In 2015, I met up with a bunch of my female work colleagues after hours for wine and a cheese plate and a bit of light conversation. The meetup had been organized by one of the other women, to have a little get-together of a bunch of women in a largely men-dominated tech department (there were maybe five of us). Over light snacks and conversation I was stunned to find out that the others didn't consider themselves to be feminists.
(I hasten to add that this was not a splitting-hairs situation of some identifying as womanists or similar; they thought feminism was man-hating and wanting to be better than men and being overly-sensitive about getting chairs pulled out for you.)
Maybe this should have prepared me better for the next few years. Who knows. But at the time, within my social circles and with the background of my education, feminism just seemed like a correct philosophy. Why would you not want the equality of genders? Like, that just felt completely unhinged as a take.
I brought up this bafflement to my parents over lunch that weekend, when they were visiting. My dad, who professionally has to be somewhat paranoid about saying anything political, advised that I not talk about feminism at all at work, and my mom (also a feminist) wondered if my coworkers were worried about being thought of as lesbians.
Anyway, that weekend was in fact when I figured out I was a lesbian. Funny how that works out.
I tell this anecdote because the lesbianism of Talia Bhatt's feminism is I think one of the most relevelatory elements here (among many others!); feminism frequently tries to apologize for itself to make the idea palatable to men, to make heterosexual women not "feel bad" for loving men--and that has in fact gone on far too long. I think I can say that without any hedging, at this point.
I don't know that feminism would seem any less natural a stance to me were I not a lesbian (I like to think that it wouldn't; I have rarely been good at apologizing for myself), but the specter of both the lesbian and the trans woman as gender deviants suspiciously unconcerned with men maybe needs to haunt feminism more.
anyway read brown/trans/les thanks
buy it here:
also the author is on bsky and also has a really good podcast