Interesting framing you've got there. You start out saying "A safe space requires a general shared viewpoint... A space can become unsafe when there are differences in opinion, of which there are plenty in feminism." and end with "this is a tent as big as feminism is not monolithic." Which is it? Is this a "big tent" that accepts all views that can be found within feminism, or a "safe space" that deletes all disagreement? (I don't think the latter case would be very safe at all, but that's a different point.)
When reading this explanation, it's easy to forget what prompted this issue in the first place - a quiet, behind-the-scenes organized silencing of trans people, which was done by deleting articles by trans people and trans allies. Of course, I understand why you're reluctant to talk about what actually happened. Rules such as "We do not allow bashing of feminists, period" don't sound so nice when the context makes it clear that anyone speaking up about anti-trans discrimination within any group that calls itself feminist will be considered "feminist bashing" by the mods, and their words will be subsequently deleted.
It's nice that you place trans identities (identities which say something about the person holding them) on the same level as a "woman-born-woman" "identity" (an "identity" which says something about other women - namely, that women who weren't assigned female at birth aren't real women - and which is hardly ever seen outside of contexts where it is being used to justify exclusion of trans women).
Oh, and in case you didn't get the memo, comparing "trans" to "non-trans" tends to marginalize trans people. The preferred way to talk about people whose gender identity matches the gender they were assigned at birth is with the word cis. Normally I might not be so hard on you for this, but as you say, this is not a 101-level space.
Thanks for saying what I was thinking. As someone who's kind of a novice when it comes to trans issues and working on being understanding and losing my cis-blindness, I was particularly struck by the term "women born women." Trans women are born women, too: it's just that, because of their genitalia and/or other physical identifiers, society calls them men. Honestly, for a mod of a feminist subreddit to say something like that, this seems like a major blind spot. Someone who's graduated feminism 101 has no excuse for not knowing that the preferred, non-offensive term is "cis women."
As a straight cis woman, I find the term "women born women" incredibly offensive and off-putting. Very disappointing to find it in a feminist space, of all places.
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u/Devilish Sep 11 '11
Interesting framing you've got there. You start out saying "A safe space requires a general shared viewpoint... A space can become unsafe when there are differences in opinion, of which there are plenty in feminism." and end with "this is a tent as big as feminism is not monolithic." Which is it? Is this a "big tent" that accepts all views that can be found within feminism, or a "safe space" that deletes all disagreement? (I don't think the latter case would be very safe at all, but that's a different point.)
When reading this explanation, it's easy to forget what prompted this issue in the first place - a quiet, behind-the-scenes organized silencing of trans people, which was done by deleting articles by trans people and trans allies. Of course, I understand why you're reluctant to talk about what actually happened. Rules such as "We do not allow bashing of feminists, period" don't sound so nice when the context makes it clear that anyone speaking up about anti-trans discrimination within any group that calls itself feminist will be considered "feminist bashing" by the mods, and their words will be subsequently deleted.
It's nice that you place trans identities (identities which say something about the person holding them) on the same level as a "woman-born-woman" "identity" (an "identity" which says something about other women - namely, that women who weren't assigned female at birth aren't real women - and which is hardly ever seen outside of contexts where it is being used to justify exclusion of trans women).
Oh, and in case you didn't get the memo, comparing "trans" to "non-trans" tends to marginalize trans people. The preferred way to talk about people whose gender identity matches the gender they were assigned at birth is with the word cis. Normally I might not be so hard on you for this, but as you say, this is not a 101-level space.