@cmdr_nova @Willow @cyb3rm0shp1t @nyx That's not to say that someone's being a trans woman immunizes her from 'being a terf' if she's habitually doing the things that make anyone a terf, right? I had that experience, and moved past it. Of course the proportion of this actually happening doesn't diverge in frequency from any other instance of a member of a marginalized population advocating pointedly against the liberation or survival of those who are also marginalized in the same ways.

It's one in a million, and trying to find it everywhere is fucked up transmisogyny but it's also unwise to categorically rule it out.

@cmdr_nova @Willow @cyb3rm0shp1t @nyx Let's agree that something on the order of 0/10 of the trans women being accused of being a terf are terfs.

I just don't think that identity is a good ideological shield to use in any circumstance, especially for someone like who I was, who was freshly homeless and visibly transgender out of high school, uncritically reading certain radfem blogs as a way to cope and thinking that I'm somehow better than the other trannies. Me thinking I was immune from being 'one of the bad ones' in terms of radfem and in terms of transgender kept me from sitting down and thinking my way out of the contradiction. I'm still a full-on self-identifying radical feminist, but I'm not a terf anymore.

I don't think being any kind of marginalized means that it's impossible to promote and reproduce that marginalization. There are way too many examples of people doing that for that to be convincing, wouldn't you say?

@cmdr_nova @cyb3rm0shp1t @nyx @Willow Certainly, the whole framing of who is and isn't a this or that is just more identity noise, it's strictly immaterial. The point I'm trying to make is that terf is an ideology, and anyone, even it's victims, can pick up and play out their dinky nerfed self-defeating facsimile of that ideology. Indeed, cis women playing out transmisogynistic narratives are also in many ways, self-defeating. It's ultimately a behavior that makes the position coherent, and a system of narratives that cause that behavior to do some measure of harm in the world. Being outside of a position to effectively wield any power-over one's comrades doesn't nullify criticism of someone's adherence to the ideology.

Missing out on the thing you're naming, that ulterior transmisogynist thing most often underneath the process of qualifying some trans woman as a terf is madness. To a much lesser extent, I think that categorically claiming that a population can't be a member of an ideological group misses a rigorous analysis of the dynamics of the thing. I'm afraid that negating those claims in a blanket way, as though it can be applied evenly to every situation isn't as robust and effective as allowing the potential and looking at the concrete specifics.