i feel like this kind of attitude also makes more sense when you realize that a lot of pop feminism is more about attempting to stabilize and reify the category of "woman" in a context where people have certain gender-progressive values, but still ultimately are seeing gender through a deeply cissexist lens.
Nevertheless, each writer’s reflection on the public distancing by straight women from the objects of their desire rests on the belief that these displays reflect women’s feelings about their attachment to men as a stable category—disappointment or shame—rather than their feelings about their attachment to women as a stable category—fear that this category is becoming politically obsolete.
The thing is, the popular misandrist left discourse, perpetuated by straight women, has almost nothing to do with sexuality, but everything to do with gender. Like political lesbianism, this Political Heterosexuality is not concerned with actual, felt sexual orientation or relationships—it’s concerned with the reifying of binary categories at the expense of a nuanced analysis of gender that accounts for race, class, and transition. [...] While the decrying of men by Political Heterosexuals is less overtly bio-essentialist—tending to focus on men’s emotional immaturity, commitment-phobia, poor sexual skills, lack of hygiene, or failure to own a real, off-the-ground bed—it still relies on an implicit or explicit comparison with women, and thus, a binary. What makes these men men is that they are not women; what makes these women, then, women is that they are not men. In my view, professing hatred of men online is not exclusively or even often reflective of individual disappointment or in service of individual absolution; it is in service of the desire to continue to define the political category of “women” by a clean-cut opposite, in a time when it is no longer politically correct to do so. [...]
Good feminists do indeed acknowledge the impossibility of lumping women together as a discrete group with legible, united needs; over is the heyday of white second-wave feminism, claiming all women—regardless of race or wealth—as equal in their second-class citizenship. But, even as progressive women dutifully point out the failure of the universal, acknowledging that the universalizing of the category “women” nearly always reeks of white supremacy and transphobia, many of those same women continue to fervently desire a universal, whether or not they’ll say it out loud. And the loophole, championed by Political Heterosexuality, is to affirm that men constitute a political class—the silent foil being, then, that women still do, too.
from "In Defense of Men: On the failures of Political Heterosexuality and No Cis Men" by Sophia Giovannitti (which, ironically, also leaves out trans men even though you'd think our inclusion would be obvious! its literally fucking everywhere!!!!)
By rehearsing the view that ‘men are the worst’ while continuing to pursue romantic and sexual attachments with them, we perform an othering gesture that shores up the purity or innocence of our own identities. We may love men, we declare, but we barely enjoy it, okay?; we are embarrassed; we are not contaminated by them; we are not they. In other words, we get to continue to be ‘women’. Perhaps, semi-unconsciously, we had worried that the very category of ‘women’ had become untenable. If we can only continue to reproduce the category ‘men’ loudly enough, then, we wager, the category ‘women’ might stay safe. (Note, while a majority of heterofatalist misandrists online today seem to think they are trans-affirming, their position not only requires erasing trans men altogether, but also all trace of trans women’s lived experiences as men, regardless of those women’s own self-understanding. Indeed, misandry, as I see it, can never reliably be prevented from collapsing into transphobia.)
from "Collective Turn Off" by Sophie Lewis (who does actually remember that trans men exist!!!!!!!!!!!!!)
these essays are both more focused on heterofatalism, which is not exactly what's being discussed here, but i still find these insights valuable. there is a feminist anxiety, centered around cis women but adoptable by anyone who feels they have a stake in preserving the universalized construct of "woman," that is explicit in radfem spaces but bubbles under the surface in otherwise pro-trans liberal and leftist spaces.
this is a major reason why people who otherwise hold progressive values and act pro-trans engage in this shit; they have not truly unlearned the cissexist, essentialist way of thinking about gender. and even to the extent they have unlearned parts of that way of thinking they have not truly learned to think about gender differently. they know its wrong to be essentialist about gender but not why, or how being not-essentialist about gender shapes how one thinks about gender beyond any one specific sentence, or how being not-essentialist reshapes one's entire worldview. this is not entirely an individual issue because feminism as a whole has struggled with creating an alternative way of thinking and then teaching it to people (consciousness raising).
as a result, people's worldviews are a hodgepodge of values and beliefs that do not all align or function cohesively; on some level we want to acknowledge that gender is a construct and "women" are not a homogenous group with universal experiences and trans people exist and also have experiences we associate with cis women despite not being cis women etc etc. but to truly acknowledge this, and what it implies more broadly, requires a lot of confrontation with personal discomfort, confusion, it requires us to unlearn far more than we are initially comfortable unlearning. one cannot simply adopt a few pro-trans beliefs in a worldview otherwise fundamentally shaped by cissexism, and think one is not going to continue perpetuating cissexism.
and without a strong feminist movement that can explain how to make sense of all of this, and how one can navigate one's feelings about being a woman and experiencing misogyny in a way which does not reify gender and does not fall back on outdated radical feminist ways of understanding gender and patriarchy? people just exist in this nebulous space of cognitive dissonance, making them vulnerable to reactionary feminism and conservatism when that dissonance becomes undeniable.
anyways. the point i'm making is that i think the impetus behind progressive people making statements like “Men do not understand what it’s like to be taught survival methods from a young age” “Men do not understand what it’s like to fear walking home at night” is exactly that desire to define and reify the category of "woman" as defined by cis women. by ignoring the intersectional and trans-intersex complexity of these experiences, even though it should contradict their political stances otherwise, they are able to reaffirm that Men Are One Thing And Women Are The Other, and the sense of stability that comes from reifying these categories is comforting and socially bonding - and certainly causes far less internal and external conflict than being genuine kyriarchy-aware and trans-inclusive.
