The kind they warned you about.
Jan 18 2026, 8:49 AM
#37
(Jan 7 2026, 2:05 AM)LeftFem Firstly, thank you and I feel that. A lot.
However, I want to say, things are a looot more positive. What we need is to recreate left wing feminist spaces (Or at least nominally centrist spaces). And I feel like that on Tumblr GC, spaces like here and other newer places, we're on the way to doing that.
I think it's best to remember that GC did not grow up from conservative roots. It grew to what it is today, because it was a radical feminist LEFT WING space. There wasn't conservatism or Trump apologism on r/gendercritical, For me, and for many others, Magdalen Berns was probably the introduction to the issue at hand, and she was a left wing radical feminist (May she RIP). Rowling is a left wing feminist.
This is being co-opted by the right, but the right does not own it. Hopefully the new thing kicks off, I see huge potential, because GC views have grown because it was a welcoming place for all women without being cruel.
My prediction on that front is that America will U-Turn right back into TRA policies by 2028. There's what we as GC advocate for, and there's the performative cruelty on that front by Republicans.
Meanwhile, the UK which has not had GC pushed by the right will not experience this pushback imo. It's why success with right wingers (or left wingers) co-opting your campaign is temporary, as it leads to backlash later on. Real change is made by grassroots which are often left wing.
I don't think I'm eloquent enough to really put it into words, my main point is more, GC will shrivel in places where LGB people and anyone not strictly of a certain viewpoint can't feel safe. It will wither if the counter to TRA's is that we all need to just perform feminity harder. It will grow in places where GC is more like the r/gendercritical of old. It will grow when our counter to TRA's is that we can all be gender non-conforming and it doesn't matter, and you can't change sex or need to change sex regardless. Remember, while Vexxed and right wing spaces mostly post about TIM's, it's TIFs who need to be talked about, they are the majority of new transgender people and they need to be told, "It's fine to not want what comes with being a woman. You don't need to be gender conforming. You don't NEED to cake on makeup. You don't need to wear a bra that is uncomfortable for society. You don't need to have an operation." Sadly, on Vexxed, that is just not addressed, the focus is on TIMs and inducing rage. Meanwhile, in the UK, the focus is on single sex spaces and restricting access of blockers to teenage girls until they can live a few years and realise they don't need to do it.
As always, I have to preface all this by saying that I'm not on Vexxed myself, though thanks to it being discussed all the time here, I do lurk.Ā
Anyway, I think you're very much on the right track here. While I definitely recognize the seriousness of what Trump represents, I'm not actually super worried that like he personally will succeed in remaking us into a fascist country or something. As you can see fromĀ
the graph here below the list of recent polls (and this is
the most conservative polling aggregator in America that I'm linking too, I might add), Trump is very unpopular and his level of public support is moving in only one direction over time. In fact, these job approval numbers are the worst any president save like Biden has ever had before at this stage of their term.
Americans now lean toward wanting ICE abolishedĀ (50% of the women, 37% of the parasites according to that survey's demographic breakdown) and
the Democrats now lead in party identification by a margin of 8 percentageĀ points, which is a bigger lead than they enjoyed even amidst the 2018 blue wave midterm election. To these ends,
James Carville is predicting a Republican "wipeout" in the November elections and that, more specifically, "the Democrats are going to pick up at a minimum 25 [House] seats, maybe as high as 45. In all likelihood, the Democrats will carry the Senate". In other words, the Democrats appear poised to recapture not just one, but in fact
both chambers of Congress this fall, which is an historical rarity. It's historically a rare thing for both chambers to flip from one party's control to the other's in the same election cycle, but that's looking like the most probable possibility at this moment. So that's how it's actually going in the court of public opinion right now. Perhaps most importantly of all though,
the overall ideological lean of the nation is currently skewing the least conservative in the long history of Gallup polling on the subject, with 35% of Americans currently describing themselves as conservatives (a record low) and 28% describing themselves as liberals (a record high), making for a all-time low seven-point gap between the two. For perspective, a few decades ago, conservative Americans outnumbered liberal-identified ones by a margin of more than 2 to 1 in contemporaneous iterations of this same survey. What I am saying is that the cultural backlash isn't waiting in the wings, it's already here. The fact that white supremacist
Nick Fuentes (the leader of the Groyper movement) has already endorsed likely 2028 Democratic Party nominee Gavin Newsom (because JD Vance's wife is a Hindu Indian-American) and Marjorie Taylor Greene has withdrawn her support for MAGA are symptoms of this fact, as are the sky high numbers of Republican members of Congress heading for the exits rather than trying to get re-elected. The recent off-year election results
weren't an aberration.
For all the above reasons, I'm not too worried about like what will happen in November or what will happen in 2028, at least in the sense of like which party will win anyway. It will be the Democrats and probably by a good margin. I mean it hasn't even taken Trump one year in office this time to have a second George Floyd killing type national crisis. He's not good at this. He's not Putin. He's not Orban. He ain't no mastermind.Ā From what I've read, even like his decision to kidnap Maduro was made only like ten days in advance because Maduro did the gay Trump dance and he felt mocked; his manhood challenged or something. He doesn't think things through to what say the political consequences of his actions will be. He's an old, senile, annoyingly extroverted narcissist who is completely at the mercy of his feelings. The masterminds of tyranny proceed more slowly and methodically than Trump, being careful to win over the public to each of their steps. Trump's own incompetence and lack of impulse control will be his political undoing.
It's more the long-term situation in this country that I'm worried about, not so much like us actually becoming a fascist police state right now. Liberalism in the abstract is enjoying a peak in popularity right now here in the U.S., but while history may rhyme with itself at many points, it never does actually repeat, so like the emerging wave of liberal politics today isn't quite the same as the last one, content-wise. I would argue that in some ways it's worse. Trans politics are seeing very little in the way of a comeback in popularity as part of the current liberal surge, but neither are feminist politics seeing much of a comeback that I've noticed. Instead, the future appears to belong to a liberal variety of men's rights activist. Gavin Newsom represents that, for example. In that sense, an election between JD Vance and Gavin Newson is only truly a difference of degrees, not so much of actual principles, when it comes to gender politics, and it's the emergence of
that dynamic -- of sustained, universal masculinism emerging as part of the response to Trump's 2024 victory -- that truly worries me about the future. It's definitely
the wrong range of debate to have in place. Like if both the left and right can agree that moids are oppressed by women and that raising the birth rate should be a national goal then we are in a shitload of trouble even if the Democrats stage a comeback. Feminist voices are being sidelined in the Democratic comeback because Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris were women and I fear the "enemy of my enemy is my friend" logic getting applied a bit too much by our movement to the point that we just accept that range of debate.
When it comes to trans politics...looking back at it now, I'm realizing how shockingly little I've had to say on the subject to date for being here on a GC feminist board! You're definitely right about gender criticism being foundationally a lesbian-led movement and that it's been of that character because the gender identity movement has nothing if not primarily victimized non-heterosexual girls and women in recent decades. Lesbians find ourselves at the center of the issue, facing the threat of social erasure. Erasing us from the pushback hence will
not help the cultural salience thereof, needless to say!
These things said, I'm thinking maybe it is finally time for me to start a dedicated thread on the subject of the gender ID issue because I have my own take. I'd like to discuss why this phenomenon happened everywhere from here in the U.S. to Pakistan, yet not so much in a place like South Korea. In connection to my past-tense reference, I've noticed that there appears to be some receding -- some desisting going on in the "gender non-binary community" specifically -- of late that has dovetailed with a noteworthy percentage of so-called bi women reverting back to heterosexual public identification at the same time that lesbian and gay identification has
not fallen. My basic theory of the case is that the Koreans had the Ditch the Corset movement against beauty culture and we had instead a marriage equality movement. They had a
women's movement addressing the repressiveness of femininityĀ in the 2010s and we had a
gay rights movement instead. There's definitely something to that difference in outcomes, IMO. I'd like to discuss that in a separate thread sometime. The British model of pushback was an interesting one too and at least partially successful! At the same time, I think it's been less interested inĀ challenging the underlying issue, which is beauty culture and femininity and instead hasĀ simply prescribed individual choice in, and non-judgment of, gender expression as the solution.
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