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Defining trans womanhood
In Revolutionary Spring Christopher Clark devotes a chapter highlighting the exclusion of women from the 1848/9 European revolutionary movement that swept the continent, highlighting how women’s identities were used to oppress in the very movement they sought to ferment. Likewise, Thomas Paine excludes women from his Rights of Man, seeing manhood as a prerequisite of citizenship. In the 230 years between Paine and now first wave feminism exploded the myth that women were lesser beings beholden to men, a revolution of the mind as radical as communism and as disruptive as the first industrial revolution. Sex is no longer the bete noir for most women, though there is still much to be done to gain full equity for all women. Along the way trans women enter the picture, their womanhood seen as something lesser and twisted, for why on earth would a legal man wish to step over into a lesser citizenship. This was the paradox for most of human history with trans female identities, that they willingly became children of a lesser god, losing all the legal rights that men held, and even to this day in the eyes of most laws become something beneath the pinnacle of men. Second wave feminism split over schismatic interpretations of trans womanhood and sex workers, and even in 2024 the central critique of trans women by exclusionary feminists is that they are men womanfacing a degraded idea of femininity. It is all about the performance, and…
