Last week, I had a comment of mine deleted from /r/feminisms by a moderator. Someone had posted a link to several blog posts by Natalie Reed of Freethought blogs about transfeminism. Several commenters showed up who appeared to be “TERFS” (Trans* Exclusionary Radical Feminists). They suggested the ridiculous and bigoted notion that trans* women are trying to usurp feminism.

The discussion also touched on the following tweets by Julia Serano:

I am a sex-positive feminist who is pro-contraception, pro-choice, and fiercely defends women’s reproductive rights and bodily autonomy…. — Julia Serano (@JuliaSerano) March 3, 2012

…but I have to say that as an infertile woman, all this contraception-centric feminism over the last month has been alienating for me… — Julia Serano (@JuliaSerano) March 3, 2012

Rather than seeing Serano as calling for inclusion, they saw her words as an attack on feminism itself. It strikes me as sadly ironic that they cannot see their vitriol toward trans* women as being comparable to the racism and homophobia of feminisms past.

In response to a comment that:

I responded:

She called me “disingenuous.” And then my comment was deleted. Because:

I replied that I was extremely disappointed to see /r/feminisms so friendly with trans* exclusionary radicals.

Yellowmix, the moderator, said I was being “antifeminist.”

I contacted her in private message and offered to revise my comment to get rid of the part where I said the that other commenter was “angry” if she really cared that much about not having tone arguments. She replied that I would also have to remove the terms “TERF,” “fade into obscurity,” and “join the 21st century” because they were “marginalizing.”

In saying that the other commenter was an “angry TERF,” was I making a tone argument? I don’t think I was. My favorite definition of what a tone argument is comes from The Unapologetic Mexican but there are other good ones too. A tone argument is when you stick your fingers in your ears and saying “LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU WHEN YOU ARE SO MAD. MAYBE IF YOU WERE NICE TO ME I’D GIVE YOU WHAT YOU WANT” to a person who is righteously angry about their own oppression. Generally, there’s also a power differential, and the person making the tone argument is privileged as to not experience the harms the less privileged person is speaking out about. That was not the case here. I was saying that if you want to be exclusionary, you will be passed by. Feminism is a big tent, and must be so. She could still keep her righteous anger at the patriarchy, at anti-choicers, at people or institutions standing between her and her rights. The problem is her misidentification of trans* women in general and Julia Serano specifically as being somehow responsible for her oppression as a woman. Serano said she felt alienated by the current discourse. That is in no way a threat to anyone’s rights.

There is also the matter of how to interpret people who are punching down instead of punching up. That is, whether or not the person you are attacking as more or less privilege than you do. It would be unreasonable for someone to say that referring a group of racists as “Angry White Men” is making a tone argument. When I made the comments I did, I wasn’t making a sexist claim that anger isn’t ever appropriate for women or denying that there are legitimate reasons for feminists to be angry. I was making an argument that her energies would be better spent elsewhere, and that her position that trans* women are a threat to feminism is blatantly false, complicit in the greater harms of transphobia, and has no place in the future of the movement.

Finally, I want to emphasize that the reason I wrote this post was because I want to draw attention to questionable moderating policies on /r/feminisms, and to explain the comments I made that were deleted. I’m thinking a lot about what Natalie Reed wrote about the difference between call-out culture and genuine discourse:

I think I fell short of this standard. I didn’t resort to name calling or slurs, and I wasn’t trying to show off. But I probably could have been more patient.