All people have a tendency to be unconsciously biased toward seeing trans women as untrustworthy, unsafe, lacking vulnerability, the problem to be solved rather than a person to be taken care of.
And this is not less true in trans and queer and feminist communities. It’s just more unconscious, and more propped up with social justice, feminism, queer lib, leftist, and anti-oppression beliefs.
This book is talking about this in context to a physical public situation of harassment, but this is true of social conflicts too, including on social media, in friend groups, in all kinds of situations.
The unconscious bias also gets taken advantage of by people who know what they’re doing and hide behind that bias to make their mistreatment of transfems seem reasonable—again, often supported with social justice and anti-oppression rhetoric.
TERFs aren’t the only people who do this!
It felt so incredible to see this spelled out in print, plain as day, an actual book calling out a real thing I’ve experience more times than I can count, that all transfems I know go through, and that I still feel crazy for seeing because there’s so much gaslighting about it.
You know how when you KNOW something is real, but you feel defensive about that knowledge, like you have to be ready to hold onto it, and then you see something confirming that knowledge for you in no uncertain terms and it feels like “wow maybe I wasn’t crazy all this time!”
That’s how I felt seeing this.
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