Gender politics and liberalism

[Kitteh]

I think you’re looking too closely into it. Men tend not to wear their hearts on their sleeves which is neither a good nor bad thing. On a thing like Facebook they are less likely to do the whole ‘share this link if you want to beat cancer’ stuff that a lot of my female friends tend to do.

This is what I originally thought too, until I noticed the guys went rather out of their way to criticize the practice.

There's a friend of mine who is very liberal but often finds himself at odds with feminism, particularly if it requires PC-ness. This is something he sent me that he mocked a lot over the past week:

http://i.imgur.com/gWe2umL.jpg

Maybe I'm just observing a subset of the population that is particularly grounded in the internet, and therefore a bit less sensitive towards social interactions than a lot of others.

i think there's a backlash amongst liberals against what i suppose you'd call new "new left" types, i.e. those with a focus on identity politics and social justice. i spend most of my time on tumblr and there's a culture of that there as opposed to sites like reddit where masculists and such run rampant.

This is basically the truth (I also lol @ the reddit/tumblr dichotomy as a user of both sites, it's pretty accurate tho).

There's definitely a trend among younger, mostly male, liberals to adopt a "colorblind"/genderblind (never heard that as a term, but I'm coining it because it works here) perspective on things, essentially a belief that "race, gender, etc were big things in the past, but they don't matter anymore" which leads to support of gay marriage but also a dislike or at best indifference towards feminism and other "social justicey" movements.

[Kitteh]

As this forum eloquently shows, there are lots of liberal guys who have a complete blind spot on gender issues. This deeply saddens me.

well, i don't think it would be 100% honest to portray feminism as attacked purely from the right. feminism for a long time was largely a movement of middle class white cishet women - the NOW didn't want lesbians involved when they first formed iirc, and there's still plenty of hatred towards transwomen from even mainstream feminists because they take social constructivism to its logical ends i.e. abolishing gender.

I'm not surprised that many feminists in the past may have held certain awful views, just like many progressive crusaders of the late 19th-early 20th centuries were deeply racist, or like many civil right activists were raging homophobes. Unfortunately, being on the vanguard on one issue doesn't necessarily entail being on other issues.

That said, I'm pretty sure 99% of feminists today are also strong supporters of LGBT causes.

Oh, and welcome back BTW!

a lot of them certainly are, idk, maybe i've been skewed by being on tumblr for a long time and seeing some of the more vile segments of the community.

and thanks

I don't know either, honestly, but that just seems really weird to me. A feminist who's anti-LGBT is the epitome of completely missing the point IMO.

I'm quite sure that basically all feminists still alive today are pro-LBG, but trans issues are contentious within a minority of feminists. It has to do with the social constructionist view of gender, and within the feminists who still believe in that (it's definitely fallen out of favor with most feminists, or at least the most radical forms have), many say that the concept of someone being trans implies some kind of innateness to gender more than biological differences and what is socially imposed. That belief is mostly limited to older, second-wave feminists, whereas the vast majority of third-wave feminists do accept trans people and are some of the strongest pro-trans-rights/anti-transphobia people out there. A lot of it has to do with the ideological differences between second- and third-wave varieties of feminism, particularly the third wave's emphasis on intersectionality and including the concerns of other groups like people of color, LGB, and, yes, T people under the umbrella of feminism. Also the fact that pure social constructionism w/r/t gender is a minority view among feminists nowadays, and most (not all though) feminists now adopt some mixed view of social constructionism, i.e. some part of gender seems to be innate, but the vast majority of gender roles are socially constucted. Part of that shift has been because of increasing science on the matter, see for example David Reimer. There are also some feminists nowadays who have tried to reconcile trans people and social constructionism, which is not impossible IMO.

The overall point is that the vast majority of feminists are very positive about trans issues nowadays, but there is still a minority that is not. To Windis's thing about tumblr, there are some particularly...infamous anti-trans feminists on there that do stuff like trying to find all the personal info (name, address, phone numbers, etc) of trans people on the internet (often specifically targeting those who aren't very out/public about it) and publish it online.

Ahh, what the internet does to people... *sigh*