A Staten Island woman buying pot from a local deli got into a misunderstanding with the cashier — who ended up macing her, dragging her outside by her hair, kicking her in the head and mistakenly calling her trans.
This is the consequence of the hatred that transphobes, garden variety conservatives and TERFs alike, have stoked. And the narrative that the media has gleefully ran with.
Being visibly trans or gender-non-conforming nowadays is genuinely scary in a way I think a lot of people don’t fully understand. And of course when femininity is being policed, women of colour tend to suffer too, even if they are cisgender.
When you’re so anti-trans you loop around and become anti-cis.
I think these people might just be anti-women.
Racism, Misogyny and transphobia have always come from a similar place and build off of each other. They share the same narratives and the same desire for ostracization and oppression. Bigots will always ally with other bigots, as this hatred is not rational and only someone with similarly irrational hate could support you. Dig enough in bigoted communities and you are certain to find all different kinds of hatred.
That’s why TERF communities are infested with homophobia, misogyny, racism, antisemitism and Islamophobia. Over time the concentration of white supremacy and nazism has grown exponentially in terf communities. Nazis share many of the same goals and many of the same conspiracies that terfs do. And prominent terfs like Kelly Jay Keen openly ally with Christian white nationalists around the world.
I’d argue that the TERF perspective is fundamentally anti-male rather than (or maybe in addition to) misogynistic.
The specific position TERFs hold that makes them TERFs is that you cannot become a woman if you weren’t born one and that women should be granted certain special protections and spaces of their own, kept free from men.
That’s why TERFs ALWAYS frame trans issues in the form of men dressing up as women to infiltrate women’s spaces and women’s services. They could give a shit about trans men, it’s all trans women because trans women are the ones using things that in their eyes should be the sole provenance of “real” women.
I feel we need to change that little children’s rhyme to be a bit more accurate
“Sticks and stones may break my bones but words can lead to pogroms” or something like that
I’ve always been partial to “sticks and stones may break my bones but words can really hurt me”.
