The Question Has an Answer

On exclusionary definitions, anti-trans propaganda, and the purpose of conservative rhetoric.

The Day Transphobia Ended

If you’re unfamiliar with who Graham Linehan is, he is most famous for being divorced and writing a lot of transphobic tweets. He identifies affirmatively with the gender-conservative movement that has with no sense of irony dubbed itself ‘Gender Critical’, and thus fosters an online presence that is uncomfortably fixated on trans issues and trans women. On one fateful day, a lone, brave voice posed a question to Linehan, prompting an exchange that I cannot do justice to, but will do my best to paraphrase here.

In response to his utter befuddlement at the idea that “There is no definition of woman”, Linehan was asked: “Graham, could you define ‘chair’ for us real quick?”

Not one to shrink from such a trivial intellectual challenge—no matter how loudly telegraphed the rhetorical trap was—Linehan met this inquiry with the solid rejoinder: “A separate seat for one person, typically with a back and four legs.”

“Happy to help but try Google next time. The definition of ‘woman’ is there, too,” he added, no doubt with a hearty chuckle at his own brilliance.

He had no idea what a storm his words would unleash.

With the tripwire triggered, the replies to his foolish rhetorical volley came in fast and furious, pelting him with counterexample after exception after erroneous inclusion. Images of chairs with no legs, bathtubs with four, and all manner of absurd objects were conjured in response to his foolish attempt at an encapsulation of “chair-ness”. The killing blow came in the form of a harbinger, a vehicle for Linehan’s own personal linguistic apocalypse.

“Chair” the tweet simply stated, suspended above the photographic depiction of a humble, four-legged, one-backed horse.

As the farrier drives shoe into hoof, so too did this tweet hammer home the final nail in the coffin of Gender-Conservative ideology. Having been shown how erroneous, how insufficient, how baldfacedly absurd their patterns of thinking were, transphobes had no choice but to capitulate utterly to a Total Transgender Victory. Every transphobic politician resigned in disgrace, while every newspaper that had ever dared to entertain transphobic notions—which is to say, every newspaper—issued a full retraction and announced Judith Butler’s coronation as World Monarch. The gender-conservative movement was driven underground, left to languish, huddled around garbage fires made of discarded children’s literature, clinging to an image of an imperfect world that had long passed them by.

If only their names had not been lost to time and ill-advised rebranding, we may have been able to honor these valiant heroes, these courageous soldiers who through their collective efforts won the Second Sex Wars.

Right! … Right?

Or, you know, none of that.

Instead, the transphobic reactionary wave core to the modern Gender-Conservative antifeminist movement only grew more emboldened, accruing more and more funding, institutional legitimacy, and coverage. The relentless push to implement transphobic legislation, from bathroom discrimination to outright bans on transition care, eventually gathered enough momentum and ideological backing to finally pass in various Western jurisdictions. Junk studies, bunk science, and fraudulent reports proliferated, polluting the scientific consensus on trans healthcare, and many politicians either took up the cause of scapegoating a tiny slice of the population for their policy shortcomings, or considered it expedient to abandon us entirely.

How did the champions of trans people and trans rights react to this resurgence of reactionary gender politics and intensifying attacks on queer existence? Largely by posting doctored images of Donald Trump and Elon Musk in a gay relationship, or in dresses, because no crime a man commits can ever compare to a presumed lack of masculinity.

Truly, we are in good hands.

A simple look around at the current state of affairs should clue in even the most tuned-out of us to the blindingly obvious: liberal feminism is fucking dead. It failed to protect abortion rights, it failed to meaningfully issue a challenge to patriarchal rape culture, and absolutely fucking failed every single trans person.

This is not a eulogy. It is not fanfare at witnessing the doddering, shambling corpse of this ideological dead-end finally collapse. It is an autopsy, an accounting, and first and foremost a reckoning with a feminist project that sought to liberate women while refusing to take into account the male-supremacy endemic to patriarchy. The mainstream feminist discourse did not meaningfully challenge the prevailing essentialist model of naturalized sex, nor did it effectively advocate for the bodily autonomy of the gender-marginalized. It is poised to squander even more of the second wave’s gains if someone doesn’t just. Call. Bullshit.

I come not to praise Steinem but to bury her, and some of her worst accomplices with the bier.

Listen Up, Liberal

Liberalism is the erroneous belief that one can paper over systemic inequality with enough contract law, consent fetishism, and lip service to ‘individual freedom’. It is ruling-class propaganda that bamboozles people into thinking that token mass participation in the political process can outweigh the hoarding of wealth and privileges and control over the means of cultural production.

When applied to feminist thought, this ideological defect reframes the imbalances of power in the sexual economy to a simple matter of ‘restricted freedoms’ that can, one by one, be alleviated legislatively through state protectionism. If women are underpaid, then we shall simply make it illegal to pay them less, in much the same way one would apply a bandage to a gaping wound. Surely treating symptoms without investigating causes would eventually solve the problem. We need not inquire why women are paid less, what factors are contributing to their labor being undervalued, and whether there are underlying causes leading to such treatment that legislation alone cannot remedy.

It is, in a sentence, a Human Resources approach to managing rape culture.

What liberal ideologies are worst at addressing, of course, are questions pertaining to their own violences, the injustices and disparities they promulgate, perpetuate, and thrive on, just underneath the facade of bringing all parties to the same table. They have never been able to confront the truth of how workers are far less free to negotiate terms than bosses, concerned more with the image of happy coordination than the reality of who has signed the dotted line with a gun to her head.

For feminism, this became a maxim of choice, a true punchline to the joke that is gender. Women can choose to be empowered, careerist, liberated, and professional, or we can ‘choose’ to be domestically confined, saddled with the bulk of reproductive labor, and have little recourse to violations of our body, dignity, and personhood. With the benefit of hindsight, it is plain to see how this strain of ‘feminism’ was never a serious counterpoint to patriarchal relations.

Fundamentally, the liberal-feminist model is motivated by a desire to ignore the elephant, even as it tramples the room’s occupants underfoot. It adopts a language of ersatz gender equality, presuming that so long as barriers to individual freedom are addressed, everyone can and benefit from the system equally. In matters of coercion, violence, non-economic interests, or even the simple identification of cultural factors contributing to these issues, this approach falls short entirely. Questions of subjugation, violence, and suppression are ignored in favor of trust in institutions and the singular guiding principle: “But what if the oppressed party consents?”

It was PR.

Missing from any of this is an analysis of the mechanisms of patriarchy, the heterosexuality at the heart of it all. There is a pervasive incuriosity permeating the school of thought, a wilful omission of the exploitation, extractivism, and sheer sexual sadism that underlies a misogynistic society.

The dirty secret is that liberal feminism, for all its paeans to gender parity, did not ever meaningfully contradict the naturalization of sex, the idea that on some essential level, women are simply synonymous with gestation, with child-rearing, with less. It was content to simply proffer the platitude that if a woman wishes to exceed her station, then she should surely be allowed to. How much could women’s liberation cost, girls? Ten dollars?

This was never an attitude, a rigorous school of thought, or an approach that could radically challenge the retrenchment of Gender-Conservatism. When the gains of feminist victories and economic independence started to pile up, the patriarchal recuperation and reactionary backlash was focused and swift. Right-wing attitudes found many masks to conceal misogynistic intent, sometimes wearing an anti-capitalist hat to talk about the meaningless grind of women’s workplaces, and at other times adopting feminist theatrics to conflate “women’s rights” with genital inspections.

Crucially, when Gender-Conservatism asked on what basis we should consider trans women to be real, authentic women, liberal feminism simply shrugged and began babbling about category errors, as though philosophical technicalities are an adequate substitute for advocacy. They are women because they choose to be, and who are we to deny them that choice?

As far as endorsements go, this one rings hollow. The gender anxieties underpinning trans people’s mutable sex, the ability to “cross” heterosexuality’s impermeable barrier, won out over a half-hearted attempt to frame the question of our rights as free expression rather than a struggle against patriarchy’s attempts to deny us bodily autonomy and eradicate us.

We were, to speak it plain, abandoned. Women, queers, and trannies alike.

I guess we chose wrong.

Round Two

For all its faults, though, wasn’t liberal feminism better? Wasn’t it a kinder, gentler alternative to the second wave that preceded it? The radical feminist movement was categorized by a militant commitment to academic, middle-class white womanhood, championed by the misandry of affluent lesbians, resulting in a stiflingly uniform classist, racist, and transmisogynistic politic. Surely, what followed learned from its mistakes, built upon its strengths, and gave a voice to those whom feminism had historically silenced?

No.

No, not really.

There is a tendency to narrativize history, to draw boundaries and delineations that are far cleaner on paper than they ever were on the ground. It would be as inaccurate to attribute an artificial homogeneity to the second-wave as it would be to assert that liberal feminism successfully addressed its myriad failings. This contextual collapse results partly from a refusal to take feminism seriously as a school of thought, one rife with its own orthodoxies, contradictions, dissidents, theoretical innovations and internal critiques. Feminism has always been fractious, always an arena rather than a solidified platform, with competing and collaborating branches that unify and schism in equal measure.

It is, in short, a discipline, and a perpetually evolving one at that.

Attempts to partition the history of feminism into easily-separable waves tend to be just as arbitrary and constructed as patriarchal gender. Audre Lorde and Leslie Feinberg are frequently claimed by “Third Wave” feminism, a categorization that flies in the face of Lorde’s two decades of friendship with Adrienne Rich, or Feinberg’s gratitude for Rich’s support in the acknowledgements of Transgender Warriors. Reading their work alone should be sufficient to see where they were inspired by the radical lesbian feminist tradition as well as where they deviated—at least, if one were given to treat feminist subschools with a greater degree of complexity and nuance than trying to label them ‘Good’ or ‘Bad’.

Nor is it anything more than naive ignorance to presume that radical feminism’s issues with transmisogyny were what inspired the backlash against it. The reverence accorded to Serena Nanda’s corpus of work alone should disabuse that notion, but one need only glance at bell hooks’ essay on Paris Is Burning, or Judith Butler’s commentary on the same, to see that the pathologization of transfemininity, together with the marginalization of transfeminine perspectives, would continue unabated into the era of “kinder, gentler, inclusive” feminism.

Just as there is still white feminism following the publication of Crenshaw’s paper on intersectionality, transmisogynistic feminism remains alive and well in the years since Sandy Stone’s ‘postranssexual’ manifesto. We still grapple with many of the same prejudices, structures, and institutional biases today that the feminists of the second wave did in their day, and part of the liberal-feminist mythology depends on the ahistorical narrativization denying that stark reality.

If we are to reckon with the failures of feminisms past and present, we have to be honest about where those failures lie rather than just patting ourselves on the back for being “so much more enlightened nowadays”. We must ask ourselves why a materialist movement allowed itself to be polluted by idealist, essentialist thought, why putative social-constructivists found themselves associating amicably with theologically-inspired fundamentalists like Raymond and Daly. We must also admit that when it came to condemning the TERFs, modern feminists took far greater issue with the ‘RF’ than they did the ‘TE’.

Simply put: Radical feminism saw the most definitive real-world proof of its own theories in the transsexual, and sought to destroy her instead of embracing her.

When perusing these texts, I am assailed, over and over, by the sheer irony of the radical feminist tradition sabotaging itself by vehemently rejecting the conclusions of its own theories. Womanhood is a social positionality constructed through misogynistic violence and sexual-reproductive exploitation, and no case confirms this more than the transsexual woman, whose ‘male anatomy’ does not spare her in the slightest. Every transsexual woman is the wretched, spurned daughter of the radical feminist thesis, the unwanted validation of its most fundamental tenets that it sought to terminate.

For all their insight, clarity of purpose, rhetorical verve, and righteous conviction, when push came to shove, the radical feminists proved no better than the gender-essentialists they once sought to condemn. They felt greater sorority with the rambling lunatics babbling about ‘sexed souls’ than the women whose very existence was so unconscionable to patriarchal regimes that we are to this day faced with utter annihilation.

In these texts, I found the language to describe my own making and unmaking. From their words, I forged the fury of my own purpose. They were, in their own day, at their best, brilliant and brave women.

And they still abandoned their own ideals out of sheer disgust.

Look upon our faces, and see the truth none of you were able to bear.

The Radical Feminists are no more, not in any sense worthy of the name, not in any form that honors their original principles. Do not consider this a tragedy, however, especially when the conclusive chapters are yet to be written.

After all, it always falls upon disowned daughters to clean up their foremothers’ messes.

The Measure of a Misandrist

This is, ultimately, where most critiques of radical feminism go wrong, even when supposedly made with trans women’s vilification in mind. It is a too-popular idea that radical feminism was too harsh, too critical and too antagonistic towards men. After all—goes the reasoning—is not the fixation on trans women, the denial of our womanhood, and the maligning of us as ontologically predatory a consequence of their gender-absolutism? Is not resorting to ‘misandry’ in response to society’s misogyny also wrong?

Such arguments fail to be compelling for two reasons, the first of which should be obvious: transmisogyny is not misandry. The transmisogynist does not treat trans women the way she treats men, even if she refers to a trans woman as a man in the process of degendering her. Even if a transmisogynist bears an authentic antipathy for men, there is a crucial difference in how she regards trans women: namely, as an acceptable target of misogynistic degradation. Trans women’s bodies are dissected and scrutinized, our behavior pathologized and sexualized, and our own testimony discarded as unreliable, insubstantial, and immaterial. We are dehumanized, third-sexed, and branded permissible targets for ritualistic, collective, and sexualized punishment. A fate that even queer men tend to be spared.

Secondly and perhaps more importantly: the ‘misandry’ of the average transmisogynistic feminist is greatly overstated.

Trivially, we can note how the modern Gender-Conservative movement is full of men and the women who gleefully encourage their violence against trans people, a modern incarnation that bears the most threadbare of claims to any feminist tradition. They are, more than anything, a project concerned with the obfuscation of the term ‘feminist’, so that staunchly patriarchal ideologues can claim the label simply for promulgating transmisogynistic rhetoric. The face of modern transphobia is a far-flung cry from the academic lesbian feminists of yore, and is these days definitively male. Men abound at transphobic rallies, threaten to follow trans women into bathrooms to beat them, and call for the abolition of transition care in publications the world over.

Is such an answer evasive, though? Surely conservative men’s transmisogyny is a mainstream discursive force now, but was not the second wave chock-full of misandrist lesbian feminists aiming their ire at trans women? Can we not draw a line from their extremism to modern antifeminist backlash?

To get to the heart of that matter, we have to recall a little history.

April, 1973. The West Coast Lesbian Conference was, at that point, the largest gathering of lesbian feminists to date. Beth Elliot, a trans lesbian folk singer and feminist activist had been on the organizing committee for the event and was also scheduled to perform on opening night. Her fellow LA organizers had, in fact, insisted upon it.

When she took the stage at 9 p.m., she was accosted by two women, one of whom snatched the mic away to scream that Beth was a “transsexual” and a “rapist”, and demanded that she be ejected. In the ensuing chaos, a few organizers took the initiative to hold a vote (or, two, by some accounts), allowing the assembled audience to decide on Beth’s inclusion. The vote passed—by a slim majority, in some accounts, or by an overwhelming two-thirds majority, in some others—and so a visibly shaken Beth Elliot, with the support of her sisters, gave a short performance before promptly leaving.

Robin Morgan, who was scheduled to give a keynote speech on the theme of ‘unity’ the following day, spent the night editing her address. Rather than speaking for forty-five minutes, Morgan spent twice that time on a meandering screed “attacking everything in sight”, per Pat Buchanan—the conference organizers, women who work with men, and of course, transsexuals, blaming the continuing ills of patriarchy on a lack of feminist consciousness. Her caustic rhetoric shifted the entire tone and mood of the conference, forefronting the issue of biodestined womanhood. The Black Women’s Caucus, who had prepared a position paper on Black feminist organizing and the relevance of race to their struggle, are often omitted entirely from accounts of the conference, in large part due to Morgan’s troonmadness sucking up all the oxygen.

While some of the facts surrounding this incident are disputed, we know that Morgan’s invective was circulated amongst lesbian feminists, drawing attention to the topic of transsexual inclusion. Her charges that Beth Elliot was an “infiltrator” and “rapist” accrued sufficient cachet to get Beth blacklisted from feminist publications and music scenes. Despite a measure of personal support, Beth withdrew from the public eye, and Morgan’s bilious language found itself echoed in 1979’s Transsexual Empire, this time levied at Sandy Stone.

In some sense, Robin Morgan, Sister Raymond, and their ilk set the discursive tone on translesbophobia. While 1960’s Psycho attests that the idea of the deceptive, cross-dressing predator already held some sway in the cultural psychosexual imaginary, Morgan and Raymond—clumsily and soporifically—elevated that hateful trope to the status of “feminist concern”. They provided a framework and legitimacy to complement the sexologists’ pathologization of the “homosexual transsexual”, transmuting the cultural idea of the tranny from a pitiable, somewhat tragic figure, to a rapacious and monstrous one. Although coercion through deceptive seduction had always been core to the mythology of transsexuality, Morgan and Raymond enabled eradicationist sentiment towards trans women as a whole to be imbued with a certain feminist authority, recasting it as almost righteous.

We were, in the truest sense of the term, constructed, remade as biotechnological horrors seeking to traverse, fresh and bloody, from the scalpel to the women’s bathroom.

Given the centrality of that hastily-rewritten keynote speech to modern transmisogynistic propaganda, Morgan’s awareness of its discursive relevance is fascinating to witness. As Finn Enke notes in Collective Memory and the Transfeminist 1970s, when Morgan published her own account in 1977, her comments from the 1973 speech condemning the organizers for “inviting” Beth Elliot are omitted entirely. Morgan deliberately edited the speech to extend her critique of transsexuals and Beth Elliot specifically, dubbing them “gatecrashers” who sought to undermine and destroy the feminist movement from within. She consciously chose to erase Beth’s involvement in organizing the event, in addition to eliding that the majority of second-wave lesbian feminists present chose to defend and protect her.

Perhaps the most telling omission in subsequent accounts of this speech is an interesting detail about Morgan herself. Once she was done berating “women who work with men”, Morgan launched an impassioned defense of her husband. Before she derided Beth Elliot as a “male gatecrasher” with no place in lesbian feminism, Morgan advocated for her male husband’s place in lesbian feminism, on the grounds that he was a “feminist”, a “feminine man”, and—I still cannot help but marvel at this term whenever I encounter it—an “effeminist faggot”.

Seriously.

It is impossible to overstate just how utterly pathetic this pantomime of radicalism is. Morgan sublimated her own sexual and gendered anxieties into unrestrained transmisogyny, as many people often do, seeking to secure her own place as a lesbian by defining her legitimacy against the seeming illegitimacy of an “outsider”. Her arguments for doing so hinged on staining transsexual womanhood with the original sin of reproducing manhood, even as she pleaded the case that her husband, through his proximity to the feminine, had successfully absolved his own! Morgan’s audacity and insecurity drips off the page, revealing her charade to be nothing more than a performative, incoherent, inconsistent, bigoted farce.

Additionally, this revelation demonstrates how even here, in the holy of holies, at the epicenter of lesbian-feminist transmisogyny, misandry could hardly be claimed as a motivation. Beth Elliot was condemned for her transsexuality. Her putative ‘manhood’ was invoked only to degender and dehumanize her, while the avowed transmisogynist slurring her asked for the inclusion of men in the same breath!

Nor should we discount those who stood by Beth Elliot and Sandy Stone, even if their efforts were ignored, silenced, and erased. Enke’s paper meditates on a photograph of Beth on stage, framed to depict her alone, isolated, besieged. The woman holding Beth’s hand is left just out of the picture.

Meanwhile, for all their condemnation of trans lesbians’ “male energy”, the transmisogynists who so revile trans women’s “manhood” had no compunctions when it came to allying with the “male institutions” that have surveilled us, vilified us, marginalized us, and tried to erase our very stories, our connections, our sisterhood from history. Even the scraps that remain cannot escape reframing, rewriting, revisionism that insists: you were always unwanted, and stood apart.

Except when we weren’t, and didn’t.

Radicalized Feminist

Of course, even if “radfem misandry” were the beating heart of feminist transmisogyny, it bears repeating that the radical feminist tradition is not a particularly well-known or influential one today. Ideas such as “gender is a social construct” and “heteronormativity” are uncontroversial in modern feminism, but their radical feminist roots are rather obfuscated, in addition to the foundational tenets of sex-class theory and heterosexuality as a political regime being far from widespread.

Indeed, for all the gesturing at gender-as-social, the average person conversant in pop-feminist jargon retains solidly essentialist notions. “Gender is social, but sex is innate,” goes the common-sense adage, allowing even “trans allies” to leave their conception of natural, immutable sex untouched. Many cis people are all too comfortable declaring that trans women are “male women” or that “no one believes trans people change sex”, statements that go hand-in-hand with the widespread ignorance, misinformation, and indeed propagandized scaremongering surrounding the topic of trans healthcare. Whilst it would no doubt be an excellent party trick, I did not sprout tits through my sheer mastery of the social fabric. I had to take oestrogen for that.

Bluntly, the popular conception of trans people today is frustratingly concomitant with historical tropes regarding us as pitiable wretches who engage in elaborate costuming to make up for the tragedy that is our unchangeable birth sex. Many seem mystified at the thought that we alter our embodiments on a more fundamental level than clothing and address, and learning the degree to which hormones alone can enable trans people to ‘pass’ tends to elicit discomfort.

Epistemic injustice and the silencing of trans perspectives certainly plays a role, but more concerning is the extent to which transphobic ideologues are allowed to dictate the discourse on trans issues without encountering a meaningful counter-narrative. I’ve often observed that if a Gender-Conservative insists that trans people do not change sex, the well-meaning ally agrees implicitly, though is quick to remind that trans people do change our gender! Both the eradicationist and the ally are in agreement that transness is this superficial, social charade, and seem to principally deviate on the extent to which trans people’s delusional performances ought to be humored.

Such an attitude is most evident the second a ‘trans ally’ happens upon a most disconcerting, destabilizing concept: a trans person who disagrees with them! Or worse, one who has her own thoughts, opinions, and perspectives on trans issues that challenge normative assumptions about her life and self-conception. The first time you witness a cis person call a trans woman “TERF” for insisting that she changed her sex, or for describing herself as a “transsexual”, the spectacle elicits a hearty chuckle. The absurdity and novelty quickly wears off around the dozenth-or-so time.

That the label of “TERF” can be levied against a trans woman who insists upon her own sex is a function of the total cultural victory of the Gender-Conservative project. Feminism has been indelibly associated with transphobia, transmisogyny is considered a function of ‘misandry’, and the trans woman is instrumentalized as a voiceless pawn by a myriad of cultural forces that seek to exploit her symbolic significance. The conservative antifeminist can point to her as a consequence of leftist overreach threatening the most fundamental underpinnings of society’s (patriarchal) organization, while the liberal antifeminist can use her woes to bemoan how unfair and extreme feminism has grown towards men, advocating for an ever-kinder, ever-gentler feminism even as abortion rights are undone and ideological investment in rape culture resurges.

After all, that is one thing the conservative and liberal and even leftist man have always agreed upon: the woman’s rightful place, and the necessity of silencing her attempts to protest it.

This environment is not merely conducive for transmisogynistic radicalization, but is one where it absolutely thrives. Imagine, if you can, what it is like to be a woman keenly aware of her culture’s intensifying misogyny. Young men—not simply the men “from a different time”—are growing disgruntled with the financial independence that allows women to be more selective in matters of dating and marriage (if they choose to marry at all!). “Men’s Rights Activism” is increasingly becoming a part of mainstream conservative politics, and media figures engaging in patriarchal extremism are becoming normalized. In addition to targeting abortion access, reactionaries are openly organizing against contraception, no-fault divorce, and even women’s right to vote! Openly male-supremacist politics have not been this popular in decades.

All the while, the media is obsessed with the plight of men, running article after article on the ‘male loneliness epidemic’ and lamenting the ‘feminization of education’ that has them giving up on college. It appears having to compete with women who value autonomy over ‘traditional family’ has soured men on the very idea of upward mobility. Even anti-capitalist politics are taking on a chillingly antifeminist bent, with women’s issues dismissed as “idpol”, a mere distraction from the primary contradiction of class.

Amidst all this, the topic of trans people seems to come up over and over, given outsize emphasis relative to how many of them there seem to be. Publications of repute run stories constantly, sounding the alarm on the threat “men in dresses” pose to women’s bathrooms, sports, prisons, shelters—to the very notion of a sex-segregated space. This deluge is accompanied by a discursive environment where any mention of feminism seems to invite accusations of being a “TERF”, a nebulous charge levied at anyone who even mildly suggests that men are systemically empowered to exploit women.

The lip-service paid to trans issues on the left, by those who outright dismiss feminist concerns, in tandem with the barrage of misinformation and the near-total exclusion of trans voices and self-advocacy, leaves the field wide open for Gender-Conservative recruitment.

An oft-overlooked factor in the appeal of hate movements is that they feel good. The politics of male grievance has wide appeal to men who, faced with an increasingly hostile world that is unashamedly denying them the economic security their fathers enjoyed, turn to misogyny as an outlet. Sublimating impotence, despair, and rage into organized hate, directed at a target you can actually hurt, who is actually within reach—unlike the faraway, untouchable concept of ‘the ruling class’—provides an immediate psychic relief that “class-consciousness” simply cannot rival.

There is a similar kind of unrestrained, psychosexual glee among the radicalized women who eagerly turn to the Gender-Conservative pipeline and make the tranny an effigy for all the male figures who have actually done them harm. Organized groups surveil trans people online and collate their social media interactions, distributing the material for adherents to leer at and mock, a Der Sturmer for the information age. Post-surgery images are mined for their apparent shock value, and long-forgotten misogynistic invective such as “axe wound” is resuscitated to be applied, anew, to the spectacle of the ‘mutilated’ trans woman.

Indeed, the chief utility of the trans woman here is as a lesser, failed woman at whom one can justifiably direct misogynistic abuse, while simultaneously chastising her for ‘perpetuating patriarchal stereotypes’. If she is too feminine, she is a sex-role upholding handmaiden, or she is a “man in drag” if not feminine enough. The trans woman, no matter her deeds, words, or politics, can be tied to the stake and set aflame, over and over. She is a pressure-valve for women looking to hurt something the same way they’ve been hurt—and feel ‘feminist’ for doing so. Trans women are just male enough for misogynistic abuse directed at them to ‘not really count’, or to even feel like ‘punching up’.

After all, who’s going to stick up for us? The same ‘allies’ who rush to call us ‘male-socialized’ the second we assert ourselves or act like we deserve dignity?

That is the reality of trans advocacy today. In an era of utter institutional capture, even those who believe themselves to be on our side tacitly endorse the transmisogynistic consensus.

How could this have happened? I mean, the picture of the horse was captioned ‘chair’!

Should have been a slam dunk, right?

Just Answer the Damned Question

Last year, I chose to participate in a mediated conversation with a self-described ‘moderate’ GC, who claimed to be interested in the transfeminine perspective. ‘Moderate’, here, refers to the contingent of Gender-Conservatives who had somehow conned themselves into believing their virulent hatred of trans women was in fact a feminist crusade, and were growing increasingly alarmed at the overtures towards and alliances with right-wingers that movement leaders were making.

It was a short exchange. While she was kind enough to not use any slurs, the GC could not help but ask insistently, “How are you different from a gay man, though?”

Wasn’t what I experienced really homophobia, not misogyny?

Amused, I brought up my complete lack of attraction to men, and pointed out that I wasn’t seen as a man in public. I hadn’t been seen as such for some time, in fact. Regrettably, I could not deny biological reality for the sake of her feelings.

I never got a reply to that.

A colleague of mine has opined that GCs exhibit a sort of “nationalistic protectionism” regarding sex-categories. Even when the GC was willing to acknowledge my oppression under patriarchy, I still had to know my place and make it clear I understood that I wasn’t really a woman. I could be the closest thing to a woman-shaped male individual that her schema allowed, but I must not insist on tainting the purity of Womanhood by claiming it included me.

If I could just concede that sex was essential, impermeable, immutable, then she’d meet me halfway.

That is what The Question is actually getting at. The reason there’s no point in debating category errors with a conservative is because they know they are operating under a limited, exclusive definition. Conservatism is an exclusionary ideology, by choice, by intent, by design. You cannot shatter someone’s worldview with an epic burn about imperfect classification, when their classification was never meant to be perfect.

A Gender-Conservative knows what a woman is the same way you know what a woman is, because we all fucking know what a woman is. Their definition of ‘woman’ is the patriarchal definition of woman: a member of the subordinate sex-class whose domestic, reproductive, and sexual labor is meant to be exploited by the hegemonic sex-class.

Truthfully, Gender-Conservatives have always demonstrated a thorough knowledge of gender-as-social. They demonstrate it when they degender women of color or queer women for not falling within their narrow schema of femininity. They demonstrate it every time they feminize and “unman” any man whom they deem insufficiently reactionary. They are perfectly aware that gender is a social enforcement mechanism because they themselves wield it as one.

Is sex mutable or immutable to a GC, then? If you’ve finally realized that seeming contradictions do not matter to them, you’ll also see that for a GC, it’s neither.

For a Gender-Conservative, sex under patriarchy is policed.

When you’re being asked what a woman is, you’re not actually being asked for a perfect definition that includes all cis and trans women. (Trust me, I’ve been ignored after I gave them one.) Look past the words to see the intent behind the question, and realize whose humanity it is meant to put up for debate. “What is a woman?” actually translates to:

“Are you really buying this shit?”

“Listen. You know it’s a freak, I know it’s a freak. I get that you want to appear all virtuous and high-and-mighty. But c’mon! At the end of the day you know what a woman is. I know you know what a woman is. And that’s not a woman.”

“How long are you going to keep humoring it?”

Just until I decide to voice an opinion, usually.

The question is meant to remind you that trans women are male women, that we don’t change sex, that we don’t really experience misogyny. It is meant to evoke a shared understanding that our genders are inauthentic. When a GC asks this question, they’re asking whether the person they’re questioning really thinks that trans women are worthy of respect as women, are worth taking seriously, or are worth defending.

Frankly, when push comes to shove, most people reveal that they don’t.

Men’s investment in transmisogyny is easily understood, but transmisogynistic women, especially GC women, display an interesting aspect to theirs. To a degree, the idea that a male person could ever experience misogyny, actual misogyny like they do, is existentially terrifying. A world where patriarchy is natural, biological, and absolute is an unfair world, an unhappy world, but it is still a world with order. A world where even male anatomy doesn’t guarantee a freedom from misogynistic violence, where gender is proven to be unstable and revocable, confronts them with the reality that their place in the gender hierarchy is only so stable, too.

The tranny is a reminder of how women with no reproductive utility are treated, and the idea that they could share a classification with us—that it is possible for them to be considered the same kind of thing as us—is unconscionable.

“A woman is not the same thing as a mutilated man,” you can almost hear them hiss, forgetting that their quarrel is with Aristotle and not me.

I wish these folks were receptive enough to understand that their hang-ups are not my cross to bear. For I have never seen myself as a “man, made lesser”. A failed man? Yes, and proudly so, but never lesser. I am, if anything, man perfected in form and spirit, in a way only a being who fulfills her true potential can be.

Faulty conceptions of trans womanhood are a recurrent point of failure for feminisms past and present. When presented with the dilemma that is the trans woman, most people have chosen to recoil in horror and emphasize their separation from us, rather than accept the notion that we might have common cause. Our revelation of gender’s porosity is sometimes regarded with a macabre fascination, often fetishized, but rarely taken as proof that our point of view is one worth considering.

We are, currently, at just such an inflection point. The trans moral panic has been (predictably) revealed to be a singular facet of a wider patriarchal agenda to retrench male-supremacy and regulate people’s gendered autonomy under the heterosexual regime. Under these nativist, natalist logics, the state cannot permit reproductive assets any bodily autonomy, and must deny them the right to shape their own sex. Your body is a resource for The Nation to mine, and will be legally enshrined as such.

Which leaves you with a choice.

You can take the same option that many have taken before you, time and time again. You can tell yourself that if you agitate loudly enough against her and declare that you are nothing like her, distinguishing yourself sufficiently from the trans woman will spare you her fate. You can try to convince yourself that if you sacrifice some bodies to the gaping maw of the beast, surely it won’t hunger for yours.

Or, on the other hand.

You can declare, for the first time in history, that maybe the tranny has a right to exist. That maybe, her freedom to determine her embodiment is indelibly tied to yours. That maybe, just maybe, she’s worth fighting for.

And we can see just how far advocating for a radical gendered autonomy takes us.

Thank you for supporting my work. My upcoming book, ‘Trans/Rad/Fem’, will be out on the 24th of January. If you would like to own these collated essays in book form or simply enable me to continue writing about feminism, please consider picking it up.