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The New Radical Feminism that Critical Theory Built

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Conclusions

Meanwhile, most observers in the mainstream community don't seem to understand this divide: those who campaign for gay marriage (almost always moderates) sometimes get unfairly lumped in with those who make life difficult for bakeries who don't bake gay wedding cakes (almost always radicals), for example. Likewise, the mistaken view that trans people all believe that gender is a social construct (more on this later).

The New Radical Feminism that Critical Theory Built

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The 'radical' faction of LGBT activism, through embracing critical theory in general, also often promotes ideas from critical theory influenced radical feminism (again, the term is used broadly here, to mean all forms of feminism that are not liberal feminism). While feminism had already been around for a century by the 1970s, the influence of ideas under the critical theory umbrella essentially created a fundamentally different form of feminism around this time. Unlike conventional feminism and its focus on equal legal, employment and education rights, second wave radical feminism saw the then-existing society and its sexist relations as a system they call 'patriarchy', and attempted to study this system similar to how Marx studied capitalism, in the hope of eventually 'overthrowing' it (you can see the critical theory influence here). Second wave radical feminists thus criticized marriage, family, and sometimes even liberal democracy and the scientific method, as being in service of the patriarchy, similar to how Marxist critical theorists criticized these things

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as being in service of capitalism, and with a similar end goal of abolishing these things. Radical feminist thinking has always had a strong influence on radical LGBT activism; indeed, it is the negative attitude of radical feminists towards marriage that made radical LGBT activists reluctant to embrace the cause of gay marriage for many years, until it became impossible for them to continue to resist and remain credible. Even today, the radical faction of LGBT activism continues to resist the promotion of 'family values' within the LGBT community, much to the dismay of people like myself.

One branch of this kind of radical feminism, 'gender critical feminism', holds that while biological sex is a material reality, all conventional understandings of gender are only social constructs that serve patriarchy and should be abolished. Gender critical feminists vehemently oppose that there can be any biological basis to average differences in temperament and preferences between the sexes. They instead hold that women, as a class (note the use of pseudoMarxian concepts here), are oppressed by men, as a class, because of their material condition (again note the use of pseudo-Marxian concepts) of having a womb, which is required for the reproduction of labor for capitalism. Also, as a natural consequence of their ideology that male and female brains cannot be different, gender critical feminists oppose the idea that anybody can suffer from the medical condition of gender dysphoria, or that it could require gender transition as the treatment. They instead often use fringe theories about trans people, like those proposed by Blanchard et al., to explain away the problems of trans

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