Repost cause this was a bit half-baked and had some glaring editing failures in it.
The idea that transmisogyny can only ever be experienced by trans women or transfems has the same core as the idea that cis women are rewarded for "performing masculinity" by the patriarchy or that trans men are an oppressive minority by being men.
What it presumes is ultimately that societal repercussions, punishments, shaming, othering, harm and all the horrors inflicted on those who transgress their designated socially accepted normative categories of gender hinge on identity and labels and nothing else.
Because we as progressive transfeminists know that self-identity is identity some of us could be misled to believe that that means that society at large operates the way we wish it would.
If TERFs claim that trans women are socially treated as men and derive privilege from this which we know to not be true then surely the crux of the matter is that self identity is truth and identifying as a man makes you a man in every possible way... and it does, but not to a hostile and repressive society built upon hegemony and systems of injustice.
The patriarchy punishes deviation because capitalism requires a "social other"... capitalism works because, broadly, people are able to convince themselves that there are some who are "unlike me" and "unlike us" who'd surely be deserving of all the bad things that can happen to people.
Our brains are evolutionarily geared for this to work, unfortunately, because as biologists know when our survival is threatened is not when mutual support and aid thrives.
But we do not live in a world of rough survival.
We live in a world that, for all material reasons, should be post scarcity and it's only for injustice and for hegemony that we a bereft.
And so society, capitalism, the patriarchy, collaborate to hide what Karl Marx ( air horn noise, i mentioned him ) called the contradictions of late stage capitalism.
Which means: people suffer in our society where the material conditions would dictate that nobody has to suffer. So society punishes deviation from its norms because our brains are evolutionarily wired to find that if anybody has to suffer it be those unlike us... but nobody has to suffer, truly. If we don't question it we all are capable of falling victim to that mentality.
TERFs claim trans women are societally treated like men and that gives them privilege but trans women, quite obviously, aren't "the oppressor" within the patriarchy.
And TIRFs claim that trans men are societally treated like men and that gives them privilege but trans men, quite obviously, still aren't "the oppressor" within the patriarchy because the ability to oppress hinges on being accepted BY the in-group of oppressors as one of them.
The ability to hold systemic privileges in our society hinge on not showing deviation from norms that society deems to be valid reasons to punish, shame, other, harm and marginalize and those norms are cisnormativity, white supremacy, heteronormativity, amatonormativity, the binary of sex and gender, the normativity of abled bodies and minds, of thin bodies and pale skin.
Very few trans men are passing enough to slip through all these thinly woven nets and even when they do pass perfectly they STILL diverge by not being cis.
But even then many cis men do not slip through this net of barbed wire unharmed.
Privilege and marginalization aren't binary states. They are intersectional and most of us derive systemic privilege from some parts of our ability to conform to the norms deemed appropriate by this system of oppression.
Society treats trans woman as what they are: divergent from these norms.
Society treats trans men as what they are: divergent from these norms.
It treats nonbinary people, intersex people, people of color, disabled people, insane people, healthy people, neurodivergent people and any other person that diverges from it's countless norms in a myriad horrid ways.
The norm is being cis. The norm is being endosex. The norm is being white. The norm is being binary gendered. The norm is being straight. The norm is being alloromantic and allosexual. The norm is being able bodied and sane. The norm is being a man and neurotypical and healthy.
If you diverge from even ONE of these you will experience repercussions and these repercussions are impacted by which of the countless other parts of this net you manage to slip through and at which ones the barbed wire cuts into your skin.
We must stand in solidarity with each other.
We must understand the ways that these hegemonies function and who truly is on our side.
We must not let our communities be divided by those who truly profit from that same divide.
Pat on the back if you read this whole thing, it's long, I know <3
But I think it's important.
