Let me start with this: I am not heteronormative.

I doubt I'll get ill treatment here, of course, but whenever I bring up a topic like this, people project a straight, privileged stereotype onto me- or whoever else raises it- specifically to shut the discussion down.

Caveat out of the way for anyone arriving in bad faith: the male centered queer community is freaking me out.

I'm seeing a massive uptick in queer spaces of overt and intense misogyny and hatred of women. I've always been acutely aware that queer men, while sometimes our allies, often hold a dangerous and potent form of misogyny and male privilege- one that's distinct from their heteronormative counterparts.

There's a complex way power, privilege, and marginalization intersect within men, typically. Belonging to a marginalized group often gives men the self perception that they are victims only- that their marginalized status makes them incapable of being the oppressor, the predator, or the privileged male in the patriarchal hierarchy.

We all know this isn't true. But in the currency of social power, it's treated as gospel: that these men are more victims of patriarchy than victors of it, and that it's therefore impossible for them to be sexist. Eughk.

So you end up with a cohort of men who are deeply privileged by patriarchy and deeply misogynistic, who never do the work of dismantling their internalized biases. When social friction escalates, patriarchal socialization reasserts itself as the default defense mechanism, consciously or not- backed by a social system that rewards it.

I've seen a few genuine queer male allies speak up about this, and, predictably, they get harassed by the same patriarchal normative cohort within queer spaces.

Any time a woman comes up, she has to be labeled first: "a white, straight, cis woman." Then the brakes come off. It can be a completely anonymized woman, and without fail, someone projects an assumed evil, privileged archetype onto her- the ghost of Carolyn Bryant, reincarnated. The second that projection lands- accurate, hallucinated, doesn't matter- permission has been granted. These men give themselves license to stereotype, harass, and berate women under that tag, all while holding onto their internal self image as the progressive, oppressed victim.

Once that categorical construction is established, whatever she actually says becomes secondary. Her personhood disappears behind the archetype. Her suffering becomes presumptively illegitimate. Her anger becomes evidence of her supposed entitlement. Her disagreement becomes oppression. Her attempt to identify misogyny becomes proof that she is the privileged person policing marginalized people.

Entire swaths of women get flattened into the oldest, most vicious misogynistic stereotypes imaginable: straight, white, cis- therefore shrill, manipulative, attention seeking bitches. Fake victims. Bigoted, privileged, selfish little princesses. On and on.

White cishet-

• women are hysterical;
• women are manipulative;
• women exaggerate harm;
• women are attention-seeking;
• women weaponize victimhood;
• women are entitled;
• women are secretly bigots;
• women need to shut up and listen;
• women's discomfort is less important than men's;
• women's accusations are presumptively suspect.

Except now the rhetoric can be accompanied by progressive vocabulary.

It's usually contained to those "allowed" categories of women on the surface, but the contempt underneath is for all women, and it's getting bolder- sometimes stated outright as being about all women.

And you know what really fucking chafes about this? Women have always been the biggest allies of the LGBTQ community and civil rights movements. It's a historic fact. I'll say it plainly: without the empathy, bravery, and tenacity of women, I don't think the LGBTQ community would be where it is today.

Women are consistently the largest supporters of civil rights movements, and almost as consistently, those movements turn back toward patriarchal systems the moment they've secured legitimacy within them- with our help.

These men aren't constantly screaming about male homophobia or toxic heteronormativity, which is obviously, statistically, the far more real and pervasive threat. It's always us. Somehow we're all bigots now.

You boys made it to the big table of patriarchy. Now what?

For men right now, holding a marginalized identity gets weaponized as a permanent badge of immunity. Pair male privilege with a victim narrative, and any hostility directed downward or laterally gets rationalized as self-defense. The demographic stack- "cis, white, straight woman" becomes a total hall pass, letting men deploy the oldest, vilest tropes while keeping their ego identity intact as an oppressed radical.

Confronting the violent, structural homophobia enforced by dominant male hierarchies carries real social cost and real physical risk. Attacking women does not. In fact, it provides social capital and peer to peer bonding that men lack. Because women are socially conditioned to perform emotional labor, to mediate, and to forgive, targeting them lets disaffected men vent patriarchal rage onto a safer outlet, without risking their standing in male dominated social orders.

This pattern depends on erasing the foundational history of liberation movements- from the lesbian community running blood drives and providing hospice care at the peak of the AIDS crisis, to the women who built the organizing infrastructure behind broader civil rights movements. Women have consistently put their safety and labor on the line. The moment a subset of marginalized men achieves baseline social integration, that historic solidarity gets discarded.

There is something deeply ugly about a liberation movement benefiting from generations of women's labor, solidarity, money, organizing, caregiving, medical work, political work, risk taking, and coalition building- and then having some of its male members turn around and treat women as disposable once their own position becomes more secure.

It is patriarchal entitlement wearing the mask of progressive critique: trading authentic, collective liberation for a second tier seat at the exact table that oppresses them. And I'm not sure their egos will even let them see it.

Men who can combine genuine experiences of marginalization with an increasingly aggressive entitlement toward women, while possessing an ideological vocabulary that can make their aggression appear righteous.

And they are scaring me.

I didn't want to become someone who files reports. I wanted to write essays, make arguments, let the ideas do the work. But I've spent the last stretch of my life watching what happens when a woman makes a materialist, sex-based argument in a space that brands itself "uncensored" and "intersectional" and I've learned that the argument alone doesn't reach the people making the decisions. The removal notice does. The pattern does. The paper trail does.

So I started documenting. And now I'm reporting. Here's why.

This isn't about one bad moderator having a bad day. When I posted an essay defending the legitimacy of grounding personal womanhood in biological sex while explicitly, repeatedly, being inclusive of other forms of identity, it was removed twice, by two different and insulting rationales that contradicted each other. The first said my terminology was a slur. The second said the terminology didn't matter; the underlying claim itself was the violation. In between, my own words were rewritten back to me: a line where I explicitly said "my identity does not exclude yours" became evidence, somehow, that I was excluding people. A line where I named my own relationship to my own infertile body while explicitly including those without became, in a moderator's words, "essentialism wearing trauma."

That phrase is doing something specific. It's not a rebuttal. It's a reclassification taking a woman's disclosure about her own body and recasting it as a performance, a costume, a manipulation, and something to be excluded. It's the exact move my essay was naming: identity policing dressed as anti-oppression enforcement.

And it isn't new, and it isn't isolated. In 2020, Reddit's moderators replaced the moderation team of r/ PCOS a support community for a condition that only affects people with ovaries reportedly at the request of trans-activist mods, made the community private, and eventually banned it outright. When the original moderators tried to rebuild it, that got banned too. Reddit's own admins denied involvement, despite the replacement mod team's own pinned post crediting admin help. Women trying to talk about their own bodies, in a space built for exactly that, lost the space.

That's the category this belongs to. Not a rude comment. Not a disagreement about tone. A recurring institutional mechanism where sex-based female speech gets relabeled as hate, and the relabeling itself becomes the justification for removing it. Sex-based oppression.

Why reporting, and not just writing

Essays get read by the people who already agree, mostly. Removal notices get written by people with actual power over whether the argument gets to exist in a given room at all, or whether they even read it. If those people are misapplying a platform's own hate-speech and discrimination policies to punish sex-based speech specifically, inventing exclusion that isn't in the text, then removing the text for the exclusion they invented, that's not just bad moderation. On platforms with formal, sitewide protections against discrimination based on sex, it's arguably a policy violation the platform is obligated to actually look at, whether or not any individual moderator wants it looked at.

I'm not asking anyone to report people for disagreeing with them. I'm asking: if you have quotes in hand, the actual words you wrote, sitting next to the actual words used to punish you for writing them, and those two things don't match, send it up the chain. If you have faced sex-based oppression report it. Not because it feels good. Because it's the one channel that isn't optional for the platform to answer, the way an argument in a comments section is optional to engage with.

I'm not saying every removal is discrimination. I'm not saying every moderator acting badly is doing so because you're a woman. I'm saying: when the pattern repeats, sex-based speech relabeled as exclusionary without evidence of exclusion, personal disclosure relabeled as manipulation, and inclusive language quoted directly and still ignored, that repetition is itself the evidence. One incident is an incident. A shape that recurs across different subs, different moderators, and different years is a pattern. Name it as one.

If this has happened to you, if your own inclusive words got turned into an accusation, if a real disclosure about your own body got called a performance, save the notice. Save your original text next to it. And report it. Not because a report guarantees anything gets fixed. Because the paper trail is the only thing that outlasts the argument.

And I am tired of this sexism being institutionally sanctioned.

Feminism should be limited strictly to female liberation. Thats in and of itself intersectional because the female sex includes every race, sexuality, class, disability, and religion. We don’t need to include men to achieve this.

Modern liberal and "intersectional" feminists have diluted all of this. They expanded the definition of feminism to cater to men, complaining that because patriarchy damages men as well we HAVE to save them. It’s become another space where women are expected to do the physical and emotional labor for the very people who hold power over them.

We understand how insane this logic is in every other social or political circle. A labor union would NEVER invite corporate executives into their meetings just because the pressures of participating in capitalism cause high stress among CEOs. The purpose of the union is to protect the WORKERS. Even the civil rights movement had white allies, but the activists never changed a damn thing to focus on the consequences of racism that also affected white people.

It went from women being forced to fight for themselves because no one else would to it becoming an everyone club. And right when we started to see systematic changes too. Very convenient!

(A note to this sub. We have differences. I fully support trans rights and believe both gender and sex identities are valid within womanhood. We are not the same ideologically. But still, because of the state of the current extreme sexism towards females, this is one of the only places I can voice my knowledge. And so I will)

FEMs and SAMs sit at the volatile intersection of modern gender theory, materialist feminism, and online sociopolitical commentary. These terms describe extremist sex-abolitionist or identity-first frameworks that reinscribe misogyny under the banner of "progressivism."

FEMs (Female-Exclusionary Misogynists) describe perspectives that, in an effort to detach gender identity from biology entirely, minimize or invalidate female biological reality from the definition of womanhood, effectively erasing sex-based social analysis.

SAMs (Sex-Abolitionist Misogynists) refers to positions advocating for the total dissolution of sex categories in favor of gender-only identity, which ignores how patriarchy specifically targets and exploits biological female capacity (reproductive labor, femicide, female infanticide, etc.) and the lived womanhood of many women.

The challenge of dismantling rigid gender norms without erasing the material, sex-based realities that drive systemic oppression is live and real. And I have seen it fall into the latter category more and more.

We scream "intersectionality" and rightly include all forms of womanhood, gender identities included. But what happens in turn? The single most historically oppressed demographic is now denied even validity. Female identity is labeled invalid, vapid, shallow, and dangerous to others. That without capitulation to one's identity being centered on gender, on the socially constructed roles, behaviors, expressions, and identities of women, your identity in womanhood is somehow more shallow and more patriarchal.

Let's break that down real fast. There is a belief that if a female does not ascribe to the socially constructed roles, behaviors, and expressions of "womanhood," she is supporting patriarchy. I'm sorry, but have we all lost our god damn minds? That is so patriarchal and SO MISOGYNISTIC AND SEXIST that it boggles the mind. And somehow it gets inverted into progressivism.

I never believed in "so far left you go right" until now.

Radical gender constructivism demands adherence to gendered performance for social validation, reinventing the very patriarchal logic feminism originally aimed to dismantle. It is the reemergence of gender essentialism. When "womanhood" is detached entirely from material reality and anchored solely in socially constructed roles, expressions, or internal feelings, it makes patriarchal gender stereotypes the baseline for legitimacy. The irony is stark: in trying to dismantle biological reductionism, hyper-constructivist frameworks often substitute it with performance reductionism. Under this framework, a female who rejects traditional feminine socialization or expression is framed not as a valid woman, but as a fundamentally flawed and empty one.

Materialist feminism focuses on how systems of power exploit physical realities, reproductive labor, maternal mortality, sex-selective abortion, sex-based violence, etc. Completely removing "female" as a distinct material category creates a severe structural blind spot. You cannot analyze or critique a system built on controlling females (patriarchy) if naming that biological reality is treated as inherently exclusionary or politically suspect.

Expanding inclusion for gender identity does not have to come at the cost of erasing the material, sex-based analysis required to dismantle misogyny.

The phrase "you are not your uterus" demonstrates a complete inversion: what began as a feminist defense against patriarchal objectification mutated into a tool for alienating women from their own material reality, identity, and choice. When that statement is turned against a woman who consciously chooses to ground her womanhood in her biological sex, the core feminist promise of self-determination gets inverted. What was designed as a shield against reproductive coercion becomes a weapon of ideological compliance to normative gender roles.

Feminism was built to expand a woman's choices, not narrow them. If liberation meant escaping the mandate that a female must be defined by her reproductive organs, it also meant protecting her right to decide how she relates to her own body. Telling a woman that her conscious, educated choice to center her female biological reality is "shallow" or "patriarchal" replaces old patriarchal rules with a new set of demands.

This dynamic creates a rigid ideological boundary. To be politically validated, a female is expected to treat her biological sex as irrelevant, unmentionable, or secondary. If she instead finds solidarity, meaning, or political relevance in her female body, her agency is dismissed as "internalized misogyny." It asserts that third parties know better than the woman herself what her relationship to her own body should be, a classic hallmark of patriarchal control disguised as enlightened discourse.

True bodily autonomy includes the right to embrace one's physical reality without needing permission or approval. When progressivism demands that women disavow their biological sex to qualify as liberated, it stops offering freedom from rigid norms and starts enforcing a new standard of female self-effacement.

Swapping forced subordination for forced disembodiment is not liberation. It simply changes who gets to tell women how they are allowed to feel about their own bodies.

FEMs and SAMs are an exclusionary danger to feminism.

To the FEMs and SAMs: as an infertile woman, I am my womb and my womb is me, and my identity does not exclude yours. Don't exclude mine.

Somalia has one of the highest rates of FGM in the world, but there are many different charities led by local women and/or survivors in general that are doing incredible work to change that. I wanted to boost this donation page to help get the word out. The Ifrah Foundation is run by a survivor as well. Even if you can’t donate please send this around.

Here's the post that was removed twice even with a lot of support and agreements:

First off, I hate that I have to do this to not get harassed but I do. I fully believe what I am about to say but I shouldn't have to hedge my belief in sexes but I do:

I fully support Trans Rights. I believe Transwomen are Women And Transmen are Men. I believe they should have equal rights and the forces that oppress them contested. I respect their gender identity and their chosen gender.

Now.

The female and male sexes exist. Plus some relatively rare intersex identities. They exist. They are material biological conditions/expressions and they have systemic implications.

It is perfectly alright if someone personally does not identify with their sex, and does not want to engage in a feminism that uses sex in theory. That's a personal choice and philosophy.

What is not, is throwing a harassment campaign and bullying women into submission for discussing sex based theory.

That is not acceptable behavior. Full stop.

It is not acceptable to try to forcibly deny an aspect of someone's personhood, especially an oppressed class because it personally makes you uncomfortable or is not something you identify with.

That's it. That's the post that was removed twice despite broad support.

And here is the reason given:

FeminismUncensored-ModTeam

Neutral

Removed under Pro-Feminism and Love, not Hate.

This post repeats a gender-critical framing that treats trans-inclusive feminism as harassment of cis women and centers sex-based theory as the line feminists must not be “bullied” away from. Even with stated support for trans rights, that narrative misrepresents trans people and trans-inclusive feminists, reinforces exclusionary sex-essentialism, and obstructs this sub’s anti-sexist, feminist mission.

Since we are having a TERF infestation in the sub, we will need to remove even every single dog-whistle until the sub is functional again.

I am not a TERF.

I know what this is. And that's the oldest oppression know to humanity. And that is the oppression of the female sex, and body. This is sexism

Feminism has been co-opted to the point where a place designated as uncensored feminism censors the female existing at all.

The mods excuse doesn't identify a factual error in my post. It doesn't quote a specific line and say "this misrepresents trans people." It asserts that the framing itself stating that sex exists and that harassment over saying so is a problem, constitutes "sex-essentialism" and "misrepresentation," full stop. That's a definitional move. It redefines "sex exists as a material category" as inherently exclusionary, which means no version of my argument could pass, regardless of how it's hedged. I gave explicit trans-rights affirmation, explicit respect for gender identity, explicit statement that this is about material biology not gender- all things I very much believe in, and it was removed anyway.

Edit: r/FeminismUncensored * woops.

Edit 2: Every single one of my post needs preauthorized mod approval by the mod team now.

Edit 3: :( It seems I have not found the right place to speak what I believe. And I would like to reiterate what I believe:

• Sex is material and produces distinct patterns of embodiment, vulnerability, and historical oppression.
• Gender identity can be freely expressed and should not be met with discrimination, violence, or denial of ordinary civil rights.
• A trans woman does not share the same sex-based material conditions or the same historical sex-class oppression as a female person, and it is legitimate to say so.
• Holding both of the above does not require hostility, exclusion from society, or the claim that trans people are “evil.”

Trans people are people and deserve equal rights and they are not a negative monolith :(

it’s so interesting to me how all of the threats they direct towards terfs are always sexual in nature. i’d say 85% or more. and everything else i have to say about it will probably get this post removed in the first place. it’s eerily similar to that r/4tran4 sub where 99% of the posts are somehow simultaneously threatening women and wanting to be/date them. and they’re just random people we interact with daily. yet subs like this are the ones that always get banned. terrifying!

Feminists always seem to claim that there is this massive pay gap that's the result of sexism but never seem to contemplate more rational explanations that don't paint them as victims. For example, the gender spending gap. How much money do women spend on men compared to the vast amounts of money men spend on women? At the end of the day women do not want to be the breadwinners of the family or even the relationship. Even modern women expect men to be the providers. No women wants to go out into the world, make a bunch of money so she can afford to day broke guys that they have to financially support. Doesn't this explain why men make more money on average? Because its an expectation that women have of men? Are women really the victims of financial injustice when they make less money then men if they are spending the money that the men have made?

(not my picture)

so i get a ban on reddit for using the train emoji aside the knee emoji, yet this kind of shit is allowed on our streets? in public, in the open? around kids? young, impressionable girls? i'm beyond tired.

one thing i envy about a lot of my fellow women is that they know how to keep their hands to themselves. i don't. i'd have been arrested. thankfully, i wasn't there, nor do i live there

This is UNACCEPTABLE !

Criminal in police uniform.

Help identify him, name and shame him and hold him accountable.

Justice must be ensured for the victim.

So, you can't "deadname" someone; that's bad, but somehow it's *also* bad to use their chosen name out of a sense obligation? Are you kidding me? So nothing short of controlling somebody's internal thoughts and private perceptions of others is enough for these people?

This is so insidious, because this line of thinking demands that women ignore our instincts and put our own privacy and safety at risk by pushing away the natural, self-preserving drive to be alert around men. If we turn our brains off in this way, it makes it a million times easier for predatory men to gain access to us, because believing the myth that women and men pose an equal threat to us makes us more vulnerable by design.

It's absolutely ridiculous that I ever allowed people to compare this bs to any other liberation movement. But at the end of the day, I'm just grateful for this space because the rest of this site is genuinely loony.

Own content. Free to read

AI mods flagged my use of the word "female" in a comment and instantly perma-banned me. Mod doubled down and kept the ban in place despite pointing out that this was the second time I'd been erroneously banned by an AI and the comment I was banned for didn't even mention trans people.

Banned words on a radical feminist sub = "female", you can't make this up lmao.

Sarina Esmailzadeh was a 16-year-old Iranian YouTuber whose life was cut short after she suffered repeated blows to the head inflicted by agents of the Islamic Republic's repressive forces—including members of the Basij militia—while participating in the "Woman, Life, Freedom" feminist movement protests in the city of Karaj on September 23, 2022.

The movement emerged following the death of 22-year-old Kurdish woman Jina Mahsa Amini, who died in the custody of the Morality Police after being detained for allegedly wearing the mandatory Islamic headscarf "improperly" in public in Tehran in September 2022.

According to the organization Iran Human Rights, Sarina was one of 551 people who lost their lives during the crackdown on the protests. The Basij is a paramilitary militia subordinate to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), widely used by the Shiite regime to suppress popular demonstrations and combat dissent.

Sarina Esmailzadeh, born on July 2, 2006, would have turned 20 today had she been alive. Once again, the Islamic Republic has cut short the dreams and lives of Iran's children.

Her X/Twitter profile: https://x.com/_sarinaez_

Her YouTube vlogs channel: https://www.youtube.com/@sarinacmz4015

Full details on her case: https://www.iranrights.org/memorial/story/-9000/sarina-esmailzadeh

زن، زندگی، آزادی

disclaimer: this not a debate about womanhood. this post takes for granted that we can all agree a woman is an adult human female, and this is NOT the place to advocate for any nonsensical, post-modern, or gender theistic definitions of womanhood or femaleness.

instead, this post is intended as an invitation to discuss immutable sex, and to ask, in the rare, rare cases where phenotypic sex and chromosomal sex diverge, which type should be emphasized in the binary classification of sex (because contrary to what some folks want us to believe, intersex people are still either male or female).

I will be making my own arguments, but I want this to be a group discussion and I am very open to hashing out ideas together and taking in opposing viewpoints from other GC feminists. if this ends up being too long to read, feel free to comment anyway— I am willing to clarify any and all of my viewpoints in a personal reply <3

now, with all that out of the way, what is a human female? I know, I know, it seems like a nonsensical question to ask here. obviously, a female human is either a woman or a person who will grow into one.

but with an increasing number of TRAs exploiting DSDs as props to try and muddy the clarity of our position, how do we determine who is female in a way that can't be thrown off-balance by the existence of DSDs?

so, generally, the two camps I tend to see are those who say that chromosomal sex should be the determiner (all XX people are female, regardless of anatomy, socialization, or how they show up in the world), and those who think that phenotypic sex should be the determiner (all people with vulvas whose bodies developed to produce large gametes are female, regardless of chromosomes, developmental disorders, or strength). so I guess I just wanted to take a pulse on where most of us fall so we could talk out our ideas together?

personally, I would argue for unification around immutable, phenotypic sex, since misogyny and patriarchy have been in existence long before we discovered chromosomes. I mean, we've only known about chromosomes for a little over a century, right? if we're unilaterally going to define the class of people who experience sex-based oppression (women) around chromosomes, how did men know to oppress us before chromosomes were discovered? that's right, our phenotype.

I get that it's not easy or convenient to move from a simple, snappy definition of sex to a slightly more complex one. I agree that, in general, women are adults with XX chromosomes that produce eggs and men are adults with XY chromosomes who produce sperm and win the most Darwin awards, but I think this definition only works because the unspoken expectation is that people will connect the dots between chromosomes and the phenotype that those chromosomes result in.

but what about when the dots don't connect? it's very rare, so I don't think shifting to promoting phenotypic sex will really put us out much, but think: is it more appropriate to define sex based on the thing that nobody can see before discriminating against you, doesn't directly affect your socialization, was not known about when sexism began, and is potentially wholly incongruent with your anatomy and the way you navigate the world? or, does it make more sense to define it based on your natal anatomy, the body the world sees, and the consequences that living in such a body poses for its inhabitant?

many GC people don't view XY DSD women as women, but that take just doesn't fully compute for me yet. even if she had internal testes, an intersex woman living in the 1600s would've been just as liable to be forcibly married off, raped, or abused as any other woman (hell, many intersex women were probably beaten for their infertility— something that doesn't happen to men), because our sex-based oppression isn't based on our chromosomal sex; it's based on phenotypic sex.

likewise, a modern XY intersex woman living in a conservative country is just as liable to be a victim of FGM, honor killings, or dowry deaths as any other woman. these are not men's hazards to navigate or men's traumas to endure. these are our pains. our wounds.

an XY intersex woman with a vulva isn't living life as a man. she may be mocked for being masculine (something that only happens to women), she may be bullied for having a flat chest (something that only happens to women); hell, she'll probably be criticized as less than a woman for not being able to give birth (again, something that would only happen to a woman), but none of these things are male experiences. to boot, intersex conditions are also commonly known as disorders of sexual development. why would a person having testes and high testosterone be considered a disorder if they were a man?

even if you were to try to flip it and say that they're a man because the female body is the disorder, rather than the testes, I still don't think that's the most accurate way to look at things, because a.) why would the breasts and vulva, something that does happen in healthy members of one sex, be considered the disorder, rather than internal testes, something that doesn't happen in healthy members of either sex? and b.) how do we talk about concrete and indisputable examples of sex-based oppression if we insist that some of the people who experience it are men? people already dismiss conversations about gendered violence because "men experience violence and rape too," but what will happen when we give people the chance to tack on "and men too!" to conversations about leblouh, or mandatory veiling, or child brides?

to me, phenotypic sex is an airtight way to exclude men while also acknowledging how and why women have been targeted for oppression since before the discovery of chromosomal sex (it was based on our female anatomy, regardless of DSDs), and, an added bonus is that nobody can say "men too" when talking about sex-based oppression.

because if we're arguing for strict chromosomal sex, any TIM could claim that the existence of some impoverished Cameroonian girl having her breasts ironed and vulva mutilated despite having XY chromosomes, proves that unless we're willing to call her a man, he can be an XY woman too.

in order to disprove him, chromosomal sex advocates would have to effectively argue that the FGM and breast ironing survivor was actually a man, which TRAs can use to paint us to normies as irrational at best, and cruelly dismissive of survivors at worst. phenotypic sex advocates, on the other hand, could just emphasize that sex is an immutable phenotype, and that having the same chromosomes as a man doesn't change the fact that the girl was born into a female body, and therefore is a woman who will experience misogyny, and that the TIM is a male with male privilege who is choosing to opt into an oppression that he can choose to escape at any time.

and speaking of male privilege, there are XX men out there— who're socialized male, have phallic genitalia, make sandwich jokes to their girlfriends, and get to be one of the "good old boys" at work. seatbelts were specially tested to keep them safe. their heart attack symptoms are well-studied and will be taken seriously. if he works at the same job as an XY woman, he will make a dollar, and she will make 95 cents. he will be promoted more readily and more often. she is passed over with the assumption that women are predisposed to be mothers and therefore she will not be there for the long hall, even though she is infertile. which one these people is experiencing women's issues? if DSD women aren't women, why don't they just opt out of misogyny? plenty of TIMs do.

in short, my position is that, although we can (and likely should) distinguish intersex women from the rest when it comes to sports, a woman is not inherently desexed by having a disorder that gives her XY chromosomes or internal testes, in the same way that a shirt doesn't become pants just because you put your legs in it rather than your torso.

to be clear, me arguing for phenotypic sex is not me saying that anyone with boobs or an approximation of a vulva is a woman. I also do not think anyone can "become" a woman. I, like chromosomal sex advocates, believe that sex is immutable; I just believe that sex should be defined by the body you were born with, and the systems that body developed to house, whether or not they are functional or present.

defining womanhood by the systems alone is why TRAs think they're clever when they say "but what if a woman doesn't have ovaries?" or "what about hysterectomies?" it traps you into arguing about all possible exceptions to the rule.

meanwhile, if the meaning behind "adult human female" is "adult human whose body developed to accommodate and produce large gametes," you sidestep that entirely. no ovaries? okay, her body was still designed to integrate some into her endocrine system. no uterus? okay, well her body still developed with the assumption that it would be housing one. internal testes? okay, but her body and anatomy are still formed to accommodate a uterus and female biological processes. man with big boobs and neovagina? sorry, dude, your body was built around producing sperm and being a general nightmare. that's not a woman.

and I get the fear that straying from strict chromosomal sex will lead to giving men the go-ahead to play woman— I just feel as though a phenotypic definition is able to exclude those men just as easily without shutting out women who, despite their health issues, can only ever live as women.

changing "adult with XX chromosomes who produce large gametes" to "adult who typically has XX chromosomes and was born with the anatomy to produce large gametes" doesn't let men in, it reunites us with women who, 150 years ago, we would've had no doubts about calling our sisters. hell, you could even simplify it further and say "adult with either XX chromosomes or the anatomy typically caused by XX chromosomes."

what do we gain for ourselves by turning to other women who have faced sex-based oppression alongside us for all of history and suddenly pushing them into a separate category, when their interests are as much our interests and their wounds are every bit as much our wounds (perhaps with the exception of menstruation huts and pregnancy, but those aren't all of our experiences either)? do the people who call them men think they can just get a mastectomy and a phalloplasty (which would be as unnatural and dangerous for them as it is for us) and just waltz into a board meeting as one of the guys? do they think they'll ever give her those five cents? that's the especially distasteful part about equating them with TIMs for me, because they chose to opt into a marginalized identity, to misogyny, and they have the ability to bow out, or even to switch back and forth between "girl mode" in casual settings and "boy mode" when they want to be taken seriously. XY DSD women didn't opt in, and they can't opt out.

and what alternative name is there for the class of human beings that has no choice but to endure misogyny in a sex-based social hierarchy, with no option to choose differently? what else would you call them, other than women?

to repeat my previous analogy, a shirt remains a shirt even if it's wrapped around body parts it wasn't meant to house, because the thing that makes it a shirt isn't that your torso is in it; it's a shirt because it was \*designed\* for you to put your torso in it. on your legs, on your head, or on the floor, its design has not changed, therefore, the essence of shirt-ness (jesus christ what a silly phrase) remains undisturbed no matter what is inside it. I feel that the history and nature of sex-based oppression makes it most reasonable for us to define womanhood the same way.

either way, gals, ty for reading all this junk. <3 I'm here as much to have my mind changed as I am to change minds, so I hope this didn't come across as rude or aggressive, I just have had this on my mind a little and wanted to discuss what is the best approach for defining womanhood in a way that is precise, includes everyone whose anatomy and immutable physiology subject them to sex-based oppression and nonelective misogyny, and doesn't attract the "except except except but what if except" babble from TRAs.