#interectionality

idle thought, but i often wonder if the kind of transphobia exhibited by the straight, middle-class, white women of Mumsnet and its ilk stems from a kind of psychological defensiveness - in that like, because they themselves have generally conformed to the sociological script of Typical Womanhood(TM) - cis, heterosexual, white, giving birth to and raising children - they take it as a sort of personal attack to be faced with the truth that those things are not synonymous with womanhood. also that acknowledging the reality of trans people means acknowledging that they are not automatically always the victim, or always the underdog, just by virtue of being women. perhaps that is part of why they are particularly aggressively transmisogynistic - it is, cognitively, far easier for them to dismiss trans women’s lived experience and claim the old two-step patriarchal hierarchy they are familiar with is still what is happening - because engaging with the truth of the situation demands a humility, emotional honesty, and capacity for self-evalution that most of these women are not willing or able to develop. (sidenote: i guess this is not-entirely-dissimilar to the logic at play when white LGBT+ people resist acknowledging that we still enjoy white privilege?)