The Personal is Political

How Two Men Bullied a New Mother until Reportedly Her Milk Dried Up in the Name of Trans

There is a feminist slogan that the personal is political. Women are often chided that our concerns are so local and unique to the banalities of day-to-day life that there is no political dimension to the fact that it is women who disproportionately take care of children, the sick, the elderly, and the men, and we are, by and large, not or not fairly compensated for this labor. We are denied a class consciousness because men benefit personally from our political subjugation. Their refusal to do their share of housework is not trivial because the system that enriches men so they can buy women, and impoverishes women so we are cheaper to men, gets that money from the unpaid sexual, emotional, household, and reproductive labor of women. We loan the value they use to buy us. That is why they work to devalue it. The personal is political.

A woman recently contacted me. For the past two years at least, she has been the only regular member of a group playing a game I know to be tedious as all hell and not worth the trouble: Dungeons and Dragons. If I wanted the slow ramp, I’d watch Rick & Morty. She apparently contributed valuable effort in the form of making game tokens and preparing and providing food. And she hosted one game a week at her house while participating in another game hosted at a public venue. Her participation was sufficiently essential that when she needed a break for maternity leave, they replaced her with a temp. Perhaps they simply do not want to have to listen to more than one female voice. Perhaps they fear two women might get to talking.

Two years ago, she had an exchange with a man who had issue with JK Rowling and her request that they not use the term, “TERF,” to slur women. As we all learned in Brighton, the use of this slur directly predicts which men will come to our protests and set off smoke bombs and initiate other instances of violence against us, setting off smoke bombs, knocking people to the ground, and throwing punches. This dehumanizing slur, generally paired with eliminationist rhetoric, i.e., “kill the terf,” legitimizes violence against women, as well as other forms of intersexual aggression against women and girls, such as targeting our employment and participation in public life. Male domination of women is along the axis of our sexed bodies, our differing female biology.

Inescapably, males need females in a way females do not necessarily need males. Femaleness, the capacity to produce oocytes or bear offspring, is clearly older than maleness and preceded maleness in our evolutionary timeline, and is the sex not defined by the existence of the other sex. Maleness evolved to advantage femaleness, not the other way around. Men who worship a male creator god cannot reconcile their god’s masculine omnipotence with the constrained potence inherent to actual, functional maleness. So they make up a story abou thow the male creator god had the first created male human give birth to the first female human, and do it better, with less pain and suffering and effort, than a female human giving birth. Then they made our superior power, as females, a punishment, to explain why we possessed it when they were made in the true image of God, the father.