i began reading mackinnon’s piece, but it’s so full of bad faith arguments and mischaracterization of feminism…it’s honestly embarrassing. i am embarrassed for her.
she does not explain WHY one might think males who claim to be women would be welcomed. just states it like it’s common knowledge. i’m open to hearing her argument here but there is none.
it does not strike me as self evident that there is a certain subset of men that women would be happy to consider also women. it strikes me as thinly veiled homophobic rhetoric and actual biological essentialism—“leaving masculinity behind” as of being a woman/“embracing womanhood” requires leaving masculinity behind. embarrassing argument for mackinnon to be making here.
she again needs to explain herself here. no radfem who knows anything about feminism conflates “female sex” with “feminine gender.” the accepted position of radical feminism is actually the exact opposite—women are female, not not necessarily feminine. there is no wrong way to “be” a woman; the word is not a carefully delineated category into or out of which movement is even possible, it is merely the linguistic extension of female that is specific to adult humans in the same way “kitten” describes a baby cat. my cat plays fetch and i sometimes jokingly call him “puppy cat” but it’s universally understood that he doesn’t belong at the dog park, right?
“reverting,” as though this definition of woman is somehow regressive. this is a linguistic feint meant to make an emotional appeal and it’s again embarrassing for a smart academic to be making this and all her other arguments in this piece.
“defining women by biology” is NOT biological essential!! and i have to believe mackinnon knows this because…cmon this is undergrad level shit. which makes this a bad faith argument she should again be embarrassed by.
biological essentialism is ascribing a biological basis to behaviors/roles/preferences, like “women are naturally submissive” or “it’s nature for women to enjoy looking pretty;” mackinnon is not just wrong here, she’s lying.
again with the “reduction” language. no radical feminist is saying women are nothing more than female bodies, just that a female body is the one and only requirement for being a woman, and then that woman can live whatever type of life she wants!
“qualities chosen so whatever is considered definitive if sex is not only physical but cannot be physically changed into.” i am so so so embarrassed for this grown woman who is an academic to really be making this argument—first that the definition of sex has been “chosen,” as though it was concocted rather than observed, then that the physical, corporeal locus of sex is somehow arbitrarily arrived at, that there is some other locus of sex into which one CAN change but the mean women have picked the rigid physical categories not because it best reflects the shared reality of women, but because it excludes men. embarrassing to make the argument that women have defined our entire existence as a reaction to men.
i couldn’t keep reading. so embarrassed for her and incredibly let down.
