Here is the 1500 Signature Update that’s got Payton and pals hitting the flag button:
Oct 25, 2015 — I’ve thought about what I was going to say when this petition reached 1500 signatures and I hope I am eloquent with my words, but I am really pissed off. I hope I’m able to speak for many women who are too afraid to say what I’m about to say .
This issue is not only about freedom of expression, it’s about women’s lives, women’s bodies, and more importantly, misogyny. I can’t count how many times I’ve seen women be no platformed, threatened into silence by transactivists and their ‘feminist’ allies.
Guess what? We’re sick of it.
I’ve been watching this one issue slowly simmer away, just under the tongues of many women. I’ve watched transactivists cancel the Vagina Monologues because talking about vaginas makes hurt feelings. I’ve seen them sit outside the only women-only Music Festival (Michfest) and demand to be let in. I’ve watched many hard won women’s spaces and cultures be completely ransacked by transactivists, all under the guise of 3rd wave liberal feminism. I’ve seen them force midwives associations to stop using the words ‘pregnant woman.’ I’ve even seen them take offense at bloody cupcakes that are frosted pink to look like vaginas!
Our patience is gone.
Let me tell you something: women are extremely angry. Greer has said what many of us think but are too afraid to say it because of the vicious misogynist attacks that will most definitely occur if we do, and this is a critical clue to what’s going on here.
Just today on Twitter I’ve seen men threaten Greer with ‘kicking her in the cunt’ and insult her over her age and status as a woman. They basically said she should be invisible.
The misogyny is palpable. Greer doesn’t identify as a woman, SHE IS A WOMAN. She doesn’t have a fetish about vaginas, she has one.
Women’s biology, women’s chromosomes are what makes us women. ‘Feelings’ don’t a woman make. The sole reason we have a feminist movement is because women’s biological realities form the basis of our oppression as a class. Any woman, anywhere in the world, can’t just play identity games with their station in life.
It’s a fact that in 2015 women in America still have to fight just to have reproductive control over their own bodies. In rural India you are murdered if you’re born female. FGM, child marriage, sex trafficking, women’s representations in pornography, femicide, birth control, hypersexualization, objectification: if you’re female, YOU’RE FUCKED!
So excuse me if I don’t think men who say they ‘identify’ or ‘feel’ like a woman have anything in common with me. Excuse me if my feminist movement is concerned with the lives of women and girls and not men’s appropriation of them.
To claim that men who ‘feel like a woman’ are women without a shred of critical thought is just downright ignorant, and worse, it’s anti-feminist and misogynist.
Seeing 3rd wave liberal feminists publicly spitting on women, misunderstanding feminist theory, and being completely fascist in their approach to women who don’t buy into this nonsense is quite frankly, disgusting.
The feminist movement is by, for and about WOMEN, biological females. It’s not about men’s feelings. You don’t graduate feminism 101 until you can master that.
There was one tweet today that perfectly encapsulated this issue. Greer told a truth, a fundamental one. Since they can’t admit it, they’ve got to silence her.
~Diana Boston aka Mancheeze
Payton can’t engage in a conversation, that much is clear, but is being touted as a comedian by the mainstream media as one of the geniuses supporting this no platforming attempt. Here’s one of Payton’s tweets which I found hilarious and mostly obnoxious:
Apparently Payton flunked Grade 6 biology and doesn’t even know how human reproduction works. Does Peyton think infants come out of a cabbage patch? This is the level of discourse transactivists and 3rd wave liberal feminists have sunk. Check out some of the comments on the petition to silence Greer and you’ll see what I mean:
While Peyton instructs people to silence my petition in support of Greer, they also like to favourite and retweet people showing an incredible level of hatred and misogyny towards Greer.
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You can imagine my face when some transactivist accuses Greer of ‘transmisogyny’. My eyes do this kind of squinty thing as I see the Oxford definition of the word misogyny in my minds eye.
The Guardian is now flogging the idea that not allowing Greer to speak will cause further harm to trans people. The article is a mess.
The rigidity and conventionality of Greer’s stance puzzles me: to define a woman as a person born with certain organs in certain places is uncurious – uncharacteristically so from this famously interrogative mind. The philosophical dimension of gender is far more complicated and interesting than the way a person looks or sounds; to refuse to brook any of that, appealing instead to the gut sense of an unidentifiable bloc of “a great many women”, is authoritarian and narrow. You’d expect it from Suzanne Evans, not Germaine Greer.~Zoe Williams, The Guardian
Over forty years ago feminists like Greer defined gender as a social construct ie: not material. Therefore, anything that comes from it, like gender identity, is fruit from the poisonous tree.
Every child has gender confusion growing up precisely because gender is a socially imposed set of cultural lessons, and it’s females who get the worst of it. Girls are taught to wear pink and be submissive to men. Boys are taught to dominate females and be aggressive.
Like Meghan Murphy pointed out in a tweet, the mass media of today isn’t even talking about feminism, unless you mean neoliberal clap trap that has no basis in material reality. This is what ‘gender studies’ has accomplished: wiping out the core concepts of feminist analysis so that young women don’t even know how to discuss it with Greer, never mind having any firm knowledge about feminist scholarship. It’s a good bet not a single one of these ‘feminists’ and transactivists has read The Female Eunuch, one of the foundational texts of feminist theory and practice.
And let’s face it, Greer’s right. Men don’t magically turn into females. It’s just impossible. I think many people know this but it’s only women who are getting slammed for saying it.
I saw that very question in the comment section of the Guardian article. Why aren’t we talking about women who want to be male? The answer is pretty simple and complicated. First, men who want to wear skirts outnumber the reverse by 3:1. And even that’s a conservative estimate because we truly don’t have good data. The second reason has to do with deep-seated misogyny and anger of the men who see themselves as women.
The general public has to start understanding why men are doing this. Blanchard studied these men for many years and came to the conclusion that most of them are what he termed ‘autogynpephiles.’ Simply put, these men want to become the internal image they have of women. It’s a sexual thing for them and it’s buried in a cloak of extreme narcissism.
It’s for this reason that women like Greer, who say ‘no, he’s not a woman,’ get shouted down. Autogynephiles don’t like it when women don’t accept their delusional image of themselves and so they lash out. Remember Atwood’s saying ‘men are afraid women will laugh at them; women are afraid men will kill them?’ Many of the comments on the petition to no-platform Greer said things to the effect that men who wear dresses are more of a woman than Greer is. It’s men’s feelings and masturbatory fantasies that fuel this rage against women who question them.
When Greer gave a talk about women’s lives at Cambridge the entire Q and A was taken up by accusations, mostly from men, of ‘transphobia.’ They never addressed her actual talk and were more interested in nailing her for some imaginary offense. Greer responded in her typical snarky, yet meaningful way. We rightly condemn white people for doing ‘blackface’ but for some reason it’s ok for men to do this to women? I think not.
We must consider that ‘trans males’ (I will not call them women) reinforce the worst stereotypes about women. Many of them float around wearing lingerie in selfies while supporting the idea that females are meant to be sexually objectified in porn and prostitution. One look at Bruce Jenner on the cover of Vanity Fair and the fact he’s getting a Woman of the Year Award rightly makes women angry. The feminist movement cannot and will not accept this. This is misogyny and woman hatred.
That’s the core of this misogynist rage whether you want to hear it or not. You won’t hear it in the mainstream media and you certainly won’t hear it in ‘gender studies’ programs, which has stopped teaching feminist theory years ago.
Feminists abhor gender and gender identity. We’re not about to embrace social roles that have oppressed women and girls for centuries through practices like Chinese foot-binding and the current fad of labiaplasty.
Men can wear whatever clothes or styles they want but it doesn’t make them women. Makeup, heels, skirts et al. are not womanhood. Women’s lives are forever intertwined with our female biology, not our clothing. Our experiences of the world being the sex that carries fetuses, has periods, and so on is what makes us women. This is not to say it’s our destiny but it’s bloody well meaningful to us and we have an entire movement to address it.
This is why women around the world still have to fight for reproductive rights, menstruation leave, and on-site child care. The feminist movement can’t be ransacked because a man wants to ‘feel like a woman.’ Intersectionality, the term transactivists have hijacked for their cause, doesn’t apply. If I get pregnant in a Southern state I can’t simply ‘identify’ my way out of it. I can’t just put on a blonde wig and forget about it.
It’s time to actually read and comprehend feminist theory and practice and not dismiss the pioneers of our movement with chants of ‘hate speech.’
The petition in support of Greer is at 2500 signatures and has been updated. If you’d like to sign it, go here.