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Comment by drooby | Hacker News Reader

You're completely right..

The left is afraid to invest in men's issues out of fear of suppressing efforts of uplifting women. It's a fallacy.

To thread this needle, the left can and should frame men's advocacy as a form of women's health issues. Men and women are obviously interdependent... healthy men means healthy women.

Another good first step is acknowledging the biological differences that influence men to behave the way they do (testosterone, being one major factor).. but things like this starts to complicate other ideologies about sex and gender.. it's a mess..

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Something that I find funny is that in my experience trans people are often pretty upfront about the biological differences between "men" and "women". After all, many of them have experienced both male and female hormone profiles.

> the left

As in, the global left? Whose left are we talking about here? Biological differences are well acknowledged in modern diversity programs, but it's exactly those programs that are now being questioned. A less 'zero sum' view of social progress may be a better way forward, we all lift up one another.

Hear hear.

(warning - politics below)

Although if left tried to frame men’s issues as female issues, I personally would be offended.

A better way would be to start with non-controversial male issues (mental help to prevent suicides? homelessness?), and work up from there (equal taxation & riterement, military, equal treatment in family courts, support in domestic violence cases…)

As a side note - I don’t get why left is so afraid of pissing radical feminists off. It’s not like they will begin to vote right wing.

I don’t think the left is afraid of pissing radical feminists off. Also the left already advocates for at least some of the things you mentioned like mental health and homelessness. I don’t think those topics are particularly popular in the “manosphere”.

I think the main problem is the men invested in the manosphere want comforting lies and the left won’t give it to them because in reality it’s much more complicated than what any of the influencers say.

Hm, what country?

In Poland during the last elections the only party that said anything about men’s issues was a far right party (konfederacja).

From mid-right I wouldn’t expect a thing, and the main mid-left (KO) had first three sections dedicated to women, elderly and children, with men completely missing - in 100 issues they had covered not a single one touched upon the subjects we’re discussing.

> I don’t get why left is so afraid of pissing radical feminists off. It’s not like they will begin to vote right wing.

They're not. Embracing trans people runs completely counter to radical feminism. The left currently subscribes to liberal feminism, not radical feminism.

> They're not. Embracing trans people runs completely counter to radical feminism.

Trans exclusionary radical feminists are a radfem niche; they’re not necessarily the radical feminist mainstream. Note that most people identified by the media as ‘TERFs’ are not; they’re transphobes who may claim to be some sort of feminist, but few subscribe to radical feminism as an ideology (there are a handful of _actual_ TERFs left in the broader modern transphobic movement, though many of them, unsurprisingly, have difficulty with that movement’s dubious bedfellows.)

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