Because that is the gender people generally tidy me into, not because it is one I feel comfortable in. If I could edit my physical self so that I could always feel comfortable I would, but I can’t.
I’m trapped and it sucks.
I pass through the world perceived as a woman, and so materially I am one, I guess. It sucks though, beyond just the suckiness of dealing with misogyny.
If your Marxist-feminism claims that trans women prevent the material analysis of the condition of women, you don’t understand the material conditions of womanhood. Like materially they experience the oppression of womanhood. If you look at statistics, if you look at the way the labor expected of them changes you see that trans women materially experience womanhood.
Is whether she’s been to college.
Maybe it’s not something most women identify as cause most women haven’t been to college.
Just sayin’
It’s a form of emotional labor I think a lot of men don’t understand, because it’s not a faked interest. It’s more that women are taught how to find things to be interested about in stuff people around us are interested in. Like how to see what they like about it, or find aspects of it that interest us, and do the emotional work of making it one of our interests and like it’s a genuine interest, not a fake one but it involves emotional labor.
And like I see a lot of dudes whose female partners and friends take an interest in their interests but they don’t return the favor and so all they talk about is the stuff that was initially the dude’s interest.
So like, dudes, take an interest in the interests of the women around you. Try to figure out what appeals to them about it. Try and see aspects of it that might interest you. Learn to take an interest in the interests of people you care about.
Freedom you have to purchase isn’t freedom
It is up to those of us with privilege to stop drinking from the poisoned chalice that gives us some small advantage over the rest of our class, at the expense of dividing us from our comrades, at the expense of the real power which we can only build when we come together. We cannot come together as a class while working class women are told by their comrades to accept violence and inferior status for the sake of revolution, to show solidarity with those who ill treat us for the sake of revolution. We cannot come together as a class standing on the backs of our black and brown comrades. We cannot come together as a class if we treat our gay, lesbian, bisexual, and so on comrades as deviants or tokens. We cannot come together as a class if our transgender comrades are denied the right to take a fucking piss safely. We cannot come together as a class if our spaces are inaccessible to our disabled comrades.
You want working class solidarity? You want the revolution? Show that solidarity to your women comrades, your comrades of color, your LGBTQ comrades, your disabled comrades, show us that you will fight for us and not just yourself and we will fight at your side. Show it through your actions and not through empty words.
We can only have real solidarity when we stand beside our comrades and not above them.
or it won’t actually do anything to further the cause of the liberation of women.
Assume that the blonde, fake boobed bits of fluff with which they equip attractive male criminals (who lady detectives swoon over) are stupider, sillier, and less brutal than their male counterparts, I also love how they make them meaningless accessories to their “golden hearted gangsters” like somehow their toughness, and willingness to do what it takes to survive or to escape a hellish background is to be censured where on a man who actually kills and intimidates people it’s vaguely admirable.
Gross. Bougie bitches wanting tough scary prole dudes and trying to throw prole women under the bus are gross.
So women who aren’t cis, white, respectable bougie straight and so on, are ironically placed in the position of being oppressed by the patriarchal authority of women who are allowed the “true woman” label (also like each axis privilege allows you some patriarchal authority, like a white working class woman can use a measure of patriarchal force against a black working class woman cause yeah).
So like women who don’t have the benefit of “proper womanhood” are placed in the position of women under women who do, and so like bougie white cis abled straight “respectable” women enact a kind of double patriarchy on all other women I think.
Also I think oppression is exponential rather than simply additional (like being a disabled woman is more shitty than merely the sum of oppressed identities)
Also I think bourgeois women have a kind of patriarchal power over prole women on top of the class thing, and white women over WOC and so on.
Like bourgeois women feel entitled to regulate our reproduction, and sexuality. Feel they have the right to comment on and criticize our appearances. They feel entitled to us sexually (the way bougie female strip club patrons treat the dancers, also like the way bougie women will appropriate prole women’s, especially sex workers’, style of dress for a naughty thrill or to be daring,) and like also how they go to high powered jobs or skip off to spin class and leave domestic and often emotional labor to us.
For examples see:
The rise in demand for domestic labor as bougie women entered the workforce
The fact that all the modern hair removal women do started with sex workers (I don’t have a source but the modern trend for removing your pubic hair started with sex workers too)
a bunch of other stuff I’m not going to look at right now because I need a bath and to find my glasses
Also like how even straight white women will use black women as sexual props and toys (hey Miley, hey Iggy) as mentioned in the essay I linked to right there (also in the post before this because it’s that fucking good) and like WOC have written better stuff on this than me. OH also Laurell K. Hamilton’s orientalist submissive lotus blossom bullshit (google it or maybe don’t it’s depressing here’s a link and another).
Also like straight women using sga women as experiments and props and so on and so forth but like mostly I wanted to talk about the class thing because other people have written better on the other stuff.
Thoughts From The Peacock Angel 