"Racism is inherent to transmisogyny"
So, are white trans women affected by racism?
This is not a gotcha. I've seen a lot of people on here attempt to discuss racism and (trans)misogyny as co-constitutive, but people never show their work. If racism is in fact inseparable from transmisogyny, is everyone who suffers transmisogyny a victim of racism?
If cis women of color are subject to transmisogyny, is there no distinction between cis and trans women of color, either within or outside the West?
How does the inseparability of racism and transmisogyny operate in global south cultures where imperialism has shaped their history and economy, yes, but the extant regime is not one where white people are a present or meaningful demographic?
I know people mean well, but if you're going to make broad, sweeping statements about these topics, you need to be able to think through your arguments, realize what conclusions you are implicitly promulgating, and reason out whether what you're saying makes sense and matches up with history and empirical reality.
Because I've had experience both with Western and non-Western patriarchies, and I'm fairly sure in that regard, I am a minority on this site.
From early in development, race biases how children think about gender—often in a manner that treats Black women as less typical and represe
Gender-affirming care poses a challenge to the reproductive imperative imposed by white supremacy.
As scholars like Jules Gill-Peterson and others suggest, whiteness and childhood are co-constructed. Children of color are rarely described the way we describe white children, as something to be protected, nurtured and supported. Instead, they undergo “adultification,” being treated legally and socially as adults. White children, within this framework, need to be protected from the “social contagion” of transness. In comparison, children of color are already contaminated because of the historical connections between race and sexual and gender transgression.
[...]The bills flow from a fundamental belief that whiteness — both the category and those who occupy it — is under threat. The validity of this belief is less important than its influence; studies demonstrate that white Americans tend to see racism as a zero-sum game they are now losing. White people, as a category, tend to think of themselves as victims in a “winner-take-all” battle between supposedly “natural” racial groups, in which survival (and reproduction) of the fittest determines the dominant group. From this perspective, any advance made by non-white racial groups is seen as a direct attack on white supremacy and the ongoing ability of white people to reproduce — not just children, but the power and privilege of whiteness itself.
[...]As the Supreme Court said in its 1873 Bradwell v. Illinois decision, “The paramount destiny and mission of woman are to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother.” This reproductive imperative is consecrated in biological conceptions of gender, which see reproduction not only as a duty toward society or the nation but also as a nature bestowed upon us at birth by gender. We caught a glimpse of the racial logic behind anti-abortion movements when Illinois Republican Rep. Mary Miller claimed that the overturning of Roe v. Wade was a “historic victory for white life” at a rally with Trump
[...]By contrast, reproduction is stigmatized among women of color through racist tropes like the “welfare queen” and forced sterilization targeting Black, Latine and Native American communities. Although abortion bans may increase births among communities of color, the criminalization of birthing parents and the foster-care-to-prison pipeline ensure that many people of color impacted by the bans are denied the right to vote and treated as “surplus populations” that can be eliminated or whose influence can be removed from society.
[...]Racism is foundational to reproductive control, and the United States eugenics movement shared and inspired much of the Nazi philosophy of “racial hygiene” that sought to maintain the dominance and “purity” of the white race. Today’s conservative reproductive agenda is little more than racial hygiene’s modern iteration. Transgender people pose a grave threat to this agenda, because they resist the idea that women are defined by an innate female essence rooted in reproductive biology, and that being mothers is, therefore, their nature and destiny. If someone born with ovaries and a uterus can escape the call of motherhood and if someone born without can be a woman, the white supremacist message falls apart.
[...]By rigidly policing gender norms and sexuality, anti-trans legislation reinforces the message that the proper and natural role of women is to bear children within a nuclear, heterosexual marriage. That is why the same bills that would ban gender-affirming care expressly allow nonconsensual surgeries on intersex newborns, because those interventions reinforce rather than undermine gender essentialism.
To white conservatives, womanhood is rooted in the reproductive body, and its achievement is motherhood. That message, in turn, serves to encourage reproduction with the aim of maintaining white demographic dominance. In other words, transphobia is a by-product of misogyny, which is a corollary of white supremacy. Anti-trans laws trace their roots back to racism.
The interconnectedness of these systems of domination makes some people much more vulnerable to them than others. Even before these bans were proposed, access has been unequal based on who can afford insurance access. These bans will deepen this inequality, particularly along the lines of race and class. Non-white families disproportionately lack the financial resources to move to other states to avoid criminal bans on gender-affirming care or mount a legal defense if investigated by child services for accepting their child’s gender. As athlete Caster Semenya’s experience demonstrates, Black women are at greater risk of being subjected to dehumanizing gender checks in sports, including proposed genital inspections on children, because they do not satisfy white ideals of femininity.
This week on "Ask Code Switch," we're talking about who gets to define beauty norms — and what it means to push back on them.
Think about why that person is beautiful. Is it because of their perfectly white teeth? Their thick, shiny hair? The fact that their features conform perfectly to Western beauty norms? To begin with, a lot of current Western beauty standards celebrate whiteness — not some objective, biological, evolutionary thing, but literally just being a white person. In fact, if you go back and look at the work of some early racial theorists — people like Christoph Meiners and Johann Blumenbach — they defined the category of "white," or "Caucasian," as being the most beautiful of the races.
[...]That association between beauty and whiteness has proved hard to shake. There's a reason that so many people still think of an "all-American beauty" as a thin, blonde, blue-eyed white woman. It wasn't until 1940 that the rules were changed to allow women of color to enter the Miss America pageant. Before that, the official rules stated that contestants had to be "of good health and of the white race." Decisions about who society holds up as beautiful also have a lot to do with class. Nell Irvin Painter notes that a lot of the things we consider beautiful are actually just proxies for wealth. Think of how much it costs to get cosmetic surgery, or braces, or even a facial.
[...]There are other movements that have tried to address beauty as a political force. There was the indigenismo movement in Mexico. One of its icons was the artist Frida Kahlo. In her self-portraits, she painted herself dressed in pre-Columbian clothes and hairstyles, with visible facial hair and hair between her eyebrows. Many have described those artistic choices as being a radical rejection of white, colonial beauty standards.
And these days, a lot of women push back on the idea that they should remove facial and body hair in order to be considered beautiful or hygienic or professional. The activist and model Harnaam Kaur has spoken about how her life changed once she decided to stop shaving her beard: "I feel a lot stronger and liberated to be who I am and accept who I am freely. ... I'm here as a woman who's wearing something that's supposed to be — in quotations "supposed to be" — a man's feature." The body positivity movement and the fat-acceptance movements have also consistently pushed back on the idea that thin, young, white, able-bodied women are the epitome of beauty — or that beauty should be a precondition for respect to begin with.
And all of this white supremacy and gender essentialism and bio essentialist bigotry affects everyone.
Everyone is affected by white supremacy and it's attempts to uphold itself and it's ideals, certainly any country that's been targeted by western imperialism.
And arguably one of the most prominent being sexism via patriarchy.
Which results in things like this:
I face a lot of pressure to be ultrafeminine—and I’m tired of it
In addition to being a performer, I’m also a trans person in a culture that seems to only understand gender through appearance. My being seen as the woman I am is almost entirely dependent on my ability to perform femininity as its been established in our culture—namely, to be beautiful.
And we've established now that the ideal of beauty and femininity that most women seek to attain has been defined by white supremacists.
Trans women are no exception.
I wouldn't say white trans women experience racism, but I think it'd be ignorant to say that they aren't affected by it.
In the same vein of logic, I wouldn't say men experience misogyny, but think it'd be ignorant to say they aren't affected by sexism when toxic masculinity exists.
People across several countries that aren't in the west are constantly criticized for how accessible and normalized skin bleaching is, are they not?
These definitions of white supremacy absolutely include people in other countries and across the global south. It's not just the west that upholds these ideals, afterall the west's main export is in fact white supremacy and I can't think of a single place where that doesn't ring true and/or hasn't influenced cultures elsewhere.
Excuse me, I don’t want to be rude, but I don’t think this is addressing the OP adequately. Yes, transmisogyny and white supremacy have influenced each other over the past few hundred years starting with the emergence of white identity at the advent of European colonialism, and obviously that history is significant, but I don’t thing that provides compelling evidence that racism (in the form of modern white supremacy least of all) is inherent to transmisogyny. There is plenty of evidence for transmisogyny predating modern white identity (just look at Ancient Rome, Greece, Egypt, and so on and what they thought about “effeminate men” and other trannyized categories of people so to speak), and while colonialism did introduce a lot of oppressive categories of people to nations who had no previous oppressiveness along such lines, often it exacerbated a lot of existing problems within those societies. I think that there are a lot of historical ties between white supremacy and transmisogyny, but to say they are necessarily constitutive of each other is just historically on shaky grounds, and whether or not they reinforce each other is a historically relative thing that depends on how they have developed as systems throughout the history of a particular region.
Yeah, that was a lot of words to entirely ignore how transfeminization predates modern regimes of racialization by ... several centuries, at least?
