One of the central contradictions of transmisogyny is that society and the state seem to put so much more energy into policing the boundaries of womanhood, an oppressed class, compared to manhood, a oppressor class. This seems to make no sense. Surely it should be easier to move into an oppressed class than out of one, no?
The explanation is that it is not "womanhood" whose boundaries are so harshly policed, but a smaller category of "women worth protecting". That is, trans women are treated as women (held to impossible beauty standards, sexualised, talked over, underpaid, etc etc) even while they are denied the protections that "women worth protecting" are able to access, protections that include the right to name your own oppression by calling yourself what you are: a woman.
It is actually very easy to become a woman (in the sense of the social class). All it takes is for an average cis man to sincerely wear "women's clothes" one time (i.e. not as part of a performance), and he will be experience a whole load of misogyny for an age thereafter. You have to be a cis man with an incredibly high social status to get away with this. It's correspondingly very hard to become a man (the social class) after you have been in the class of "woman", it will take many months and demonstations of his commitment to manhood for the man who wore "women's clothes" one time to fully return there.
Similarly, if a someone who is viewed as an average cis man suddenly comes out as a woman, she will find two things happen pretty much simultaneously. First, she immediately becomes a (particularly marginalised) woman: she will instantly be subject to sexually invasive questions, will instantly incur the scorn of people who had previously liked her, will have her clothing criticised, her work disparaged, etc etc. And second, as a consequence of now being a woman, she will find that her sincere statements about herself are immediately discredited and contradicted: "No, you're not a woman" will be a common response. She would've been taken more seriously if she had come out as being from Alpha Centauri, because she would then at least still be a man, and to be a woman who is not "worth protecting" is to be denied the right to speak on your own inner life. It is a great irony that the contradiction, "No, you're not a woman," is the very thing that demonstrates that you are one.
Black women, South Asian women, Arab women, fat women, autistic women, gay women, working-class women, sex workers, and many other groups of women have found themselves denied access to the category of "women worth protecting" in various cultures and at various times. Trans women happen to be on the frontline of this fight right now in much of Europe and North America.
If you believe that bathroom bans etc are the state "protecting women", you have to ask why the state is suddenly so interested in protecting an oppressed class, when a big part of being an oppressed class is being denied the state's protection. Could it be because the state is not protecting "women" but rather the slightly different class of "women worth protecting"? Which is to say, that the specific oppression of "women not worth protecting" is the whole point.
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