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Let’s call all trans women rapists in waiting, and other tropes

Rachel Saunders
4 min readNov 4, 2023

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Photo by Liza Summer: https://www.pexels.com/photo/unrecognizable-upset-lady-embracing-knees-sitting-on-chair-6382642/

If you spend any amount of time on Twitter you will bump into the common trope that because 90% of sexual violence is carried out by men then allowing trans women into women’s spaces will lead to an increase in sexual violence against women. Trans women are sexual predators waiting to happen, and thus they should be banned from going anywhere near assigned women at birth. This logic underpins all anti-trans rhetoric, a poison pill that tars all trans women by their assigned sex at birth, and is a weapon that is continuously used to beat them with.

Alongside this, a second trope that is used against trans women is that their biological makeup, i.e. strength, testosterone, and socialisation as boys, somehow makes them incapable of ever inhabiting womanhood. Exclusionary feminists see biology as an inherent trap that women fall into at birth, meaning that to be a woman is something that you inherently have to escape from, anger the idea that a man would ever wish to inhabit that space or that trap is a sign of mental illness. They see womanhood as a perpetual victim status, a weaker version of humanity and self that can only be overcome by the existential fight that is their version of the feminist movement. For them, manhood is the great bane of women’s lives, and that any trans woman carries the echoes of that pain regardless of any…

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Rachel Saunders
Rachel Saunders

Written by Rachel Saunders

Writer, researcher, and generally curious

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