Thread by @QuestionPDX

THREAD 1/ This hits home. My family's nightmare was *entirely* the doing of women calling themselves feminists. The activists who promoted including wrong-body narratives in local curriculum, those who actually taught it, the therapist who responded to...
quillette.com/2019/08/01/how…

2/...an innocent question about it by saying "that means you're really a man," the therapists who advocated for my state's anti-free-speech rules that made it impossible to find another therapist who would act differently, the boards of directors of all the rainbow "charities"...

3/...responsible for my state's insanely low age of "medical majority" and all the laws that allow kids to get "trans" intervention without parents' permission and that have taken custody away from parents who are skeptical, the friends who encouraged it behind my back, the...

4/...friend's lesbian parents who marched for it and thus couldn't be approached for help as would otherwise be the case in any normal situation where kids conspired to do something stupid & unsafe, etc., etc., etc., ad nauseum.

And that’s just one side of the coin.

5/The other side is that of my child who, when questioned after peak trans about why in the heck all this happened, said that it was because she HATED the way her friends always talked about being victims, she HATED the way they always talked about boys as though they were ...

6/…human scum, and she HATED the way female friends she used to relate to had begun to reduce every conversation to political polemic.

Now she could not relate at all. So when the school taught her that women who don’t relate to their friends *are* men, voila.

7/...Now she was witnessing a LOT of bullying of boys by queen-bee girls & her friends were starting to do it, calling out kind boys as "rape culture" for asking if society was making progress. Crap like that. One of the group's male friends was out of school for a week...

8/...afraid to come back because the bullying was so bad, and because as the child of a very feminist family he was so shamed by it.

My child told me that when her girlfriends treated the boy this way it made her feel physically ill, like they had wounded *her* personally.

9/...So when school taught her that those who *feel* like boys *are* boys, she put 2+2 together and *realized* she was a boy.

When we told her that empathy was simply a sign of being a decent person, that indeed many women feel alienated by "feminism" when it is used as a...

10/...label or excuse for vicious behavior, she was SO relieved. Until then it hadn't occurred to her that a woman could have her own opinions, even empathize with men, & still be a woman. And who put her in that frame of mind? Women teachers, women curriculum writers, and...

11/...a woman therapist, all calling themselves feminists.

Yes, there are other ways to practice feminism, other theories and other approaches. But there is also THIS one. The one the article talks about. It's malignant, and we ignore it at our peril.

12/ And the worst thing we can do to feminism is to give it a free pass & blame “the patriarchy” when women f*ck up.

Yes, women are biologically different than men. Yes, men have contributed to this. But women are also free agents & responsible for the wrong they do.

13/ THAT is empowerment: When you realize that you have (1) the power to do damage, (2) the responsibility to own up to the damage that you do, and (3) the power to fix it.

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