Trans women seeking to pass as cis should therefore be understood as marginalized people (due to their trans status) trying to escape oppression by passing as members of a less marginalized group (cis people of either gender) than as privileged ones appropriating a marginalized group’s identity.
I think this is a quote from one of the links zscaler posted. I thought it was worth highlighting the wee sleight of hand to be found here.
Do you see how the writer here has just entirely erased the history and reality of sex based discrimination, marginalisation, oppression?
They have posited females as less marginalised than males if those males wish to be seen as women. The implication that it works both ways - “cis people of either gender” - that there is no material difference between a male person identifying into womanhood and a female person identifying into manhood in terms of power, privilege and marginalisation experienced by either the trans person or the group being identified into.
I don’t think lies come much bigger than that. It’s a real whopper.
And it’s what the whole of transactivism is based on. A huge, grotesque, insulting, inhumane lie. A lie rooted in a contempt for women and women’s lived experience so utterly deep and chilling that it’s no wonder libfems fall over themselves in an attempt to deny to themselves that this is what is actually happening.
It’s not pleasant to recognise just how deep misogyny still goes in the world we live in. It’s painful and uncomfortable to be confronted with the truth and reality of how very, very second class our status still is as women, even here in the western world, never mind those parts of the world where women’s inferiority and sub-human status is actually still codified into law as well as manifesting in the most inhumane cultural practices.
It hurts. It eats away at your soul, it makes the world an ugly, hostile place, it diminishes your sense of agency. It can be truly overwhelming. So I get why so many women make the choice to look the other way and pretend none of this is real, pretend the battle has been won and sexism and misogyny only exist as a superficial legacy of a distant past, if at all.
You only have to look at how very many women reject out of hand the term “feminist” for themselves, seeing it as a dirty word, an embarrassment, an extreme position that only those hard-bitten, man-hating harridans would claim rather than a logical, default position for any woman who doesn’t consider herself less human than men.
I get why people like zscaler lie to themselves. Denial is a very valid psychological defence against trauma - it’s probably the most basic coping mechanism there is. And just like there’s a trauma inherent in growing up and living as part of a race or ethnic group that has been profoundly dehumanised over generations, there is a trauma inherent in growing up female, living your life in a female body, in a world where misogyny is so entrenched, so far-reaching, so all pervasive that it’s simply part of our atmosphere, the very air that we breathe. A trauma that will probably be unconscious, most often; but a trauma nonetheless.
The sheer cumulative weight of man’s inhumanity to woman across the millennia is almost too much to comprehend. Maybe it actually is too much to comprehend, just as the sheer scale of the inhumanity of transatlantic slavery or the Holocaust defies human comprehension.
But whether we apprehend it or not, it lives on, and it lives in us. And some women - many women - most women - resort to denial as a way of coping with it. The fact we have made some advances over the last century and are now, on paper at least, equal citizens here in the UK, and that many women have pretty decent lives these days, relative to our foremothers, makes it easier to gloss over that trauma. And why wouldn’t you, if you can? Who wants to actually dwell on trauma? Who wants to pick around in all that gross and yuck and horror? We all just want to live our best life, as they say, and for the majority of women that doesn’t include turning a laser-like focus on all the ways women have been harmed by men and continue to be harmed by men, the world over.
But it’s there. All the time. Whether we’re focusing on it or not. Even today, even here. The horrific levels of sexual violence. Of domestic abuse. Of street harassment. Of women murdered by men they loved. Girls sexually harassed in schools. The pay gap. The lack of proportionate representation. The ongoing lack of real power. The fact that the 90% of the world's wealth is still concentrated in male hands. The stereotyping that is still rife, the way girl babies are still socialised massively differently from boy babies, by people who aren’t even aware they’re doing it. The lack of focus on women’s achievements through history. The media bias. The vicious, vicious misogynistic abuse experienced by high profile women on the internet. And by women without a high profile. The rape myths, the appalling rape conviction rate, the consensual sex murder defence, the sometimes hideously inadequate maternity care, the devaluing of jobs traditionally carried out by women... I could go on and on!
And that’s before we even come to FGM, child marriage, “honour” killings, all of which happen here too. And then there are the countries where women are still denied basic human rights, where womenhave to have male guardians, where women and girls are gang raped as punishment for a transgression by a male relative. There are the historical and recent cases of women being raped and impregnated en masse as an act of war; and too many outrages through history to name, like the horrendous mass rapes of German women by Soviet soldiers (and American and French and British) at the end of the war, something which is almost never spoken about and whose victims, many of whom died, are never recognised or commemorated in any way.
All these factors shape the world we live in, whether any of them happen directly to us or not. They all shape our unconscious attitudes and our sense of who we are, our position in the world. And women have been told for such a very long time that we are not fully human, and are not entitled to fully human rights.
Transactivism denies all this. Transactivism says that we are less marginalised than males appropriating womanhood. It says we are privileged relative to them. It denies our disadvantage and denies their male privilege, the benefits they got from growing up in a world that never questioned or threatened their humanity on the basis of their sex. On the basis of other issues, yes, maybe; but never on the basis of their sex.
Because the male is the default human in the patriarchal world, and the patriarchal world is the one we all live in; and all males internalise that while growing up, and retain that legacy, however much they may claim to reject their maleness.
So yeah. Transactivists lie. Women who don’t want to face the full extent of misogyny in the world also lie. Women have always colluded with their own oppression; again, it’s survival. Like the women who perform FGM on the next generation of girls, having been through it themselves.
We all lie to ourselves about some things. We all do what we can to survive. But some of us won’t lie about this, not if you emotionally blackmail us, not if you call us names, not if you treat us with contempt, not if you repeat your catechism of “trans women are women, trans men are men, non binary identities are valid” till you’re blue in the face.
You can’t make us lie too, just to make you feel better about your own lies.
Sorry (not sorry).