I’ve been seeing some supposed feminists engage in an awful lot of transmisogyny for people who claim to give a shit about trans people. And I’ve seen entirely too many feminists claim or act like they’re intersectional, then go off the rails when it comes to trans women. Ophelia Benson is the prime example of late, but there have been others. Far too many others. And I am bloody tired of it. So we’re going to have some real talk today.

This is not how you go about intersectional feminism. And it makes me really fucking uncomfortable when someone claims to give a shit about women and does a little public posturing about how much they care for trans people, too – and then goes off on a trans woman. In one recent episode, I saw a self-righteous feminist argue with a trans woman (who is also a biologist) about the trans-misogynist term “female-bodied.” When you run roughshod over another woman because she does not have the same genitals you do, you are fucking up badly. When you argue that there is such a thing as biologically female with a biologist who is telling you it’s more complicated than that, you are fucking up spectacularly. And there are far too many cis women who are doing shit like this.

So, as a cis woman, I’d like to say this to all y’all who think that being “biologically female” or “female-bodied” – meaning having a vagina and a uterus – is crucial to the experience of being a woman:

You are not helping me when you tell my trans sisters that their bodies aren’t female. You are not helping me when you reduce the totality of being female down to whether or not someone was born with a vulva, vagina, and uterus. You are doing me no fucking favors at all when you insist on erasing trans men and non-binary people from reproductive health discussions involving uteruses and ovaries and suchlike. You are harming me when you tell my trans sisters they aren’t female enough. You are reducing me down to a set of organs and a hole. You are considering me only as a baby-making machine. You are treating me as a piece of meat.

You know who else does that? The religious right. Misogynists. All those men and the women they’ve bamboozled, the ones who strip my humanity away because I was born coded female by their standards. You cast your lot with everyone who’s ever told me I cannot do X because of my sex and gender, which they considered to be the whole of me. You stand with everyone who ever made me hate my cis female self and wish and pray I’d been born a boy. You stand with everyone who made me disdain anything and everything coded feminine. I am only just now unpacking that baggage, ridding myself of that internalized misogyny, and discovering how to be a woman – thanks to my trans sisters and their intersectional allies.

And all that harm you do to me pales beside the violence you do to my trans siblings by insisting that our genitals define us.

I see you. I see you pretend you care about trans people, but I see you treat trans women as less than women because you are convinced that a woman must be able to bleed and breed in order to be a real woman. I see you reducing us down to our genitals. I see you pretend to be oh so inclusive and enlightened as you force us into the same tattered fucking gendered boxes.

I fucking see you.

And I’m sick of your bullshit.

Stop pretending you care about women when all you really seem to care about is a set of reproductive organs. Stop pretending that including trans people is somehow erasing women. Stop pretending you know more about feminism than anyone else in the universe. Just. Stop.

Start educating yourselves. You can begin right here and right here. Read every word. Shut up and listen for a change. Listen to trans people and intersex people and women of color, and listen to the cis white women who are telling you that listening to others makes us stronger, not weaker.

I can’t say it any better than Agenderagenda did:

“If your feminism is cissexist, racist and transmisogynistic it ain’t feminism, it’s fucking garbage.”

And if that’s your feminism, if you are happy that way, kindly fuck off forever. I am done stumbling over you on our way to equality.

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