Trans expression and debunking sexist stereotypes
A significant strand of gender critical discourse fixates on how trans women express their gender identity, stating that we are simply rehashing old sexist stereotypes of what a woman should be when we transition and affirm our identities. In the affirmation they believe that trans women buy into patriarchal ideals of womanhood, reductive conceptions of gender rather than seeing the struggle to emancipate women from the burden of men’s yoke. To be a woman is more than the artifice of female expression, a class of being that is impossible to colonise. Which by itself makes women out to be puppets of patriarchy desperate to cut the strings of control. Tackling this pernicious philosophy requires more than simply hand waving it away because the argument that women are more than the cultural artifice they wear cuts to the heart of why trans women are women, not the ugly stereotypes we are caricatured as.
One of the most potent weapons of any oppressive movement is the propaganda caricaturing of those you seek to demean. Jews, black people in the US, Irish folk in the UK, indeed any minority that has been othered has suffered at the hands of the propagandist. You only have to say the words hooked nose to know how embedded antisemitic poison is within western society. The same dangerous techniques have long been used against anyone gender non-conforming within…
