There’s a concept I’ve usually seen named “Girl Hate” or some variation of it, named that since, as far as I can tell, the communities the name came from are/were made up of mostly teenage girls (even though ericainchoate, whose use of this term for dynamics among trans women was the first time I saw it that way (I’ll find her article and link it later; right now I’m writing to get my thoughts out), hasn’t been a teenage girl for almost two decades now). It describes the way women and girls tear each other down; the way the surest route to approval, one of the quickest ways to gain social capital, as a woman, is by climbing over each other.

Nowhere have I seen more of this than among trans women. Regardless of age, time since transition, whatever, we do this to each other, viciously, and we often feel good about doing it.

This is in part because we have so many more people whose approval we have to gain. Those of us who want transition-related medical treatment have to gain the approval of doctors, when it wasn’t long ago that the medical establishment almost uniformly would try to limit the number of transitions they would allow tightly. We, of course, need cis women’s approval to exist among women, especially if we are at all open about our history (or unable to hide it). Those of us who want to participate in queer scenes need to win the approval of people with social capital in those scenes. Last, but not least, we’re judged for men’s approval whenever we exist in public (by standards that are neither entirely like or entirely unlike how male doctors might judge us), whether we want to be or not, and men have their ways of imposing consequences for disapproval on us.

I’ve probably missed a few.

While some of these apply to cis women too (we all need approval from our peers, and needing the approval of strange men is one of the defining conditions of womanhood in this society), one of the consequences of being trans women, or of being known to be trans women, is that we’re starting from less social capital in the first place. We don’t get the presumption that we belong that gets extended to presumed-cis women in women-run communities, or that gets extended to literally anyone else in “queer” communities. To an extent this is analogous to the way men get the presumption of belonging to male “geek” spaces, while women are presumed to be faking their interest in whatever subject matter no matter how much effort they demonstrate (although, as an aside, I’ve never seen anyone try to prove she’s not a “fake geek girl” by trying to push that off on other women. That may just be the circles I run in, though).

So we tear each other down. When the highest place we can reach to stand on is our sister’s face, we grind our shoes into our sisters’ faces.

I’m not, by the way, doing the thing where I say “we” and mean “you”. I’ve done this, I’m not proud of it, and I’m doing my best to avoid ever doing it again. I know what happens when trans women are left isolated, and I never want to push a trans woman down or leave her isolated again.

Specifically, I want to talk about how I did this. One scene I involved myself in online was a heavily politicized “queer” scene, although part of the politics of that scene were of aggressively denying that we had anything to do with politics. There, I took on a role that gave me power, respect, and had universally-respected members of the scene talk to me regularly. I was one of the special enlightened few trans women, who grasped the true politics (i.e., the ones it was trendy to espouse in that scene because they benefited the scene’s leader, a CAFAB trans person who admitted to being able to take advantage of male privilege, and next to nobody else in the scene. Certainly not the women, cis or trans) and it was my task to make sure other trans women espoused them, especially the parts that worked at trans women’s expense.

This role, the special, enlightened trans woman whose job is to lecture trans women (and sometimes people who aren’t trans women who you share other identities with too), whose task is to use discourse as a bludgeon to force people to take “appropriate” views, to conform to the views espoused by the people you model your politics on, is a transmisogynist one.

It’s still being given a pattern of the acceptable trans woman, conforming yourself to that, and then tearing down other trans women for not conforming because conforming to the acceptable model yourself is never enough for someone who presents a model of womanhood (cis or trans) and demands conformity. They need enforcers, and they put that demand on the people who care most about adhering to it.

Worst for us, “girl hate” prevents us from drawing close to each other when we need to. Whether pushing people out of communities run on “girl hate”, or demanding that we not talk to those other trans women as peers, as equals, because our status in whatever in-crowd we’re requires that we avoid them to maintain it (and possibly because we feel superior to them and don’t see them as an equal to engage with. Thinking you have secret knowledge does that), it keeps us apart. We need these communities, though, and many of us are driven to try to find kindred spirits.

The contempt for each other and the need to enforce someone else’s model of the ideal trans woman on each other, and this drive to seek out peers, are competing forces. Depending on how narrow this model is, it can leave us completely isolated, or with only a few people we can speak to as peers (I don’t count whoever sets those models for someone as that person’s peer). It’s an environment that sets us up for disappointment again and again and again.

I don’t have a surefire recipe to end “girl hate” among us, except for opting out. Refuse to participate. Build community anyway. It’s demonstrably worked for the scene it came out of. Large chunks of feminism are committed to and founded on this project for cis women. We can make it work for us.

This is, like, half of why I’ve committed myself that my first loyalty can only be to trans women, as a whole.