I'm stealing this screenshot from a larger post because I believe it perfectly summarizes the argument I'm about to debunk.
I've seen this argument and variations of it a lot in transfeminist spaces. In fact, for many this is the baseline assumption upon which their theory is constructed.
I can say, with confidence, that this is demonstrably false.
While the emergence of patriarchy is complex, most of the theories about it come around to the desire to control resources and reproduction.
Historical hunter-gatherer societies showed little evidence of sex/gender inequality, and this is reinforced by the precense of contemporary hunter-gatherer societies which have relative equality between men and women.
Some argue that the advent of agriculture led to the need to control resources, as evidenced by greater inequality among societies with food surpluses.
This led to a higher division of labor, in which women were forced to spend more time child-rearing. Resulting in them being forced out of the ability to gather and control their own resources.
More recent research, such as the book The Patriarchs: The Origins of Inequality by Angela Saini, suggests that social elites pressured families to form hierarchal structures to ensure social control and the aggregation of wealth. Controlling women's reproductive capacity meant that the men in positions of power could ensure that their wealth was inherited by their biological children.
The subjugation of women goes as far back as 3100 BCE, in which women's reproductive autonomy was controlled, and they were excluded from, "the process of representing or the construction of history".
Marxists, such as Engels, theorize on the oppression of women in The Origin of The Family, Private Property, and the State.
The crux of Engels’ theory of women’s oppression rests on the relationship between the sexual division of labor and the mode of production...
... unlike hunter-gatherer societies, which sought to limit the number of offspring, agricultural societies sought to maximize women’s reproductive potential, so the family would have more children to help out in the fields. Therefore, at the same time that men were playing an increasingly exclusive role in production, women were required to play a much more central role in reproduction."
Women became trapped within their individual families, as the reproducers of society – cut off from production. These changes took place first among the property-owning families, the first ruling class. But eventually, the nuclear family became an economic unit of society as a whole.”
None of the evidence we have suggests that the construct of womanhood or femininity are the reasons why people with vaginas / uteruses are oppressed. In fact, it is very likely that the reverse is true.
The need to control the reproductive autonomy of those who can become pregnant led to the construction societal gender roles that ensured that those classed as girls and women would continue to be subjugated.
Am I saying that misogyny is exclusively sex-based? No.
I am saying that misogyny as a social force (which oppresses people on the basis of both sex and gender), first emerged as a means of the social control of reproduction and resources. The construct of women as inferior was created to justify that control. Not the other way around.
