RAY TORO OWNS THIS ASS

In case it's not clear to anyone, I'm using 'downstream' as a metaphor for 'occurring solely as a result of' or 'following the pattern of'. In this case, that would mean that patriarchy & misogyny are initially created in reference to, say, a class of people who are presumed capable of giving birth; transmisogyny would then target transfeminized people as a result of some combination of their [purported] resemblance to this class (roughly cis women), and their differences from this class. According to this reading, trans women encounter misogyny because of their similarity to cis women, and transphobia due to their differences from cis women. We could understand transmisogyny as being an equation of misogyny + transphobia.

I think we can see this isn't the case from a study of the historical processes that created the modern 'colonial gender binary' (following María Lugones). English, French, Spanish, Portuguese etc. colonizers in Africa, the Americas, and Oceania positioned Indigenous peoples as inadequately sexually dimorphic and inadequately disparate in gendered behaviour (through travel writing, legal systems, military violence, 'ethnographic' or 'anthropological' and medical practices including measurements of African people's genitals, economic intervention including paying only certain "genders" for certain kinds of work, etc.). The strategy here is both ideologically to justify colonial government, and to divide and conquer by disrupting Indigenous forms of government and social organisation (also per María Lugones iirc).

We recognise that the creation of sex is part of the same process as the creation of "gender": that is, the construction of binary "sex" where gamete production, chromosome type, hormone cycles, 'secondary sexual characteristics', and genitals all line up, is the biomedical justification for the construction of binary "gender," where moral qualities and social / economic roles fall into place along those same lines—rather than sex being "prior to" gender.

In the same way, a growing body of scholarship recognises "gender" (here read: "the modern colonial gender binary") and "race" as produced concomitantly. Indigenous societies are morally inferior, because Indigenous genders are not created and policed along the same lines as European ones, because Indigenous bodies are in-between and sexually indeterminate, because Indigenous peoples are racially inferior, because their societies are morally inferior, as evidenced by their genders being different... and so on and so forth. The idea that moral behaviours are heritable, that they create physical and thus racial difference over generational time, is the mechanism by which Europeans' (and some Europeans' more than others!) racial superiority is supposedly built.

On the flip side, Europeans are morally superior, and their civilisations more advanced (literally, more 'forward' in time than the atavistic Indigenous people's, closer to the apotheosis of human achievement), both as a result of and as evidenced by the fact that white "women" are supposedly cleanly differentiable from white "men" in body, in dress, in behaviour, in sexuality, etc. So policing the boundaries of "womanhood" or "femininity" is policing a gendered boundary, yes—but by the same token, it is policing a racial one (following Kyla Schuller).

So an idea that racial and moral inferiority is both caused and evidenced by a failure to neatly align "physical sex" with "social role", and an abjection of specific Indigenous social, sexual and economic roles (n.b. the point here is not that Indigenous gender systems are perforce perfect utopias or whatever), give us transfeminization and transmisogyny—but the same process also gives us the ideal of white, bourgeois, cisgender, heterosexual womanhood.

Things that we might take to be quintessential instantiations of misogyny—forced birthing or valuation primarily for one's 'utility' in giving birth, reproductive labour (which btw means 'all the work, including domestic work, required to produce the conditions necessary for the proletariat to persist', not 'reproduction' as in 'birth-giving'), division into a protected class that is spared the worst sorts of patriarchal violence in exchange for morally 'advancing the race', and an abjected class (some trans women, some sex workers) who are not under the same protective control—

—all of these things have race, imperialism, and transmisogyny already baked in.

See also:

/tagged/gender and colonialism

it's the same thing as TWERFs (and other transmisogynists who use the aesthetic of feminism) who claim that recognition of trans women as women is an issue of women's boundaries broadly. what boundary is being violated? access to the power to make undesirables disappear from society at any moment. but that's harder to defend. it's much easier to defend the idea of women's sexual boundaries and then expand the definition of sexual boundaries to cover literally every public interaction.