Recently I’ve been seeing a concerning rise of radical feminism in trans spaces. A lot of trans people will describe themselves as “trans radical feminists” or whatever, or will try to claim that TERFs are bad but radical feminism is okay.
No.
The two biggest, fundamental beliefs of radical feminism are:
- That misogyny is the root of all other oppression. According to radical feminism, racism, classism, and even environmental harm stems from misogyny.
And
2. That womanhood is defined by its relation to men and under the patriarchy, where “women” are the class oppressed by “men” under the system that is the patriarchy.
The first belief is problematic for anybody with intersecting identities, though not an issue specifically for trans people. That being said, it should be clear to everybody that radical feminism is an
inherently non-intersectional ideology. You cannot have an ideology centred around one form of oppression that treats all other forms as secondary and properly recognise intersectionality. You cannot have an intersectional ideology that focuses on the sisterhood of women while ignoring the voices of Black women who feel more comfortable with Black men than white women.
This belief is so inherent to radical feminism, by the way, that that is where the term comes from. Radical feminism explicitly derives the term “radical” from its etymology from a word meaning “root,” because radical feminism is founded on the idea that misogyny is the “root” of oppression.
The second belief is where it starts to get dicey for trans people specifically. Obviously, there’s TERFs. But everybody knows how TERFs harm trans people, so I’m not going to focus on that. There are also people who try to incorporate trans people into radical feminism, and that’s the type of thought I’ll focus on.
Because radical feminism defines “woman” socially, as a class of people oppressed by the patriarchy, that means that, according to radfem literature, anybody who is oppressed by the patriarchy is a woman. This means two things.
- Many trans-“inclusive”radfems end up equating women and nonbinary people for this reason. But grouping nonbinary people in with women is just a reconstruction of the gender binary, something many trans and nonbinary activists are trying to actively fight against. It is disrespectful of nonbinary identity, and as a nonbinary person, I also don’t really appreciate binary women who decide they are authorities on the way nonbinary people navigate the world just because they’re shoving everybody into the “oppressed gender” box (which their ideology defines as the “woman” box).
- The options for trans men under this framework are either that they experience patriarchal oppression (and thus are “women”) or that they do not experience patriarchal oppression (and thus can be seen as men through a radfem lens). Neither of these options is okay, and both are actively transphobic towards trans men. The first option misgenders trans guys, and the second erases the systemic oppression they experience, aids in the silencing of trans male voices, and reinforces the lack of support for trans men. The second option, imo, is the reason I’ve seen so many trans radfems deny the statistics on trans male violence.
Every form of radical feminism ends up harming trans people. You cannot have radical feminism without transphobia, and I wish trans people would stop trying to “reclaim” it or whatever. You can’t reclaim it. It is a flawed ideology. There are other forms of feminism.
I want to end by providing a radfem essay that reflects some of what I talk about here, so I’m not just talking out of my ass.
https://xyonline.net/sites/xyonline.net/files/2023-06/Rowland, Radical feminism - Critique and construct 1990.pdf
