Kri Reads Whipping Girl - Blog Posts

”Feminists think the goals of Tra’s and MtFs are unconnected-“ and you spent an entire book giving me really good reasons to continue to think that. This book says that the reason males are misogynistic is their fear of being perceived as feminine, therefore feminism should focus on helping males out of that brain hole. And the thing is… Feminism has tried that. Libfem bullshit has BEEN babying men and blaming women for males cruelty for supposedly being the people who won’t let them hold purses or whatever the fuck.

Has it worked? I wouldn’t say so. I look around and still see women suffering. I think the reason males are misogynistic is because they benefit from a hierarchical system that treats women as property. I think this happens regardless of any secondary factors. I’ve seen too many feminine males defend pornography to think defense of pornography comes from some place of self loathing instead of their desire to get off no matter what. The goal of radical feminists is female liberation from a system that sees them as the property of males. The goal of ‘trans feminism’ is the liberation of femininity from the shackles of masculinity. I can say that’s a fine goal, but they are so fundamentally different that they require different movements.

You don’t get to argue that only males experience oppression based AND call yourself a feminist book.

See the thing here is I kind of wish there were numbers on this. If there were numbers that said, “If given the option non trans people would chose to stay their sex regardless of oppression” than there’d actually be something here. But instead it’s just a weird anecdote that even within itself acknowledges that people say ‘yes’ but denies that that yes is anything but a lie. Followed by a failure to acknowledge that some female and LG (no B here because they’d face oppression on the basis of same sex attraction either direction) people might not ‘just chose to transition out of their oppression’ because without a surgery that won’t actually magically change your sex and will fuck up your body, everyone will be able to tell anyway.

Can a movement for Female People exist?

This is one of the things that ultimately loses me from the beginning with Whipping Girl. It is a work interested in reclaiming femininity from its place of degradation in the hierarchy, and that’s… Well I think you end up missing a lot of nuances of things when you claim that femininity is always seen as degrading. How many women in Congress can be accurately described as masculine? How many female singers or actresses are? It ignores the history of females like Helen Hulick or more infamously Joan of Arc whose refusal to bow to the insistence of femininity resulted in legal action/death respectively. This ‘let 👏 everyone👏 Be 👏 feminine 👏’ stuff seems really out of touch. Go outside. Female people are plenty aloud to be feminine and in fact are often alienated by their peers if they aren’t inclined towards it.

But more than that, why must feminism (especially radical feminism) be about femininity and not females? Are there not enough issues to focus on based on sex for a movement to exist with goals focused on it in mind? Perhaps this will be focused on later, but it’s almost anti intersectional to claim the majority of the world supports the idea of men and women as equals. Do females banished to menstruation huts because they are seen as ‘unclean’ and will ‘taint the people around them’ not bleed the same blood as I do? Does the female child undergoing genitalia mutilation out of a sense of tradition and who sees her vagina as something sinful and disgusting not deserve our attention? Does the female forced to give birth against her desires not deserve the right to her own body? Is it not worth it to have a movement dedicated to the rights of half of the population? Maybe this will be addressed at some other point in the novel, I may be making too quick of a judgement.