You know what? There's a lot to unpack just there, so I need to start earlier.
"Who ordered the SWERF & TERF?" See, the lobster is for trans folks,
and the steak is for misogyny-laden metaphors. (Image from Wikipedia.)
and the steak is for misogyny-laden metaphors. (Image from Wikipedia.)
A bullet list of links will go here when I'm reasonably into this (looks like we've got Trans Thursdays going, which really makes me wish I'd chosen Tuesdays instead), but for now just know that a general introduction is below the cut.
We'll take a quick walk over what I'm doing with this series and why, then a 30,000-foot overview of feminism's history.
The What and the Why
Today I'll be focusing on some history and context. Throughout this series, I will be doing a lot of linking to, and summarizing of, Cristan Williams, author of TransAdvocate and The TERFS. "Why do this at all, if you're just going to be cribbing from another trans woman," you may well ask. Because, while the information is all out there for anyone to find, it's often steeped in discourse & rhetoric that is well beyond an introductory level, and my aim here is primarily to summarize and break down for a lay audience who doesn't feel like Googling jargon every third line. Not a knock against Williams or any other jargon-heavy site, I just have a different aim and audience: this is for people my age, with careers and families, who haven't made a gay slur since high school, but who don't know a lot about trans issues, and who could use an accessible and curse-laden Fucking Short Version (link unrelated).
External links are mostly for further reading, as lots of what I'll say has a great deal to unpack if you don't want to take my word for it. This is a step up from a Twitter thread on the bare facts of right and wrong in the matter, meant to explain a little and point to more if the little explanation doesn't make enough sense on its own.
Feminism: A Way-Too-Short History
There have been three or four waves of feminism, going back 200 to 500 years, depending on who you ask. The first wave of feminism was mostly about legal matters, like the right to vote, all through the 19th & early-to-mid 20th century. The second wave of feminism, in the mid-to-late 20th century, moved beyond the de jure sexism that was the first wave's focus to the de facto sexism that would come to be a strong focus in subsequent waves (and this is also when we get numbering of the waves per se). While the following elements do not characterize the whole of second wave feminism, this is where we get lesbian separatists, matriarchalists & female supremacists, the "all het sex acts are rape" & "all men are rapists" bullshit, and most of the other fuckery that 21st century anti-feminists are still reacting against. But this is also where we get a focus on workplace issues, reproductive rights (most visibly Roe), a notable concurrence with the sexual revolution (with concomitant evolution of sexuality discourse, including marital rape), Title IX and no-fault divorce, and so on. So the second wave was a mixed bag, as are most things.
In short, the second wave of feminism both informs and haunts today's discourse. Many of the issues, and the discourse surrounding them, are still highly relevant today; backlash against the progress of this wave has never really died down in large areas of America; and many of this wave's mistakes are still held against feminists of today. A serviceable oversimplification would be that the first wave identified laws as the problem, the second wave (partly) identified men as the problem, and the third wave identified patriarchy as the problem. I tend to focus on the anti-male sentiment when discussing the second wave because, for a lot of people, that's where the focus still is: while most second-wavers came along to the third wave, many stayed behind, and every MRA I've been able to press for specific, sourced, feminist positions they oppose winds up quoting second-wavers (admittedly, this is the half-dozen MRAs whom I happen know personally and so there's certainly some selection bias at work).
This brings us to the third wave of feminism, from the 90s to today, when we figured out that patriarchy is bad for everyone and started talking about intersectionality. "Intersectional feminism" is the idea that, hey, different mechanisms of oppression can overlap (or "intersect") in unique ways, compounding the oppression experienced by different groups. For example: gay folks face oppression for being gay, African-Americans face oppression for being African-American, and women face oppression for being women; but gay African-American women face those obstacles cumulatively and in a unique way due to their intersection. There was also a realization that the previous two waves of feminism focused pretty much exclusively on the concerns of white women, which means that in hindsight even the first wave was a bit of a mixed bag. This is where we get "feminism is for everybody," "patriarchy is harmful to men even though it doesn't oppress them as men," and other more inclusive ideas that essentially make feminism into the "equalitarianism" that equalitarians say they want (at least, the handful with whom I have personally spoken).
The ideas of third-wave feminism are still penetrating the zeitgeist, so I'm hesitant to say that a fourth wave is even possible at this point - but some disagree with me, positing a fourth wave of feminism either as a mega-list of "it's 2018 and we still x" memes, or as a transphobic reaction to the relatively rapid mainstreaming of trans folks, depending on who you ask.
I can't stress enough how inadequate this three-paragraph history is, but if you didn't know what the waves of feminism were when you woke up this morning, then this is a quick & dirty improvement on that. I think that's enough outta me for now, so next time we'll pick up with trans women in the movement and the ongoing split that led to the coining of the term "TERF."
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