Like, the politics of desirability surrounding trans women’s bodies go far beyond individual body-objects, and that’s where TWERFs bog down trans women in arguments. Talking about individual trans women’s body-objects is a capitulation to this framing and is not the way to question the rhetoric involved.

I really couldn’t care less about whether or not an individual woman thinks I’m desirable, or if her conception of my body-object is of a potential sex partner. I really don’t fucking care. I care about Tala seeing me as desirable, and I care about other women thinking of me as beautiful and pretty because I enjoy validation like just about every woman does.

But critiquing how essentialization of sex leads to transmisogyny by condoning an unquestioned focusing-in-on genitals is based in locating sex, and as a result gender, in the genitals as a way of tying bodies to body-objects. Whatever reason you have for being repulsed by dicks, okay, fine. I don’t care one way or another, I really don’t care until you start talking about me in particular regarding it.

Men fetishizing us for our genitals while robbing us of any existence beyond objects for men, living to either trick them or pleasure them, is transmisogyny because of the manner that it does not allow for a reciprocity of gazes, we can merely look at them while they have the ability to gaze upon us and perceive us.

An incredibly important aspect of understanding gender is how it creates bodies upon body-objects, altering the perception of said body-object and thus making it so that men can gaze upon women in the possessive manner described as the male gaze. By claiming trans women possess this same gaze, one engages in transmisogyny.

You don’t have to fuck anyone, ever. That’s something that should be agreed upon as a basic holding. There’s a difference between saying “you’ve gotta go out and fuck a trans girl!” and “the way that trans girls are socially perceived both sexually and outside of sexual matters is shaped by transmisogyny and often their genitals are used to justify that” is a different holding entirely, one that spreads to the holdings of perceptions of all of our bodies.

Critiquing this, critiquing the manner in which lesbians are invalidated based upon their desire for trans women, critiquing the notion that I cannot be a desirable woman at all is part of critiquing how our bodies are understood.