really really really detest it when (usually older millennial and genX) cis women say shit like "welcome to being a woman!" or "that's how you know trans women are women!" and so on in response to hearing about instances of catcalling, sexual assault, workplace chauvinism etc. directed at trans women. in the first place it's blisteringly patronising, as if transfems are not and have not been constantly subject to misogyny throughout their lives both pre and post transition, but in the second it perpetuates this vile mindset that somehow receiving misogynistic abuse is validating of your womanhood. it's a head on the very same hydra that makes girls shamefully privately feel that they must ugly and undesirable if they're not catcalled or objectified or 'chosen' by sexual assaulters.
your identity, your dignity and your worth as a woman have absolutely nothing to do with how or why abusive people lash out at you. the insidious narrative that survivors should feel special on some level for having been worthy of their abuse is battered wife rhetoric. it's the perpetrator-system of violence grooming you to accept, and even shamefully yearn for, violence it always intended to inflict. and women are so often complicit in repeating the narrative back to each other. sometimes it's very well meaning and springs up out of the solidarity of shared experience, trying to reclaim power from situations where power was wielded against you, but sometimes it's lana del rey sadgirl coquette I need a man who'll slap me around so I know he cares. sometimes it's eating disorders and self harm. the twinning of femininity and female worthiness with suffering, associating the scars of misogynistic violence with acceptance of one's femininity by somebody who hates you, is profoundly unhealthy and profoundly unfair.
bottom line: trans women have never needed to be identifiable by their abusers at a glance to be subject to misogynistic violence. they have never even needed to be out. remember the early days of the internet when online culture was so outspokenly misogynistic as a baseline that most women just never disclosed their gender, never went on mic, never posted pictures? would anyone ever seriously argue that women weren't subject to misogynistic abuse online until they broke anonymity? and that being the case, would it ever ever seem appropriate to hear someone had been doxxed or sexually harassed for disclosing her gender and respond "heh, proves you really are a woman"?
womanhood is not contingent on suffering. womanhood is not contingent on suffering. womanhood is not contingent on suffering. the cart does not define the horse.
While I understand a sarcastic "great, you're passing" as a first response:
Any reaction to that account from any woman must include something from the "okay, how do we ensure your safety/get you justice/repair the damage/prevent the perpetrator from ever doing that again/get your self-defence up for the next time" drawers... if you're trying at all to be helpful. They don't? You don't.
What happened was not ok, was not normal, was not what women need to settle for, and pretending otherwise is not solidarity, but an indicator that you both need help instead.
