Content warnings for mentions of sexual and physical assault, suicide, sexism, and transphobia.
Transphobia is sexism.
Transphobia is sexism.
Despite what yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling might have thought, transphobia is fucking sexism.
Unlike what many a headline is choosing to claim, this wasn’t just an affront to transwomen, but a ruling against non-binary people, intersex people, and all men and women—trans and cisgender.
The ruling pretty much entirely ignores the status of transgender men (so-called ‘biological’ women). Are they allowed into women’s only single-sex spaces? You remembered trans men exist, right? They make up like 50% of all trans people in the UK. More than 50% by some measures.
Maybe if any sort of trans advocacy group was consulted you’d have thought about that.
Biological sex isn’t binary. Intersex people exist, more than you might imagine. A lot of intersex people don’t even know they were born intersex because it’s standard procedure in the Western world to genitally mutilate them at birth.
Like seriously, was a single medical professional specialising in this area consulted?
But really, the thing that peeves me off the most is that it’s blatant sexism, against both women and men.
The entire argument about bathrooms is based on the notion that men are naturally more predatory and aggressive in a way that women are not, and somehow are unable or unwilling to control those urges for more than five minutes.
The idea that transwomen have an unfair advantage in sports (note: they don’t) is based on the notion that women are naturally slower and weaker than men.
Even some tournaments where physical differences , like competitive chess, seem convinced that transwomen are somehow at an advantage, tacitly making a statement that men are supposedly more intelligent than women.
I repeat: Transphobia is fucking sexism.
Cisgender women assault people. Cisgender women rape people. Cisgender women are more than capable of the same individual horrors as men. More than is ever reported to police, because big manly-men don’t want to admit that they were taken advantage of by biologically weak, stupid women.
You know, because of sexism.
Oh hey, you know what other group of people are overwhelmingly subjected to assault, rape, and discrimination on the basis of their biological status, by both men and women? ✨ Transgender people! ✨
And where are the support services and networks for them?
After yesterday, fucking nowhere.
When asked, transgender people will tell you that the worst part of being transgender is the way society treats you. That they lose friends and family, that it’s harder to access healthcare and support services, that you’re more freely discriminated against, that sometimes it’s hard to leave the house for fear of being harrassed or assaulted.
People who ‘regret’ transition overwhelmingly do so because their quality of life goes down, not as a result of being trans, but because of society’s response to it.
Some of those people end up killing themselves. Better to be dead than to live in a world hostile to their true selves.
Do you ever think that so-called ‘gender critical’ campaigners consider the blood they have on their hands?
Do you think they ever question that they stand on the same side of history as Europe’s historical fascists and modern far-right, Trump’s America, Putin’s Russia, and Sharia law—all ideologies that also denigrate women and other queer groups?
Do you think that the embers of their vitriol die down just before they sleep, and they actually consider the question “Am I the baddie?”
Maybe that level of critical thinking is too much to ask from people who haven’t realised they just fought for transgender men to be in their spaces instead.
Unless… it was never about ‘biological women’ in the first place?
Isn’t it interesting that in 2017 we had a Conservative prime minister who was in favour of trans self-ID, so much so that it was in her inaugural speech upon entering Downing Street, and less than a decade later all mainstream political parties oppose it? That the tide of public opinion seems to have shifted so rapidly in favour of oppressing an already oppressed minority?
Gosh, it’s almost as if this whole thing is just a manufactured culture war, invoked by groups with a vested interest in degrading the rights of both women and queer people. Like transphobia is being used as a gateway to normalising further bigotry.
Almost like transphobia is sexism.
