The feminist movement imitated the trajectory of industrial capitalism. It was born in the XVIIIth century, consolidated in the XIXth when the capital needed more and more people to work in the factories irrespective of their physiology, won all of its major victories before the end of the 1970s, and fizzled out starting in ≈ 1980 when industrial capitalism began to disintegrate.
Since then, gender became a lot less relevant than mobility. Today, the issue of abortion access, for instance, is not an issue relevant to all women. It’s an issue relevant to women who can’t afford to transport themselves easily and casually wherever the needed service is provided. Safe streets are crucial to women who can’t afford to move to a gated community, etc.
Capital never cared about gender. It’s entirely non-ideological, and that’s why the rise of capitalism coincided with the development of the civil rights movements. Today’s liquid capitalism cares about gender only inasmuch as it can be turned into an object of consumption. In the words of Ann Branaman,
“‘Identity’ becomes a problem and a source of deep anxiety in liquid modernity; gender and sexual identity, like other bases of identity, become destabilized and deregulated, open to an unprecedented degree of individual experimentation and choice.”
Of course, this consumerist approach is only available to those who have the means to adopt it. However, those without the means eagerly celebrate this consumerist view of gender, hailing a spoiled rich “being a woman means buying nail polish” celebrity “a hero” and “the woman of the year.”
If gender is placed on a Walmart shelf alongside bottles of cheap shampoo, its value as a mobilizing factor for political activism evaporates and feminism drowns in cheap, weepy sentimentality of Walmart commercials.
Clarissa's Blog 
“If gender is placed on a Walmart shelf alongside bottles of cheap shampoo, its value as a mobilizing factor for political activism evaporates and feminism drowns in cheap, weepy sentimentality of Walmart commercials.”
You’re definitely sounding TERFish here (TERF: Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist).
What bugs me is the confusion between the biological categories of sex and the social categories of gender (as if the latter were all that mattered and inherently biological in nature).
What’s hilarious is how a bunch of biological men* are getting women to carry their water for them by making their ‘struggle’ an non-negotiable part of modern feminism.
*I restrict that to those claiming to be women without any hormonal or surgical … alterations – that is autogynophiles. I admire the determination of those who undergo the fantastic inconveniences of hormone and surgical therapy – those who just grow out their hair, put on a dress and buy expensive nail polish —– not so much.
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I’m all for facilitating people’s access to treatments and surgeries that they feel they need. But the moment I’m asked to accept weird rantings about female brains, female essences, what it means to be a woman, “men get pregnant, too”, “people who need abortions”, etc, that’s where my willingness to be understanding ends. I have a mountain of psychological problems of my own, and I’ve paid a small fortune for getting them resolved instead of dumping them on other people. Now I’m very uninterested in anybody dumping their psychological shit on me.
And I agree, it’s hilarious how FtM trans people don’t get anything even remotely resembling the servile fawning that MtFs get from delusional pseudo-feminists. This just goes to show that, all protestations notwithstanding, these feminists don’t really see MtFs as women. They see them as men and react to them exactly like the most browbeaten patriarchal women react to men.
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Many years ago I posted/read on a feminist BB attached to a website. One surefire way to start a flame war thread lasting into hundreds of posts was to talk about MtFs. People would disgorge impressive encylcopedic essays full of gender theory and a history of personal slights. I knew a poetry professor who would write such complete essays in such quantity that I wondered how the hell she got any academic articles published or teaching done and she’d complain about her administration and talk about her horses. Uh?
I remember one MtF would insist that fractals were masculine, which made no sense whatsoever, and she performed gender better than everyone else. I remember another woman who kept cycling through identities completely and totally. Once she decided she was really trans for six months and went as far as to take hormone injections and when she cycled back, woe betide any reference to this previous identity or any others. Somehow she managed to stay married to her very stable husband.
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