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Victoria Smith Profile picture
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Aug 16 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
You don't address historical exclusion and marginalisation by treating female life stories as a resource to be repurposed for anyone but female people themselves. In doing that, you reinforce an age-old pattern of exploitation and erasure
When you position a female figure as non-binary, you position them as someone who belongs to a category that is not specific to female people. You take something away from female history and a female legacy. It's the opposite of addressing marginalisation.
And if you think "women have a history! They have history to spare!" here's How To Be A Woman, published 2011, claiming we've done nothing
And if you think "okay, but women don't need a history and should just #bekind and stop wanting things to be about them", here's Dale Spender (1982)

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More from @glosswitch

Victoria Smith Profile picture
Aug 15
I wish people who made superior, right-side-of-history statements like this would remember that everyone who punches thinks they're "punching up"
When I read smug dismissals of people "getting their knickers in a twist" about trans issues, I think of someone deciding to put photos of my kids on their "terf hunt" website because I wrote a piece about my own experiences of anorexia and gender dysphoria
No, I won't have the free speech debate "reclaimed" from women like me because I've been deemed insufficiently Guardian-approved to count
Read 5 tweets
Victoria Smith Profile picture
Aug 15
Unimpressed at certain people's sudden pivot from "freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences" to "I get loads of death threats too, me"
If you've spent the past few years treating the violent threats aimed at particular writers as "evidence" they've chosen to engage in "toxic debates" - that is, a moral taint on them - then you've been complicit in creating the culture you now claim to abhor
I would not tell anyone receiving threats of violence that they should have known better than to provoke, or that it's fine because they were "punching down" whereas the threat of violence "punches up". But plenty of people now posing as anti-violence have done just that
Read 4 tweets
Victoria Smith Profile picture
Aug 14
Knowing female people exist as a class is a prerequisite to promoting their interests as a class, but you can do the former without doing the latter. If women can explain this to you and you don't hear, it's because, like Truss and Sunak, you're not interested in the last bit.
So sick of "ladies, you can choose between existing as a sex class with no class politics, or having a class politics but no definition of sex". As if those are the only possibilities.
The current government offloads more and more unpaid work onto women, treats us as an endless, invisible resource when cuts are "needed", but we're not meant to organise as a sex class because that makes us "the same as them"
Read 4 tweets
Victoria Smith Profile picture
Aug 14
One of the things I'm exploring in my book is the way in which the perception that women have done "fuck all" historically influences women's perceptions not just of dead women, but older women, and themselves. >
This denial of continuity is rooted in a belief in female inferiority - from which feminism will liberate "the new women" (or the non-women) to be their true selves, at their full potential. >
But the sense of inferiority never goes away because you will always know you're still female - just "one of them". You can only feel pride and acceptance of yourself as a woman if women are granted a history and a continuous legacy *as women* >
Read 5 tweets
Victoria Smith Profile picture
Aug 6
One of the things that annoys me most about this "younger people are so much cooler about gender" line is the absolute failure to apply an analysis which takes into account the different lifecycle experiences of men and women
Do Tom and Simon think today's older women are thinking "yeah, gender norms have been brilliant for me! Totally worth the care work and pensions gaps!" Or could they have a less superficial view than men of what it means to be non-conforming, starting with women saying 'no'?
Older women may have particular reasons, related to lifecycle experiences, to know both that biological sex matters and that endless demands placed on women to be kind and inclusive are just an extension of female socialisation.
Read 5 tweets
Victoria Smith Profile picture
Jul 30
This tweet, and responses to it, are revealing of how many people think/pretend "letting people choose their own gender" = "letting people be gender non-conforming", not "letting people pretend biological sex isn't real and politically salient"
It shouldn't be hard to tell the difference unless you are a) unable to imagine a world without gender stereotypes and b) unable to imagine sex difference as anything other than an oppressive hierarchy. But lots of people are both these things.
Letting people "choose" where they are positioned in a sex-based social hierarchy is not like letting your child choose their own haircut. It's more like letting people "choose" their own social class regardless of their income or background relative to other people.
Read 4 tweets

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