I fail to see how she’s “making us look bad” considering she doesn’t call herself a feminist. Conservatives/alt right/trolls/male comedians/gay men also being gender critical doesn’t “make us look bad” either because we aren’t any of those things. The whole damn world is mostly “gender critical” because it’s rooted in biological reality. Being GC is just part of feminism, not the whole deal.

I see a very angry woman who finally had enough and is venting. She’s speaking for herself, not us and power to her even if I didn’t agree with every single sentence. We should be angry. I agree. I am angry too. She had a lot of good points even if the language was vulgar and raw (something I actually find refreshing in all honesty).

One thing I haven't seen mentioned or discussed is that JKR was completely calm, rational, and level in her writing of her big piece about this and TRAs levelled the exact same claims against her - that she wanted all trans people murdered.

I do wish Cade had chosen her words a little more carefully but honestly, no matter what anyone says in criticizing TRAs, those accusations will fly, won't they? A beloved children's author is painted as being just as "murderous" as a former porn star and admitted rapist.

It's not really about the words anyone chooses, it's about the fact that they are choosing words at all to express that they do not agree with the trans movement.

I thought what she had to say was powerful. We can't ignore women's voices just because they are rough. Being a women is rough. I don't have to agree with everything a woman has said or done to find value in her words. Every female perspective is important to me. The blog post that was copied here the other day just showed me how much we all have in common as women. She's deep into porn culture, but she still sees the truth of the trans madness. Obviously she has done bad things that she admits to and feels remorse for. That doesn't take away her credibility. Hell, how many men have done equal or worse and feel no remorse and face no consquences? How many male creators of any kind have committed sexual abuse and rape that we never hear about and we continue to support their work and listen to their voices? How many men do we know personally who have committed crimes we'll never know about but we still allow them in our lives? I find absolutely nothing wrong with reading the perspective of a woman deep in the pits of the worst patriarchy has to offer, and I will continue to fight so that other women never have to face the evils that she has.

I enjoyed the sheer powerful rage of her piece, but I totally understand why others aren't on board with the foul and violent language she used.

Surely though, there is no one true way to be a GC feminist? I very much appreciate that we all have a space here to discuss all this, and come to a mutual understanding of each other's thoughts and views and feelings, even when we do have sharp divisions of opinion.

I found her writing "unhinged" specifically due to her calls for violence, not the level of her anger. I take moral issue with her lynching statements, and she absolutely does NOT represent me as a GC person whatsoever. And yes, the TRAs claimed for years that GCrs/TERFS want them dead, well now they got their evidence so yeah. this was a very poor move on her part and set us back. We had just gotten a lot of folks' attention with the BBC article and she shat all over it and now everyone will just remember that woman who said we should lynch TIMs. I mean come on. Everyone here is angry, I doubt anyone has any issues with her being angry as well. Also, her having suffered from trauma and abuse does not give her or anyone else a pass to advocate for violence, full stop.

This is a really naïve take. You can write powerfully (see: Dworkin) without calling for violence.

Her writings seemd incomprehensible to me but whatever, I just don’t understand why we needed a link to a porn site

This is the "apology" she supposedly wrote - I could only find it referenced on a gossip site with no receipts (no archive, no screen shots).

She doesn't blame the victims here - she takes full responsibility. I have never seen a man take responsibility like this. Never.

I remember my father, after he'd been arrested, coaching me about "how he'd never done x" to me - he was lying through his teeth to protect his reputation, to prevent everyone - my mother, the police, our family from being aware of the full depravity of what he'd done.

I will say - she writes like a woman with PTSD. I don't say that to discredit her, to throw her under the bus, to diminish her in any way. I say it to acknowledge I've been there with her.

The monsters don't need to hurt all women. They need to hurt just enough of us to scare all the other women and keep us in line. To keep us afraid. A few women are the examples to everyone else - you don't have to have been personally hurt to be impacted by the violence against women. You're impacted to. You have a right to single sex spaces too.

Again - I can't find any proof she wrote it, but this is what everyone is passing around as her confession, if you want to read it.

I’m sorry, everyone. I have let you all down.

I’ve always hooked up with girls at porn parties and conventions, frequently on camera, in front of witnesses. I did this because I thought it was wanted, and that girls enjoyed it. The cameras enjoyed it, anyway. It was an organic thing at first. I did it before I was even really in porn and was a piece of how I got in. As the years wore on, I started to feel obligated to do it. It was my “thing”. The cameras would follow me around and I would get up to my usual hijinks. I tweeted about this. I posted pictures on social media. I didn’t conceptualize any of this as assualt, or I wouldn’t have done it much less promoted it.

Eventually, I started to hear complaints, through the grapevine. No one said anything to my face, but people complained to each other, and eventually it made it’s way to me without names or details that some girls didn’t appreciate the bathroom trips. I felt thrown, because I had thought of these as mutually pleasurable activities. My thinking was warped – I thought I was so good at reading people that I could tell when girls wanted it. I lived to get girls off. I thought of myself as being a good person. I wanted to stand for sexual freedom, not sexual coercion. I thought was on the side of the light. I have failed.

I’m deeply embarrassed by these revelations. I did not want to be evil. I remember the incidents with Jasmine Summers, Honey Gold and Maren. I misread the situations so completely that it came as a shock to me that these girls experienced them as assaults. I was aware of some situations where I’d crossed lines, but I didn’t know that these were among them. I didn’t know they felt violated by me. I feel gross about it. I feel stupid. I tweeted about all of these girls, posting photos of Honey and video of Maren. I gave them my number afterwards. I wasn’t ashamed about this, because I didn’t think there was anything to be ashamed of.

I feel ashamed now. I thought that that girls went along with me because they enjoyed it, but they did it because they felt like they couldn’t say no. I thought it was all in fun, but it wasn’t. I played a sexual predator in movies, but it was supposed to be tongue in cheek. I thought of myself as someone who helped girls in the business, not preyed on them. I thought of myself as an artist, not a monster. On the same party bus where Maren says I ruined her Exxotica, I shoved Ron Jeremy for refusing to back off from trying to get in some lesbian action. At another party, I broke Max Hardcore’s nose. I thought I was better than porn’s serial gropers, but I guess I was just the female of the species.

I’m deeply sorry for the way that I made these girls feel. I’m sorry to anyone I have hurt. I engaged in so much “partying” – I don’t know how much of it was ok and how much of it was damaging. I knew I had gotten lost in my persona and had been taking steps to come out of it and get treatment for my mental health. I had already stopped the substance use and the public sex, but it was too late. I am sorry from the bottom of my heart. I can’t take it back, and I don’t expect to be forgiven. I’m seeing a lot of warnings about staying away from me. You don’t have to stay away from me. I will be staying away. I will not be attending the award shows this season. You have nothing more to fear from me. This “party” is over.

If you have been harmed by me and wish to talk to me about it, I am here to listen and make amends if possible.

I am sorry for how much she has suffered and for how much pain she seems to be in. I also denounce her calls for lynchings and executions of trans-identified people and make no apologies for that. It's not about policing anger - I'm an angry woman too and I have suffered far, far less than she has. I just draw the line at specific calls to violence and want to make it clear that she does not represent my views (my anger is more "get the fuck out of my bathroom" and "stop trying to speak over me, you male asshole" - but I'm perfectly happy for trans-identified people to do whatever they want to do in life as long as it doesn't infringe on women's rights). I do not share her views, do not think it's good for other women to share them, and do not think we need those views in the GC movement. Our movement is strong and growing stronger - why would we need to embrace a radical, violent isolated perspective? What good would it do?

We can still hope that Cade gets the help she needs on a personal level without embracing her ideology. It's not leaving her out to dry or failing to understand that she is angry, but the place for her to understand that depth of anger is in a therapist's office, not on the frontlines of female political advocacy.

I do not think we need to self-flagellate because one woman has, in a moment of desperation and rage, written something shitty and violent. It's tragic that the porn industry chewed her up and spit her out, and that she victimized so many women in a bid to cater to the male gaze more successfully. It is good, though, that she's speaking up because the machine that profited the most from all of it, is still running. In a way, the pornsick TiMs are symptoms of the entire woman-hating and objectifying depravity of that industry, so I get why she's angry as hell, even if I don't want anyone lynched (obviously)

I have seen, in my 25 years of reading online forums and social media, literally thousands of posts by men that were just as bad or worse than what she wrote. Not to mention actual videos and confessions of abuse and assault. And never have other men seen themselves or their political movements as personally responsible. Bringing this up is not whataboutism, it's pointing out the extreme double standards of patriarchy. A million men can enjoy women being abused from the comfort of their own homes, and pay for their continued degradation through porn, no one cares, don't kinkshame, blahblah. One woman, who was literally used and abused for years, tweets "violently", stop the presses, gendercritical feminism is to blame!

I don't think everyone here has to support her, but we also don't have to blame ourselves or attack her to "prove we're the sane ones". Women don't have to answer for everything another woman does, we have solidarity but we're not a hive mind. What we need to do is be heard and not back down so what happened to her and was done by her doesn't happen to other women.

I can't get specific, but I've known Lily Cade in real life as a casual acquaintance. I haven't spoken to her in a long time, but I know her. Her porn career took a lot from her. It was both her creative peak and her personal downfall. I know she's tried in various ways the last few years to get her life in order outside of porn and things weren't going too badly. I suspect her recent manifestos are a low key form of self harm, her last ditch effort to burn the Lily Cade persona to the ground publicly. She's stood up for herself mostly alone for so long that I think she was aiming for the shock value as well as the catharsis of unleashing her honest thoughts. I wasn't aware of the assault allegations, though I don't think that issue negates her other experiences as fucked up as it all is.

Also people seem to be unaware that she accepts being called a rapist because she accepts she hurt people. None of the other women, and men involved in porn will own up to the fact that they too are rapists. She was a prostitute, payed to act out fetish for men. If you know what goes on behind the scenes then you fucking know the men behind the camera are often pressuring or outright forcing these women to commit these acts.

I've seen other women say their fellow actresses didn't want to do something and yet they did it(one woman says they didn't want to be fingered up the ass as that was not discussed and guess what she ended up doing it to them). I've seen women talk about blood being wiped off their ass during takes. I've read worse then this too.

Come the fuck on now, please be aware of the true inhumanity of this industry. It's not as easy as her being the bad egg, they all were and at least she go out. The rest are still hurting each other in the name of male pleasure, still forced to work for a shit system.

She is still a woman who is standing up to this ideology her own way

She named prominent TIMs and said they should be lynched. That's completely uncalled for, and should be denounced.

Calling for death threats and violence is not the answer, as we point out with TRAs.

She’s a lesbian, a proudly prostituted woman, a woman who is fully woman identified. Very few feminists or women are going to listen to her or want to be associated with her. I don’t know what she did in the sex trade that got her canceled, but I will assume she pimped/raped other women, so she’s a pariah. Suggesting women or anybody use physical means to protect women’s interests puts her outside the circle of female political innocence.

The funny thing is she never asked for approval from feminists or other women, but women are so accustomed to the idea of deeming which of us are acceptable, they are withdrawing approval she never had or asked for. She admits she’s a monster, she’s bad and she’s an outsider, and women are rushing forward to disown a woman who they never claimed to begin with. The issue of Lily Cade has always been sanitized or avoided in discussions of the cotton ceiling, because she doesn’t fit any easy narrative about women’s politics. She’s the Julia we can all point at and say “do it to her!”

Many gender critical women are putting stock in appearing rational, reasonable, nonviolent and passive as a political strategy. The idea is the state and society will side with women speaking calmly and nicely in a specific accent against men who are screaming sexualized threats. Sidelining women who are truly angry and use vulgar language is part and parcel of the strategy.

As for radical/cultural feminists, lesbian separatists, misandrists and the like, the male focused and male led gender critical movement has made their use of us and our theories, protests, research, interpersonal support, money and personal pain. They’re done with us. They now have the clout they need to claim leadership and primacy in the movement and marginalize us as activists. Men have taken control of “gender critical” just like they took control of social justice oriented feminist spaces in the 2000-2010s. It happens every time and will continue to happen until women take the principle of separatism seriously. And its not too late to do that. Women only political spaces are popping up in secret again in response to the male and male-identified invasion of gender critical.

You do not need the gender critical label if you are a radical lesbian yourself or a radical feminist, because those movements are based on gender criticism and incorporate criticism of transsexualism. There is no “gender critical” without us.

I haven’t seen this explicitly mentioned in either post but I think that a lot of women are just disappointed with how things played out. A problem that we’ve been screaming about for so long was finally addressed in a mainstream media article and its disappointing that instead of people focusing on the TIM rape victims mentioned in the article, people are only focusing on the woman who has been a victim and perpetrator of rape, who has said that TIMs should be lynched (be it metaphorical or not), and who was included in the article purely for the historical context of the “cotton ceiling.”

Its just the same old “wOmEn RaPe AnD aRe ViOlEnT ToO” that is always used to discredit women who speak out against their rapists and male violence. That’s not Lily’s fault, or any of our faults, it’s the fault of society at large. Women should be allowed to be upset and to grieve over the way things played out, and that we will be associated with this regardless of the fact that she is one woman out of thousands who are speaking out against this evil ideology. In a perfect world normal people (not TRAs) should be able to distinguish Lily’s actions and words as her own, but in our fucked up world full of dense followers, that’s just not realistic and it fucking sucks that humanity has allowed ourselves to become this way.