I was writing a comment in the other thread but I figured might as well post here.

So, to explain where I'm coming from, I was kind of surprised to see this sub is so anti-TERF. It seems to me that you guys have rejected so many of the false and destructive ideas, but in this case you're following a mainstream feminist narrative. Now, I'm not saying that gender critical feminism doesn't suffer from many of the same issues as other feminisms, but basically I think that they're heavily demonized because they are a threat to feminist narratives from the inside. And I think some TERFs say hateful and petty things to trans people, but they aren't an existential threat to trans people like fascists are, nor do they have structural power to gaslight and oppress men like post-modern feminism does.

And gender critical feminism is more leftist and less neoliberal than mainstream feminism. I'm not telling you to choose either of them, but to understand why. If you want to deconstruct contemporary feminism from a left-wing perspective then you need to recognize how it has rejected materialism in favor of this post-modern idealism where identity is more important than material conditions. This applies to so many men's issues as well as working class: being cat-called is awful but people joke about prison rape, men dying in wars is whatever because the generals are men too and it's their own fault anyway, etc.

And you need to see how humanist academia is failing men, challenging the same ideas of patriarchy over and over again while they themselves perpetuate a new, dominant narrative.

But most importantly, if you want to build your own theory of men's liberation, then you can't shy away from looking at the material basis of relations between men and women. The right is willing to look there, and that's why they appeal to men. So don't fall into the same trap as liberals do.

That doesn't mean you have to reject trans people or ally yourself or even engage with TERFs. I'm mostly trying to defend their theory. I've definitely experienced misandry from some them, but also from liberal feminists, and personally I've been silenced and patronized much more by the latter. So I'm saying you should separate the shitty online flaming from the theory and ideology of gender.

Of course TERFs are radical feminists ultimately, so there wouldn't much understanding for your perspective. I actually used to post on r/GenderCritical before it got banned. Basically my take is that they had a better or more honest interpretation of gender/sex than mainstream feminists, but still didn't go all the way in understanding the flaws of modern feminism, plus they did have paranoia and hostility towards trans people. But there are different kinds of TERFs and also a lot of people who aren't even feminists who get labeled as that. The whole Dave Chappelle thing by the way is a good indicator of how this issue has become more general now rather than just a schism in feminism.

And one more thing. This whole culture war over gender, it relates to things that matter and can actually be solved, like discrimination and violence against trans people, even just bathrooms, and so on. But a lot of the controversy is driven by a semantic struggle over what words like man and woman and so on should mean. There's no winning there unless the goal itself is to polarize whole societies or movements within those societies or to distract from other things going on, and the solution is to accept that words have different meanings not just in different contexts or for different people but also overlapping and for the same people.