The further along I read The Great Cosmic Mother, the more I see trans women as a natural end result of patriarchy.
With the Industrial Revolution, and the rise of science as the dominant patriarchal religion (...) materialism becomes the dominant and manly ideology (...). But still, matter is viewed as dumb and inert; materialism does not glory in matter, but in the male's ability to manipulate it. "
To me, this echoes the male/TRA worldview where material reality is denied its significance, while at the same time human bodies are just a site for acting out social roles, often through extensive medical intervention. A male body can be made a woman's body through "the male's ability to manipulate it" with hormones and surgeries.
One of the strangest, and bitterest, facts of later male domination over women is that the major tools and industries of this domination were the inventions of women, and first given to the men by women. The ceramic, textile, and clothing industries, the medical and healing professions, farming and the food industry, animal domestication, writing and calendric science, numbers and chemistry, religious symbol and ritual - all women's creations - were taken over by men and then closed to women's entry, except under slave conditions. In the same way men took over women's menstruation and childbirth rites, and then kept women away from these rites under taboo of death.
In the same vein, males are now taking womanhood from women, and redefining actual women as cis women. We are not allowed our own spaces anymore, and if the trans women find out we still do have them, they will not hesitate to threaten us with violence, even death. Trans women are celebrated, while "cis women" all around the world are still relegated to a more or less slave-like position.
As Enki (male god in Sumerian myth) boasts, "Enki perfected greatly that which is woman's task." Men had indeed coopted all of women's craft and "improved" upon it - and, as Enki demonstrated, he's trying hard to do the same with childbirth and motherhood.
"Cis women are just jealous because trans women are better women than they are!" Sound familiar? Trans women are coopting womanhood itself and brazenly claiming to improve it - saying their surgical approximations of vaginas are better than women's actual vaginas, that trans women are more feminine and therefore more womanly... on and on. From Neolithic to modern times, man takes what is woman's, claims to own it, claims to do it better than women, and then banish women from it, in this case by redefining womanhood itself.
For most of the millennia of Christian (and Jewish) history, the biblical God Yahweh and his immaculately begotten son, Christ, have always and only been represented at the altar by a male. Quite often these males have worn skirts. And always, in all times, they have been the givers and upholders of dogmatic laws regarding women - laws telling women how to dress, how to move, how to behave, how to relate to our bodies, how to reproduce, when to reproduce, how to have sexual activities, when to have sexual activities, how to relate to our menstrual periods and our childbirths and our afterbirths, how to bow our heads, cover our hair, keep our eyes modestly averted; how, in general, to be pliant and submissive and unquestioning handmaidens in the holy back-halls, kitchens, and bedrooms of the Lord. Indeed, this strange urge of "holy men", of all patriarchal denominations, to stand there, wearing skirts, giving sermons to the world's genuine females on what it really means to be a woman... is a propensity that needs deep pondering.
(Sjöö&Mor 1987, p. 346-347)
Men in skirts telling women what it means to be a woman... sound familiar?
With this in mind, the phenomenon of trans women openly admitting they used to be nazis/traditionalists/incels/misogynistic neckbeards/conservatives/etc, i.e. steeped in extremely patriarchal ideologies, takes on a whole new significance. Intrinsic to patriarchal thought is that males can grab whatever belongs to women, claim it as his own, "improve" upon it, and banish women from what was theirs. This sets an obvious precedent for trans women, who are in a sense the culmination of this phenomenon, because they do this with womanhood itself. Then, as trans women, they do the same with feminism: going from fascist to liberal feminist the moment they realise they can twist the latter to their advantage - making feminism all about them, "improving" it again to suit their interests and bashing real feminism in the process to such an extent women stay far away from it lest they be labeled TERFs, to finally... kick women out of feminism altogether, make it into a useless all lives matter movement, and forbid women from speaking about our own, real, female experiences, under threat of violence.
Ideologically, patriarchy has gone full circle. Now, if only patriarchal industrialists and capitalists render the earth uninhabitable, the quest of patriarchy will be complete. Total dominion over women and life itself.
To end this on a less grim note: if there's one thing I've learned, it's that the flame of women's power can never be put out completely. It's always right under the surface, waiting to be rekindled. Women's resistance and sisterhood is invaluable, and by being a woman radically, by being a roots feminist, you make a change, and you matter.
