the alleged boyfriend dated her online. we note that specifically in the text. there's no evidence they ever had sex. gare can correct me but my understanding is there's no evidence she considered him her boyfriend. she hung out in and considered herself part of the femcel online community.
Again, another great post from ShatterZone ... Robert Evans last week and now this time Garrison Davis. Looking at, how you put it, "the weaponization of lack of verified information," - what seems to get swallowed so knee-jerkingly easily makes it feel like posts like these are a bit like spooning out the ocean, at least from my perspective and the pace at which I like to write, read and analyze. No doubt there are still more details in this particular case to be verified and investigated, but given the workload and time it takes to do it properly, there may very well have already been yet another calamity or shooting of some sort, making this story less individually relevant to a mass audience. I am thankful for your consistent efforts to attempt to get in front of things, recognize patterns when they occur, be willing to be ambiguous where merited and practice good journalism. Even if you can't get in front of every collage-creating numbskull perfectly, you are at a minimum creating a valuable record. Putting diligence and thoroughness first like you two do is very admirable.
I live in Madison a few miles away from Abundant Life and I've been trying to stay informed on this shooting, but this is the densest and in-depth accounting I've read. Thank you for the full explanation on vocabulary and rhetoric as well as the baggage that came with it. All the news articles are just surface-level details, but this gives a lot of context.
JFC, can we just like, destroy the internet already? Or at least do the inverse of the AUS 16 or under social media ban, and ban anyone retirement age from it?
I dont understand how the term "feminism" could possibly be used, at least without massive scare quotes, when you're saying it's this: "trad-influenced rightwing...advocating traditional gender roles for men and women, with anti-trans flourishes." Absolutely NONE of this is feminist. TERFs are also not feminists, despite them claiming to be.
Feminism has meant many different things to many different people over the years. Like any movement, it has a right and a left wing (really more than that but you get my point). TERFs absolutely do NOT have claim to the term “feminist” in a contemporary sense because mainstream feminism has moved to embrace intersectionality. This includes an embrace of trans women as women by that shift really didn’t take place until the 1990s. Words like “feminism” are powerful yet also malleable in ways that can be appropriated to nefarious ends. All words, ultimately, can become a victim of that reality of language usage.
The exclusion of transwomen by some feminists has been around since at least the 60s and 70s, so, of course, TERFs can lay claim to feminism. Contemporary feminists can't assert by fiat that feminism no longer includes TERFs. There are even some feminists who reject intersectionality, most notably Marxist feminists.
Feminism is an expansive ideology with no necessary political valence, which, as you've pointed out, has both a left and right wing. TERFs haven't appropriated feminism; they are feminists.
Feminism at the very LEAST be referring to the desire the advancement of women's rights and belief that women are not inferior/designed to be servants to men who must take instruction from, be led, and be "kept" by men? Tell me what is mean by "traditional roles for men and women" above and how that could possibly align with any meaningful definition of feminism.
The reason I CAN say that TERF is not truly feminist is because I recognize that being anti-trans and declaring biological essentialism to be valid is ANTI-women's rights and equality, and pro- policing the boundaries of what women (and men) can do or want or be, how they behave and dress, etc. TERFs are accidentally and stupidly not feminist, while claiming to be feminist (and no doubt some are basically going with second-wave feminism, some the idiotic third-wave, some with intersectional but only SOME sections (that is, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation...) etc. I get that they probably else-wise adhere to (whichever/some) feminist ideas; but sadly they undercut their own feminism with their trans-exclusionary biological essentialism.
It seems like you don't know the history or intellectual genealogy of feminism. Feminism has its origins in 18th-century racist ethnology. It began as an extension of and supplement to colonialism because its progenitors conceived of it as a complement to the civilizational project of white patriarchy. Feminism didn't start as a universal project for the advancement of women as such. Feminists originally didn't even believe that all females were women.
What you take to be the universalism of feminism didn't develop until later. That's why there are some feminists who are biological essentialists as well as some who are gender essentialists. The most prominent example of the former are TERFs. TERFs are feminists who are biological essentialists.
The most prominent example of the latter is Catharine MacKinnon who developed dominance feminism. In fact, because Kimberle Crenshaw based intersectionality on dominance feminism, intersectionality is gender essentialist.
Wow what an extremely skewed version of 18th century feminism lmao.
I dont give a fuck about some fucked up thing that has managed to fly under the banner of feminism. I am literally rejecting "trad wife" bullshit as not being remotely feminist.
If you want to argue there's a "feminism" that promotes women as a category being "naturally" subservient to men, having a limited set of talents, intelligence, abilities, flaws (yes flaws, real humans are allowed to have flaws), complexity, aptitude, and "roles" separate from men ("complementary" roles lmfao), then sure you can think i'm committing a "no true Scotsman" fallacy although I'm not; that would mean you're just broadening the term feminism to mean "any type of thinking about sex/gender at all even bad faith arguments and misogynist dogma itself." But I dont think you even addressed what I ACTUALLY said is not feminism.
As for TERFs: I am fully aware that TERF and other threads of feminism (eg what you're calling "dominance feminism" or what I'll just call female supremacy/superiority or what was sometimes called radical feminism back in the 1970s/1980s even though not all of what was called 'radical' feminism argued that women are superior to men) involve biological essentialism. And yes for that reason I explicitly personally reject those as useful or yep truly well-considered feminism since they preserve the basis of most sexist discrimination and misogynist ideology. I did acknowledge there is a feminist strain of thought, art, and politics that is, again (so retro lmao) essentialist, and I just think it's a shitty one. You can use the term feminist here, accurately, but like I said: I think it's an inherently limited and ultimately complicit-to-the-patriarchy version, even if unintentionally. Hence "not truly feminism" TO ME.
You can curse at me all you want, that won't disabuse you of your ignorance or your fallacious reasoning.
On what basis do you claim the unilateral authority to decide what is and isn't feminism? Feminism has a history and intellectual genealogy that can be empirically investigated. Feminists have been arguing amongst themselves for 200+ years, and the common link between all of them is that they all claim to be feminists.
Feminism, like any ideology, is not conceptually uniform. Take Marxism as an example. The vulgar Marxists claim that post-Marxists are wrong. The Black Marxists claim that vulgar Marxists are wrong. And round and round they go. They're all Marxists.
Very well said. Biological essentialism is the key to understanding terfs/"gender critical"/"gender abolitionists". The core being the idea that women are oppressed primarily on the basis of their capacity to conceive.
Which is *technically* true if you ask me, but I think misses a lot of the complexity about the politics of sex and gender.
Well it certainly misses the complexity of human beings and how we are not locked into a particular set of behaviors, thinking, personalities and aptitudes just because of our biology. As well as the complexity of cultural and historical gender norms, how they are produced and enforced and how much agency any individual human has around their performance of gender and which gender characteristics are valued and in which type of sexed body those characteristics are valued or even recognized. In my view we VERY much as a culture overemphasize sex DIFFERENCE over what all human beings have in common, our vast variety and potential. I cannot stand the policing of categories that flatten out difference on the one hand (within a rigidly defined category) and heighten difference on the other (between the reductively constructed categories). Always seems to be for the purposes of domination, exclusion, exploitation, hierarchy. Glib thinking. Rationalization of discrimination.
The thing is, you can recognize the (essentialist) basis of the oppression but not REPRODUCE the flawed thinking that reduces women and men to their sexed body parts and further conflate gender with sex. Also you dont have to identify women with their oppression as the defining factor. This kind of category-policing can only backfire; it IS backfiring, and hurting plenty of cisgender women.
I'm not from the US so i can just say this without getting investigation on my ass but, you all leftist up there are cowards just kill these fking animals already you all know where Chaya and the other scum lives but you waste your days writing about praxis and materialism but never actually do anything.
In a few years they are gonna set up camps to round minorities up and these inhuman monsters will keep spreading their rhetoric and all you will be able to do to help minorities is writing on social media or whatever.
This was my first time in years active on "real time" social media and seeing anything like this develop. Specifically on threads, the assertion the shooter was trans seemed to spread quickly (although my follows showed me pushback *first*).
Thanks for wading through the online cesspools for us all. 🫡
The horrifying new twist I noticed today was someone explaining that “terf” stands for “trans inclusive radical feminism.” Fuuuuuck , asshole. It’s so subtle it’ll work.
I recently became a paid subscriber to Cool Zone for podcasts so I already know you all do great work, but this was so excellent. I think every parent of teens should read this and understand how deep and vast online spaces can be. The internet my 19 year old was exposed to was scary, but I was so much more concerned about my 16 year old. Things like the KMFDM shirt is such a red flag, but she had a therapist and went to a “good Christian school” so I bet her dad thought he’d done enough. Another depressing and messy tragedy, until the next depressing and messy tragedy. Thanks for the good work 🫡
Gender criticals, Christo-fascists and TERFs want gender purity.
(The Handmaid's Tale, uneducated women at home, making babies, in the kitchen, serving their husbands. A serf with less rights than an illegal immigrant.)
What's fascinating to me right this second is the speed/type of the response by the state here. One CEO gets shot and it's all hands on deck, we must make CEO's safe.
Another school shooting and it's 'shrug' "thoughts and prayers to those affected".
So bleak.
Thank you, as always, for the detailed, fact-based, investigation both of you. Thanks Garrison.
the alleged boyfriend dated her online. we note that specifically in the text. there's no evidence they ever had sex. gare can correct me but my understanding is there's no evidence she considered him her boyfriend. she hung out in and considered herself part of the femcel online community.
Fyi this reply doesn't seem to have nested as a reply to a commenter (the one who maybe needs to be subject to his own handle)
Garrison, well done. Main stream media needs to mainline this post.
but won't
Again, another great post from ShatterZone ... Robert Evans last week and now this time Garrison Davis. Looking at, how you put it, "the weaponization of lack of verified information," - what seems to get swallowed so knee-jerkingly easily makes it feel like posts like these are a bit like spooning out the ocean, at least from my perspective and the pace at which I like to write, read and analyze. No doubt there are still more details in this particular case to be verified and investigated, but given the workload and time it takes to do it properly, there may very well have already been yet another calamity or shooting of some sort, making this story less individually relevant to a mass audience. I am thankful for your consistent efforts to attempt to get in front of things, recognize patterns when they occur, be willing to be ambiguous where merited and practice good journalism. Even if you can't get in front of every collage-creating numbskull perfectly, you are at a minimum creating a valuable record. Putting diligence and thoroughness first like you two do is very admirable.
seems like the real cause of school shootings is bad haircuts, has anyone investigated this yet
I live in Madison a few miles away from Abundant Life and I've been trying to stay informed on this shooting, but this is the densest and in-depth accounting I've read. Thank you for the full explanation on vocabulary and rhetoric as well as the baggage that came with it. All the news articles are just surface-level details, but this gives a lot of context.
"Those do not look like female hands."
JFC, can we just like, destroy the internet already? Or at least do the inverse of the AUS 16 or under social media ban, and ban anyone retirement age from it?
I dont understand how the term "feminism" could possibly be used, at least without massive scare quotes, when you're saying it's this: "trad-influenced rightwing...advocating traditional gender roles for men and women, with anti-trans flourishes." Absolutely NONE of this is feminist. TERFs are also not feminists, despite them claiming to be.
Feminism has meant many different things to many different people over the years. Like any movement, it has a right and a left wing (really more than that but you get my point). TERFs absolutely do NOT have claim to the term “feminist” in a contemporary sense because mainstream feminism has moved to embrace intersectionality. This includes an embrace of trans women as women by that shift really didn’t take place until the 1990s. Words like “feminism” are powerful yet also malleable in ways that can be appropriated to nefarious ends. All words, ultimately, can become a victim of that reality of language usage.
The exclusion of transwomen by some feminists has been around since at least the 60s and 70s, so, of course, TERFs can lay claim to feminism. Contemporary feminists can't assert by fiat that feminism no longer includes TERFs. There are even some feminists who reject intersectionality, most notably Marxist feminists.
Feminism is an expansive ideology with no necessary political valence, which, as you've pointed out, has both a left and right wing. TERFs haven't appropriated feminism; they are feminists.
Feminism at the very LEAST be referring to the desire the advancement of women's rights and belief that women are not inferior/designed to be servants to men who must take instruction from, be led, and be "kept" by men? Tell me what is mean by "traditional roles for men and women" above and how that could possibly align with any meaningful definition of feminism.
The reason I CAN say that TERF is not truly feminist is because I recognize that being anti-trans and declaring biological essentialism to be valid is ANTI-women's rights and equality, and pro- policing the boundaries of what women (and men) can do or want or be, how they behave and dress, etc. TERFs are accidentally and stupidly not feminist, while claiming to be feminist (and no doubt some are basically going with second-wave feminism, some the idiotic third-wave, some with intersectional but only SOME sections (that is, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation...) etc. I get that they probably else-wise adhere to (whichever/some) feminist ideas; but sadly they undercut their own feminism with their trans-exclusionary biological essentialism.
It seems like you don't know the history or intellectual genealogy of feminism. Feminism has its origins in 18th-century racist ethnology. It began as an extension of and supplement to colonialism because its progenitors conceived of it as a complement to the civilizational project of white patriarchy. Feminism didn't start as a universal project for the advancement of women as such. Feminists originally didn't even believe that all females were women.
What you take to be the universalism of feminism didn't develop until later. That's why there are some feminists who are biological essentialists as well as some who are gender essentialists. The most prominent example of the former are TERFs. TERFs are feminists who are biological essentialists.
The most prominent example of the latter is Catharine MacKinnon who developed dominance feminism. In fact, because Kimberle Crenshaw based intersectionality on dominance feminism, intersectionality is gender essentialist.
Your argument is a no true Scotsman fallacy.
Wow what an extremely skewed version of 18th century feminism lmao.
I dont give a fuck about some fucked up thing that has managed to fly under the banner of feminism. I am literally rejecting "trad wife" bullshit as not being remotely feminist.
If you want to argue there's a "feminism" that promotes women as a category being "naturally" subservient to men, having a limited set of talents, intelligence, abilities, flaws (yes flaws, real humans are allowed to have flaws), complexity, aptitude, and "roles" separate from men ("complementary" roles lmfao), then sure you can think i'm committing a "no true Scotsman" fallacy although I'm not; that would mean you're just broadening the term feminism to mean "any type of thinking about sex/gender at all even bad faith arguments and misogynist dogma itself." But I dont think you even addressed what I ACTUALLY said is not feminism.
As for TERFs: I am fully aware that TERF and other threads of feminism (eg what you're calling "dominance feminism" or what I'll just call female supremacy/superiority or what was sometimes called radical feminism back in the 1970s/1980s even though not all of what was called 'radical' feminism argued that women are superior to men) involve biological essentialism. And yes for that reason I explicitly personally reject those as useful or yep truly well-considered feminism since they preserve the basis of most sexist discrimination and misogynist ideology. I did acknowledge there is a feminist strain of thought, art, and politics that is, again (so retro lmao) essentialist, and I just think it's a shitty one. You can use the term feminist here, accurately, but like I said: I think it's an inherently limited and ultimately complicit-to-the-patriarchy version, even if unintentionally. Hence "not truly feminism" TO ME.
You can curse at me all you want, that won't disabuse you of your ignorance or your fallacious reasoning.
On what basis do you claim the unilateral authority to decide what is and isn't feminism? Feminism has a history and intellectual genealogy that can be empirically investigated. Feminists have been arguing amongst themselves for 200+ years, and the common link between all of them is that they all claim to be feminists.
Feminism, like any ideology, is not conceptually uniform. Take Marxism as an example. The vulgar Marxists claim that post-Marxists are wrong. The Black Marxists claim that vulgar Marxists are wrong. And round and round they go. They're all Marxists.
Very well said. Biological essentialism is the key to understanding terfs/"gender critical"/"gender abolitionists". The core being the idea that women are oppressed primarily on the basis of their capacity to conceive.
Which is *technically* true if you ask me, but I think misses a lot of the complexity about the politics of sex and gender.
Well it certainly misses the complexity of human beings and how we are not locked into a particular set of behaviors, thinking, personalities and aptitudes just because of our biology. As well as the complexity of cultural and historical gender norms, how they are produced and enforced and how much agency any individual human has around their performance of gender and which gender characteristics are valued and in which type of sexed body those characteristics are valued or even recognized. In my view we VERY much as a culture overemphasize sex DIFFERENCE over what all human beings have in common, our vast variety and potential. I cannot stand the policing of categories that flatten out difference on the one hand (within a rigidly defined category) and heighten difference on the other (between the reductively constructed categories). Always seems to be for the purposes of domination, exclusion, exploitation, hierarchy. Glib thinking. Rationalization of discrimination.
The thing is, you can recognize the (essentialist) basis of the oppression but not REPRODUCE the flawed thinking that reduces women and men to their sexed body parts and further conflate gender with sex. Also you dont have to identify women with their oppression as the defining factor. This kind of category-policing can only backfire; it IS backfiring, and hurting plenty of cisgender women.
Welp, that was depressing. So glad to be doing this again. Can't wait for next time...
Probably won't have to wait long!
these people are so stupid that they can reconcile a TRANS person being a TERF. it’s the dumbest possible timeline.
i see they only care about school shootings if they can create propaganda with it.
and as usual, the shooter is a nazi and a racist POS.
I'm not from the US so i can just say this without getting investigation on my ass but, you all leftist up there are cowards just kill these fking animals already you all know where Chaya and the other scum lives but you waste your days writing about praxis and materialism but never actually do anything.
In a few years they are gonna set up camps to round minorities up and these inhuman monsters will keep spreading their rhetoric and all you will be able to do to help minorities is writing on social media or whatever.
This was my first time in years active on "real time" social media and seeing anything like this develop. Specifically on threads, the assertion the shooter was trans seemed to spread quickly (although my follows showed me pushback *first*).
Thanks for wading through the online cesspools for us all. 🫡
The horrifying new twist I noticed today was someone explaining that “terf” stands for “trans inclusive radical feminism.” Fuuuuuck , asshole. It’s so subtle it’ll work.
I recently became a paid subscriber to Cool Zone for podcasts so I already know you all do great work, but this was so excellent. I think every parent of teens should read this and understand how deep and vast online spaces can be. The internet my 19 year old was exposed to was scary, but I was so much more concerned about my 16 year old. Things like the KMFDM shirt is such a red flag, but she had a therapist and went to a “good Christian school” so I bet her dad thought he’d done enough. Another depressing and messy tragedy, until the next depressing and messy tragedy. Thanks for the good work 🫡
The Nazis wanted racial purity.
Gender criticals, Christo-fascists and TERFs want gender purity.
(The Handmaid's Tale, uneducated women at home, making babies, in the kitchen, serving their husbands. A serf with less rights than an illegal immigrant.)
Excellent article, thanks. I note the use of the phrase "looked like" they were trans. The exact same logic is commonly used to identify "pedophiles".
We're heading straight into pogrom territory.
What's fascinating to me right this second is the speed/type of the response by the state here. One CEO gets shot and it's all hands on deck, we must make CEO's safe.
Another school shooting and it's 'shrug' "thoughts and prayers to those affected".
So bleak.
Thank you, as always, for the detailed, fact-based, investigation both of you. Thanks Garrison.