(continued from https://fstdt.com/X_WSP.74WBDP6 )
Where "Just Be Kind" Has Gotten Us
[...]

The next ceded ground: girlhood (and feminism)

This brings me to one of my least-favorite woman-identified men of all time: Dylan Mulvaney, [...] The underlying ideology that informs Mulvaney’s shtick is taken directly from social media platforms like Reddit and Tumblr, where a frequently repeated mantra of the trans-identified is “Wanting to be a girl is a symptom of being a girl.” In other words, the desire to be female, no matter how intense, is enough of a justification to claim that identity for yourself. For males like Mulvaney, declaring you are a girl is akin to a magical utterance that creates you as such and starts the clock, if you will, on your “girlhood” journey (I’ll save the discussion of why many of these adult men prefer to refer to themself as “girls” for another day).

Colonizing girlhood is not only the next logical step once the colonization of womanhood was complete; it’s also a symptom of the way trans ideology presupposes womanhood and women as “open access” in this way: the barriers to our identities are so low that, if you desire womanhood at all, it is already yours, constantly available to everyone. [...]

This is the extreme end of the “inclusive at all costs” logic: The barrier to womanhood, to our lives, to everything we have, is so low, how could they hold any value at all? Being demonstrated on a society-wide level here is the complete inability to conceive of women as human beings who can possess anything at all that we shouldn’t be willing to gladly give up to someone else at the drop of a hat, or their expression of a desire to have it.

Following this principle of inclusivity to its logical conclusion, then, is how we got to modern-day liberal feminism. Feminism is for everyone narratives have effectively, gently, insidiously, almost invisibly, swept natal females to the side in their own liberation movement. This is what Andrea Dworkin meant when she said that a mainstream feminist movement is an oxymoron that can’t actually exist, because once it becomes mainstream it will cease to serve women’s liberation: the only type of feminism that can ever become mainstream is the toothless kind, that can ultimately only support the status quo.