It's always frustrating when your political enemies don't have even the slightest understanding of your motivations.
I have put a lot of time over the years into trying to understand the minds of G*nd*r Cr*t*c*ls. I must've read thousands of Mumsnet threads, spent hours reading the grim posts on places like the TerfTransAlliance subreddit, and I often go and read through the blogs of GCs who harass me on here.
Yes, it's partly digital self harm, but I've been doing this long enough to be pretty immune to feeling any type of way about the things they say. I really just want to understand why their minds work the way they do, and after so many years of reading their thoughts I think have a pretty good grasp on it.
They generally come from a background where misogyny is the only major form of oppression they really face. That is: white, fairly wealthy, straight, non-disabled, cis women who own their own homes. It's always been a bit of a red flag for me, having been involved in the feminist movement for so long, when a feminist who says a lot about misogyny never mentions any other forms of oppression at all. It's an indicator of someone who is very determined not to imagine themselves in a position of privilege. These types of people are the ones in my circle who went on to become GCs in later life.
Their perspective is born of a refusal to be cast in the role of oppressor. The adjective "cis" riles them up spectacularly, because it does that so succinctly. "I'm not 'cis', I'm just a woman" is their way of saying "don't take my victimhood away from me, it's all I have", which is ironically not all they have because they are typically fairly wealthy too.
I think a lot of them are frustrated that the spotlight that was on women's oppression during the Millennial Feminism era later got increasingly shared around between other marginalised demographics, at which point they were being asked to reflect on their own privileges the way they had asked men to (not that men ever did, but still).
They could equally be saying "I'm not white, I'm just a woman", and actually a lot of them are saying that! The idea that Black women are not women is a fairly foundational one for them, and they manage to imply it every day in a variety of different ways, ways that are often intertwined with their hatred of trans women such as their treatment of Michelle Obama.
Anyway, the amount of time I and other trans women have spent mulling over their psychology is not reciprocated in the slightest. What proportion of them have read Whipping Girl? What proportion of us have read The Transexual Empire? I actually suspect that more of us have read the foundational texts of their movement than they have.
Reading the way they describe trans women is like reading Pliny the Elder reporting that porcupines can fire their quills like arrows: maybe actually interact with one of them before writing what you reckon they're probably like.
It would be nice for a GC to think a little bit further than "eww gross" and actually consider that we have a perspective on our own lives that differs from theirs. I mean, a couple of them have tried, but their attempts are embarrassingly bad and reflect once more an inability to actually engage with anything a trans woman has ever said.
Holly Lawford-Smith is somehow employed as an associate professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Melbourne. In her essay Trans Men Are Men (But Transwomen Are Not Women) (which I'm not going to link but you can find it for yourself if you must) she makes the argument that trans men actually know what it means to feel like a man because so much media is from a male perspective, but trans women don't know what it means to feel like a woman because it's "highly unlikely" that a "man" in our society would engage with media written by women about women.
Even taking for granted that this argument makes sense, what percentage of people are likely to do a "highly unlikely" thing? 1% perhaps? Wow, problem solved, trans women are women after all! That a professor of Philosophy could write an argument that something cannot exist because it is unlikely and be happy enough with that to press "publish" is frankly an embarrassment to the Australian higher education system.
But that's about as good as it gets for GC engagement with trans women's thought. At least she went as far as admitting that trans women have thoughts and feelings, that puts her right at the top.
I know this is a pointless thing to complain about, because the fact is that to be a GC you already have to be incapable of critical thought or reflection. I am taking a group of fascists and asking them to consider the inner life of the subject of their disgust. But... they're fascists, their inability to do that is the whole point.
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