One important manifestation of transmisogyny:
It’s clear that the tactic of pitting cis women and trans people against each other in a manufactured moral panic has been incredibly successful in terms of manipulating and setting the tone of public debate.
Asserting a false dichotomy of ‘trans rights vs women’s rights’ has served as an excellent cover for transphobes: anti-trans groups have very successfully argued that they aren’t anti-trans — they’re pro-woman.
It’s an emotive claim which frames the debate around transgender equality as an issue of who’s rights are more important — trans people’s or cisgender women’s?
It forces people to take sides.
The success of this tactic has had a particularly harmful impact on public discourse, since many people invoking this seemingly ‘reasonable concern’ have no idea that they’re repeating (and thus reinforcing) a transphobic dog-whistle.
— Kaylin Hamilton, PhD, "'Trans Rights Harm Women' is a Transphobic Dog-Whistle," Substack, April 28, 2023
And here's one manifestation of the idea that trans rights conflict with women's rights. Exactly one year earlier, the anti-trans Women's Voices @WomenReadWomen had tweeted this: "Transgenderism is not a human rights movement; it's a men's rights movement, bolstered by the medical industry. The belief that women can be reduced to purchasable parts — breast implants, hormones — is fundamentally a belief that women, and humans in general, are commodities." (Aug 28, 2022) See, this comment posits that "transgenderism" may not be an individual's fact or the state of being transgender, but is a "movement" based on a "belief" in the commodification of women. And this comment is of course focused on trans women, ignoring the existence of trans men. Which isn't a casual omission. The lopsidedness of the treatment is a way in which their sexism and transmisogyny works. The anti-trans movement considers trans men to be women, yet avoids examining our (trans men's) experiences to see how sexism might show up in our lives, and thus the anti-trans movement ends up reproducing that sexism toward us (intentionally or not).
Putting those two illustrations together, you can see a narrative begin to form: Trans women commodify gender and bodies in a sexist way, whereas non-trans women want to end sexism. Trans women are (only) perpetrators of sexism, whereas non-trans women are (only) the victims of sexism. This is transmisogyny.
Consider, for example, the complaint of "womanface" (my article on Medium). If we live in the non-sexist future that many so-called "gender criticals" (i.e., anti-transgender people) claim to believe in or want to see, we don't assign genders to makeup or clothing, meaning that anyone can wear anything and no one should be judged as putting on the appearance of another gender when they get dressed in the morning. If you tell someone they're too male to be looking so feminine, it's just invalid sexist namecalling. That's what the word "womanface" is and does, according to the so-called GC's own "standards."
People, not objects
Max Strassfeld challenges the treatment of "trans women as abused philosophical objects" (Trans Talmud, Chapter 2).
More specific remarks seen on Twitter
Just had a transphobic comment complaining specifically about the part of my video about misogyny so I'll say it again: you bigots might be too thick to grasp this, but you are treating me like a woman every time you call me a man
— Sophie ✨ From ✨Mars (@sophie_frm_mars) April 4, 2023
I thought I'd seen it all from "gender critical" land, but last night I tweeted with an American doctor, who claimed her husband was a surgeon who did bottom surgery, and yet, she'd posted a pic of an anal gape in gay porn and misidentified it as a picture of a "neovagina." 1/
— Aidan Comerford (@AidanCTweets) April 4, 2023
trans women endure misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and still happily express our womanhood knowing that doing so will make our lives harder under cishetero white supremacist patriarchy
— Jerrica, Local Sports Lesbian (@JinkiesJerrica) October 7, 2022
terfs experience misogyny, and that trauma leads them to see their womanhood as a burden
"Go and stare at the genitals of trans people before you make your opinion on whether they deserve rights" is a hell of a take. pic.twitter.com/QyIYdqnxlG
— Alejandra Caraballo (@Esqueer_) September 21, 2022
Transphobes relentlessly mock trans women for performing what they say is exaggerated femininity, but also will accuse and publicly attack any woman they feel is too masculine in looks or behavior, regardless of if they are trans or not.
— Nic Anstett (@NicAnstett) April 6, 2023
Terfs use so much eugenics-y, phrenology esq language. The amount of cis women who don’t pass their “Gender critical” categories… they love asking “what is a woman?” but their answer is “must weigh below x, must have a nose length below y, must have estrogen levels above z”.
— hamish steele! (@hamishsteele) July 23, 2022
"How do you know it's a male face?"
— WikiHow to melt steel beams (@WikiHowToLogout) July 23, 2022
"It has an Adams apple"
"Theres no Adams apple"
"Yes but only because they deliberately cropped it out" pic.twitter.com/jBPiUcToSw
I think of this often when people argue that transmisogyny and transphobia are historically recent phenomena that haven't occurred cross-culturally. This idea seems based in defining transmisogyny and transphobia very incompletely, by only modern expressions of them. https://t.co/jBXUyGM2Me
— May Peterson 🌸 (@maidensblade) April 5, 2023
Book portrays violent divine retribution against someone for transmisogynistly abusing a trans woman when she was a child
— Maddie, The Transsexual Empress (@lisaquestions) August 19, 2022
TME reviewers: "I just don't understand why all the cis people accept her as a woman without question."
gender clinics used to turn trans people away for not being hot enough. the idea that if you transition you *have* to be really good looking or you've failed isn't something we invented.
— owl (@owlyowlnow) October 10, 2022
the latest thing that transphobes are upset about is a trans person having done sex work in a society where sex work is often the only kind of work you can get because of anti-trans discrimination and the fetishisation of our lives.
— the illegal lesbian project (@notCursedE) October 12, 2022
of course, trans bad, not cis bad.
Literally begging people to notice that the weaponized detrans narrative that testosterone is poison and that going on T makes you undesirable/ugly/bad in some way is anti-transmasculinity
— Alex (he/him) is vaguefiend on Tumblr (@AlexPetrovnia) October 10, 2022
Daily Wire host goes on strange sexist rant: “Women cannot take care of themselves”: Andrew Klavan: “The central purpose of every society is to figure out the distribution of women because women are valuable”. Media Matters, July 29, 2024
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