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Transphobes will do anything to justify their behaviour
Ask a transphobe why they are being transphobic and they will launch into a broad range of topics including protecting women’s spaces, protecting women’s bodies, and their personal right to call a trans person whatever pronouns and names they like. It is exhausting engaging with them because you have to work around their personal biases, cross-examining why they feel justified in abusing trans people, especially when they try to rationalise it using science and rationality. Then you take a step back and realise they are just like racists, antisemites, and all the other bigots who couch they hate in the same rhetorical processes. Hates are going to hate, and will go to any length to justify their hate.
It is not to hold a hateful position, you have to make that position societally acceptable for you to allow those views to be spouted in public. Racists thrive when they can openly denigrate their targeted minorities, using all forms of dog whistles to speak to their followers, while also taking about their “concerns” and how polite society should care about those “concerns”. Transphobes have co-opted these techniques to frame trans women as predators, much in the same way Muslim men and immigrants are targeted by racists. You listen long enough and the justifications blur into one.
Feminists have long pointed out the misogynistic tropes about women’s bodies, the policing of what women can do and how women should be framed as victims to prevent them from existing as equal citizens to men. Women were long denied political power because they were though to be simple minded, girl-children in need of male supervision and control. Transphobes have imbibed this rhetoric wholesale, seeing women as sacred creatures that cannot be polluted by anything seemingly male. What is a woman is as much as trope of misogynistic control as it is a weapon to wield against any body deemed male.
The Taliban’s misogynistic contempt for women, the US Supreme Court’s stripping of abortion rights, and the denial of puberty blockers to under 18’s in the UK are all underpinned by moralistic attempts to control women’s bodies. Pity the poor woman-child, she must be controlled for her own good. Transphobes only care about woman-children when they can critique trans bodies through their new lens, launching into…
