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.
These people "grieve the loss" but they dont want trans girls to be their happiest selves to cancel it out.
These people are silly.
@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.
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