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.

@artemis It can be hard to understand this without a decent explanation of what is actually happening. For a long time, I saw a lot of shouting about genitals, bathrooms, and sports, but it wasn't until I read a long article that examined what was going on, that I started to understand that all the people claiming they only want to protect women are trying to restrict us instead.
@HollieK72 @artemis I mean the thing is, even if they waved their magic Harry Potter wands and made all the trans people not trans, it has absolutely no effect on the potential for a man to convincingly dress as a woman for the purpose of assaulting people in bathrooms. It makes no sense at all.
@A_bee @artemis It doesn't have to make sense to work as a scare tactic - like the "pro-life" argument that abortion is killing babies. As long as they shout loudly enough about "protecting women," it can be hard to see that they're doing the opposite.
@HollieK72 @artemis I’m aware. I’m trying to express exasperation that people accept the nonsense.