“Shut up, terf” and “punch a terf” rhetoric is nearly indistinguishable from anti-suffrage rhetoric.

When people deride “terfs,” they frequently describe or portray them as ugly and middle-aged, because they instinctively sense how our culture devalues the concerns of women who aren’t attractive to men. This is a cheap method of propaganda, and it’s anti-woman.

Reversal and straw man tactics which mirror that of modern trans activism - peaceful protest depicted as violence, equal protections sought depicted as dominance, men shown as the righteous and gentle victims of women who never actually committed these acts of violence.

And can we pause and remember that women were NOT simply handed the right to live and dress without conforming to gender norms? It’s your turn, guys. If you want feminine presentation in men to be normalized, have the courage women did in decades past.

Can you name a historical example of a time when women led a movement, were violently suppressed mostly by men (inc. law enforcement), were shamed for lack of devotion to traditional gender roles... and were found, with time to be the oppressors in the situation? I can’t.

Gaslighting, a century ago. One parallel that strikes me is how every publication tries to isolate women who dissent by insisting only a “tiny minority” of women care about being able to vote. Sound familiar? Women fear being unsupported, ostracized. This is a silencing tactic.

One group of women isn’t entitled to waive the rights of another. Some women don’t believe they need sex-segregated spaces or sex-based legal protections. That doesn’t entitle them to deny the rest of us those things. Our rights belong to US.

The suffragettes were hated because they refused to have their interests ignored because many considered women’s suffrage to be less important than other issues. They refused to be put off, to keep sweet and set their own cause aside in order to serve others.

And, yes. There was inexcusable racism within the leadership of the suffrage movement. But that doesn’t make the CAUSE of women’s suffrage immoral. We need to discuss IDEAS rather than individual value. Ideas exist separate from individuals and must stand on their own merit.

Right now, we devalue individuals in order to suppress discussion of their ideas. This is dangerous, and this is wrong. Our history should tell us all this, if we’d just be willing to remember, to see the patterns and learn the lessons.

Silencing women never serves justice.

GCs, women especially, remember —

Being hated and ostracized does NOT mean you’re in the wrong.

The members of every worthy social justice movement in history have been widely misunderstood and despised.

This does NOT mean you’re the bad guy. It just means you’re a threat.

/thread

Some people have commented that it’s nuts for me to compare gender-criticals to suffragettes. But they’re missing the point of this thread, which is to compare the RESPONSE to the suffragettes to the RESPONSE to gender-criticals. These women are talked about in the same way.

Misogyny is abusing women who behave in a way you don’t like. It’s about control of women’s behavior. Even misogynists are usually kind when a woman is pleasing them. So, if you think it’s okay to speak abusively of “bad” women, then you’re a misogynist. Period.

This thread wasn’t about gender-criticals so much as about the people who harass, threaten, and scorn them. If you spoke up in defense of that behavior, then, congratulations, you’re a misogynist, and YOU are who this thread was about.