I'm aware that someone who the media has positioned as a brand name and face of Boomer/second wave feminism left the planet yesterday.

We've entered a time where more and more brand names and faces of yesteryear's feminism are passing.

I mostly shrug.

They were once my heroes in the pre-internet days of low information.

And then I discovered that many of these faces and names tainted the good they did with heaping doses of transphobia and other bigotries.

https://www.themarysue.com/gloria-steinem-bill-maher-cissexism/

While I did learn a lot of useful things from Boomer/second wave feminism, one of the sadder things I learned is when a person's motivation for participating in a social justice movement focuses on securing greater power for oneself, rather than centering finding a place of equal access to society's power and resources for the larger group, things tend to go off the rails quite readily.

Again and again and again.

If you're just in it for yourself, you're probably going to become a problem for yet another social justice movement to confront.

And so many women who participated in second wave feminism became the faces and names who populated the problems that other social justice movements had to confront.

"Ally." 🤨

I am used to the kinds of allies who say nice nice things that sound good in one moment and then stab folks in the back during the next moment.

It's as common as shards of glass washed up on an ocean beach.

Oh, I was aware of her original recanting on her bigotry but I never trusted her and my judgement turned out to be sound, LOL.

@timberwraith genuinely losing my mind seeing leftists mourn a CIA asset

@nautilus Yeah, her past was, shall we say, "quite mixed." 🙄

I reread Steinem's 2013 editorial where she revealed that she had a change of heart and supported trans rights.

But it wasn't an apology for her fucked up behaviors and words of her bigoted past. No. The editorial contained a litany of, "Here are my justification for the horrible shit I said about trans people. It wasn't all that bad and I had my reasons. It was a different time with different rules. Whatever."

Cripes, I'm starting to remember why I thought she sucked.

https://www.advocate.com/commentary/2013/10/02/op-ed-working-together-over-time

Here is a tip:

If you have an epiphany and realize that your bigotry toward trans people was a bad thing and now you feel different, that's great.

However, if you feel compelled to share that change of heart with the world, don't precede that with a long preamble that is basically an ass-cover to justify your past prejudices.

You're just talking to yourself and other cis people at that point. It looks like bullshit to trans people. Or more bullshit on top of your previous bullshit.

It's an ego trip to make YOURSELF feel better, not trans people.

If you are truly sincere about your change of heart, that requires that you set your ego aside and truly, honestly, and forthrightly admit that you really messed shit up. No excuses. No equivocations. No justifications.

Just own your past screw ups. Own the role that you took part in when you had embraced prejudice.

Actually show some real remorse, ffs.

That is NOT what Steinem did.

What she did amounted to a PR press release to cover her butt.

That's fucking empty.

But someone might be thinking, "Eh, timberwraith is being picky and unforgiving. What an asshole."

Well first of all, OK, you think I'm an asshole. I don't care. You go with that.

But second of all, imagine that same 2013 editorial recrafted as a guy of some public prominence among progressives/liberals who has an epiphany that his past sexism and misogyny were rather terrible.

And then he writes a long list of justifications as to why the terrible things he said about women were justified by the politics and social order of the times and his personal concerns about all of that.

But he decided that he's now an ally to women and feminists.

Ponder that for a bit.

How many feminists would take his epiphany editorial seriously?

How many would likely write him off as a self involved bullshit artist?

To make matters worse, as of this interview in 2012, in the year prior to her weak recanting of her anti-trans prejudices, she was still supporting and making excuses for the horrifically bigoted book "Transsexual Empire" written by Janice Raymond, a notorious TERF whose other writings were used by the federal government to ban medicare coverage of trans people's medical care in the 1980s.

https://www.vassar.edu/vq/issues/2012/03/vassar-today/gloria-steinem.html

Those two screenshots sound very similar to the excuse-making of her 2013 editorial.

She's so full of shit.

@timberwraith

The 'nobody knows if they're dangerous or not' line is what firmly cements her TERFness and anti-feminism. Right there, right the fuck there. Because it's a talking point used by the patriarchial scumfucks who want to maintain control and think that positioning the sanest treatments possible as 'unsafe' will somehow explain away their decisions to indulge in infant genital mutilation, rape and forced birth.

Oh, but I thought Steinem was 'pro-choice'? Ahaha not with this line, she's not.

@theogrin It's awfully intriguing that TERFs and their ideological kin readily use tactics, ideas, and verbiage that patriarchy uses, if it's part of an effort to target people they despise.

@timberwraith

The master's tools, the master's house.

It shows that their commitment to equal rights are anything but intersectional, that they're willing to focus on one small factor without exploring the larger causative things (which benefit them in other ways).