quite honestly I think the issue with modern transfeminism is white people. And in some manners yes wwii plane diagram but also white people are trained that their experiences are the prototypical experience from birth. Their gender is the gender everyone has or aspires to have. Their culture is everyone’s culture. Their experiences are Everyone’s experiences or else if not then that person is Scary Other and probably some sort of Unperson. And then these white people take that mindset into feminism and transfeminism and if someone is doing gender Differently from either them or their mindset view of whatever amount of nice gender boxes they have then they’re Wrong and maybe a Scary Yucky Other. There is no meaningful feminism without antiracist action.
you are so so so fucking right and Emi Koyama literally made this connection decades ago. she literally directly connected her own neglect of trans men and nonbinary/genderqueer people in the Transfeminist Manifesto to the Manifesto's lack of intersectional awareness & made this profoundly insightful self-critique:
But there was something unsettling about the “Manifesto.” In an effort to forge an alliance between transsexual and non-transsexual women, the piece neglected the struggles of transsexual men and other transgender or genderqueer people who do not identify as “women” unless it was convenient to include them. The piece was also weak on intersectional analysis–that is, how anti-trans sentiments and oppressions compound and complicate oppressions other than sexism, including and especially racism and classism. It borrowed from the work of women of color when it was useful–for example, to point out that transsexual women’s unique experiences should not be the basis for their exclusion because to do so would presuppose a singular universal female experience, which is obviously false–without contributing any insights as to how the inclusion of trans sensibility helps to fight racism and other oppressions. The fact is, I had only been living in my new home town for three months or so when I wrote this piece, and I was not fully in touch with my own discomfort with the white feminism that filled nine out of ten weeks of the Introduction to Women’s Studies, nor did I feel confident enough to challenge the view that feminism is simply about advocating for women and fighting sexism–and nothing more. In short, what I had written was a version of white feminism that was modified just enough to include transsexual women. At the time, I felt that it was the only safe way to write a feminist theory that advanced transsexual women’s place within feminism. I spent next couple of years meeting more people with a common commitment for justice for all, slowly building the self-confidence it takes to “transform silence into language and action,” as Audre famously stated.
so yeah no modern transfeminism is literally just white feminism modified just enough to include (white etc.) transsexual woman. the author of the Transfeminist Manifesto herself pointed this out when reflecting on her own decisions when writing the Manifesto, which even in spite of this was more inclusive of trans men and nb/gq people than many people who identify as transfeminists today.
