[Image ID: screengrabs of a Twitter thread by Siobhan O'Leary.
There’s a whole-ass psychodrama to unpack in the misapprehension of vaginoplasty as an amputation, how it’s framed as a loss rather than an acquisition.
Like, I’ll be real with you: 99% of what makes cissexism so draining to deal with is the abrupt demand from cis fold that I unpack their tangled Freudian psyche simply because my existence upsets them.
The bare bone facts of a vaginoplasty is that very little is actually discarded–that’s what made it a relatively easy procedure to invent and refine. So why, without knowing that, is a vulva and vagina framed as a loss, next to a penis and testes?
Rhetorical question, of course. I know why. The mythologising of vaginoplasties is such a transparent reproduction of the menstrual taboo and it’s a wonder more feminists haven’t connected the dots.
Added analysis: if the property that makes trans women’s bodies supposedly aberrant in the minds of transphobes is her penis, especially as it is attached to a feminine body, then the transphobe must compose a new post-hoc excuse to maintain his hatred for those with vulvae.
Thus, vaginoplasty becomes shrouded in absurdist and even biologically impossible mythologies. The trick is that these mythologies are literal carbon copies of what supposedly makes cis women’s genitalia disgusting.
This was the logic behind coining the term transmisogyny–you can’t create an excuse to hate a trans woman with a vulva without also pulling in all the crap that’s been thrown at cis women by patriarchs since the dawn of history.
“It stinks!” uh, yeah, that’s what pussies do.
“It’s disgusting! Filth!” I’ve heard the same said of menstruation.
“Bleeding wound!” huh, I swear I’ve read this script before. Oh yeah. It’s just misogyny. Scratch a transphobe and a misogynist bleeds.
Trans women who’ve undergone vaginoplasty dilate because her pelvic muscles in their resting state do not accommodate a vagina. This is no different than any cis woman with vaginismus, who may also dilate. That’s why dilators were invented, in fact.
But “muscle exercises” sounds a lot less scary than “gaping wound”, so the transphobe obscures the nature of a vaginoplasty to further what is, essentially, the menstrual taboo in a different wrapper: The post-hoc excuse for disgust that was there before facts were gathered.
