Gender Essentialism - Tumblr Posts

Interview With An Ex-Radfem

exradfem is an anonymous Tumblr user who identifies as transmasculine, and previously spent time in radical feminist communities. They have offered their insight into those communities using their own experiences and memories as a firsthand resource.

Background

I was raised in an incredibly fundamentalist religion, and so was predisposed to falling for cult rhetoric. Naturally, I was kicked out for being a lesbian. I was taken in by the queer community, particularly the trans community, and I got back on my feet- somehow. I had a large group of queer friends, and loved it. I fully went in on being the Best Trans Ally Possible, and constantly tried to be a part of activism and discourse.

Unfortunately, I was undersocialized, undereducated, and overenthusiastic. I didn't fully understand queer or gender theory. In my world, when my parents told me my sexuality was a choice and I wasn't born that way, they were absolutely being homophobic. I understood that no one should care if it's a choice or not, but it was still incredibly, vitally important to me that I was born that way.

On top of that, I already had an intense distrust of men bred by a lot of trauma. That distrust bred a lot of gender essentialism that I couldn't pull out of the gender binary. I felt like it was fundamentally true that men were the problem, and that women were inherently more trustworthy. And I really didn't know where nonbinary people fit in.

Then I got sucked down the ace exclusionist pipeline; the way the arguments were framed made sense to my really surface-level, liberal view of politics. This had me primed to exclude people –– to feel like only those that had been oppressed exactly like me were my community.

Then I realized I was attracted to my nonbinary friend. I immediately felt super guilty that I was seeing them as a woman. I started doing some googling (helped along by ace exclusionists on Tumblr) and found the lesfem community, which is basically radfem “lite”: lesbians who are "only same sex attracted". This made sense to me, and it made me feel so much less guilty for being attracted to my friend; it was packaged as "this is just our inherent, biological desire that is completely uncontrollable". It didn't challenge my status quo, it made me feel less guilty about being a lesbian, and it allowed me to have a "biological" reason for rejecting men.

I don't know how much dysphoria was playing into this, and it's something I will probably never know; all of this is just piecing together jumbled memories and trying to connect dots. I know at the time I couldn't connect to this trans narrative of "feeling like a woman". I couldn't understand what trans women were feeling. This briefly made me question whether I was nonbinary, but radfem ideas had already started seeping into my head and I'm sure I was using them to repress that dysphoria. That's all I can remember.

The lesfem community seeded gender critical ideas and larger radfem princples, including gender socialization, gender as completely meaningless, oppression as based on sex, and lesbian separatism. It made so much innate sense to me, and I didn't realize that was because I was conditioned by the far right from the moment of my birth. Of course women were just a biological class obligated to raise children: that is how I always saw myself, and I always wanted to escape it.

I tried to stay in the realms of TIRF (Trans-Inclusive Radical Feminist) and "gender critical" spaces, because I couldn't take the vitriol on so many TERF blogs. It took so long for me to get to the point where I began seeing open and unveiled transphobia, and I had already read so much and bought into so much of it that I thought that I could just ignore those parts.

In that sense, it was absolutely a pipeline for me. I thought I could find a "middle ground", where I could "center women" without being transphobic.

Slowly, I realized that the transphobia was just more and more disgustingly pervasive. Some of the trans men and butch women I looked up to left the groups, and it was mostly just a bunch of nasty people left. So I left.

After two years offline, I started to recognize I was never going to be a healthy person without dealing with my dysphoria, and I made my way back onto Tumblr over the pandemic. I have realized I'm trans, and so much of this makes so much more sense now. I now see how I was basically using gender essentialism to repress my identity and keep myself in the closet, how it was genuinely weaponized by TERFs to keep me there, and how the ace exclusionist movement primed me into accepting lesbian separatism- and, finally, radical feminism.

The Interview

You mentioned the lesfem community, gender criticals, and TIRFs, which I haven't heard about before- would you mind elaborating on what those are, and what kinds of beliefs they hold?

I think the lesfem community is recruitment for lesbians into the TERF community. Everything is very sanitized and "reasonable", and there's an effort not to say anything bad about trans women. The main focus was that lesbian = homosexual female, and you can't be attracted to gender, because you can't know someone's gender before knowing them; only their sex.

It seemed logical at the time, thinking about sex as something impermeable and gender as internal identity. The most talk about trans women I saw initially was just in reference to the cotton ceiling, how sexual orientation is a permanent and unchangeable reality. Otherwise, the focus was homophobia. This appealed to me, as I was really clinging to the "born this way" narrative.

This ended up being a gateway to two split camps - TIRFs and gender crits.

I definitely liked to read TIRF stuff, mostly because I didn't like the idea of radical feminism having to be transphobic. But TIRFs think that misogyny is all down to hatred of femininity, and they use that as a basis to be able to say trans women are "just as" oppressed.

Gender criticals really fought out against this, and pushed the idea that gender is fake, and misogyny is just sex-based oppression based on reproductive issues. They believe that the source of misogyny is the "male need to control the source of reproduction"- which is what finally made me think I had found the "source" of my confusion. That's why I ended up in gender critical circles instead of TIRF circles.

I'm glad, honestly, because the mask-off transphobia is what made me finally see the light. I wouldn't have seen that in TIRF communities.

I believed this in-between idea, that misogyny was "sex-based oppression" and that transphobia was also real and horrible, but only based on transition, and therefore a completely different thing. I felt that this was the "nuanced" position to take.

The lesfem community also used the fact that a lot of lesbians have partners who transition, still stay with their lesbian partners, and see themselves as lesbian- and that a lot of trans men still see themselves as lesbians. That idea is very taboo and talked down in liberal queer spaces, and I had some vague feelings about it that made me angry, too. I really appreciated the frank talk of what I felt were my own taboo experiences.

I think gender critical ideology also really exploited my own dysphoria. There was a lot of talk about how "almost all butches have dysphoria and just don't talk about it", and that made me feel so much less alone and was, genuinely, a big relief to me that I "didn't have to be trans".

Lesfeminism is essentially lesbian separatism dressed up as sex education. Lesfems believe that genitals exist in two separate categories, and that not being attracted to penises is what defines lesbians. This is used to tell cis lesbians, "dont feel bad as a lesbian if you're attracted to trans men", and that they shouldn’t feel "guilty" for not being attracted to trans women. They believe that lesbianism is not defined as being attracted to women, it is defined as not being attracted to men; which is a root idea in lesbian separatism as well.

Lesfems also believe that attraction to anything other than explicit genitals is a fetish: if you're attracted to flat chests, facial hair, low voices, etc., but don't care if that person has a penis or not, you're bisexual with a fetish for masculine attributes. Essentially, they believe the “-sexual” suffix refers to the “sex” that you are assigned at birth, rather than your attraction: “homosexual” refers to two people of the same sex, etc. This was part of their pushback to the ace community, too.

I think they exploited the issues of trans men and actively ignored trans women intentionally, as a way of avoiding the “TERF” label. Pronouns were respected, and they espoused a constant stream of "trans women are women, trans men are men (but biology still exists and dictates sexual orientation)" to maintain face.

They would only be openly transmisogynistic in more private, radfem-only spaces.

For a while, I didn’t think that TERFs were real. I had read and agreed with the ideology of these "reasonable" people who others labeled as TERFs, so I felt like maybe it really was a strawman that didn't exist. I think that really helped suck me in.

It sounds from what you said like radical feminism works as a kind of funnel system, with "lesfem" being one gateway leading in, and "TIRF" and "gender crit" being branches that lesfem specifically funnels into- with TERFs at the end of the funnel. Does that sound accurate?

I think that's a great description actually!

When I was growing up, I had to go to meetings to learn how to "best spread the word of god". It was brainwashing 101: start off by building a relationship, find a common ground. Do not tell them what you really believe. Use confusing language and cute innuendos to "draw them in". Prey on their emotions by having long exhausting sermons, using music and peer pressure to manipulate them into making a commitment to the church, then BAM- hit them with the weird shit.

Obviously I am paraphrasing, but this was framed as a necessary evil to not "freak out" the outsiders.

I started to see that same talk in gender critical circles: I remember seeing something to the effect of, "lesfem and gender crit spaces exist to cleanse you of the gender ideology so you can later understand the 'real' danger of it", which really freaked me out; I realized I was in a cult again.

I definitely think it's intentional. I think they got these ideas from evangelical Christianity, and they actively use it to spread it online and target young lesbians and transmascs. And I think gender critical butch spaces are there to draw in young transmascs who hate everything about femininity and womanhood, and lesfem spaces are there to spread the idea that trans women exist as a threat to lesbianism.

Do you know if they view TIRFs a similar way- as essentially prepping people for TERF indoctrination?

Yes and no.

I've seen lots of in-fighting about TIRFs; most TERFs see them as a detriment, worse than the "TRAs" themselves. I've also definitely seen it posed as "baby's first radfeminism". A lot of TIRFs are trans women, at least from what I've seen on Tumblr, and therefore are not accepted or liked by radfems. To be completely honest, I don't think they're liked by anyone. They just hate men.

TIRFs are almost another breed altogether; I don't know if they have ties to lesfems at all, but I do think they might've spearheaded the online ace exclusionist discourse. I think a lot of them also swallowed radfem ideology without knowing what it was, and parrot it without thinking too hard about how it contradicts with other ideas they have.

The difference is TIRFs exist. They're real people with a bizarre, contradictory ideology. The lesfem community, on the other hand, is a completely manufactured "community" of crypto-terfs designed specifically to indoctrinate people into TERF ideology.

Part of my interest in TIRFs here is that they seem to have a heavy hand in the way transmascs are treated by the trans community, and if you're right that they were a big part of ace exclusionism too they've had a huge impact on queer discourse as a whole for some time. It seems likely that Baeddels came out of that movement too.

Yes, there’s a lot of overlap. The more digging I did, the more I found that it's a smaller circle running the show than it seems. TIRFs really do a lot of legwork in peddling the ideology to outer queer community, who tend to see it as generic feminism.

TERFs joke a lot about how non-radfems will repost or reblog from TERFs, adding "op is a TERF”. They're very gleeful when people accept their ideology with the mask on. They think it means these people are close to fully learning the "truth", and they see it as further evidence they have the truth the world is hiding. I think it's important to speak out against radical feminism in general, because they’re right; their ideology does seep out into the queer community.

Do you think there's any "good" radical feminism?

No. It sees women as the ultimate victim, rather than seeing gender as a tool to oppress different people differently. Radical feminism will always see men as the problem, and it is always going to do harm to men of color, gay men, trans men, disabled men, etc.

Women aren't a coherent class, and radfems are very panicked about that fact; they think it's going to be the end of us all. But what's wrong with that? That's like freaking out that white isn't a coherent group. It reveals more about you.

It's kind of the root of all exclusionism, the more I think about it, isn't it? Just freaking out that some group isn't going to be exclusive anymore.

Radical feminists believe that women are inherently better than men.

For TIRFs, it's gender essentialism. For TERFs, its bio essentialism. Both systems are fundamentally broken, and will always hurt the groups most at risk. Centering women and misogyny above all else erases the root causes of bigotry and oppression, and it erases the intersections of race and class. The idea that women are always fundamentally less threatening is very white and privileged.

It also ignores how cis women benefit from gender norms just as cis men do, and how cis men suffer from gender roles as well. It’s a system of control where gender non-conformity is a punishable offense.

never in my life did I think that toilet doors would make me so angry

with how we're all aware of how toxic masculinity leads men/boys to harass, assault, and abuse other men/boys, you'd think the fact they can be harmed by patriarchy and misogyny wouldn't be a controversial statment. *especially* marginalized men. but alas, many people have taken the "identity" in identity politics so literally, they just end up ignoring and reinforcing the harmful things they claim to be against.

also if you think the pain of the men harmed by toxic masculinity isn't a big deal because they're men... that is. that is literally you believing in toxic masculinity. like i thought we all knew part of toxic masculinity is that men shouldn't feel pain, they shouldn't cry, they can't ask for help or be truly hurt, etc. etc. and if they do any of these things, then they're not real men and not only deserve to be emasculated, but deserve to suffer. you just switched it to they are real men so they deserve to suffer.

and even though again, this is extra harmful for marginalized men, i shouldn't have to say that for you to care. if you only give support to people harmed by these systems when you think deserve it, you're always going to end up propping these systems up at some point. maybe you should stop that.

also. to any man reading this who feels like their pain doesn't matter: it does. you deserve to exist in a world where you're safe to be yourself and feel emotions, and get genuine protection and support. we all need to exist in that world. none of us deserve this hell.

Uh,if you guys are so fixated on 'Fem mc ends up with the edgy dude instead of the goody two shoes male protagonist' trope,where's all the hype around them exactly?

Or let me guess:You're gonna say they don't count because they aren't enemies to lovers or um Ackstually Hobie's an adult!!!(He's not,his age is up for interpreation as confirmed by the writers)as if y'all don't brag about loving age gaps or Hobie dosen't need to date anyone or you 'don't like their aesthetic'.Yeah,right-Y'all raved about Zuko/Katara and Bakugou/Ochako and Felix/Marinette and fucking Reylo but Gwen and Hobs are too healthy and an actual female fantasy that doubles as transfem and real interracial rep instead of steteotypical and racist bs.You guys are all about classic tropes until a black person is involved and then suddenly it's overdone or even 'gross' PLEASE you look like clowns who didn't go to your makeup lessons

radfem lite(tm) and tumblr discourse

identifying radfem dog whistles: that is, radfem ideology when it’s not obviously and blatantly transphobic or anti-sex worker

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nobody likes TERFs or SWERFs - or so we like to think, even if we don’t entirely know it means to be a terf or swerf. but the truth is that radical feminism - the overarching worldview that contains within it both TERF and SWERF ideology - is fairly widespread and even popular here on tumblr. it’s just that most of the time it’s not identified as being radfem/terf/swerf rhetoric unless the transphobia (or anti-sex-worker sentiment) is blatant and open.

this is the first of a series of posts intended to help fellow people on tumblr identify and understand what I call ‘radfem lite’ - radfem rhetoric that is not obviously transphobic or anti-sex-work, but naturally points one towards becoming a radical feminist (that is, abandoning intersectional feminism, eroding belief in free will (particularly in regards to consent), embracing binarist thinking & gender essentialism, and denying or belittling all forms of societal oppression that are not directly related to misogyny.) 

radfem lite rhetoric is frequently a ‘dog whistle’ as well - a phrase or word that has more than one meaning depending on who hears or reads it. non-radfems hear one thing; radfems and their targets hear another. those who become radfems or radfem targets eventually become familiar with the true meaning of the dog whistle word or phrase, but the majority of those who spread it have no idea what they’re really ‘saying’. 

some of the things I’ll post about will have overlap with other types of exclusionist thinking, or will have been adopted by those who aren’t radfems so widely that it might seem absurd that it has radfem roots. I’ll try to be clear about why I am attributing a concept to radical feminism when I introduce it. 

some things will also have some grain of ‘truth’ to it - the reason why the radfem lite concept seems reasonable to non-radfems. I’ll try to identify that grain of truth, and dismantle or demystify why the reasoning built around it is faulty.

Why am I doing this?

the first and most obvious reason is the number of ‘OP was a terf so I stole this post’ headers i’ve seen that are followed by a post loaded with radfem lite rhetoric. many, many people on tumblr know that terfs (and swerfs) are bad, but don’t know why or can’t identify terf rhetoric if it isn’t labeled ‘terf rhetoric’. 

but also: because radical feminist thinking - particularly the anti-porn branch, which bends into SWERF thinking - is highly appealing to fannish tumblr, and forms the basis for a lot of fandom anti-shipper thinking and arguments. I hope that seeing the radfem roots of these arguments will help those leaning into fandom anti-shipper thinking avoid falling victim to radical feminist outreach. 

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post 1 / some basics

What is radical feminism?

Radical feminism - which encompasses, among others, subgroups such as trans-(women) exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs/TWERFs), and sex-worker exclusionary radical feminists (SWERFs) - is an ideology that holds that the most important and severe axis on which oppression occurs is patriarchal social structure and its inevitable product, misogyny.

By discounting all other forms of oppression and marginalization as being of lesser or no importance, radical feminists (aka ‘radfems’) naturally conclude that those they perceive as men are unable to experience meaningful societal oppression and those they perceive as women are unable to experience meaningful societal privilege. As such:

it is impossible for a (perceived) woman to have a mutually beneficial friendship, business partnership, romance, or sexual relationship with a (perceived) man.  

Further, their perception of how oppression works is frequently concerned only with the binary sex organs one is born with (or ‘closest to’/that which was surgically created for intersex people).

The belief that a (radfem-perceived) woman cannot have a good or beneficial interaction - especially sexual interaction - with a (radfem-perceived) man, which (like misogyny) belittles and degrades the ability of women to make decisions for themselves, encourages activists to focus on modifying and correcting the behavior of perceived women rather than focusing on modifying and correcting societal inequalities caused by gender/perception of gender. This misplaced focus disproportionately harms sex workers* and/or any (perceived) woman having sex or in a line of business that radfems consider ‘degrading’ to women**.

The reduction of gender identity and experiences to sex organs alone leads to inclusion and/or exclusion of people from ‘womenhood’ based on whether radfems perceive a person as ‘born male’ or ‘born female’. This causes disproportionate harm to trans people (trans women particularly), leading not only to misgendering, but accusations of sexual assault/attempted sexual assault, (mostly directed at trans women), exclusion from gendered spaces to which they belong, and erasure.** It also harms anyone who does not identify with a binary gender by reducing their experiences to their agab, and anyone who does identify on the gender binary but does not ‘look’ sufficiently like the gender they identify with (which may include those who identify with their agab.)

(*this is because radfems believe that only people they see as women are sex workers and their only clients are people they see as men.)

(**all this potentially leading to even more severe consequences, such as being assaulted, attempting/committing suicide, or being murdered, among others. the consequences of radical feminist ideology are severe.)

Why is all radfem ideology so dangerous?

if you’re wondering ‘what’s the problem with radical feminism when a radfem isn’t a TERF or SWERF’, this is why radfem ideology as a whole is damaging and harmful to embrace:

because its ideology is, at heart, transphobic, and leads to trans people being harmed or killed or otherwise put at severe risk.

because its ideology is, at heart, anti-sex work, and leads to sex workers being harmed or killed or otherwise put at severe risk.

because its ideology is, at heart, based on the existence of a gender binary created by sexual dimorphism, and leads to erasure and harm of anyone who does not identify on the gender binary

because its ideology is non-intersectional and therefore belittles or ignores many axes of oppression and marginalization that can have as much as/greater effect on any given person’s quality of life

because it flattens societal structures to a single dimension (sexism), encouraging black and white thinking: namely, all (perceived) women are inherently good and all (perceived) men are inherently bad

this harms (perceived) women by putting them on a pedestal, expecting them to be ‘better’ than other genders in every way, only to be knocked off if they don’t appease radfem standards of female behavior

it erases the harm that women with axes of privilege over other women can do to those other women

it erases the harm that women with equal privilege can cause to one another (abuse in a relationship between two lesbian women), and the harm that women can do to those who are not women (predatory women who prey on men/children are erased, for example)

dismisses the victimhood of victims/survivors of oppression or harm who are not seen as women

because its aggregate societal effect is to reinforce patriarchal social structure, misogynistic dismissal of (perceived) women, and magnify sexism, primarily by putting pressure on (perceived) women to perform womanhood to radfem standards while ignoring (perceived) men as being beyond hope of reform.

because all of this hurts everyone, regardless of their gender, and disproportionately harms those marginalized by additional axes of oppression (such as race, sexual orientation, etc). 

Further reading: 

Below the cut, there are (or will be, depending on when you’re reading this) links to posts talking about specific ‘radfem lite’ concepts or dog whistles.

this will never be exhaustive, and my hope is that by illustrating how radfems perceive the world, it will be easier for others to identify radfem rhetoric that isn’t explicitly mentioned.

It’s also important to remember that radical feminism does not exist in a vacuum. it gets its power (ironically) by aiding and reinforcing bigger, much more powerful societal engines: gender essentialism, misogyny, sexism, and patriarchy. (this doesn’t mean that radfems don’t do serious harm as a group or as individuals, but rather that radical feminist ideology and its offshoots should be seen as only part of a whole, widespread societal problem.)

Thanks for reading this far.

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