Transfeminism is incomplete without an understanding of how our white supremacist patriarchy operates, and this is my understanding:
All women are treated as property of white men under the patriarchy, but white, cisgender women specifically are treated as prized property, rather than disposable property like the rest of us
This means that white cis women have some level of protection under the patriarchy--they are necessary to create more white babies and "secure the future of the white race," after all. White men will go to great lengths to defend what they see as their property from external threats. Many of them outright hunger for an opportunity to do so. Consider how many white men love to fantasize about committing brutal murder to home invaders
This gives white, cisgender women a bit of leverage over their white male oppressors. Because white men hunger for an opportunity to defend their property, white, cisgender women need only paint a disposable class of women as a threat to them to direct white men's violence against them. And, because a woman's supposed inherent harmlessness is the reason they need men's protection in the first place, their targets cannot really be portrayed as women like them, so they masculinize them
"Women are weak and ineffectual, so we need men to protect us. ...How can this class of women be strong enough to hurt us, then? It's because they're basically actually men"
"Male" enough to be dangerous, but still female enough to be disposable property of the patriarchy for white cis men to kill freely, that is
This damselization is how the terf movement operates. Terfs largely do not build their movement around organizing to directly protect themselves from the supposed threat trans women pose. No, they simply damselize themselves, and call upon higher structural, patriarchal powers to do the actual protecting. The damsel does not protect herself from the dragon, after all. She calls out to the knight instead
Terfs don't endeavor to challenge the white supremacist patriarchy, despite how dangerous they say "men" are, because when they say "men," they're not talking about white, cis men--they're talking about trans women
Their movement is about creating and upholding a dragon so that they can maintain the meager amount of leverage they have over the class that oppresses them--but to do this requires maintaining said oppressor class as well, or there is no power to leverage in the first place
From this vantage point, the route to freeing themselves from their oppressors is obvious: organize with the groups they oppress
They don't do this, though. Maybe they're just comfortable enough in their relative privilege, and, being conservative, would rather maintain their position than fight for better. Or maybe it's because, to become a terf in the first place, you have to have internalized the idea that you are below the white man, that you are the damsel and he is the knight, that you are only safe if you are his property
