the trouble with terfs (apart from, you know, the immediate danger they pose to trans people and especially trans women) is that they don’t actually understand the mechanics of oppression
here’s the thing: a lot of women, especially white women, find TERF rhetoric really, really compelling. this is because radfems are really loud and really angry about the systemic things that really, genuinely, and significantly harm women - especially white women.
growing up assuming “male” is the default and having a father who waffles around the question of whether women are and have always been men’s equals? that’s damaging. growing up being inundated with makeup ads and airbrushed models and anti-aging creams is damaging. a woman having body hair being treated as an abomination and/or a joke, women being reduced to simultaneous sexlessness and hypersexualization, the ontological impossibility of women being whole people is something that many of us grow up learning. that’s damaging. that’s real.
but it’s not the end of the story.
because see, if you’re raised as a white girl in a white community you are going to have sexism-related trauma. But your trauma is not the same as a black girl raised in a black community, or a biracial girl, or a second-generation Korean-American girl. The cause of your trauma is systemic, but your particular trauma is individual, and the shape it takes is affected by everything in your life, including the other types of systemically-inflicted trauma you may or may not be subject to.
You speak for every woman when you say sexism is damaging. You do not speak for every woman when you say how it damages you.
Here is where TERFs go wrong:
the nature of trauma is such that our brains shy away from experiencing it. We deny and repress and stubbornly pretend it away, and even when we manage to acknowledge it, we do so in increments. That’s good. That’s a way of protecting ourselves.
the nature of empathy, as a general neurotypical phenomenon, is that humans feel others’ suffering, to varying personal extents, depending on a number of factors, beginning with brain structure and ending with how we contextualize others’ personhood and the reality of their suffering.
when we are dealing with systemically-inflicted trauma, when we’re trying to process the effects of an abuser that is not someone that can be fought or escaped but is instead an entire society of which you are an inextricable part, there are two directions you can go. You don’t have to pick either/or. People fall all along the gradient of these extremes.
The first option is that you look at your trauma and consider that it is not unique. You allow for the personhood of Other People, and allow for the possibility that they also have been traumatized and victimized by an unjust society. You let your own trauma catalyze your empathy for others.
The second option is that you refuse to feel any other kinds of pain.
You’re suffering. You’re furious. The injustice that has been done to you is monstrous, untenable, and there is nothing, nothing, nothing you as an individual can do to stop it happening again and again and again to other people just like you. You don’t have breath in your lungs to express how horrific this trauma is.
You cannot bear the thought that others might feel this and other pain, too.
You cannot bear the thought that anyone might feel a different kind of pain than you.
They aren’t oppressed. Not like I am.
And, when all else fails:
They’re monsters. They’re predators in disguise.
This is how genocides work.
Trauma breeds trauma, if we let it.
Now, see, the thing is, among other fun brainweird quirks, I have hyperempathy. I get why people become exclusionists. I get why they become radfems. I get why they become TERFs. I empathize with them. I can’t not.
Your trauma is unbearable. I’ve been raised a girl in a white community, I understand you, in many ways I am you, and that terrifies me, because I know exactly how you feel. But the thing is, I also know how everyone else feels, insofar as they’ve expressed themselves and I’ve been able to understand. Everyone I let myself see as a person. Everyone I listen to until I understand. I feel the agony of a little girl raised to think she was wrong, that she was broken, that she could never be whole and was a monster for even wanting to. I feel your pain, and I feel the pain of everyone you hate.
Your trauma is unbearable, and it’s not the only trauma that matters.
Black trauma matters. Indigenous trauma matters. Colonized trauma matters. Immigrant trauma, disabled trauma, queer trauma, transmasc trauma, nonbinary trauma, you may not understand it and you may not want to feel it but that does not mean it isn’t real.
Trans women’s trauma fucking matters.
Just because they get the fun three-for-one deal of experiencing your trauma as women, and the trauma of being trans in a violently transphobic world, and the trauma of being raised like men by a patriarchial system - a different kind of trauma, an uncomfortable kind of trauma, a trauma you don’t understand and just because white men are the favoured child in this grand system of abuse doesn’t mean they aren’t also traumatized by it, and I have only ever met one man in my life who hasn’t been violently screwed over in some way by the fundamental nature of this system - just because they get your patriarchial trauma three times over doesn’t mean you get to pretend they aren’t real.
It hurts. I know it hurts. I know it hurts to see things for what they are. I know you’re only trying to keep yourself safe, and save those that are like you. I know.
But if the way you go about fighting for yourself means you turn on the people being crushed by the system instead of the system itself, you are part of the problem.
And you’re doing nothing to protect the people exactly like you. It’s not a coincidence that TERF rhetoric so perfectly parallels 19th-century anti-feminist writings.
Even if it didn’t. Even if you managed what you so desperately want, and set (white cis abled dyadic) women up for ultimate safety from this hurt, your efforts are meaningless.
Because you would slaughter children in your so-called just war. You have done so. You will do so again.
I don’t mean that metaphorically. There is no place for trans people in your world, and you are happy to let them die. As surely as “the patriarchy,” you are the reason trans kids’ suicide rates are as high as they are. You are the reason the trans panic defense ever existed and if you have your way it will exist again, because you would kill innocents in your quest to protect yourselves.
You are the patriarchy, as surely as you hate it.
It’s funny, I suppose. The only monsters humanity has ever birthed are the humans that fear them the most.
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