transphobia is ruining feminism

19/04/2025

there is something that's been on my mind for a while that i want to take a big think about here. lately, whenever i'm faced with the profile/website/etc of a woman online that clearly states their feminist beliefs, i'm not filled with the same sense of camaraderie that i once was. now, i become suspicious.

as a lifetime loud and proud feminist, this has been urking me. why should i look at these people with suspicion? feminism and feminist activism have always been extremely important to me. they should be my sisters, and yet i've become distrustful. though as much as it urks me, i do know why.

nowadays, when i see a woman loudly proclaiming themselves feminist, my first instinct has become to find out whether or not they're transphobic.

transphobia is ruining feminism. the influx of terfs and other exclusionary "feminists" makes it impossible to immediately recognize a feminist as a true sister. i don't want to align myself with those who advocate for harm towards transgender people. i don't want to hold hands with those who use theirs to spread hate. but so many so-called feminists today want to make transphobia a sticking point of feminism, insisting that transness is some inherent threat to women. and it's bogus! it's brain rot! and it makes feminism worse.

see, i've also been chewing on how much terfs reaffirm misogynistic and patriarchal ideas in the name of defending their hate. when i was growing up, the most basic form of feminism was to target the notion that women are unequal to men in any respect. campaigns to end cultural cliches like "you throw like a girl" were the norm, and there was a general push towards understanding that anything men can do, women can do too. terf "feminism" discards all of this in the face of a trans woman. suddenly, women are too weak and frail to ever be able to engage in sport against a so-called "man" and they must be protected from any opportunity that they could be "unfairly" overpowered.

or they go the other way and panic over the "women lost" to gender ideology. to the terf, when you endeavour to learn more about yourself and play with what gender means to you, you are only doing so out of some internalized misogyny... which somehow makes you not a feminist anymore? crazy that the internalization of a specific negative belief that you are otherwise in disagreement with (internalized fatphobia to the otherwise body positive person, internalized homophobia to the otherwise queer ally) is understood to be two totally different ballparks except when it comes to misogyny, for some reason. not to sound like i'm saying those terfs are correct in their notion, because i most certainly think that's a big load of shit, but you'd think if they really cared they'd be more tactful.

i love especially when this is a talking point by transphobic detransitioners - like sorry you.... experienced something else for a while and eventually found your way? why exactly is that anyone elses problem??? maybe i'm being unfair as someone who historically has had a very complicated relationship with and viewpoint on gender (but ultimately identifies herself as cis), but it really seems like a no harm, no foul situation to me. maybe you should've figured yourself out sooner, or not been so susceptible to peer pressure. your indecisiveness is not really transgender peoples problem though!

but that's getting into rant territory and that's not really what i'm trying to do here. i'm trying to discuss how transphobia is bad for feminism. let's hit another example that i've seen brought up frequently.

terf rhetoric thrives on this imagined villain. the "evil transgender" who is a man that is just dressing up like a woman so they might get into women's bathrooms and inflict sexual violence on "real" women. so they might get into the women's wrestling ring and inflict physical violence on "real" women. so they might get into women's sport and win one over "real" women. but all this absurd rhetoric does is undermine the actual threat of the patriarchy. men don't need to come up with elaborate schemes to harm women. men can harm women and get away with it because that is the society we live in under patriarchal rule. that is why we need feminism. there is no imaginary dress-wearing super villain male because they don't need to do all that to harm women in this world.

when you refocus your hate campaigns away from actual issues created by patriarchal society towards transgender people, you are defocusing time and resources that could be spent addressing issues and violence that are actually happening to women because of men. you are falling for a grand patriarchal scheme by buying into this hate. they are pulling the wool over your eyes. they're yelling "hey, look over there!" and you're turning your head. you are stupid. the tigers are going to eat your face next.

they've already started! because transphobia effects cisgender women too. if you look "too manly" the terfs are going to come for you. if you have a short hair cut and you're wearing pants in the bathroom? you gotta talk to a cop now. we're already seeing this happen with cases like imane khelif. it is actively becoming more dangerous to be a woman because of transphobia in our spaces.

i guess what i'm trying to say is "feminism" that excludes trans women and actively seeks to harm them is feminism that focuses on the woman purely "physically" instead of the woman as a whole. and in doing so, it slots the woman back into harmful gender roles and patriarchal stereotypes of weak, hopeless, and in need of protection. i haven't quite figured gender out yet. i don't know what makes a woman a woman or a man a man. i don't even know if i'm a woman because for myself, i've never really cared how i'm viewed and mainly just identify as cis for simplicities sake. and i don't want to limit womanhood to some antiquated box of physical traits and hobbies that men have pushed on us in the form of stereotypes for centuries. there's gotta be more than that. there's gotta be something innate that chromosomes and logic and behaviours can't reach. something that trans women (and on the opposite side with manhood, trans men) have felt and held close to their heart against all hate and hardship. and isn't that really the beauty of womanhood? that it endures?

i don't really have a way to wrap this entry up. i'm just so angry with the way the world is going lately and this in particular has been really pissing me off. can't even be radfem anymore because of terf. at the end of the day, i just miss the feminism that told me a woman can be anything. i miss the power of that.

i didn't speak on my issues with the mystification of "women's knowledge" either, but as it's an idea i've observed to frequently come from terfs, i think i do want to leave this off with a quote from ursula k. le guin. a reminder that whenever you try to put womanhood into a box, you are suppressing women as a whole.

But I didn't and still don't like making a cult of women's knowledge, preening ourselves on knowing things men don't know, women's deep irrational wisdom, women's instinctive knowledge of Nature, and so on. Al that all too often merely reinforces the masculinist idea of women as primitive and inferior - women's knowledge as elementary, primitive, always down below at the dark roots, while men get to cultivate and own the flowers and crops that come up into the light. But why should women keep talking baby talk while men get to grow up? Why should women feel blindly while men get to think?

vanish into you - lady gaga