@Blackbird1234
But as we've understood with racism, homophobia etc there isn't necessarily one definition of it. I'm straight and white, therefore if I said something that a gay person or black person deems offensive and homophobic/racist to them then I'm not going to question it, I'll simply apologise and not say it again. I don't understand why it isn't the same rule for transphobia. Some people think what she says is, some people think what she says isn't - I'm inclined to listen to trans peoples opinions on it as they're the ones concerned and as that can differ from person to person, I dont find it my place to call it transphobia or not.
This is the fundamental mis-step (in the case of some activists, an entirely deliberate mis-step, but I’m going to assume good faith from you) at the root of all this. You’re assuming a power dynamic that simply isn’t there.
You’re equating being “trans” with being part of an oppressed/marginalised minority (black, gay) and being “not trans” with being part of the privileged/oppressor class (white, straight).
This is one of the cornerstones of the argument for why women should cede their rights to those male people who identify as women.
But this assumption leaves out/denies the existence and reality of arguably the single biggest axis of oppression/privilege that there is in the world, that there has ever been. The axis of sex. The oppression, control and abuse of biologically female people by biologically male people is and has been pretty much universal throughout recorded history: it has taken place and continues to take place among people of every culture, religion, and race.
Male people have oppressed female people because they can, because of their ability to overpower female people should they wish, and because of the power structures they have been able to create over millennia based on that capacity for superior brute force - power structures which serve their interests, and perpetuate and massively compound that natural physical advantage.
The relative ability to overpower of male people and the relative vulnerability of female people is a fact of life that will never change, regardless of what laws are passed or cultural shifts we see. Likewise, it is a fact of life that only males can impregnate and only females can become pregnant, with the huge additional layer of vulnerability for females and of potential control for males that brings.
In whose interests is it to pretend these things are not facts? To demand the complete dismantling of the language we need to identify and analyse these facts, and the power structures our world is based on? To obscure this fundamental axis of oppression and paint biologically female people as the privileged oppressors and biologically male people as the disenfranchised minority they oppress?
Who benefits from this most audacious reversal of the real power dynamics? Whose interests are served by this mass delusion?
You say you listen to black people when it comes to racism and gay people when it comes to homophobia. (Probably best not to get into the issue here of these groups evidently not being a monolith so there not necessarily being a consensus, but there are black people and gay people who would find it offensive in itself to think there is a single “black” or “gay” voice, that one person or even group could speak for others with such vastly differing experiences and attitudes.)
But taking your point in good faith, let’s extend it. If you were black yourself, would you listen to a white person who identified as black telling you that something you said was trans-racist towards them? If you were a lesbian, would you listen to a straight person who identified as gay telling you that something you said was trans-homophobic towards them?
Do you think black people whose lives have been shaped by growing up black in a racist world, who have no choice but to move through the world being recognised as black, with all that that entails, have a moral obligation to recognise that they are the oppressors vis à vis someone like Rachel Dolezal?
Because those are the more accurate analogies to what is being demanded of women. We are being demanded, by members of the privileged/oppressor sex class, to act as if we are the ones with too much power, so awash with privilege we are blinkered to the plight of these more unfortunate and disadvantaged biologically male people, so powerful, traditional and conservative in the way we jealously protect our lofty status in society that we are literal dinosaurs hoarding our rights.
Let that sink in, as they say on Twitter (or let that penetrate as some are wont to phrase it). The underlying narrative here is that women - biologically female people - have too much power in the world we live in.
We have TOO MUCH POWER. Just as men wrongly perceive women to be talking too much, talking more than they are, when their contributions to a meeting even begin to approach parity with those of the men there, so male people are now perceiving women to be simply too powerful now that we have a modicum of “equality” in law in the western world and a greater measure of influence than we previously had.
Obviously we’ve seen this trope for some time in MRA circles. But now it’s been picked up by those who identify as liberal and on the side of social justice. What a useful, useful tool for the closet misogynist to beat women with. You women have too much power! You’re using it against these poor defenceless biologically male people! Stop being so meeeeeaaaaaan, you nasty bullies!
Do I really need to spell out how women don’t actually have too much power in the world we live in? Surely I don’t, do I? The evidence is really blindingly obvious, isn’t it?
And yet… not just men but women throw themselves into this incredible contortion, this incredible distortion of reality. The same studies that show that men perceive women as talking too much - talking more than men - in mixed sex groups/meetings where men are actually still dominating, just because women talk a bit more than they used to, also show that many women are liable to the same misperception.
Men have controlled women for so long that we are, as a class, used to shrinking ourselves - holding back, deferring, taking up less space than we should be entitled to - and it is a hard habit to break, even now that male control has apparently loosened somewhat. (I say “apparently” because the current state of affairs would seem to show that that male control has not loosened much after all, just reconfigured itself into a more acceptable shape for the times we live in.)
Hence there being so many women who seem to agree with the logical and moral absurdity that women do indeed have far too much power in the world today and need to give some of it back to the downtrodden males we have oppressed with our femaleness for literally millennia.
The hardest chains to break are the invisible ones. Especially when you’ve worn them for so long they feel like a part of you. Men have been telling women it’s in our nature to be enslaved by them, to be lesser than them, to be the ones who put their needs ahead of our own, ever since they first felt the need to justify the fact they’d so unilaterally seized power over us.
We don’t have to believe them.
And that means we don’t have to collude with the lies. Including the lie that women are the oppressors and biologically male people who identify as women are the oppressed.