Realization

[sabotabby]

 Listening to some TERF spew TERF bollocks on CBC and I'm struck by how close the TERF (and their buddies, the misogynist right) sound to the arguments of anti-immigration types. You were not born X, therefore you can never be X, etc. Is it then coincidence that the two greatest points of unity on the Alt Reich are the opposition to the human rights of immigrants and trans people?

Comments

[minoanmiss]

Not a coincidence at all.

[sabotabby]

I had a lengthy discussion with two TERFs yesterday who insist that trans women shouldn't be discriminated against, but you know, can't they just be a third gender? And prohibited from working at women's shelters? Etc. It was mindboggling.

[minoanmiss]

Ooo separate but equal! That trick always works! gags

I read an utterly infuriating article where a woman brought out her credentials as a survivor of child sexual abuse to bolster her claim that trans women should be forced to use separate third bathrooms [which don't actually exist] in order to prevent the has-not-actually-happened assaults in bathrooms by crossdressing predators. I wants to shake her and shout "How DARE you turn the pain inflicted on you into a justification for bigotry against someone else!"

It's so... as well as infuriating it's just boggling how much energy TERFs and other transphobes want to put into harassing people for existing, people who just want to be left alone to exist. As a Black person and an immigrant I can't fail to see the paralells.

[sabotabby]

It was such a weird discussion.

One TERF was arguing about Vancouver Rape Relief Society v. Nixon and asking why Nixon felt the need to use the court system. When TERF #1 was excluded from a feminist group because she was a Trot in a male-dominated org, she just started a separate group. I said that a) being a Trot was a choice and being trans wasn't, and b) that's a fair approach to take with an activist group, but not a state-funded workplace, whether the work in question is paid or not. From there the conversation got really bizarre, with the TERFs arguing all kinds of specious things about biology, and the second TERF saying that well, the sight of the apparently visibly-male Nixon would trigger the women and remind them of their rapists. But also that trans women performed femininity in a way that was harmful to women. And I'm like, which is it, either trans women look too masculine to be considered women, or they are too stereotypically feminine, it sounds like you just don't want them to exist at all. And then she started going on about Iran.

I actually brought up the experience of WOC and particularly Black women in the white-dominated feminist movement, and how her singleminded focus on a particular definition of femininity had led to historical exclusionary tendencies (yeah, we will just throw you under the bus to get the vote, whatevs) but she did not seem to see the parallels. I ended up just noping out of there because the conversation was getting way too twisted and derailed for anything productive to be said.

[minoanmiss]

Hey, you said something, though. Go you!

(Did anyone ask the rape survivors? That particular argument reminds me of the arguments over non-con fic, where people say "writing non-con fic hurts survivors of sexual assault!" and then some of us say "we write non-con fic because we are survivors, as part of recintextualizing what was done to us" and then people go DOES NOT COMPUTE and it's all such fun.)

[sabotabby]

Well, I had just posted this, and I felt it would be hypocritical of me to not argue with people who hold wrong opinions. Can't leave all the educating to my marginalized friends, right?

I'm not sure if either of the TERFs were rape survivors—I don't know them well enough to open that particular discussion, particularly on FB. But I suspect no one asked the survivors at the shelter.