the thing with transmisogyny is that it really is based in assignment (a legal structure) rather than specific traits of the body— the focus on the body is a rhetorical decoy.
I have no uterus and I have a testosterone dominant system right now, and I still occasionally get TERFs reblogging my shit. I’m sure that will be true even when I have no breasts or vagina either. Even if I don’t have any of the traits they go on about as the supposed basis of sexed based oppression, they will view me as potential recruit because of my legal assignment.
Similarly, as much as they will obsess over various physical traits that they associate with trans womanhood, the traits themselves are never the actual reason. And you can tell because they will engage in the same demeaning sexual harassment to trans women with extremely diverse bodily traits. A trans woman’s actual individual body is vulnerable to abuse but the target on her is structural, not individual.
Transmisogynists go on and on about bodies, especially areas of the body that are private or provoke common insecurities, because they are engaging in sexual harassment and/or sexual abuse.
It’s the exact same dynamic as an abusive husband talking about how “smelly” his wife’s vagina is in front of friends— the point is to publicly demean and humiliate. The more sexualized and objectifying the comment, the more she’s supposed to understand that her body is owned by him, her social circle is owned by him, her life is under his control.
That is the function of transmisogynists talking about “genital preferences” or “not wanting to be around penises” or “open wounds” or whatever the fuck. It is sexual harassment.
The harassment is a social act of flexing and flaunting their already existing structural power.
This is why if you were assigned female at birth, no matter what your body looks like, even if you are mistaken for a trans woman and experience sexual harassment on that basis, you are not going to be a fully transfeminized subject.
The harassment is to reify a material structure, it is not for its own sake.
If you’re TME you will be TME forever. The goal is not to shed this status but to structurally dismantle transmisogyny (and I’m talking literally, not symbolically) so that no one is subject to it.
We probably cannot do this within a single lifetime, but we can do work that will position the next generation in a better place when they pick up the fight. No one is a bystander in this.
