Lovecore Warrior

We can't study misogyny via an experiment where we put one woman in a world with misogyny and another woman in a world with no misogyny and see what happens, we just observe this world and come up with theories to explain it, theories that can be tested when new data comes in.

The "Gender Critical" theory (if it can be called that) is that your birth sex (or chromosomes, or gametes, or intended gametes (???)) determines whether or not you experience misogyny. OK, we can test that quite easily, and it explains misogynistic oppression for well over 90% of the population. Great.

One problem though, there's this specific category of people for whom it doesn't seem to work at all. The data that comes in from our sociological "telescope" is stuff like the gender pay gap statistics, and that tells us that, accounting for other marginalisations like race, sexuality, disability, there's around 1% of people who according to GC theory should be at the top of the pile but are actually right at the bottom.

Their theory cannot explain the observations that we see, so there must be something that their theory is missing. It's just like the Michelson-Morley experiment that disproved the existence of aether or Eddington's observation of light being deflected by the sun's gravity. The old theory cannot explain what we observe, so we need a new one.

We can try out a theory from Julia Serano that says that sexism actually has two forms: one that venerates masculinity and abhors femininity; and another that rewards adherence to the gender expression that society has decided is appropriate for your birth sex, and punishes deviation from that gender expression.

It follows from this theory that someone who was assigned male but has a gender expression that society has decided is "female" will be uniquely hurt by sexism twice over, by virtue of being at the intersection of these two forms of oppression. And that group is also precisely the group at the bottom of the gender pay gap statistics! Awesome, the new theory can explain the observations, so we adopt it going forward.

Rhetorical dogwhistles are things that most people would not be able to identify as bigoted because they're INTENDED to have plausible deniability.

The wording changes are meant to be subtle enough that people really can mix them up accidentally when they don't have much information!

So when the gender critical movement calls trans women "transwomen", they're hoping for 2 things.

this usage will spread enough among people who don't know any better, to give transphobes the plausible deniability of not LOOKING like a frothing bigot constantly.

the usage grammatically places trans women in a different category than other women; it's changing "trans" from an adjective to part of a noun to make this distinction.

The more we can avoid this usage, the less deniability have transmisogynists have when using it, and the less rhetorical ground we cede to the degendering and misgendering of trans women.