Thoughts on this? Reading this it feels almost like seeing a light at the end of the tunnel. For years I projected a lot of this discourse onto myself, possibly as a way to mask over my own gender identity issues.
I held back every response I could think of because I didn't feel like I could convince someone I was bringing it forward in good faith. But if we bring up our trans comrades in the context of this dialogue I feel like we could really be taken seriously. Like it opens up so many opportunities for solidarity.
What am I missing here? What do you folks think?
Except patriarchy already hurts them. I sometimes facetiously say that I'm a feminist for selfish reasons, namely that every supposedly pro-men movement out there directly hurts men, and only feminism actually cares for men. There's nothing more anti-male than being told that “men are animals who can't control their desire for sex” or “women will only love you for your money, alphaness, and social status”. Suddenly you read those evil, evil feminists, and they say shit like “rape is about power, and men being assholes is due to socialization”, and suddenly you're like those pink-haired psychos are actually the first people ever to respect me and consider me a human being.
Being a misogynist is like eating a cactus, it makes your life fucking miserable. All these incels, “masculinists”, abusive boyfriends, they are the saddest people in the world. Patriarchy already hurts them, you'd think that “hey, I've got this thing that will massively improve your quality of life” would entice them to drop their shitty beliefs, but it doesn't. So I don't think waiting for them to be hurt is a good strategy, because they are hurt every second of their life, and it isn't working.
Then like I said, you need to just cut them off. I was lucky in a way that I was able to save myself but for every me there's a million toxic shitheads. I just don't want to take an extremist stance and say all men are inherently bad is all, you know?
Nobody on the left is saying “all men are inherently bad” though. Only TERFs believe in this gender essentialist nonsense. In fact, the only woman I personally know who unironically believed in this sort of thing is a giant TERF and she can go fuck herself on that alone.
That's good then, btw fuck TERFs too.