Entering the parallel universe of transactivism

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So too does transactivism, with the help of the media and the academy, work to fill in the consequences of the original fictions that transwomen are "women”, transmen are “men”, and nonbinary people "are neither men nor women”. Partly this is a matter of working out what would follow logically, given the way the concepts “woman” and “man” usually work. For instance, if transwomen are “women”, then transwomen are a sub-set of women generally, so we also need a special word for the sub-set of women that aren’t trans: “cis women”. If transwomen are “women”, then, since women before the age of sexual maturity are “girls”, transwomen before the age of sexual maturity are “girls” too. Since women who have children are “mothers”, transwomen with children are also “mothers”. Since women exclusively sexually attracted to other women are “lesbians”, transwomen exclusively sexually attracted to other women are “lesbians” as well (and so on and so on). There is also a frequent fiction that transwomen are “female” (because transwomen are women, and women are female).

And then there’s the practice of extending the entitlements and resources of women to transwomen, because transwomen are “women”, so they are imagined to share precisely those entitlements and need exactly those resources too. As we now know to women’s cost, being immersed in the fiction that transwomen are “women” leads people to think that transwomen should be in women’s changing rooms, schools, dormitories, halls of residence, prisons, social groups, sports teams, rape crisis services, swimming ponds, domestic violence shelters, shortlists, political meetings … the list goes on and on. Dedicated single-sex services and resources built painstakingly over years are now effectively dismantled, largely in the pursuit of aesthetic verisimilitude for males.

Meanwhile, if transwomen are “women”, and certain events and experiences characteristically happen to women, then the logic of the fiction dictates that transwomen must undergo these too. So for instance, transwomen are supposed to suffer from “misogyny”, because women suffer from misogyny (a fiction given further oomph by the fact that experiencing misogyny or even sexual violence is a common sexual fantasy of autogynephilic males.)

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