the socialisation that terfs like to talk about - and use to deny the possibility of camab womanhood - does not exist. the idea that men and women receive different messages in childhood - as though children were being separated into different rooms based on assigned gender to watch different educational videos - doesnât hold up.
women receive and internalise the same message of misogyny as men do. this is not, of course, a post about how men and women are âequally badâ, or anything like that. but women do learn misogyny. the difference is that women are misogynist towards each other while men are misogynist towards women, who have no recourse.
if a woman mistreats another woman, she will probably be mistreated in turn. this is normalised with words like âcatty,â âbitch,â - we are told this is simply how women are with each other. meanwhile if a man mistreats a woman, he faces no consequences. this is normalised by heterosexuality. his actions will be justified with phrases like âboys will be boysâ or, even worse, by attributing his violence to a secret fondness he does not know how else to express.
the consequence of this is that as women grow up, we either learn to treat each other better or risk having no female friends. (a lot of straight women take that second path!) meanwhile men continue to get away with their violence, and so their misogyny only grows deeper and becomes more entrenched.
i think it is common nowadays to imagine that boys and girls start out the same and grow apart, but i think we have envisioned it wrong. the difference between men and women is not that women do not go on to learn misogyny like men do, but that we unlearn it while men dont. and the reason we unlearn it has nothing to do with biology but with consequences, and the need to find shelter among other women. this need is even greater among lesbians, of course, which is why weâre all the best feminists ~
but the need is also greater for trans women, and even more so if you are both trans and a lesbian. trans women need female community because we are so violently rejected from the male - where even the odd âcoolâ straight cis girl is allowed to be a part of things.
what is also greater for trans women are the consequences we face for internalised misogyny. where cis women are often willing to let it slip amongst each other (nobodyâs perfect!) any instance of misogyny that a trans woman has not yet been able to unlearn (as all of us, cis and trans, are still and will always be trying to unlearn) is capitalised on, punished harshly, and held up as proof - either of our inherently violent biology or of our socialisation (depending on which brand of transmisogynist you ask).
and when trans women face these consequences they are often final. they are promptly exiled from whatever community they were a part of and never welcomed back. and there are so few communities that even want us in the first place.Â
(and this is not like when a man is ousted from a community. he will always have somewhere else to go, every other community in the world is meant for him - including countless which are only meant for him, and men like him. this âconsequenceâ he faces is no consequence at all.)
and so, a trans woman, having had this happen to her or seen it happen to someone like her, knows that her place in society is as precarious as it can be, and her holding on to it depends on her vast and in-depth knowledge of feminism, politics, social niceties, ethics, and her willingness and ability to perform all of these as well as any role or labor her community might demand of her. and that is her socialisation.
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