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everyone in the trans community, including way too many trans women who call themselves transfeminists, plays this funny little game where if you’re transfemme you have to look as close to being a cis woman as possible and if you don’t it means you have internalized transmisogyny or you’re idolizing transmisogynistic caricatures. there’s “no” transfem butches because if you want to be masculine and transfem, you simultaneously have to deal with all the people who think you’re a predatory man and all the people who think you only want to be butch because you don’t understand your gender and the way it’s oppressed well enough.

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"trans women experience misogyny because they're women"

All women are treated as property of white men under the patriarchy, but white, cisgender women specifically are treated as prized property, rather than disposable property like the rest of us

This means that white cis women have some level of protection under the patriarchy--they are necessary to create more white babies and "secure the future of the white race," after all. White men will go to great lengths to defend what they see as their property from external threats. Many of them outright hunger for an opportunity to do so. Consider how many white men love to fantasize about committing brutal murder to home invaders

This gives white, cisgender women a bit of leverage over their white male oppressors. Because white men hunger for an opportunity to defend their property, white, cisgender women need only paint a disposable class of women as a threat to them to direct white men's violence against them. And, because a woman's supposed inherent harmlessness is the reason they need men's protection in the first place, their targets cannot really be portrayed as women like them, so they masculinize them

"Women are weak and ineffectual, so we need men to protect us. ...How can this class of women be strong enough to hurt us, then? It's because they're basically actually men"

"Male" enough to be dangerous, but still female enough to be disposable property of the patriarchy for white cis men to kill freely, that is

This damselization is how the terf movement operates. Terfs largely do not build their movement around organizing to directly protect themselves from the supposed threat trans women pose. No, they simply damselize themselves, and call upon higher structural, patriarchal powers to do the actual protecting. The damsel does not protect herself from the dragon, after all. She calls out to the knight instead

Terfs don't endeavor to challenge the white supremacist patriarchy, despite how dangerous they say "men" are, because when they say "men," they're not talking about white, cis men--they're talking about trans women

Their movement is about creating and upholding a dragon so that they can maintain the meager amount of leverage they have over the class that oppresses them--but to do this requires maintaining said oppressor class as well, or there is no power to leverage in the first place

From this vantage point, the route to freeing themselves from their oppressors is obvious: organize with the groups they oppress

disabilities, especially autism, are treated similarly to womanhood in our society; the "prized possessions" are people with cute, inspiration porn-able disabilities and the disposable property is everyone else. of course, with disabled people the ratio of "good ones" to "bad ones" is different and less clean-cut, but the image of the "good disabled person" tends to be a polite little white child, and the image of the "scary disabled person" is often a psychotic adult black man. one deserves compassion and care, one is dangerous and needs to be kept away from us and put with the other dangerous people for our safety. sound familiar?

all of this to say that a significant part of the anti-trans argument is "some girls are just SO helpless they need to be shepherded back in place!" and terfs' solution is "rally with men in power to force them to stop their HRT and keep them away from fellow trans men and women so they have to rely on us"

those "boundaries" get us murdered lol. trans women who can't access women's shelters or other forms of housing because of cis women's "boundaries" are left on the streets to be assaulted and murdered

me: "so you think men are better at literally everything, even things that do not require any physical ability whatsoever?"

terf: "yes! those should still be segregated by sex! males should not be playing against women ever. it's an unfair advantage"

me: "so my brother has an unfair advantage over me when playing fucking monopoly?"

terf: "yes. males are statistically better and managing finances, while women are irresponsible and lenient with spending money."

(The character is xion from kh, who's entire story in game revolves around her picking and creating her own identity as a girl, in spite of having been created to literally be a clone of a boy (sora). In the process of her game she's repeatedly misgendered, degendered, and abused for trying to be her own person. She canonically kills herself to avoid physically turning into a boy. (She later got revived and is part of the main cast now) It's literally canon, they just don't say the word trans. The tme person in question told my friend that they see her as "nonbinary instead")