Transphobia and especially transmisogyny probably are currently the greatest threat to women's rights.
Transphobes wish to create a world where women have to constantly prove that they are "really" women and show sufficient femininity before being allowed to participate in public life.
They want to make it impossible to participate in women's sports without invasive and humiliating investigation. They want women to be uncertain whether someone will accost them for entering a woman's restroom while appearing insufficiently feminine.
They want the ability to critique and control women's participation in the public sphere. It's fucking horribly regressive, and it *will* get out of hand quickly. It already is.
Trans women are an easily vilified group of women, whose "otherness" can be used an excuse to police all women.
Trans rights are human rights, and trans women's rights are women's rights.
Women have a right not to be scrutinized for how we choose to participate (or not) in femininity. We have a right to live our lives without proving anything to anyone. We should not need to ask for permission to exist in public.
Meanwhile to these people, trans men don't exist.
Persons perceived as feminine are not granted the right of self-determination, are not granted their own identities. When persons designated "feminine" by society cease to perform femininity as demanded, it is tantamount to ceasing to exist.
For these people, to be a trans woman is to be a pariah. To be a trans man is to be a ghost. There is only one way for female-designated persons to exist.
That is not freedom. That is a denial of humanity.
Trans men are men. Trans women are women. Non-binary people are...well, whatever they say they are... that's a mixed bag of individual identities, to say the least.
People who want to restrict trans rights want to restrict human rights. They want to set the boundaries of what it means to be human and force everyone to obey.
Transphobia is a form of proto-fascism.
As a genderqueer cis-ish woman (it's complicated), anything that hurts trans women hurts me. Any right people want to deny to trans women is a right that now can be refused to me also.
If there is a standard for who is and isn't a woman in the "right" way that determines how you are allowed to interact with the world, then women don't have rights. We have obligations. We have to earn our participation in the world. We have to prove we are deserving of it by the degree of our femininity.
I wish more cis women would understand that the way society treats trans people is inextricably related to our rights as women to individuality and self-determination and to our ability to freely exist in society.
The idea that trans men are "lost" women should tell you that they believe that your feminine body and your existence as a feminine person is something you *owe* to the world. If you cease to perform femininity, you have taken something away from others that was rightfully owed them.
When someone "grieves the loss" of "girls" who are actually trans men, they are saying that those men's bodies never belonged to themselves but to others. Especially when they talk about things like top-surgery or sterilization.
Bodies perceived as "feminine" are not to be altered because somehow it is important to others that we have breasts and functioning wombs.
Cis women, this should concern you. Deeply.
In the final event, it's about "showing women their places, their accepted behaviour and roles, their presentation". Guess who defines these attributes and to what purpose.
We can already see how women are loosing real rights ... bodily autonomy, the right to divorce, the right to vote - through a number of legal initiatives already implemented or on the way.
These people "grieve the loss" but they dont want trans girls to be their happiest selves to cancel it out.
These people are silly.
As a cis man, I really support this. For decades I have heard misogynistic straight guys objectifying all forms of femininity while also fearing and censoring much of their own body's sensitivities, sensual and sexual capabilities.
I can only assume that these homophobic misogynistic straight types project ownership delusions outwards onto anything even slightly feminine because they fear parts of themselves. In abandoning parts of themselves, they compensate by imagining they own others.
It is really messed up, and I am thankful that not all straight guys fall into this category. It seems to be mainly unattractive dinosaurs and those they condition. Trump and Musk are perfect examples of that. In fact, so many far right politicians who push this kind of misogyny.
A person deserves to be able to be themselves, and another person wanting them to be something other than themselves is a boundary encroachment form of abuse. To expect someone to not be themselves is incredibly cruel. It throws them completely off centre, and no misogynist would want it for themselves. In fact, misogynists cling to right wing politics precisely because they are hypersensitive to others possibly telling them what to do or not to do.
@artemis if they can’t neatly sort us into male or female they’ll have to give up on forcing women to be domestic slaves and breeding machines.
Ultimately they want to destroy women’s sports because they don’t want women playing sports. They’re not trying to protect women, they’re trying to end our ability to participate in competitive sports.
If we all have to prove we are women before we can use the bathroom at work women who don’t have to work to survive aren’t going to keep going for new jobs where we have to pass new genital checks. Then fewer women will be at work, so we won’t steal jobs from men.
Of course co-ed sports aren't always a bastion of equality. I was once in a city kickball league with a male captain who used misogynistic slurs and suggested after the team lost the first game that they should play with the minimum number of female players on the field at all times. One softball player wanted women banned from playing the infield because men might feel uncomfortable sliding into bases. Prejudice can survive proximity, but it thrives under segregation.
@me @PedestrianError As an example, Olympic Shooting:
"Shooting sports overall have had an interesting path in terms of women's inclusion.
At the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, the Chinese shotgun shooter Zhang Shan won the gold medal in the mixed-sex skeet shooting event.
Yet this was not a straightforward triumph for women in sports.
At the following Olympics, women were barred from participating in the mixed event – yet there was no women's-only version either."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20240731-the-sports-where-women-outperform-men
This was historically a way women were kept in their place. At one point women did not have access to public washrooms at all, it meant you could not stray far from your home because you had no public access to a washroom. Washroom policing is just another way to enforce that. Once it's happened to you once, you think twice about where you want to go.
@JaneinNJ An argument I continue to press, though many resist me on it, is that all bigotry and bias is fundamentally rooted in some kind of ignorance. That includes religiously motivated bias, which is rooted in some kind of religious ignorance -- either ignorance of the religion, or the religion's own ignorance. (Which is common enough.)
Bias can be visceral, but it absolutely REQUIRES ignorance. Knowledge erases ignorance, and thus bias.
@JaneinNJ And here's the usual resistance, almost to the word, and complete with the usual passive-aggressive condescension, too. As a (very) queer person, I'm familiar with being on 'the receiving end' of bias.
I'm sure you're sincere. But you're not thinking it through. If you do, I believe you'll end up agreeing with me. All bias stems from something that people don't know or don't understand, one way or another.
Bias is solvable through education. But only if people are willing to learn.
I've had somebody full-on cross the street waving their arms to demand I explain my gender, it's apparently that arcane, so I am definitely not safe. But really, nobody is.
People will be feeling pressure to conform no matter what they look like-- and the more people perform in reaction to that pressure, the more pressure the people around them will feel, and the ENTIRE thing is just fucked up and should never be allowed to be set up remotely this way in the first place.
People don't get that once they can come up with some formulation to deny someone/anyone their rights, they can make a formulation to do it to you too.
PERIOD.
@artemis 100%
I believe that all forms of "radical feminism" are fascist.
The whole thing is an attempt to pervert a struggle for human rights for all into a warpath, dreaming up an opposition that never existed in feminism, in order to trick women into attacking their own rights.
And it has worked.
@artemis The concept of enforced gender via clothing or appearance is just so weird. Like men have worn skirts since the dawn of fabric. It was a while before anyone figured out how to connect tubes to make trousers. (Granted, women being allowed to wear trousers is a relatively new thing in western culture, but that’s because Puritans are weird.)
As the mother of a transdaughter who has backed down bigots twice my size when they’ve said something to her, (don’t piss off little women, we will hurt you in ways you’ve never even imagined), I am tired of trans people being the punching bag for the current crop of fascists. They aren’t hurting anyone. Why does what someone is wearing matter?
This is just the stupidest goddamn timeline.
And more to the point, I recall reading that pants were invented in the far east as women's clothing. Men have never had a need to secure cloth between their legs. Pants were adopted in the west by barbarian tribes but wealthy male citizens of either the roman catholic empire or the orthodox empire would not have been caught dead in them. Kilts and togas, tunics (glorified dresses) and gahabiyahs (long robes) have been normal men's clothing since the dawn of time.
@artemis I have yet to understand why protecting a vulnerable group (women) requires vilifying another vulnerable group (trans women) whilst ignoring the fact that the people who they are vulnerable to is the same group of people (aggressive and abusive men).
But what would I know? I'm just a cis man who doesn't believe being aggressive and abusive is the pinnacle of masculinity.
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