Nothing but hair and pencils

your identity, your dignity and your worth as a woman have absolutely nothing to do with how or why abusive people lash out at you. the insidious narrative that survivors should feel special on some level for having been worthy of their abuse is battered wife rhetoric. it's the perpetrator-system of violence grooming you to accept, and even shamefully yearn for, violence it always intended to inflict. and women are so often complicit in repeating the narrative back to each other. sometimes it's very well meaning and springs up out of the solidarity of shared experience, trying to reclaim power from situations where power was wielded against you, but sometimes it's lana del rey sadgirl coquette I need a man who'll slap me around so I know he cares. sometimes it's eating disorders and self harm. the twinning of femininity and female worthiness with suffering, associating the scars of misogynistic violence with acceptance of one's femininity by somebody who hates you, is profoundly unhealthy and profoundly unfair.

bottom line: trans women have never needed to be identifiable by their abusers at a glance to be subject to misogynistic violence. they have never even needed to be out. remember the early days of the internet when online culture was so outspokenly misogynistic as a baseline that most women just never disclosed their gender, never went on mic, never posted pictures? would anyone ever seriously argue that women weren't subject to misogynistic abuse online until they broke anonymity? and that being the case, would it ever ever seem appropriate to hear someone had been doxxed or sexually harassed for disclosing her gender and respond "heh, proves you really are a woman"?

(the Nonsense being "well of course it's realistic in Gone With the Wind that Scarlett makes the curtain dress herself with patterns her mother formerly used to make clothing! plantation mistresses had to know how to make adult clothing from scratch so they could direct the enslaved women who made their clothes!")

Filtered through a heaping dose of the classic "well, women of the past could do everything and women of the present are spoiled and incapable!" Which in the US you see all the way back to the 19th century fiction of the totally self sustaining colonial household where the wife did absolutely every domestic task somehow 

Like just in case you had any suspicions that Margaret Mitchell did a lick of research when writing this. Please throw those suspicions in the trash 

There was a whole invisible, disregarded and mostly unrecorded economy of independent self-supporting businesswomen making clothes for sale. (The author had to pore over local records all over the UK just to pull together the information. Working women were not given much visibility or mention in those centuries.)

One thing that's really clear is most women did not make their own clothes.

Rich people had servants and professionals to make their garments, and later on couture houses. Many of them used enslaved labor which would have had to have been highly skilled.

Middling sorts had local dressmakers, sometimes professionals, sometimes a local woman or neighbor who would do it for pay. There were itinerant dressmakers too, who would come into houses and make up the family's wardrobe. And there were shops of readymade garments far earlier than most people realize.

Poorer people bought their clothes secondhand. There was a huge secondhand garment trade.

American pioneers in homespun is pure modern-day fantasy. Women in the territories had mail-order catalogues from which they could have clothes delivered by trains or by ship.

As far as I can tell, the idea of self-sufficient women doing a constant round of spinning, weaving, and sewing is a fantasy of the post-industrial age projected onto women. But spinning, weaving and clothing-making has long been a professional industry.

(worth noting that slavery was in something of a legal gray area in the UK during the 18th and early-mid 19th century when it was legal in other parts of the Anglosphere; it was never technically legal in the UK itself, but of course it was legal and commonly practiced in their colonies, and many enslaved people who were brought to the UK Were treated as though they were still de facto enslaved until they were taken back home again. And of course you don't have to rely on chattel slavery to make a business off of unfair labor practices, which was extremely common even after slavery was outlawed and/or fell by the wayside)

Source: #DRCL Midnight Children

萩原 卓哉／Hagihara Takuya