[Deleted] #transphobia ovarit.com
A TRA argument I never really understood
A common form of TRA propoganda is to insist that wanting to keep intimate public spaces single sex harms masculine/gender-nonconforming women, because it's easy for them to be mistakenly clocked as male. Seems like every time I venture out of Radtwt, there's some viral tweet making the rounds about someone's 'cis woman friend' who was humiliated in a washroom when someone assumed that she was a man and freaked out. The tweet usually concludes with some sanctimonious fingerwagging about how "this is how you know terfs don't reeeaaallly care about safeguarding! Their harmful rhetoric harms cis women, too!"
First of all, if women are becoming hypervigilant about potential men in their spaces, it's because of the self-ID policies YA'LL have been promoting. Not because of GC women's objections to it.
Second of all, while I don't deny the existence of women who are wary of gender-non conforming women, and don't feel comfortable sharing an intimate space together, associating masculinity with maleness and fearing it even in other women, to the point where said fear overrides your capacity for sex recognition seems like a trauma response more than anything else. And if these masculine-phobic women are in fact, as common as the TRAs would have me believe, it might have something to do with the widespread nature of male violence- which female only spaces serve as a refuge for.
And honestly, TRAs, if your first instinct when faced with such a woman ISN'T to feel heartbroken over what she must have endured at the hands of men to the point where (even in the only public spaces where she WOULD be objectively safe from male violence) she STILL doesn't feel feel safe if around other women who remind her of them, - and instead you use her as a pawn to advocate for the elimination of said spaces because 'she's too stupid to know who's really a man anyways'... you're a sociopath. You just are.
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So yeah, fear of masculine women is largely irrational in a way that female fear of men is not. And whenever TRAs use it to champion self-ID, it makes me think of their other arguments like 'black women are women therefore natal men are women' or 'you don't have any problem taking your clothes off around lesbians, so you have no reason to deny that right to men'