Some religions are secular- Atheists should oppose these too

[TaraJo]

I think any theory/doctrine/school of thought can become dogmatic and fundamentalist if its basic beliefs are not kept in mind during application.

I think there is truth to that. Gender equality is an admirable goal and I don't think there are very many rational people who can make very much of a case against that. At best you could point out some general biological differences, such as men generally having upper body strength or women generally being able to have children, but it's rare that those differences have relevance.

However, any idea can be brought to an unhealthy extreme. The problems start happening within the whole movement when the extreme branch is the one that pushes them. For example, if Rush Limbaugh was just a fringe kook in the Republican party that nobody really listened to, I would think he's stupid but I wouldn't care that he's stupid because she's an inconsequential buffoon. However, this isn't the case. He's wildly popular within Republican circles and he's pushing agenda and influencing how the Republican party as a whole thinks. When your thinking becomes more and more aligned with a lunatic, you're in dangerous territory.

And part of gender equality is recognizing sexism when it happens to men. However, within feminism circles, it's common to get told "what about the menz" as an almost automatic response when men's issues are brought up. Others simply explain away those issues as "men only have issue x because women have issue y." Some will simply say men deserve any mistreatment they get because they're overly aggressive, overly entitled and too likely to rape or something. This is either offensive or dismissive to legitimate issues men have in the area of gender equality. I mean, try talking to a father who lost his children in a divorce, even though he's a better parent. Try telling it to a male victim of domestic violence who isn't even listened to. Try telling it to a guy who feels valued based entirely on how much money he makes.

To that end, can you tell me what some of the basic beliefs of feminism are? I'd have thought that gender-equality is the only one, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

The basic belief is usually about gender equality; however, some of the extreme branches push for feminine superiority and/or elimination of the concept of gender. The fact that I'm transsexual argues against the second; if gender wasn't important, I could simply live as an uber-femme dude (tried it, didn't work, I was miserable and wanted to kill people).

And, yes, there are feminists who specifically argue for feminine superiority. Most notable work in that department is The SCUM Manifesto. While I can forgive the author for her writing because she's probably paranoid schizophrenic, there are people who are otherwise reasonable and rational who will speak up in defense of it, using feminism as a defense. How insane must their extreme be if they're able to consider it acceptable to chop up and kill people because they happen to have a penis? But it doesn't end there. There's Andrea Dworkin who argues, basically, that all heterosexual sex is rape. Germain Greer wrote that "women have no idea how much men hate them." Betty Friedan compared men to nazi guards at concentration camps. Rosalind Miles called men "the death sex." Yes, there are some very big, influential names within feminism who make no attempt to cover the fact that they hate men.

I've seen how alienating this can be to men or people who care about men; how can I agree with people who compare my brother to Nazi's? How can I agree with people who call my boyfriend "the death sex?" My boyfriend came from an extremely misogynistic background and he knows now that it's wrong and he wants to explore that some, but how is he supposed to get involved with a movement that considers as one of it's matriarchs, someone who says women have no idea how much he hates them?