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vodcar:

morphodyke:

so my housemate and i were talking last night about terfs because i’ve been getting some more harassment, and she brought up how terfism is really a conspiracy theory, and a very unbelievable one at that.

i mean, it’s literally absurd on the face of it. they believe that almost every trans woman (with the exception of those they groom in their communities) is part of a vast deception, one that’s been variously going on since Nazis, Stalin, or ancient greek necrophiles “invented” trans women. that every single trans woman is actually on some level secretly a man, whether consciously or not. that every single trans woman is lying about the self-reporting of the abuse they’ve experienced. that everyone who is allies with trans women, has a trans woman family member they’re supportive of, is dating a trans woman, etc, is actually delusional and being decieved by this giant secret army of a bunch of men spontaneously giving up their entire lives to enact a conspiracy just to be able to appropriate from women (something that men are already freely capable of doing). it means believing that every single lgbt+ kid and ally who actually, like, understands the way gender is socially constructed is actually being misled into collectively believing a mass delusion. and it means believing that somehow all of this was caused and propagated by a group that ostensibly has almost no social power at all, and that it is being perpetrated against the majority of people on earth. all of these beliefs fly in the face of sense, demanding a suspension of disbelief that would be absurd were it not for the prevailing transmisogyny in our culture. and day-to-day, it’s blatant and obvious that we are suffering, so that too must either be a hoax or a trick we are also playing on ourselves.

there’s just nothing plausible about terfism; the only reason its wild claims are listened to is because there’s such a widespread animosity against trans women that people will accept just about anything (again, there are hundreds of thousands of people on youtube that think we’re reincarnated babylonian demons or whatever). it makes terfs feel special, like they really get the world in a way other cis women don’t, that they, unlike other cis women, understand the Real Danger, and they can build a community out of reassuring each other constantly about the crazy distorted TroonWorld they live in. like any other conspiracy theory, it draws in people who feel alienated and disempowered, and gives them a quick access to a kind of feeling of social power built by their constant volley of hatred upon the lives of young girls. the adrenaline kick out of reblogging to prove someone wrong by tacking on an unrelated gotcha, probably knowing on some level the traumatic effect their constant harassment has and getting a sadomisogynistic kick out of that too. screaming again and again, “your words are irrelevant because all i can think about is your genitals.” because clearly this is all about projection and transference: the chance to enact the most violent misogynist disparagement on an emotionally safe target, a target the terf can convince herself deserves every bit of harassment and hate.

is it really even about us? is this “trans conspiracy” actually about us, or are we just the convenient targets for a series of women working theough the way their understanding of patriarchy attached to body forms rather than gender; people who felt traumatized and isolated and wanted to be part of a special community where they could feel like they have special insight; narcissists who don’t realize they never actually respond to what trans women say but just react to key words like an algorithm? people who could work themselves up into believing there is a worldwide conspiracy of hundreds of thousands if not millions of people spontaneously giving up their previous life in order to secretly infiltrate womanhood, and that everyone else who knows them and sees the experiences of their lives is just being decieved or deluded? in other words, is the situation of terfism the sort of thing we can only understand when we entirely imagine it without the actual trans women who are being targeted, as a psychotic stage play acting out traumatic patterns inside a terf’s mind? after all, where do troons and trannies and transactivists and all these images of terror come from? from inside the minds of terfs…

so perhaps we give them too much credit when we frame terfism as a response to our existence. we have existed as long as gender has; terfism is new. maybe it’s a psychological response against the women’s liberation movement that ripped the curtain from in front of patriarchy’s machinations of social construction. maybe j ray and mary daly and the others just couldn’t deal with facing the void that is patriarchal reality, so they affixed to a simultaneous hatred of trans women and patronizing contempt for cis women who support trans women, to set themselves apart as the ones who, in gazing a little south of their navels all the time, could somehow find the true feminine mystical power / political analysis, unlike all these others and their complex problems. likewise, the rising “sjw” discussion of misogyny and gender on the internet has produced a slew of young women who can’t accept fully deconstructing the patriarchal worldview, and fall even harder into weird bioessentialist stances than oldschool terfs. again, trans women here are not what is being reacted to. trans women are a target onto which terfs fixate, but what they respond to is patriarchy, and they channel it’s energies against us. we are just the victims of their trauma narratives.

all of which is to say, maybe part of the reason it’s so impossible to get through to a terf even when you’re obviously right is because none of us have anything to do with this, except being the target of the violence. terfism is about the psychology of terfs, and how they react to learning about the structures of patriarchy. we are just objects for them to use in their narratives amongst each other. i doubt they really do care if they succeed in bringing a full-scale genocidal purge against us, because we’re not real to them, and our lives could never matter to them in even the most basic human way (which is part of why they consistently treat actual men better than us). they are just using us, and until the culture of misogyny changes there’s little we can do, especially when they seem incapable of reading and actually understanding a single sentence that we write.

“is it really even about us? is this “trans conspiracy” actually about us, or are we just the convenient targets for a series of women working theough the way their understanding of patriarchy attached to body forms rather than gender; people who felt traumatized and isolated and wanted to be part of a special community where they could feel like they have special insight; narcissists who don’t realize they never actually respond to what trans women say but just react to key words like an algorithm?”