with such relish by male extremist groups and queer/transactivists to try and stop radical feminists naming our truths.

Transgender activists are actually part of the patriarchy! Somehow, they prevent radical feminists from naming their truths!

Crazy? Sure. But you only reach this kind of radical insanity by passing every exit along your journey down the Crazyville Road.

Do not for a moment doubt what “truths” were named at RadFem 2013:

Sheila Jeffreys then went on to discuss compulsory heterosexuality and lesbian feminism. She noted that it was very strange that so many women in this modern resurgence of feminism are not becoming lesbians as they did in the second wave, despite the horrific tidal wave of male violence and creepy male sexuality that is even more visible culturally. Some reasons she thought this might be were that mixed-space organizing was dulling women’s revolutionary impulses.

The fight for “female-only space” is necessary to radical feminism because only within such space can “women’s revolutionary impulses” lead them to becoming lesbians, as all feminists should be.

They are all about “transcending the norms of gender,” you see.

Men are obsolete, and nobody’s fixing sandwiches for us anymore.

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