she tried to get wrapping paper made, presumably to sell to raise campaign funds.
the wrapping paper and it had a pattern that alternated between a graphic that reads,
Spoiler
“No [picture of balls] in our stalls,” and her campaign logo.
“My team just informed me that no company would make this wrapping paper for us because it’s too ‘offensive,'” she wrote.
Spoiler
“What I find offensive is men in women’s bathrooms.”
“A sitting Congresswomen using a disgusting and bigoted slur about Americans who staged a nonviolent protest,” responded Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-FL). “People who use this type of despicable language should not be leading anyone.”
Transfemme enby here. I hear what you two mean, but I wanna make sure we also resist medicalizing gender nonconformity. While many trans folks undergo bottom surgery to alleviate dysphoria or to simply be “safe” from the scrutiny of the cis gaze, surgery is not what qualifies a trans woman as a woman. The issue isn’t about genitalia, it’s about transmisogyny.
TERFs have so deeply internalized the misogyny that it’s all they know, woman TERFs and man TERFs alike, cis or not ('cause Caitlyn Jenner is still a TERF).
What I said was not to mean that “not having a penis” is a prerequisite to enter a toilet. This is so complex to put in simple terms, because what TERFs say is an inconsistent cocktail of hateful ideas, that contradict themselves. But no one is examining genitals to enter any toilet. They just appeal to plain old cisgenderism, “people who look like men must have dicks and people who look like women mustn’t, because these are the two natural categories and I want to be able to put anyone neatly into them, except some freaky accidents of birth”. Their actual problem is that legitimization of transgender individuals threatens the very core of this cisgenderist ideal, which only lead to the corollary that trans people are not natural and should not exist. I intended to write sth else entirely but this is the cornerstone of the whole discussion, that cisgenderism is the substrate and breeding ground of transphobia and perhaps we should start discussing in these terms instead.
I think your analysis in pretty on point. In my circles, we call this problem “gender essentialism.” I see that it stems from neoplatonic thought as derived from Christian puritanism, and it desperately attempts to reconcile a kind of cherry-picked modernism with traditionalism. And it fuckin’ sucks.
