Dear readers: Let me introduce you to something called the No True Scotsman fallacy.
Readers, No True Scotsman. No True Scotsman? Readers.
Okay. Notice I have not yet explained what this fallacy is. That's because it's only half a fallacy.
No True Scotsman comes into play if you are an atheist and you say you find Christians annoying because they all send money to Jimmy Swaggart, and then some Christian comes back at you with "No true Christian would send money to Jimmy Swaggart." Well, that might be true these days, but fortysomething years ago there sure were some real Christians sending money to Jimmy Swaggart. Sorry.
However, not all "no true blanketyblank" arguments are No True Scotsman arguments. If you are an atheist and you say you hate Christians because they all sacrifice kittens at Mass, you are guilty of an ideological misfire because there are several reasons kitten sacrifice is never part of Christian worship. Any Christian pointing this out to you is fully within their rights to do so, no fallacy whatsoever, and you may safely dismiss anyone claiming to be Christian and sacrificing kittens as not only an animal abuser but also a rank liar. Kind of like Rachel Levine when he says he's a woman. The rank liar bit, anyway. (Does he also kick puppies? I wouldn't be surprised.)
Because there really are criteria for who's a true Scotsman and who's not. The edges of the definition are a little fuzzy (if your parents are Scottish but you were born and grew up in the United States and have never so much as set foot in Great Britain, are you a Scotsman? Maybe aye, maybe naw) but if you ever meet a person who was not born in Scotland, has never lived in Scotland, has no Scottish parents or ancestors, and is female, what you have on your hands is no true Scotsman. Sometimes that is just plain a fact, and you are just going to have to accept it.
So I'm going to lay out for you some warning signs that you have encountered a "feminist" group which is not a true feminist group.
First up, a definition:
FEMINISM (noun): The political movement to liberate female people from the patriarchy.
This definition also implies a movement that works for the good of female people, both women and girls. We can quibble about what's good for women and girls, at least a little bit. But if you can plainly see someone is doing something that is bad for women and girls, you can safely dismiss their claim to be a feminist.
(If you need me to tell you what women and girls are, a refresher:
Woman [noun]: An adult human being who was born with ovaries
and
Girl [noun]: A juvenile human being who was born with ovaries
Got that? Good. Moving along now.)
If a group is working against what's good for female people, they're not going to come out and say so. They aren't dummies; they know it'd turn you off, and they REALLY want your money. So you have to look for clues.
Here are the more egregious red flags I've seen.
"All genders"
The people running this organization who use this term are operating from a fallacy -- not the No True Scotsman fallacy -- that I have discussed elsewhere. They use the term gender when they really mean sex class. Therefore they believe women and men are genders, and they believe there are additional genders besides women and men but because they don't know the difference between gender and sex class, what they are arguing is that there are more than two sex classes in the human species.
In other words, they have bought into gender identity. Thus they sometimes, or often, make decisions or adopt political stances that take resources and spaces away from female people and give them to male people. They may even (and usually do) support admitting male people into situations where male presence, even in a miniskirt, puts female people at extra risk.
The proper phrase is both sexes. An organization using the proper phrase doesn't mean they are safe for female people, but using all genders is always a red flag.
A variation on this is "all-gender," dash, no "s", appended to a public restroom. It means a high likelihood of piss on the floor around the toilet and a high risk of hidden cameras. This essay is about organizations, not restrooms, but if your organization makes a point of meeting in a building with such restrooms specifically because that sort of restroom is available, be wary.
Arguing that feminism is for everyone
It is very probable that if feminist politics ever accomplishes its goal of liberation of female people from patriarchy that men will benefit too. It LOOKS like they will. Feminist politics being successful would LIKELY be beneficial for gay and bisexual men too, not just heterosexual. Certainly, if I've got my information lined up right, feminism SHOULD also benefit male children in the long run. (It's already meant to benefit girls.) There's always a chance I'm wrong, but I doubt it very much.
That doesn't mean feminism is for everyone. Feminism does not concern itself with what comes after feminism, if there is such a thing (men are quite persistent about oppressing women, I find). It has one job, and that should be its only focus.
If you need a movement for your particular problems and those have nothing to do with you being a female person living under patriarchy, don't expect feminism to band-aid your bo-bos for you. That's not what it's for.
The particularly offensive thing about this argument is that, well, see also the John Lennon song. He had no room to talk, but he did have a point. We've already been expected to wipe the world's ass all our lives and everything we've had that was our own, we've had to fight for and all too frequently, men take it away. Here we have this ONE thing SPECIFICALLY NAMED for us and men want that too? Fuck off. Get your own.
Anyway, so any "feminist" group saying this can be safely ignored. They lost the plot a long time ago.
A side note, however: Intersectional feminism is a real thing which the genderdorks have also done their best to take over and ruin. It's a kind of feminism that looks at other ways a particular girl or woman might be oppressed. For instance, a black woman in the United States not only faces oppression for being a woman, she also faces oppression for being black. This can put her into situations where she feels she has to choose between her sex class and her racial group because a situation has arisen that throws both into conflict: for instance, what do you do when you are a black woman, a black man you know has raped a black woman you know, and the police in your city, who have long had discipline problems and who are mostly white, beat him to death during an arrest for jaywalking? You want to protest police brutality and to convince politicians to reform the police, but the police also accidentally did a rape victim a huge favor (although she may not see it that way, which is her right). Stuff like this happens. It can be difficult to navigate.
Intersectional feminism DOES NOT mean including men. Not even men who call themselves women or non-binary.
A second side note, because I just thought of this: An organization can have feminist inclinations and also address other causes at the same time if its membership perceives that those causes are related to female people's rights. But if it throws up any of the red flags I list here, it's just the organizational version of Feminist Guy: claiming to be feminist so it can fuck us. If that's what it's doing, avoid.
Black women vs "black trans women"
I've mentioned elsewhere that genderdorks will try to "prove" that "trans women are women" by calling black women men. In other words, "trans women are women just like black women are women." "Trans women" are actually men, so you're calling black women men as well.
The other thing I notice with genderdorks is that they hold up the "black trans woman" as the epitome of... whatever. I don't even know. This is just the Most Sacred Person EVAR and if something isn't safe for him, it isn't worth anything.
I was at a pro-choice rally in 2019 in downtown Columbus, Ohio and a young woman of color had started a "black lives matter" chant after sharing some info about how dangerous pregnancy is for black women. She got the chant going all right, but we weren't even going thirty seconds when some little white lady over on the side started a "trans lives matter" chant, which most of us (not me) immediately jumped into. So that's where we are. Men and confused white women who aren't even pregnant trump the black women dying in childbirth. What the actual fuck.
Anyway, if some so-called "feminist" organization starts nattering on about "black trans women," run the other way. And I'm not gonna whitesplain to black women but if I were black, I would be running the other way twice as fast. It's like these organizations want to argue that black men are women and black women are men. I say again: What the actual fuck.
"Cisgender," "cis woman," "cisgender woman," "cis female," etc.
In chemistry, cis and trans mean particular configurations of molecules. Thus you have trans-fatty acids and cis-fatty acids: two different configurations of the same fatty acid. In genderspeak, if you are cis, you're not trans. No one is trans, of course, but that's how they see it.
Meanwhile, they're using the prefixes wrong (if you use them as they're used in chemistry, then in order to be a trans woman, you have to actually be a woman first -- a trans fat is not a carbohydrate that identifies as a fat), which has confused some older people who actually know what those prefixes mean.
Most of all, again you see they confuse gender with sex class. A woman can't be cisgender or transgender because woman is a sex class. And you can't be a trans female or a cis female because female is a sex. They're mixing up all these categories. They are completely confused. But we knew that.
Long story short, these terms mean the organization is captured by gender identity and, again, can be safely ignored unless you have to fight them in the political arena because they're trying to ban free speech, facilitate porn-sickness, wreck families, or make quackery legal.
"Inclusive" or "intersectional"
If inclusive in the context of a "feminist" group means all female people are welcome (or all female people of a certain age range, if that applies), that's fine.
If inclusive in the context of a "feminist" group means "trans women are women" and they're welcome too, that's bullshit.
A group can only be inclusive of you if you actually belong in it. Otherwise you are an invader.
If you can't figure out which kind of "inclusive" is meant, look at the organization's literature and social media posts to see if you find any of the other red flags listed here. Obviously, if you see them terfing out, there's probably nothing to worry about.
"But what about normal men joining feminist organizations?" Good question. I haven't 100% decided how I feel about this. But it feels too much "man bossing women around telling us how to feminist," and I'm at a point where I'm having absofuckinglutely none of that. Maybe if the organization has a men's auxiliary. I've never heard of a feminist group that does that, but they should probably start.
I am definitely in the "men are not feminists" camp, however, for the same reason the U.S. Army didn't become the French Army at Normandy in World War Two. You agree with our aims and want to offer material support? Super. But every time men actually join a women's thing, they take it over and reshape it in their image. The entire fucking point of feminism is to stop them doing that to us. If you can't understand that, I can't help you.
Also, I mentioned intersectional feminism a few items back. The genderdork organizations use intersectional to mean the same thing as their definition of inclusive: men are allowed, men are centered, men are primary. If you see that happening, avoid with great prejudice. (The right kind of prejudice.) If a group calling itself feminist really is intersectional, they shouldn't need to announce it. If they do announce it, look for other red flags. You will probably find them.
"Non-men"
The up-and-coming kids won't be aware of this because they're too busy bullshitting about firehydrantgenders on TikTok to know their own damn political history, but calling something "non-thing" means "thing" is default, primary, normal, more important. It's why we started saying "people of color" instead of "non-white people." If you see an organization saying non-men, they're dick-panderers.
Doubly so since some of the people they are labeling "non-men" actually are men and they want their pseudo-feminist organization to cater to those men using women's time and women's resources.
I've seen this with the Greens in the UK and their "women's" caucus. I'm sure it's happening elsewhere.
Obsession with abortion more than any other women's issue
I am absolutely, 100% grade-A pro-choice, focused on the well-being of the pregnant female person over anything else.
Groups claiming to be feminist still need to be willing to work on other issues pertinent to female people's lives in addition to reproductive issues.
You can't yell at JK Rowling for "reducing women to our biology" and then only focus on women's biology.
And that goes double if you think men can get pregnant. Assholes.
(They don't even focus on ALL of women's biology. When was the last time you saw the National Organization for Women launch a huge nationwide campaign to make doctors aware of female heart attack symptoms? I would not be surprised if heart attacks kill us more often than pregnancy does. They definitely kill us more often than they kill men.)
"Pregnant people"
Pay close attention if you are watching MSNBC or CNN or any of the other more liberal news outlets and they do a piece about reproductive rights. Chances are very good at least one of the people they interview will be a woman et up wit' the genderdork and you will hear her say pregnant people.
Not everyone in the media has caught on to this, and it's interesting because even those who sort of buy into gender identity will still say "pregnant women" most of the time. Maybe "pregnant women and girls." Not often "pregnant people." Knowing it's female people who get pregnant is a tough habit to break, apparently.
If you see an organization using this phrase, do not donate to them. Do not join them. If you are feeling particularly brave, tell them why.
It's bullshit that we finally get someone to admit that women are people but they will only do it so they can erase us in language. Fuck you too, "folx."
It isn't even to make trans-identified and non-binary-identified women more comfortable. Most of those know they're women and they consider themselves included in the term "pregnant women." The real reason the genderdorks have adopted this new phrase is so trans-identified men won't feel sad for not having uteruses. Got that? Having a uterus doesn't make you a woman, except when it does. If you're an organ donor, make an exception for that one. They're trying. It's gross.
Oh, I just remembered. You know that pro-choice rally I mentioned a few items back? Yeah, they've fucked up the chants now. I particularly like this one:
"Right to life," your name's a lie!
You don't care if people die!
Right? "People." Which people? Oh, just... people. Whatever. Dying of a brain tumor, probably. What were we here for, again? Tee-hee. [twirls hair, smacks gum]
"Women and femmes"
Okay. For those of you who don't know, a bit of lesbian terminology. (I'm not a lesbian. I'm just aware of this.) Femme means a lesbian who "looks feminine," as opposed to a butch who has more of what we would call a "masculine" vibe. I've addressed elsewhere the problem of assigning gender to things which have nothing to do with sex, but that's how we tend to think as a culture and so I am just explaining.
But, knowing that, look at the above phrase. Women and femmes. Huh? Of course femmes are women. Why name them separately?
Oh, right: you didn't know, did you? Men have taken that word away from women too. It's ironic, because femme is a French word that just means "woman," so it DOUBLY has nothing to do with men. Nowadays the blue-haired kids use it to label a guy who looks more "feminine" than "masculine" and usually, he "identifies as a woman" as well.
If an organization throws around the phrase women and femmes, they are saying that whatever they're offering is also for men. Chances are very good that means you will find yourself in risky situations with men or that men will be stealing resources that were supposed to go to you. Or both. It's often both.
"Women and non-binary"
I will be fucking stunned if I ever encounter an organization for men that brags about including "men and non-binary." Haven't seen one yet and I've been following this trainwreck for many years, long before it became personal for me.
This phrase was created with the same mindset that gave us non-men (see above). Typically an organization using phrases like this sees women as the garbage bin containing everyone Not Good Enough To Be A Manly Man. But if you tell them women are adult female people with vaginas and boobs and periods, they call you a Nazi and block you on Twitter.
Ironically, even though men don't really attack gender-nonconforming men in privacy facilities (restrooms, locker rooms, etc.) anymore, in theory the gender-nonconforming men should be safer in women's facilities, and yet genderdorks are always coming down on women for being "dangerous" for "trans" people, so why the fuck are they all queueing up to get into our spaces? If we're going to completely ignore men's role in violence against "trans" people, which apparently we are, why not put the "trans" people in the spaces with the people we are not blaming for their murders, even though those are the ones actually responsible? Make it make sense.
--
A lot of this stuff has to do with genderfuckery. That's because the gender identity movement has really eroded the feminist movement. We can probably even blame them for Dobbs, because one of the criteria the Supreme Court used for deciding to strike down Roe was legal precedent that pregnancy is not a sex-based condition [sic], hence discriminating against pregnant women is not sex discrimination. This is what happens when you completely ignore that men abuse us because we can get pregnant and you pretend that the abuse just happens at random -- y'know, the way they "assign" sex at birth. Just flip a coin. No mainstream feminist organization is going to be able to get anything done if they don't even know what they're working for. They can't know what they're working for when they don't know what a woman is anymore.
But there are a couple other red flags you should also watch out for.
Buzzwords and slogans
Hypothetically, because I'm not sure this exists, a good feminist organization engages in material analysis of the life conditions of women and girls. They pay attention to what is actually going on and they try to come up with real solutions to those problems. They don't try to sound like the cool kids. Girls and women don't stop being female at age twenty-five, even if incels think we do.
(Do incels think? Sometimes I wonder if the incel penis doesn't serve as an antenna to pick up manosphere signals and project them through the incel's mouth. It would explain a lot. Not like they're doing anything actually useful with it.)
If the organization does coin a term or name for something that didn't really previously have a name, fine, but make sure it actually addresses the problem. I still call myself "pro-choice," but when you get right down to it, we don't have the right to choose to do absolutely anything we want to do. I would say a more accurate name for my stance is "pro-consent," though obviously that would not just apply to abortion. I don't want to call myself "pro-abortion" because it sounds like I want all pregnant women to always get abortions, which is not true. You see the problem. And we can't even talk about this because feminist groups are too focused on appealing to the public rather than educating them. That was a problem long before Bruce Gender.
"Oh, but the public don't want to just be educated. That's boring."
Oh, are YOU ever in the wrong job. And they're not listening to you now. You might as well go back to the drawing board and appeal to people's intelligence, because you haven't tried that one yet.
Anyway, if all the organization's literature and social-media posts look like they're cartoon characters trying to explain particle physics to a room full of ficus trees by talking like Elmo and bootydancing on TikTok, you might want to give that one a wide berth. Remember that Oceania in George Orwell's 1984 invented the Newspeak language to stop people from thinking by reducing the amount of language they knew. That is NOT the effect we are after here.
Large corporate organizations valued over grassroots politics
Before they bowed before the altar of gender identity and started poisoning our born kids, we had a huge problem with Planned Parenthood hogging up all the family-planning resources to the detriment of smaller local women's clinics. (I will not call them "abortion clinics" because that's never been the only or even the most important thing they do.) We've seen similar things happening with feminist organizations and feminist newsletters, newspapers, and magazines. The big nationals get all the attention, the grassroots dry out and die.
On the one hand, an organization having a national platform means they potentially have a lot more ears to yell into about any given issue affecting female people. This can be a good thing.
On the other hand, it takes a lot less effort for a bad-faith actor to take over an organization like that and make it do what they want it to do for maximum damage. I've seen the small clinics sometimes go genderdork, but Planned Parenthood is the absolute worst about it.
But even before we had to deal with men in lipstick controlling women's organizations, when you only have a handful of groups controlling the public discourse about women, you get the same problem you have when only a handful of national networks report the news. You never hear the whole story. I remember the Clinton scandal in the 1990s (this was Bill, not Hillary, for you young'uns reading this) and how all the major feminist organizations were angry that the fundies were picking on Bill for stuff that should have been private. I know of one feminist magazine that spoke out against Bill's sexual harassment (owing to his being in the same position as an employer) of Monica Lewinsky.
One.
Doesn't mean that was the only one -- I wasn't reading them all -- but it doesn't bode well.
That magazine is no longer in print, by the way. I think it folded in the 2000s.
(On The Issues, if you're curious. Who also sounded the alarm about the Taliban in 1997, four years before the 9/11 terrorist attack. "Where are all the feminists?" My fucking God.)
Cult of personality
Frequently I see women who are trying to analyze what went wrong in our culture placing the blame on hierarchy, which is a way of prioritizing who has power and who doesn't by placing some people in a dominant position over other people who are supposed to be their inferiors. Typically these women (and some men; men sometimes tackle this problem too) will say that hierarchy is a trait of patriarchy, that if we did away with patriarchy then hierarchy would go away as well.
(Speaking of men, another version of this I've run into is a man saying that there is authoritarian hierarchy and there is authoritative hierarchy, and that we should want the latter and not the former. I could quibble with that because there are potential pitfalls in the model, but that's way off topic here.)
Sorry, not buying it. I have seen too much evidence that women have hierarchy too and that it does not all depend on men.
Would it go away if we shitcanned patriarchy? Was it caused by patriarchy? I don't know, but I have my doubts. Social animals have leaders. We're a social animal. Even in matrilineal cultures, the grandmothers are held to be more important than the baby girls are, at least in terms of governance (baby girls being more important than grandmothers for other reasons, of course). I would imagine that at least the nature of hierarchy would probably change and become something more humane if it weren't based on the worship of male violence, though.
But we aren't there yet. And we keep allowing various women to be leaders and be more important than the rest of us women on very little evidence that they've actually earned it. And then we're confused when shit goes horribly wrong.
Sometimes this is highly visible, because the woman in question is some kind of media figure, and sometimes it's less visible because the women in question are on a board of directors or something and so they act more as a group and it's hard to tell whose bright idea it was to cancel some other woman for being too flippant in a Twitter space or for, gasp, knowing that women are the people who get periods (love ya, JK Rowling). But either way it causes a lot of drama and keeps us from being effective for female people's rights.
I would not join an organization that hasn't figured out some kind of protective measure against this problem. At MINIMUM, there needs to be good communication all around. I know of one organization that shitcanned a friend of a friend from one of their caucuses and acted like there was absolutely nothing wrong, even though the friend of a friend had served in that caucus for years. No explanation, no apology, just "tee-hee, try again next year!" [twirls hair, smacks gum] If someone can't be kind and understanding in a position of power, she doesn't belong in power. I don't mean you demand kindness from her and she complies. I mean she should be willing to offer it by her own incentive. If too many women in power in a "feminist" organization are incapable of kindness and understanding, that organization is doomed.
I mean, it might hang around for decades yet if it can get enough money from the tit-implant industry, I suppose, but it won't be doing the job it's claiming to do.
We deserve better. If demanding better goes nowhere, let's BE better.
—
Postscript: No, I don’t usually include images with my essays. Yes, I created the meme in this essay. Yes, you can pass it around if you want to. You don’t have to credit me if you don’t want to, but please don’t credit the wrong person, either. Thanks.
I’m still confused. I liked it better when men were men, women were women, etc. it was so much easier back then. No one was trying to “pass” as what they supposedly truly were. The voice is always the giveaway in that trying to pass thing. And the cartoon like gestures and inflection that are so tiresome to be around, and the drama and fluttery eyelashes.
Anyway, have you ever noticed that men beat up other men and women more than women beat up men or other women?
I still think this is a mental illness, and it’s 100% mental illness, because no one is really a woman in a man’s body and vice versa. Biology doesn’t do things like that. That poor dandelion is really a rose, deep down, and that lion is really a lamb and that is why the lamb is so beat up and bloody.
You can’t tell me that this isn’t just crazy. ALL of it!
It’s hard to read an article about one of them because of the pronouns. They is plural. (Autocorrect just underlined “is” in that sentence. Autocorrect needs to get with it before it misgenders somebody and ends up with a bloody nose)
I wish that hadn’t taken over the rainbow, baby colors, and the word kind. I bought some KIND protein bars and I can’t eat them because of this. They’re probably full of barbed wire or something.
Oh well, enough for now.