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Progesterone is kicking in so I& #39;m a bit drowsy as I write this out, so please be forgiving as I rant about transmisogyny!
I think the part that& #39;s most difficult for me about transmisogyny is how it has decentralized my own personhood. Like, how I understand transmisogyny is… idk, bear with me.
I want to immediately preface this with saying this is just some girl’s life experience and personal understanding of it. I’m not putting this out there as de facto theory or whatever.
Part of the purpose of transmisogyny is to make a trans woman so paradoxical as to be impossible. To be fetishized and repulsive, sex object and pervert, glorified and demonized, a medical curiosity and a freak. Very much alive, but people are primarily interested in our decay.
Honestly, it feels like the core of it is being vilified for being so incomprehensible. How can we really exist when we’re painted as a mess of contradictions? Blah blah blah Frankenstein’s monster blah blah Susan Stryker blah blah.
And the whole point of making a trans woman an impossibility is to turn her into a sacrificial object. We’re something every tme person can use in order to mitigate the gendered violence they receive (or so they believe when they do it). Really, they dig their own grave.
If we’re not people, if we can’t possibly exist, then what really is the harm in committing violence against us? What’s it matter if we’re sterilized? If we’re isolated? If we’re attacked? If we die?
So I often end up doubting people’s sincerity when they say they care about trans women, which is a uhhhhh pretty stressful feeling that makes me question my perceptions. I feel like any time I try to explain this to people, I watch them grow bored, impatient, and disinterested.
And it’s because it’s complicated. There’s a lot of shit to sort through. And the other depressing thing I’ve noticed is if I’m not around consistently or talking about transmisogyny constantly, people relapse to the same old patterns.
I have trouble seeing their initial effort it as anything but saving face with me. The vast majority of people’s understanding of transmisogyny can be best reflected in the refrain of “trans women are women!”
It’s meant in this incorrect, liberal idea that trans women are only superficially victims of misogyny. People quote statistics (that are… often blatant misinformation), do the same old refrain, but that’s where the understanding often stops. Statistics and refrains.
It& #39;s just trying to "say the right words." It& #39;s SAD! I think it ultimately boils down to the fact that people don’t actually understand what bioessentialism really is. To borrow from “Talmudic Abstractions,” bioessentialism & eugenics is the fetishization of the concrete.
In other words, the literal, observable phenomena devoid of context. Well, outside of the context used for national socialist ends of creating an ethnically and biologically pure ethnostate (yikes!)
So my questions are always: Can you explain WHY and HOW trans women are offered up as a sacrificial population? Can you explain WHY and HOW transmisogyny is embedded in all forms of gendered violence? Can you explain WHY transmisogyny?
If you can’t explain the function of transmisogyny, then I’d really hope you make an effort to figure that out. Don’t just wait for your TMA friend to explain it to you.
