I’m still processing far too much from Week 1.

Feminists Against Women: the Politics of Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminism. This is a course I didn’t realize I needed. It’s been a no-brainer to support the trans community against the likes of J.K. Rowling and other “feminists” of late. Their fear of trans folks’ perceived threat to women clearly seeks to (re)establish oppressive regimes over the gender category to which they feel a manifest privilege; through exclusionary membership. When my radar feed blipped with these reactionary dogmas — their cantankerous claims to categorical purity — I could easily flag as untrustworthy (and dangerous to trans folks). Something about the way that a very small group of people could inflame suspicion and panic…as a Jew this always tickles heightened security.

Yay BISR! The chance to trace this thesis of hate back 50 years to reactionary “radical feminists” of the 70s like Mary Daly and Janice Raymond. They considered trans women another faction of patriarchal violence. Deceptive illusionists!

And then encounter secondary analysis alongside this hateful rhetoric from Naomi Joni Aliza Cohen and others that yank our investigation of TERF’s ideological roots as far back as the rise of National Socialism in Germany.

Cohen’s work in The Eradication of “Talmudic Abstractions”: Anti-Semitism, Transmisogyny and the National Socialist Project:

“Nazi political ontology understands the biological as one of, if not the most important terrains of political dispute. We know this in our understanding of Nazi race theory, but what has been neglected is the centrality of endocrinological purity and security to Nazi ideology. In this sense, endocrinological purity is the gender/sex corollary of the Nazi eugenic project of racial purity.”

EDIT 2023-06-06: I might have had more to say at the time…now forgotten. Let’s end it here.