I was talking to another member of the AgentOrange team today, and that individual pointed out to me that I hate transexuals. At least, that appears to be the official party line among members of a twitter community who have adopted use of the hash-tag #OrangeisPatriarchy.
As I write frequently on issues of a growing legal and social marginalization of men in family courts, the education system, in media and other areas of society, this apparently translates to opposition to the rights of transexuals, and to misogyny (hatred of women). You may wonder how the first argument; in favour of male human rights translates to the second; hatred of women. I wondered about that too. However, twitter postings only allow 140 characters, which really isn’t enough to develop an articulated case of logical cause and effect. The users of the #OrangeisPatriarchy tag say it is so, thus it must be so.
Funny how they seem to know more about the goals and positions of the MRM ( men’s rights movement ) than I do.
All of this discussion comes on the heels of a radical feminist conference which was to be held in the UK, and which lost it’s booking at the original venue, Conway Hall in London. The venue’s administration issued the following statement when they cancelled the radical feminists’ booking.
“We had sought assurances that the organizers would allow access to all, in order to enable the event to proceed at the venue. We also expressed concern that particular speakers would need to be made aware that whilst welcoming progressive thinking and debate, Conway Hall seeks to uphold inclusivity in respect of both legal obligations and as a principle.”[1]
Apparently these particular radical feminists subscribe to a doctrine called womyn-born-womyn, in which only human beings with double-x chromosomal sexual identity are ever to be allowed into conferences, meeting spaces, and so on.
Adhering to an ideological enthusiasm for eugenics, child abuse and publishing fantasies of sexually targeted murder apparently won’t get you booted from a conference centre booking. Excluding self-identified transexual women from your conference though, that’s going too far. Ha!
All of this is old news, originally released on AVfM several weeks ago, but it merits mention again because it provides the context for the emergence among some trans-activist twitter users of the hashtag #OrangeisPatriarchy.
It is also a little bit funny. Of course, I can predict some objections to my amusement, structured along the logical line that disruption of a radical feminist conference is equivalent to suppressing the legal or social equality (or rights) of women.
Other versions of this argument:
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- “you just hate women”
- “you’re supporting patriarchy”
- “you want to send women back to the kitchen”
- et cetera, ad infinitum, ad nauseum
[/unordered_list]
These standard, predictable and boring arguments all hang on a false premise. That false premise being that feminism and women are the same thing. They’re not. Women are a group of people, identifiable by their sex. Feminism, as a thing distinct from “women” and indeed, distinct from “people” is a thing made from ideas. It is an ideology. Obviously, some of feminism’s proponents and apologists are women, and a great many of them are men, too. Some are even transexual men and transexual women.
But feminism is not a group of people, it is an ideology. However, a slightly more defensible argument might be made that feminism is a movement seeking equal rights between men and women. That is my phrasing, btw. Feminists usually use the term “equal rights for women” which if examined logically, excludes the consideration of human rights for men, (a revealing slip in their rhetoric). However, whatever they claim as a supposedly humanist, equalist, egalitarian goal, it all amounts to happy talk and baloney, because an examination of the activism and produced outcomes of the past half century reveals that feminism’s true goals are sharply at odds with any public declaration of equality or humanism.
The radical feminists unceremoniously denied the Conway Hall booking are a bit more wrong-headed than simply being squeamish over the challenging prospect of transexual women attendees to an organized event. They are advocates of eugenics to cull the earth’s human population of men, and the sex-selective practice of purposefully developmentally damaging child abuse. They are monsters.
Obviously, not all feminists are so extreme as this. But, at the core of every version of feminism are two problematic elements.
The first is an attachment between victimhood and female identity. Whether this is expressed as “patriarchy” or “rape culture” and whether it is conceptualized as historical or ongoing, the attachment of feminine identity to an all-encompassing victimhood is fundamentally flawed. It is an ideological construct starting from a “Truth” and selecting or fabricating evidence to support that “truth”.
This is the defining quality of an ideology, and that which distinguishes ideology from philosophy. A philosophical approach begins with observation and evidence, and posits a view of reality dependent on that evidence. If you are always a victim, then you are never a self actualized adult, and you do not own personal accountability. Feminism’s victim identity creates an identity for women in which they remain non-actualized infants. Mental toddlers is hardly a useful model for self actualized empowerment. That is feminism’s first problem.
The second problem is that starting from that doctrinal victimhood, feminism seeks to use force to redress that claimed victimhood. In many versions of feminism, this is the co-option of the apparatus of the state to use violence, to appropriate funds and property, and to dis-enfranchise groups deemed in the doctrine of victimhood to be “the enemy”. More extreme flavors of feminism don’t bother to disguise this violence by acting through the proxy of the state, rather they talk openly about plans for human extermination, mass murder, infanticide and so on, such as the public postings on the blog Radical Hub.
However, the extreme and overt violence advocated by those radicals does not exempt non-radical flavors of the ideology from accountability simply because for them, violence is pursued by proxy, through the state, through legal and financial instruments of government. Violence done at one or more remove is still violence.
However, this is why, whether it is radical or not, feminism is not a human rights movement. It is a dogmatic ideology of class hatred and violence. This is why many self identified MRAs oppose it, and why opposition to feminism is not opposition to, or hatred of women.
This is also why in much MRA writing, the word feminism is omitted in favor of the term Gender Ideologue. Those being so labeled should recognize the low esteem they are held as ideologues.
The MRM, or men’s rights movement, generally does not advocate equal rights for women. ♠ It is a humanist movement recognizing that men and women are not identical, but pursuing equality of rights among all people, whatever their sex or gender might individually be. Shocking as this may be, this includes men and women and transexuals of whatever self identification they use.
The MRM is also distinct from most flavors of feminism based on a foundation of libertarian philosophy. MRA’s (mostly) do not support collectivism, or state-ism. Also, we don’t want to murder anyone – which sets us apart from radical feminists as well.
However, many transexual rights activists, at recent odds with their radical feminist colleagues appear greatly attached to the rather stupid view that the MRM wants to shove them back into the kitchen, or something. This may be a manifestation of the shared roots of radical-feminist and transexual activism. Until thrown under the metaphorical bus by radfems, the trans activists appear to have been a subset of the radical feminist community.
Lately there has been substantial complaint that the “evil men’s rights movement” is attempting to colonize or co-opt the trans-activist community. Unfortunately, much recent trans-activist rhetoric addressing the recent schism uses language such as “kill” or “exterminate” in reference to radical feminists.
I can assure all readers of this. The men’s rights movement wants no part of any movement using the language of killing or violence. However, since men’s rights activism has nothing whatsoever to do with denying anyone else’s legal rights or humanity, I’ll suggest what I hope is taken in the friendly helpful spirit it’s offered in.
To trans-activists: clean up your childish act, abandon the use of violence and killing in your rhetoric, or be ready to be bulldozed aside along with your violent and idiotic cousins; the radical feminists.
[1] http://conwayhall.org.uk/statement-regarding-radfem-2012
♠ The spade represents a quote mining alert. It is designed to assist feminist critics in locating material that they can take out of context in order to promote a false impression of MRM literature. In this case, the quote identified and tagged can be used to paint MRA’s as against women’s rights instead of its actual meaning, which is that we support human rights for all individuals.
