“A TERF is a white supremacist whose gateway to white supremacy is anti-trans bigotry, instead of anti-Semitism or anti-Blackness or anti-migration or misogyny. As with any gateway, many people engaging in this ideology may not be aware of their proximity to white supremacy. This is the standard radicalization pathway that we have seen over and over and over with, for example, anti-Islamic sentiment. Personally, [I] find it is most comparable to how anti-Semitism gateways are used. Often, we see white supremacists exploiting legitimate grievances with the financial systems by turning into an anti-Semitic issue. White supremacists take legitimately frustrated and class-oppressed people’s anger at banks, and carefully plant the seeds of anti-Semitism. They’ll point out the irrefutable fact that there exist Jewish people in executive positions in banking and vilely twist this. TERFs take a legitimate grievance: patriarchal oppression of women and homophobia and turn it into a movement based on systematic exclusion of a specific class of people. This is the redpill. [We] need to stop the good-faith engagements with their ideology and start treating it like the gateway to white supremacy that it is.”
— Emily Gorcenski, Source: https://twitter.com/EmilyGorcenski/status/1088180524504571908
I don’t think a lot of people understand that transphobia is, in fact, inherently racist.
it never would have occurred to me that transphobia has roots in racism or that TERFs are a gateway into white supremacy.
information like this is vital.
It’s inherently racist because it assumes all cultures follow the western concept of the absolute gender binary rooted in what genitals you have.
It’s also racist because it defines womanhood using conventionally attractive white women as the baseline.
Women who have facial hair, have thick or “excessive” body hair, have broad shoulders, have “masculine” facial features like angular jaws, have deep voices, are taller than “average”, have receding hairlines, are muscular, etc are immediately assumed to be men because they don’t fit white European ideals of womanhood. And these standards do affect white women of course, whether they’re cis or trans, but they mostly target Black and brown women.
There’s a reason why Black women, particularly athletes, are the ones who get targeted with so many accusations of being men. Why they’re expected to undergo hormone testing. Why they’re accused of having “excessive” testosterone. Why they’re expected to undergo physical examinations to “prove” that they’re “real” women.
Radical feminism, trans inclusive or not, is based around biological essentialist white supremacy whether radfems want to admit it or not.
