I have a question, if you don’t want to/can’t answer maybe one of your followers can. I keep seeing that men who claim to be women are ultimate misogynists or are displaying misogyny. Can you help me understand how or why? It makes sense to me and I believe it but something is not clicking for me.
The foundational principle of patriarchal ideology is that 'man' and 'woman' are not merely neutral biological realities but rather representations of pseudo-spiritual categories; this is, of course, retroactive justification for the oppression of women. It is claimed that 'woman' is a type of person who not only has a vagina, uterus etc. but also is more caring, frivolous, emotional etc. - very useful beliefs to have if you want to force women into continuous pregnancies and out of wider society. If you want to combat the oppression of women, you have to deconstruct patriarchal beliefs, and it's impossible to do this without recognising the class of people being oppressed and why they're being oppressed. Trans activism ostensibly wants to acknowledge misogyny but doesn't want to put the work in to dissect that fundamental patriarchal belief in the origin of sex stereotypes; instead, they find themselves agreeing with the patriarchy that the body is lesser than the spiritual self, and so sex stereotypes exist but not even associated with sex.
Trans-identified males do not have neutral female sexed bodies, nor do they experience the misogyny that women with such bodies are pushed into - but they do however recognise the sex stereotypes and identify with a romanticised version of them; something they're able to do much more freely in a society where women experience relative freedom. They get to roleplay an aesthetised version of our oppression without actually being oppressed. Women in our society are 'free' to engage in the consumerist practice of buying and wearing clothes and makeup, as well as undergoing plastic surgery (to 'affirm' our identities within a capitalist system that entrenches hierarchy and enforces this patriarchal belief that there is an 'identity' above and beyond our mere biological, material reality); so, then, male people get to indulge in such practices without ever needing to consider why they get to be the default whereas women have to decorate and modify ourselves in order to receive societal respect - male people get respect by default, and they are completely oblivious to that.
Additional, most - if not all, at this stage - trans-identified men are heavily influenced by pornography, which - no matter what conservatives pretend to believe otherwise - is the ultimate expression of what patriarchal ideology believes about women: that we lack souls, that we are inherently corrupted by our needy, consuming, leaking, animalistic bodies, and we need to be 'tamed' by men sexually - that under the surface, no matter how much we play pretend at being fully human, women are fundamentally 'whores'. Men who are both detached from their biological reality and also experience guilt/cognitive dissonance over their dehumanisation of women facilitating a desire to rape, see a certain appeal in the 'freedom' their beliefs ostensibly offer women.
This belief that women are more 'free' in their base, animalistic nature is something share across all systems of oppression: rich people are envious of the 'simple folk', white people believe in the 'noble savage' stereotype, disabled people are subject to being perceived as inherently more 'pure' than the 'able-bodied'. So, then, male people, enchained by having an ego based in their sense of cultural superiority over animalistic women, romanticise the female experience, especially the sexual and romantic ones.
This is also how sexed roles are sold to women under patriarchy: being surface-level creatures incapable of deeper appreciation of life means that women get to experience child-like joy and enjoy aesthetics; being weaker and caring, women get to experience avoiding fighting in wars and men will claim 'chivalry' over not hitting women; engaging in bdsm gives women a 'freedom' to not have to make life decisions or think too much about what they actually want out of life; and, of course, unburdened by supposedly not having a desire to rape/forcibly impregnate, women are 'free' to be animalistic during sex, especially as we lie there and experience pleasure, writhing and screaming with multiple orgasms, and men have to 'perform' in order to 'please' us, which is something they use to contribute to their ego and brag about to other men. Men's belief that they have to sacrifice some sense of lightness and freedom in order to think more deeply and make the 'tough decisions' is the exact same principle as the 'white man's burden' - the belief that the oppressor has to take an adult-like responsibility over the unwashed mashes, the children of the world, imposing restrictions, punishment and order.
This, of course, is all a flimsy pretext in order to commit violence, exert control and extract resources. And men deep down know this, or else they wouldn't go to such lengths to protect each other as a class. And with women in modern western society not submitting to men, there is no 'reward' at the end for a lot of these men. So for many of them, they see how they're 'forced' to construct this male ego without women 'playing along', and as such being a woman is seen as enviable - privileged, even. Trans-identified men are not particularly shy about this; trans spaces are littered with overt misogyny and the belief in 'cis privilege', and the term 'TME' (transmisogyny exempt) is a dogwhistle to 'cis' women, with some TIMs overtly stating they believe cis men to be 'TMA' (transmisogyny affected) because they have the potential to be closeted transwomen. TIMs have appropriated feminist terminology to both gain legitimacy and undermine the legitimacy of actual feminism, and 'transfeminism' is getting increasingly bold with this; their belief is that hatred of trans women as 'failed males' forms the basis of misogyny itself, of course deliberately obfuscating the fact that male people constructed this idea to justify the oppression of women.
I don't know if i would say that transgenderism is the 'ultimate expression of misogyny' because I find that a reductive concept, but I do think it is perhaps the most convert, insidious and insulting expression of misogyny, in its embrace of sex stereotypes as a foundation of defining womanhood, in its denial of sex-based oppression, and its appropriation of feminism.
