Mrs. Doubtfire isn't real and can't hurt you.
This is a point I feel like I've made before on several occasions, but if so, it's one people haven't paid attention to, so I don't especially mind repeating myself. Bigots are really good at doing this thing where they realize if they just said what they meant outright, nobody would support them, because the things they mean are just plainly evil crap without any upside. So you know, obvious example, they hate Black people and want society segregated they never see anyone who isn't dead-worm white, but they NEVER say "everyone with darker skin than mine should be fired from every job and banned from every school," they instead do weird cryptic mental gymnastics about it. Hmm... forever ago people noticed that white supremacists routinely reject applicants who aren't white (and for that matter, men, cis, straight, this one is a bit of a catch-all) and instituted policies where you can't throw out obviously more qualified applicants in the name of white supremacy. "Ooh, what if we twist that around! Make it sound like people are being forced to take inferior people to meet fiendish quotas that don't take into account the needs of employers and schools! As long as we don't outright say we mean 'inferior races' and 'our need to only ever see fellow white guys' it actually sounds like a good thing! And of course this one has been such a winner with them for so long that many many times now people have caught onto it and they've had to change out for fresh euphemisms (Integration, Affirmative Action, Forced Diversity, DEI...)
And of course when the weird euphemism thing doesn't get any push back against it, and gets into that sweet spot where people seem to know that sure SOME people beating that drum are being bigots with it but it's plausible that that's a minor faction and most of the moral outrage, surely, is about something actually worth getting upset about, they do their best to switch over to whatever it is people are responding to and reframe all their arguing around that. They're still TARGETING whatever minority, but just straight up lie about why. The two most obvious examples that come to mind: Bigots hate queer people. They fumble around for a euphemism and settle on "sexually deviant" or whatever. They shout about that until people go "oh you mean like CSA?" They go "yeah, sure!" and just start claiming every teacher they're trying to get fired for being gay is a pedophile. Or they hate women having sexual agency. They fumble around, get to 'loose women' and move from there to sex workers, bit more workshopping and listening to feedback, and you end up with people shouting about women posting topless photos or hell writing spicy fan fiction are "part of human trafficking rings." And of course the people really pushing these things who do know what they're talking about are going to switch back when it's time to influence policies or rile up mobs.
The proper way to push back against that sort of crap is of course to break these links between the bigotry and the lies. Focus on how the accusations are just complete fabrications from malevolent weirdos. You don't start quoting statistics, you don't point out how "sometimes they even say this about straight teachers!" You don't start looking up statistics about sex offenders who teach and go "so even if he was..." That would be ridiculous, decidedly unhelpful,and actively reinforce the association they're inventing to recruit people.
Keeping all that in mind, I don't actually know if there has been one single time in my life I've ever heard a real diehard transphobe use the word "trans" in a sentence. They switched to pure lies mode decades ago. It's always calling women men and sometimes calling men women. They never have to do any work to reinforce the association because... everyone else does it for them?
Some bigot starts screaming about how there's "men in dresses sneaking into women's bathrooms!" and "men pretending to be women to win sporting events!" "Men are taking performance enhancing estrogen to win at chess and StarCraft and beauty contests!" etc. People who can understand hardcore transphobe code-talk but don't understand why they use it then correctly identify that when they say "men" they always mean "trans women" then will just jump out there, consistently, with stuff like "hey if we were really talking about a man competing here, guess what, men don't actually have any sort of advantage over women in this field!" which just strengthens the false association. Even with the people jumping in on this!
Taking this to absurd extremes for instance, here's a story from this week: A 31 year old woman apparently learned via a dedicated nazi website that a 19 year old woman she would be matched against at some point was trans, and proceeded to stage and film a stunt wherein she gave a big speech and forfeited rather than compete against her. She was rightfully disqualified for this, but was immediately given a $5000 check from an anti-trans organization for her PR service. There are so very many ways to cover this, the simplest and let's be real most honest would be "paid nazi activist forfeits fencing tournament to create inflammatory video," or something along those lines.
But naturally, everyone I've seen talking about this is just going in with this downright Pavlovian response with their "well a man wouldn't have an advantage..." spiel, but hey, thing is? I said hardcore transphobes do that "man" code-switching but this is more of an amateur. They're not calling her a man, just letting "defenders" do that for them... and the real kicker of it is the nazi pulling the stunt here regularly DOES compete against men. This is the rare instance of just naked transphobia... but again, STRONG association, people are trained.
I would say we wouldn't even be having this conversation with any other bigotry, but honestly? That "just say a man" tactic is so effective it actually DOES get deployed about other minorities pretty regularly. At least if we look at the stuff that gains traction, I swear the ratio of BS I see tossed around about girls "really being men" in sporting events is maybe targeting trans girls like... 5% of the time? Then another 5% targeting trans guys and the odd nonbinary person in a particularly confused and confusing fashion, and past that it's like an even split of claiming that someone is trans because she's Black/Asian/a white girl who regularly hits the gym and keeps her hair pretty short.
What we should all get in the habit of doing with this is refuse to do the work for the bigots, and force them to either say the quiet part out loud or fold on their absurd lies. Because wow this isn't even like the sex offender stuff. The crimes bigots keep shouting about aren't something that happens and we should do something about it, with trans women being lumped in with the real perpetrators. These are fully fictional crimes being invented and pinned on fully fictional people.
The first time the whole bathroom predator thing was making the rounds, someone bothered to run the stats and found... literally zero instances of either trans women OR "men in dresses" assaulting people in public bathrooms. That's just not a thing that happens. People absolutely get assaulted in bathrooms, but you know, generally this involves some guy, without a disguise, just walking into a women's room because like... they can just do that? There's no magical force fields, or security guards, or cameras, or even laws against it (well, laws less than like 10 years old, the panic's gotten results and all). Or a woman going into the men's room. Probably some instances of cis gay or bi people getting up to things, or stuff happening in unisex bathrooms, but... yeah this whole deception angle just Is Not A Thing.
Also not a thing? Men pretending to be women to win at sports. Women get accused of being men pretty regularly, as mentioned above. It's a racism thing mainly. People shout about it enough that various forms of gender testing have been a thing forever. Most of these historically have just flat out consisted of sexually assaulting whoever some racist creep points an accusatory finger at. More recently the standard has generally been to go by testing testosterone levels, since that's the (pseudo-) scientific basis for men having an edge (which frequently doesn't statistically bear out) and... not only does that only ever "catch" a handful of pretty clearly cis women, they tend to have to move the goalposts to get those positives. So you get stuff like Caster Semenya having "too much testosterone" for the 800 meter dash but she's still A-OK for the 400 meter, 1200 meter, or like any sort of relay? They just lowered the value to below her level because... again, straight up obvious racism.
You know what else just does not ever happen in real life? Men dressing up as women to trick other men into having sex with them. Catfishing is a real thing. Drugging people is a thing. Secretly taking condoms off is a thing. People deciding to ignore it when people withdraw consent is a thing. People making various incorrect assumptions about people they're into and asking them out is a thing. Sometimes in both ways! I know I've heard some "this guy thought I was a girl and I thought he was gay" stories and at least one "I thought this girl was a guy and she thought I was a girl" sorta thing once, but these are very much "we flirted for like 10 minutes before realizing so that was pretty embarrassing" stories. But that's about it?
Oh and the Panic Defense is absolutely a thing, but I don't know of any cases where it's ever been claimed in an honest fashion. You get stuff where some cis person decides they're going to go a bit outside their usual comfort zone and hook up with a trans person (or gay, or bi, but I feel like that's increasingly less common), so they use some queer-specific dating app to find one of the rare trans people actually willing to ever date cis people. They hook up, they enjoy it, but then either they have some kind of panic attack because whatever internalized queerphobia made this "an adventure" for them, or more likely other people they know who are significantly more bigoted find out one way or another (this was the case with that recent high profile horrific murder of a trans guy in New York), they freak out and get judgey (or jealous), and someone kills the innocent person in question, because that somehow undoes their earlier decision by some backwards bigot logic somehow.
I'm also unaware of any real instances of a man pretending to be a woman to trick the producers of a soap opera into hiring him, get cheaper housing along with a roommate, see his kids after his wife leaves him for Pierce Brosnan in the guise of a nanny, enter the service of a duke, go undercover as the female lead singer of a popular band to throw off giant space bugs looking for an accomplished guerilla fighter, attend the all-girls school their grandmother for some reason insisted they attend as a dying wish, pretend to be wealthy socialites after the real ones backed out of being used as bait for kidnappers, or uh... whatever increasingly weirdly specific examples I'm forgetting.
EVERYTHING I've mentioned I've seen in fiction though, where writers just makes up ridiculous premises and don't double check if they'd actually work. Hell the sports thing was done by both The Simpsons AND Futurama years before bigots started claiming it was really happening. So I dunno, maybe instead of playing along with hypotheticals we just say "that doesn't happen in real life, are you thinking of something you saw on a TV show? Do you think there's astronauts out there marrying genies and vampires dating high schoolers?" You know they can't reply with real examples, so just call the lie and point out how ridiculous it is.
This also works for a lot of stuff that actually IS trying to target trans people without the gender-swapping code talk. There's been a lot of recent traction trying to make bigoted declarations based on whether someone is "a biological woman" or whatnot. And like... trans women are biologically women. By any definition of "biological woman" I can think of. Again, just ridicule the premise. Ask what the hell a non-biological woman would even be, a Barbie doll? Do they, again, think Mrs. Doubtfire is real perhaps? Again just stop doing their work for them, make them say what they really mean and then point out how it's obviously nonsensical garbage with no basis in reality. We can all do this.
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