I honestly don't think I ever had a choice. I was raised in the middle east in a culture of extreme misogyny and I knew it was wrong basically from the moment I could critically think. I was definitely the loud killjoy feminist in my school/family as early as 11 lmfao. I didn't discover radical feminism until 2017, but ever since I can remember I've been passionate about feminism and women's rights

I wish I had a cool story but I’ve always been a feminist even as a teenager. Feminism just perfectly describes my life and beliefs.

I love being a woman, I loved female puberty, I love my female body, I love female sexuality, I love female only spaces, centering women in my life, exposing male violence and foolishness, lesbian culture, vagina/menstrual art, just everything about women sounds great to me. I can’t imagine anything better than being born a girl, growing into a woman and being surrounded by other women and the majesty of women’s contributions to human culture all the time.

I don’t remember becoming a feminist. The idea of being a woman and not a feminist doesn’t even make sense to me, like being a fish who is not pro-water, what would that even look like?

To me the reading of theory comes second. I didn’t read The Vagina Monologues or SCUM Manifesto and then became a feminist. I read those things because I was already a feminist, a woman-identified-woman, as they used to call it in days of yore.

I was born to be a radical feminist and I will die one.✌🏽

Another commenter put it well in terms of what I felt growing up too...aware of the sexism directed at women/girls from a young age; wasnt able/didnt want to conform to feminine standards. I have a larger bust and hips and a small waist and I hated my body for a long time because of the unwanted attention I got, until I realized there was nothing wrong with me and everything wrong with men. I just wanted to exist and be left alone lol.

I didnt really have any involvement with feminism until I started using reddit and saw that "feminism" was basically anything that got mens dicks hard, so I wanted nothing to do with it. I remember getting a feeling of "wrongness" in my gut when I read stuff like porn/makeup/prostitution was empowering and feminist, and I was like no it most certainly is not, but as someone who was generally against SJW stuff I kind of just lumped it in with weird internet culture and ignored it.

It wasn't until I started hearing about nonbinary stuff that I started poking my head down the rabbit hole more. I specifically remember reading about trans stuff on reddit constantly and looked at their subs to try and understand them better...hoo boy was that a mistake. They were clearly off and alot of them were fetishists, though I didnt know what AGP was at the time. The thing that really got me was they were calling people 'truscum' (old school transsexuals, or people who actually have a diagnosed mental illness) and saying shit like 'you dont need dysphoria to be trans!11! uwu'.

Oh and nonbinary people "werent male or female"...if your idea of male or female is regressive gender stereotypes. The nonbinary stuff is what I took the most offense to because of how blatantly sexist it was, and it disturbed me how many people seemingly agreed and went along with it. What happened to gender is a social construct?

Down the line I ended up finding r/gc and found myself agreeing with the majority of the views there. I was glad it wasnt just me who felt that way about choice feminism and the trans stuff. And it actually made sense, unlike the weird flowery 'feminism' and strange logical contortions that gender trenders and enbies espoused.

Now I'm here :) I try and post about my personal experiences because maybe theres someone like me reading them.

It sounds weird but when I saw how gleeful "liberal" men were to bash Melania Trump after her husband won the election, I knew they were just as misogynistic as conservative men. Things started to click over the years- their ardent defense of women's subjugation through Islam (they like it!), the normalization of woman beating and woque polygamy (don't kink shame!), and the idea that womanhood is a competition to be won.

My final straw was when a TiM and his friends (including a former mutual friend that straight up told them to attack me) flipped out on me because I said Chick-fil-A was not even close to being the most evil corporation as far as human rights are concerned. They can boycott them if they want but it won't make a difference, and painting everyone as a bigot who eats there isn't going to gain any allies. All sorts of misogynistic abuse was hurled my way for not participating in their self induced struggle season, as I unfriended the individual that literally told people "go for [ her ]". I completely snapped after that and have zero tolerance of men's bullshit anymore. I look VERY critically at men who claim they are feminists these days. They're usually the most misogynistic ones of all.

Edit: Also to add some male hypocrisy, my former friend flipped out when I DMed him privately and asked if he would like to tell the TiM that he didn't believe said TiM had gender dysphoria, or if I should do that publicly since both of them were so convinced that I was the bigot. Hoo boy he did NOT like that. 🤣 I blocked him shortly after, but a mutual friend told me he came up with a bullshit story about how I "threaten real life friendships with hate". Sure Jan. 🙄 Apparently they carried on calling me a bitch for the entire weekend. Pathetic.

Hard to answer when I can't share any identifiable personal information without fear of losing my livelihood, but let's take a shot.

I experienced sexism from a very young age - nothing horrifying like some women do, thankfully, but I was constantly chafing at people's expectations of me as a girl. I had sensory and social issues that just made it impossible for me to live up to them, and for the life of me I couldn't understand why I should have to.

I was just me, you know?

But my takeaway was more not-like-other-girls than feminism. So much of the shit came women and other girls, I just assumed that most women were the way everyone expected me to be. Definitely, 1000% would have said I was nonbinary if I'd encountered the word.

So I was in this weird position of being hyper-aware of sexism, but wanting to avoid feminism because it was for girls, and I avoided things that were for girls like the plague! Even the ones that might otherwise have been appealing to me - I felt like I was constantly fighting to avoid being put into that category.

It didn't occur to me until much later, as I became an adult and was forced to make compromises, that other women might be in the same boat. Yes, even the ones who wore makeup.

But, like a lot of people here, it was the trans stuff that forced my hand.

It was one thing for me, personally, to be waffling about whether I wanted to group myself with other women. It was entirely different to see otherwise intelligent and caring people saying that women aren't allowed to form a group for any reason. And defending violent sexual threats against women who objected to that!

There's no amount of not-like-other-girls that can protect me from that level of endemic misogyny, so fuck it.

I'm in.

I was a libfem for quite a while. I used Reddit and fell into the MRA bullshit and also an addiction to porn, which resulted in carrying around a lot of internalized misogyny. The time I spent as a TIF was miserable. A lot of what led to me IDing as trans (and then discovering radical feminism) was porn, because porn is fucking horrible and the most utterly misogynistic content that's for some reason still allowed in our society. Watching porn had made me internalize these messages about sex, mainly that sex for a woman was about being subordinated, and I wanted none of it. I have vivid memories of crying in the shower, just hating being born a woman. As much as I oppose transgenderism, gender dysphoria is a very painful thing. I saw a comment on r/pinkpillfeminism yesterday that I think sums it up: “I hate being a woman. It's so humiliating. I feel like a piece of meat with holes to fuck and sexualize every part of it for male pleasure. I hate my role in sex. I hate the things men desire to do to female bodies. So fucking humiliating, I hate how female body looks like so weak and soft, I hate the curves, I feel like a pig to fuck.” I spent a lot of that time very suicidal. I was hospitalized, put in a mental health ward with other people, and a large number of women. I heard about the experiences of rape and incest, suicide attempts and poverty, and it made me very angry how many women had been mistreated like this. When I returned, I was shocked to discover many of the women I knew had been to mental health wards as well, that they had been raped, that they had self-harmed or attempted suicide. I'd never known that there was this massive underbelly of female suffering in our society. I read somewhere that 9% of female high-schoolers (The survey was in NYC, I believe?) have attempted suicide and it made me really upset. That's 1/11... That's fucking abysmal. Porn also solidified my awareness of this. I had developed masochistic fantasies and whatnot. I watched very violent and degrading porn, mainly as a way of like... psychological self-harm? I hated myself, so I thought I deserved to suffer, and these masochistic fantasies were a way of making myself suffer. The porn made me very, very aware of what men think of women. One of the first porn videos I ever saw was an animated one, where the plot was that a woman is tied up in a basement and raped repeatedly by multiple men. There was one where the plot was sex robots that men were able to buy. There was one where the plot was that one girl at a high school was chosen to be a public sex slave for all of the boys and repeatedly gang-raped, in this case, by a couple hundred men. There was one where girls who dropped out of high school were turned into public sex slaves. There was one where the plot was that rape was legalized. There was one that was just men molesting women on a train. Women in porn are always depicted as enjoying being raped, enjoying being molested, enjoying being treated like a sexual object devoid of any human worth, enjoying being dehumanized and degraded. The fact that porn is consistently defended with "free speech" or whatever is pathetic. Pathetic. Free speech doesn't fucking apply to hate speech, and that's what porn is, really: hate speech against women. Then, at some point, I stumbled upon r/gendercritical, spinster.xyz, and later this site. I read Andrea Dworkin's "Pornography" and Gail Dines' "Pornland." And... well now I'm here, and I'm pretty happy.

The only girl with three brothers, all four of us very close together in age, I remember a kind of "hang on a minute" moment when, consistently, my brothers would wolf down their first course before I did, and my mother would tell me to stop eating & get up from the table and serve them their second course.

As a teenager and in my early twenties I was actually an anti feminist: all those things that feminists said were happening to women didn’t match with my experience. I started the world of work and got involved with the disability staff group after my mum had some health issues and I started to see how difficult it was to navigate the world as a disabled person although I’d never noticed it before because it didn’t concern me. This led to me thinking more about sexism (and racism) and realising that it was real and that I could see it all around me. So I became a feminist.

I grew up in a small country town, misogyny was rampant. I was acutely aware of how women were treated differently to men. I experienced domestic violence and sexual assault in my late teens. When I was studying in the 90s I was very fortunate to have 2 radfem lecturers. That was my exposure to feminism and the things that I had experienced in my life made sense then.

Well, it all started with the JK Rowling situation. While everyone was attacking her and calling her transphobic, I didn't see anything wrong with her statements. I'm the kind of person who doesn't go with the crowd and needs receipts for every accusation. So I just supported her in silence. A bit later I started reading this korean feminist book called 'Kim Ji-young, born 1982' (a great book btw) and researched about feminism in South Korea. I saw that the most popular kind of feminism they supported was radical feminism, so I looked it up and immediately knew that this was the feminism I wanted to be a part of. Fast forward to now, I regret nothing. Radical feminism gave me all the answers I needed, and I wouldn't trade it for anything.

i grew up in a bronken family, witnessing my alcoholic father being violent to my mother. people blamed her and said he was sick and needed help. i never agreed with them. i knew i didn't want to get married to live the same hell. i always perceived boys and men as my enemies. they were threatening and dangerous and i should keep my distance. i had my first male friends at age 12-13. before that, i was hostile because i thought they were evil. well, can't say i was completely wrong hahaha

so, as an adult, i started reading more and more about feminism and realized that i agreed with most of the things in the movement. i found in feminism a voice, a way to articulate my thoughts and i finally understood everything. my father's violence, why my mother didn't leave him, why i i was expected to be feminine, etc. i kind of always have been a feminist, i just didn't know the political aspects of feminism. it was very eye opening and there was no way to go back. i'm very greatful to feminism for being a part of my life.

Third generation feminist here. They literally sang feminist lullabies and told me stories of brave women while growing up.

I started with feminism...pretty young. My nan would tell me about how she grew up not being able to open her own bank account. About how she felt uncomfortable "without her face on". My dad made uncomfortable comments about women's weight and appearance, and would make sexist jokes about the suffragettes. My mum taught me to be louder and more outspoken when I thought things were wrong. Over the years it just grew. I noticed all the shit I faced for being gay, for being disabled, and for being a woman in ways people didn't want. I was criticised for wearing "boy" clothes at first, for example. Then criticised for not "making it clear" I was a lesbian (my town felt all lesbians should be butch so they were recognisable). And then I was criticised because people get weirdly angry at women in wheelchairs, and if you dare look pretty then men consider it some kind of personal insult. Because like, you're a woman, that they don't like, that dares look nice? At least, that's what I've been getting.

Eventually I started reading more, looking for ways to be an activist. I started adjusting the way I presented myself - I'm still very feminine, but I'm a lot bolder and louder. I wear brighter colours, I wear patches that make it clear I'm a lesbian (people do not like it), I took a long deep look at why I liked make up, and narrowed it down to only what I actually liked.

Essentially, after a long time of experiencing and hearing about injustice, I decided I wanted to do something to help stop it. And now I'm the person that makes family dinners awkward by pointing out when my dad is being sexist, and talking about politics.

It started when I was young. I would always get into trouble for not paying attention in bible study, not wanting to go to bible study, or asking too many questions in bible study. Even at my young age, I realized women were getting the crappy end of the stick and didn't believe our entire purpose was to serve men (yep, I went to one of those churches lol). From there, I've always found ways to silently protest women's/girls' treatment and didn't like the gender roles forced on us. It wasn't until early adulthood that I actually started reading more about feminists and feminism and identifying as one. It wasn't until my mud twenties that I got into the female separatist movements. I just love women. I love everything about us and I hope one day we can all truly be liberated.

Lots of things, lots of experiences, but the first I can remember is how, as the only girl with three brothers, all of us close together in age, thinking "Hang on a minute" when, consistently, my brothers would wolf down their first course before I'd finished eating mine, and my mother would tell me to put down my knife & fork, get up, and serve them their pudding.
In retrospect, I realise she was trying to get to finish her own meal in relative peace - having cooked it, which she hated doing but also, somehow, would not allow anyone else to do - and also I suppose "managing" them: if they were waiting for the next installment of food they were liable to become a bit boisterous. But it didn't seem to occur to her that it cast me as a servant to my brothers, as she herself was cast.

I became a feminist by noticing how it feels to be a girl in a boys' and man's world. I wanted to be good at playing guitar and being a rock star but all of the musicians at my high school who played guitar or bass or drums were boys. The girls sang backup vocals and danced, but they did not write songs or play guitar.

I also grew up and noticed how women are not in positions of power in society, such as political positions, or at least, not in the numbers that men are.

These and other things made me a feminist because I know women are just as human, if not more so, as men. We give birth to all of humanity and should be respected as such.

I also read Mary Daly and Andrea Dworkin. They also made me a feminist by speaking truth to power with their words.

I was 9 y,o. when Roe v. Wade passed and I was totally oblivious to it. Fast forward to my sophomore year of high school, when I first learned that abortion had not always been legal. Now, I wasn't sexually active -- had never even dated, and I didn't personally know anyone young who had gotten pregnant. But the moment I heard that abortion had been illegal, I felt deep inside how very wrong that was and that women should always have that option.

Over my life, I've just gotten more feminist/rad fem, but that was my first step.

Oh well... this is gonna take a while. Actually, I have repeated this story for a while now, but I like to tell it! :)

I have identified myself as a feminist since I have known myself. But you know, I never really knew what a feminist was until 2020. So far, I was proud to understand what a "transperson" was, and I was glad to have the #HeForShe movement around. I still knew that the women who fought for our rights related to voting and all... Anyways...

Then #covid19 happens, and I was in my house having plenty of time to do whatever when I heard about JKR being 'transphobic'. I had heard she was being a transphobe for a second time, but I didn't know what was going on. So a went after it and her tweet and I talked to a radfem friend of mine to try and understand the tweet.

Meanwhile, my ex-boyfriend came to me to talk and share some private experiences he had had. He told me to wear 'women's clothes" such as pumps, panties, tiny shorts and all. Until that point, I saw myself as super open-minded and all. So all fine there. However, I had always thought that clothes don't really have specific sex. And I was super open-minded, why did his pictures wearing those clothes bothered me. He said he was testing his sexuality, he didn't want labels... Something was bothering me, and I told him that clothes "didn't have sex", to which he replied: But then, there's no fun! ....

It took me by surprise... I was shocked.

Well, My friend was telling me the problems with the trans ideology and now with my ex-boyfriend situation.... I looked for YT videos and FB pages looking for more information. It was an intensive month on Radical Feminism.

And that's how I realized that somethings that had been bothering me for a while (prostitution, pornography, surrogacy, etc. ) had a name, had people fighting against... Also, the gender-related situation... I suddenly had become a RadFem over night. Now, there's no turning back... <3

When I look back at my childhood I realize I was always pretty critical of the gender roles women are assigned in our society, in large part because I'm a lesbian. I knew from a young age that I did NOT want the life society said I should have (i.e. get married to a man, have kids). I thought that the the other alternative, being a spinster, was the better option lol. Back then I thought I'd rather just spend my life with a female "friend" and we'd be spinsters together. But my sexual orientation aside there are other aspects of me that I always felt were at odds with the way society portrays women, like how I do not have the maternal instinct society says women have (I've literally never wanted kids, nor do I care for children), or how I'm incredibly disorganized as opposed to being good at cleaning like women are supposed to be, or how women are supposed to be good at cooking and I'm not. So yeah, I've thought gender roles were bullshit ever since I was little.

When I was around 11 or 12 I discovered Tumblr because of fandom, and when I was 13 I discovered the "feminist" (libfem) side of Tumblr (looking back I wish I had discovered radblr instead lol) and was immediately drawn in. Then after 2 years I started becoming disillusioned with liberal feminism and left Tumblr, and for a while felt politically homeless. That is, until I found out about r/GenderCritical. I was either 17 or 18, and I had found out about it because there were some terfs I'd encountered on another website who helped me peak trans, and I agreed with everything they were saying. At the time I didn't have a Reddit account, so I started out lurking. When I first started reading the posts there I was so relieved, I was like yes, I've finally found some sane women!

I believed I was a feminist since high school, but I only recently came to terms with the fact that gender ideology is, at best, misguided, and at worst, directly harmful to women. You can't simultaneously believe in gender as an innate _feeling yet also believe that gender is socially or culturally constructed under patriarchy.

Here's the full story of how I got here, from thinking I was non-binary and dating TIMs to actually writing on a radfem forum:

I was very butch when I was 18, to the point of being mistaken for a man in a woman's restroom. Obviously, it was humiliating. I started thinking that maybe I was non-binary; I did not feel "welcome" under the umbrella of “womanhood”, which I confused with femininity. My girlfriend at the time seemed more into men, and I was insecure that I could never be _masculine enough for her, and that if, say, I felt like wearing a lovely dress, she would not feel sexually attracted to me. Turns out, I was grappling with internalized misogyny and insecurity. I also didn’t want to end up like the women in my family, who were so subservient to men; as a result, I wanted to reject the part of me that I viewed as a curse (my sex). Fortunately, after that relationship and with some time, I grew more confident and sensible.

However, I still didn’t know anything about radical feminism and I was a blind follower of gender ideology for many subsequent years. As an undergraduate, I actually dated and slept with a handful of TIMs (amongst many women and men, I didn’t discriminate lol). I’m happy to answer questions about that experience, as long as I can guard their privacy and mine. During this time in my life I also used the “gender unicorn” in presentations. I was knee-deep in trans ideology within my social circle and loathed the dreaded “TERF”.

Funnily enough, Youtube was my dose of reality. It started with watching Blaire White “ironically” while secretly agreeing with what Blaire was saying about TRAs. Then I began watching gender critical feminists “ironically” but feeling a thrill as they spoke, because it resonated with my common sense. Then, I began reflecting more deeply on one of my damaging relationships with a TIM, my own experiences hating my body, and the experiences of Keira Bell. I began interrogating those beliefs that I adopted and perpetuated because I am highly sensitive and just wanted to be accepted by my peers. I have a lot of sympathy for TIMs and TIFs, I really do. By and large, they are genuinely good people. But I don't want to be dehumanized by medicalized language that reduces me to my uterus. I don’t want children to take life-altering hormones; I had what I thought was gender dysphoria as a young adult and I genuinely grew out of it. I don’t want women to lose their jobs because they don’t feel comfortable waxing a man’s balls (see: Jessica Yaniv). I am genuinely sad about Ell(en/iot) Page because that was my first wlw crush.

That’s how I ended up here.