By : When people make this kind of public declaration, such as Salon’s article about why the author left the GOP (here), many people respond by doubting if they were “truly” whatever they claimed to be formerly. To me this is similar to the No True Scotsman fallacy, saying that No True X could just give up being X to be something else. I think a lot of this has to do with the way humans are socially wired to create in-group preferences and out-group biases. When someone leaves our group for the out-group, we often look at them with incredulity, suspicious that they were a false friend or a spy for the other group all along. History is littered with examples of this, as is literature, but I won’t bore you with examples. But the truth is, people are more complicated than that. And with politics, I value truth and rationality above any concerns about loyalty to a particular brand or group of people. Loyalty, in my personal experience, is too often used to silence the truth or to attack people for telling it.
There is no amount of real evidence that would satisfy people who would respond to this by doubting if I was ever a “true” feminist. They’d say “well she never castrated anyone,” “she never went topless in protest,” “she never pulled a scroll dripping with menstrual blood from her vagina to engage in a nude artistic protest,” therefore “she was never a TRUE feminist.”
But basically, I was just a liberal, and feminism was just another way of saying I rejected bigotry. I bought into the idea that feminist just meant gender egalitarian, and I believed that any decent person should believe in equality between the sexes in terms of political power. I thought that women needed better representation in sexist media, which is reflected by some of my earlier articles on hubpages.
