btw “you are allowed to hate your oppressor” is about Your Personal Feelings As An Individual. that you are allowed to have whatever feelings you have about your experience being oppressed, and the fact that rage and hatred can be a powerful motivator to break away from the status quo and engage in revolutionary action against oppression, does not mean that no one is allowed to criticize an approach to liberation that is centered on rage and hatred given the very well recorded downsides to such an approach.

like “well POC are allowed to hate white people so women are allowed to hate men!” yeah and also, Malcom X himself realized he was wrong to disregard working alongside sincere white people as a group, because coalition building between working class people of different races was actually quite important to overthrowing racial capitalism. the Rainbow Coalition was built on this premise. plenty of feminists activists (particularly women of color, bisexuals, trans people, sex workers) have criticized feminism for separatism and gender essentialism and reluctance to form necessary coalitions across gender to meaningfully resist racist capitalist patriarchy.

none of this means You The Individual are not allowed to feel the emotion of hate in response of oppression, or that that emotion needs to be suppressed or stigmatized or shouldn’t help motivate your resistance. but it’s just naive and shortsighted to stop your revolutionary thought there.

Early on in feminist movement we found that it was easier to accept the reality that gender, race, and class combined determined female destiny, and much more difficult to understand how this should concretely shape and inform feminist practice. While feminists talked often about the necessity of building a mass-based feminist movement, there was no sound foundation on which to structure this movement. The women’s liberation movement has not only been structured on a narrow platform, it primarily called attention to issues relevant primarily to women (mostly white) with class privilege. We needed theory mapping thought and strategy for a mass-based movement, theory that would examine our culture from a feminist standpoint rooted in an understanding of gender, race, and class. In response to that need I wrote Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center.

Nowadays it has become so commonplace for individuals doing feminist work to evoke gender, race, and class, it is often forgotten that initially most feminist thinkers, many of whom were white and from privileged class backgrounds, were hostile to adopting this perspective. Radical/revolutionary feminist thinkers who wanted to talk about gender from a race-sex-class perspective were accused of being traitors, destroying the movement, shifting the focus. Often our work was ignored or ruthlessly critiqued, deemed not scholarly enough or too polemical. In those days black women/women of color were often encouraged by white comrades to talk about race while our ideas about all other aspects of feminist movement were ignored. We effectively protested this ghettoization of our perspectives, sharing our commitment to creating feminist theory that would address a wide range of feminist concerns. That commitment is the ethical foundation of Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center.

from Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center by bell hooks (2nd ed. 2000)

Feminist movement has created profound positive changes in the lives of girls and boys, women and men, living in our society, in a political system of imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy. And even though trashing feminism has become commonplace, the reality remains: everyone has benefited from the cultural revolutions put in place by contemporary feminist movement. It has changed how we see work, how we work, and how we love. And yet feminist movement has not created sustained feminist revolution. It has not ended patriarchy, eradicating sexism and sexist exploitation and oppression. And as a consequence feminist gains are always at risk.

We are already witnessing powerful losses in the arena of reproductive rights. Violence against females is escalating. The work force is daily re-instating gender biases. Harsh critics of feminism blame family violence on the movement, urging women and men to turn their backs on feminist thinking and return to sexist-defined gender roles. Patriarchal mass media either trashes feminism or tells the public it is an unnecessary, dead movement. Opportunistic women applaud feminist success, then tell us the movement is no longer needed, as “all women have improved their lives” in a world where women are fast becoming the majority of our nation’s poor, where single mothers are pathologized, where no state aid is available to help the needy and indigent, where most females of all ages have no access to basic health care. Yet given these dire realities, visionary feminist discourse is increasingly only talked about in the corridors of the educated elite. If it remains there the feminist message will not be heard, and ultimately feminist movement will end.

from Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center by bell hooks (2nd ed. 2000; yes this was written 26 years ago)

One of the most affirming aspects of feminist movement has been the formation of an intellectual environment where there has been sustained dialectal critique and exchange. Hearing the voices of radical thinkers (among them the voices of women of color), the face of feminist theory and practice changed. Many unenlightened white women broke down the wall of denial and began to examine anew how they had talked and written about gender in the past. There has been no other movement for social justice in our society that has been as self-critical as feminist movement. Feminist willingness to change direction when needed has been a major source of strength and vitality in feminist struggle. That internal critique is essential to any politics of transformation. Just as our lives are not fixed or static but always changing, our theory must remain fluid, open, responsive to new information.

from Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center by bell hooks (2nd ed. 2000)

Often when individuals talk or write about contemporary feminist movement they make it seem as though there was a set body of feminist principles and beliefs that served as a foundation from the very beginning. In actuality when feminist uprising began to occur in the late ’60s, it manifested itself in diverse settings among women who often had no knowledge of one another’s existence. There was no clearly defined platform.

While Betty Friedan was writing about “the problem that has no name,” addressing the way sexist discrimination affected highly educated white women with class privilege, Septima Clark, Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Ann Moody, along with individual black women across the nation, were challenging the sexism within black civil rights movement. Appropriating the vernacular of black liberation, white women called their resistance to sexism women’s liberation.

We do not know who “first” used the term “women’s liberation.” That is not important. Significantly what we know from charting the history of contemporary feminist movement is that individual women were rebelling against sexism all over the place. When those women began to meet and talk together, that collective rebellion came to be known as women’s liberation and would later evolve into feminist movement. Feminist struggle takes place anytime anywhere any female or male resists sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression. Feminist movement happens when groups of people come together with an organized strategy to take action to eliminate patriarchy.

from Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center by bell hooks (2nd ed. 2000)

giving this its own post actually:

the transmedicalist way of thinking (that trans men, in order to be “real (trans) men” and deserving of respect and community, must seek to be as close to cis men as possible and to downplay their transness and their relationship to the social class of “women” and/or misogyny as much as possible, and vice-versa for trans women, and that nonbinary people are suspect at best and actively detrimental to trans people as a whole at worst) is very much aligned with the trans radical feminism we have seen becoming increasingly blatant in this community. because fundamentally, when trans men discuss transandrophobia and anti-transmasculinity theory, we do so by first rejecting the idea that everything about patriarchy and gender oppression is reducible down to the cis binary, or that trans people shouldn’t organize as trans people, as a trans community.

transmasculine transfeminism, at least the productive kind, demands we reject the assimilationist model that says that trans people should have no trans class consciousness, that trans people are only doing politics right when we identify with cisness, whether cis women’s or cis men’s. it demands we go “no, being a trans man is something more than just being a confused female or being a cis man in the "wrong” body, there is more going on here when it comes to gender oppression and how it impacts us and our bodies than what cis feminists have described, there is a trans position that has something worthwhile to contribute to analysis of patriarchy, and manhood and womanhood.“

this challenge is absolutely vital for the continued development of feminism and the liberation of all peoples, on a gendered level and a broader social level. it is not exclusive to transmasculine transfeminism, to be clear. but when trans people adopt the cissexist radical feminist model, they adopt a binary view of patriarchy that reduces it down to "men vs women,” which is inherently transphobic; it is inherently transphobic to push the idea that the patriarchy is all about “men vs women” which erases transphobia and intersexism as core, fundamental parts of how patriarchy functions and has always functioned.

when TERFs use this framework, they act transphobically (and racistly) by trying to explain away trans experiences as “basically cis men (universal oppressors) or basically cis women (universally oppressed, and all oppressed in the exact same ways with the exact same material experiences)”. nonbinary people are erased in both of these ways, and trans people are rendered unable to describe transphobia without it being reduced down to a side-effect of misogyny as it impacts binary (cis) women, or as a side-effect of toxic masculinity as it impacts binary (cis) men, which is also brushed off as a legitimate point of feminist interest and concern. when trans people use this framework, we do the same thing, just in reverse; trans men are forced into the category of “basically cis men,” trans women are forced into the category of “basically cis women,” transphobia becomes a side-effect of misogyny, etc etc. and in many ways, adopting this framework is especially tempting because it is the framework of transphobic cis women and patriarchy as a whole; because if we can make this model of gender ours, tweak it just enough that it can fit some trans people inside it comfortably we can control the framework that is used to hurt us so badly. we can finally be real men and women by the definitions of the model that has been used against us.

and in our community, as this framework is adopted, nonbinary and intersex people become the scapegoats of in-group transphobia, because our existence is antithetical to this kind of binary model - not just the specific kind of binary that is associated with a very strict traditional patriarchy, but any binary. and that resistance to binary thinking gets labeled as anti-revolutionary. and then, to return to the points made above, the discussion of anti-transmasculinity becomes so controversial because it is an example of binary-identified trans people (alongside nonbinary/genderqueer/gnc people) refusing the cissexist, oppositionally-sexist model of transness, and insisting that their experiences can only ever be truly described, and our oppression truly fought, by rejecting binary trans/feminism.

in the group of “men” there will always be women. in the group of “women” there will always be men. no matter how you define these groups there will always be people on the “opposite” side. frankly this should be a basic tenet of transfeminism because its vital for all trans people- not just multigender people. its vital that any resource catering to men or to women understands that they will also, inevitably, have someone of the “other” gender who needs their services. its vital that any discussion of gendered experiences understands that no experience is incapable of being had by the “other” gender. tbh if including trans people in your feminism doesn’t shake up your entire understanding of gender you aren’t doing it right

was gonna add this to this post but it was getting to long:

The biggest ideological issue with “trans men are men and trans women are women, and so trans men have privilege over trans women like marginalized cis men have privilege over marginalized cis women” to me, is trying to position transness as having the same kind of intersectional relationship with gender as other factors like race or class. Those interact with gender profoundly and intimately, but transness is literally, directly, part of gender. People conflate “gender” with “being a man or woman” and treat transness as some vague other category that merely overlaps with gender, when to me, it is far more accurate to understand that the category of “gender” includes both gender identity (man, woman, etc.) and gender modality (trans, cis, etc.).

This is what I’m talking about above wrt trans people’s experiences being treated as shadows of cis people’s, and wha I was talking about in the post that people got mad about which prompted the above linked post. Rather than including trans people in feminism by retheorizing gender in a way that is no longer cissexist, transness is acknowledged ONLY in ways that allow the cissexist feminist understanding of “man” and “woman” to be preserved. This can be connected to larger issues in how people misunderstand “intersectionality” in ways that actually only reaffirm the very non-intersectional ways of thinking about oppression they claim to want to resist (but that’s yet another post; see here).

People react to “trans men are not cis men and this is a meaningful class difference under patriarchy” as me saying that trans men aren’t really, truly men. But my point is that transphobia is as fundamental to patriarchy as misogyny is, and the patriarchy is ideologically binary while never having been functionally binary. The idea that “men” is a good way of understanding gender on a social class level is itself born from patriarchal thinking (again, this connects back to intersectional feminist critiques focused on class and race and how white class-privileged feminists promoted a simplistic theory of “women’s oppression by men” in part to obscure their own position in society and oppress lower class women and women of color by centering white, middle-class experiences as the definition of Being A Woman). When cissexist feminists have said “men,” they have always been thinking about cis men, it is just that cisness has long been invisibilized and naturalized and centered.

Being trans or cis (or intersex, which provides it’s own complications that need to be integrated into feminist theory) needs to be treated as being as fundamental to gender privilege/oppression as being a “man” or “woman” currently is. And when you do that, it’s pretty fucking obvious that just saying “men” when you are talking about systemic male privilege is egregiously transphobic, in the sense that it actively obscures the role of trans

i think genuinely one of the biggest political weak spots on the trans community in terms of actually pursuing liberation is people’s aversion to meaningfully challenging the gender binary because it is personally gender affirming for them. so much reactionary bullshit in this community is intimately tied to exorsexism and transmedicalism/

and like. i also don’t want to downplay why people would feel like that. you spend your entire life suffering because of being denied your gender. it impacts your identity and your relationships and your work and your everything. and then when there’s finally a chance that you may actually be able to cross the great divide that separates the group you are forced to be to and the group you have always felt you belonged in, there is all of this talk about how we should dismantle the groups entirely, when you have barely - if at all - gotten a chance to even exist in a way that doesn’t make you want to kill yourself, when the groups are still influencing everything about the world all the time.

but the thing is! we feel this way primarily because in our present culture, to be gendered as cis-binary is to be made human. it is to socially exist, to be seen, to be loved, to have existential, ontological meaning as a person. and nonbinary people do not get to pursue gender euphoria that also makes us human, you understand? nb/gq/gnc people do not have the option of pursuing being socially recognized as you truly feel you are and not wanting to kill yourself. some people can be happy on either side of the chasm and carve out space for themselves there, but too often only on the precarious edge. and the rest of us can only jump off or wait to be shoved off.

do you understand? we don’t have the option. our insistence on fighting and deconstructing the binary is not an abstract political choice based on what we speculate would be the most #radical. it is as much a choice made out of trans survival as any binary trans man or woman’s pursuit of a passing and stealth life. and plenty of us also do not want the concept of “man” or “woman” to be erased entirely; many of nb/gq/gnc people are men and women! sometimes both at the same time! others want to see new concepts to gain acceptance and social recognition!

but that is the problem with the community’s exorsexism when it comes down to it. it is binary gender ideology which provides the foundation for patriarchal ideology and power as a whole, and so as feminists it is the binary we need to challenge (early radical feminists circled this realization, although they failed to develop it productively; intersectional feminism leads us to challenging the gender binary by challenging the related privileged oppressor/powerless oppressed binary). nb/gq/gnc people strain under a binary system and binary culture, and so tend to be more conscious of the binary and the need to challenge it, just like cis perisex women are more likely to be conscious of patriarchy than cis perisex men because they experience a lot more direct and obvious strain under it. all trans people are ultimately oppressed by gender binary ideology and exorsexism, and it goes against trans people’s class interests to support it. but a lot of trans people who identify strongly with the binary have, for decades at this point, actively decided to sacrifice the pursuit of trans liberation and liberation from patriarchy as a whole, in favor of keeping the binary in place so they can experience being the ones who benefit from it and wield it against others. like lower-middle class people being fierce defenders of capitalism and taking great pride in self-sufficiency and financial sense and not relying on handouts.