The war on cis women
Another scorching exposé of those selfish bitches who support women who have survived sexual violence when they should be supporting trans women instead:
It was at the tail end of 2017 when Cora*, a frontline worker for a south London organisation supporting women who have survived sexual violence, realised that undercurrents of transmisogyny had become a new precedent for her workplace.
“I just remember there being far more comments like ‘Yeah we only support real women’,” Cora says.
How dare they!!! How dare they support women who have survived sexual violence instead of men who have a fantasy that they are women? Have you ever heard of anything so selfish?
Both visibility and hostility were on the rise for trans people in the UK thanks to proposed reform to the Gender Recognition Act. As a result, many junior workers were attempting to ensure inclusivity for trans survivors. But senior staff, made up of cis women, responded by shutting down the conversation altogether.
Don’t you just hate senior women who are also cis? Hate hate hate. There is no one worse.
Cora remembers one member of the counselling department declaring that it was “unsafe” for cis survivors using the centre’s services to have people in the building who had not fully medically transitioned. She was challenged by Cora and her colleagues, who explained that this transmisogyny went against the fundamental principles of sexual violence workers: that you must believe survivors.
Brave brave Cora and her colleagues. Evil evil evil member of the counselling department. Her name is Karen, right?
When Cora and her colleague refuted transmisogynistic claims, the goalposts shifted. Senior staff instead claimed they weren’t equipped to work with trans women because they wouldn’t “understand” their experience with sexual violence. Tellingly, one staff member who used such a defence said they would feel comfortable supporting trans men who had “experienced violence as women” – revealing that they didn’t recognise trans men as men.
“There is a real focus on the penis,” Cora says.
So irrational, isn’t it, to think a penis=male?
But where does the antagonism towards trans people in the VAWG sector come from? Academic Alison Phipps, professor of gender studies at the University of Sussex, links it to “political whiteness”. Transmisogyny in the UK is focused on violence against white, cis women and “lasers in” on the male body as the source of that violence, Phipps explains. “There’s a lot of straight, [white], privileged [cis] women involved. Whiteness has a lot to do with it. Whiteness and class privilege.”
Yup yup yup, they’re all Karens; I told you so. Saying that men are not women is so racist and so white. So unlike Alison Phipps.
Weaponising woundedness against marginalised groups has always been a core component of white womanhood and political whiteness, adds Phipps. “It’s Carolyn Bryant [Emmett Till’s accuser] all over again,” she says. “[Trans-exclusionary feminism] is grounded in fear and, in some cases, a hatred of the Other and a deep need for protection.”
It’s not Carolyn Bryant all over again or the first time or ever, and refusing to agree that men are women is nothing whatever to do with Emmett Till – it’s revolting to use him that way.
Phipps believes many transphobic, white radical feminists also think that acknowledging their own privilege
scompared to the likes of trans women is tantamount to erasing their traumatic experiences. “It’s as if they think ‘if you tell us we’re privileged because we’re cis, that means we haven’t been raped or haven’t experienced these awful things’,” she observes. “Well of course you have and that’s awful and it’s because of your gender. But that doesn’t mean you don’t also have race and class and cis privileges.”
There’s no such thing as “cis privilege,” and it’s wildly insulting to tell women that we have it. Phipps is maddeningly gullible and thought-free.
In the VAWG sector in particular, Phipps says there is the feeling of “living in the past”, with particular aping of the 1970s women’s liberation movement. It’s a notable reference point for trans-exclusionary feminists, many of whom experienced the movement as young women. But they’ve created a warped pastiche that erases contemporary critiques of white radical feminism that were made at the time, says Phipps.
In other words they’re witches; burn them.
Maybe feminism is just plain doomed, eternally doomed, because of shit like this – because of the New generation of So Much Hipper women who fall all over themselves in their hurry to flatter and pamper men.
And so. Many. People. believe this shit and hate us for not going along with it.
This is so disgusting.
(I see that it says: “Content warning: transphobia, transmisogyny”. Maybe it should say: “Content/Trigger Warning: This article mentions cis women.”)
Strange how women who have suffered violence committed by males would see the male body as the source of that violence. Peculiar that, no?
I am so, so sick of this shit. If she didn’t hit EVERY spot on the bingo card: White. Middle-class. Cis. Old.
First of all, trans is not race (of course, OB covered that well; she always does). Trans is not holocaust survivor. Trans is not “the most marginalized group ever”. In fact, from all appearances, it is difficult to believe that trans is marginalized, since they appear to be running so much. That isn’t to say they don’t suffer from bigotry and hatred, but they don’t seem to realize that most of that is centered in misogyny, not necessarily in them being trans. It is because of misogyny that men becoming women and women becoming men is so hated. Women getting above themselves – men who are sissies.
I may be a white middle class old woman, but I grew up a white, underclass, young woman, and I have experienced shit that these mostly white, mostly middle-class (or higher) men who think they are women have never experienced. They are so fucking clueless. They don’t know what it’s like to be marginalized; they imagine they are, because they don’t hear anyone else. I know what it’s like to have rats run across my bed at night while I lie there terrified. I know what it’s like to have to wait on my brothers, and have no one willing to be proud of me because I have no penis. I know what it’s like to be raped. I know what it’s like to be sexually harassed. I know what it’s like to be passed over for promotion, or even hiring. I know what it’s like to be whistled at in the street. And I know what it’s like to grow old as a woman, losing what little value I once had as an object that men liked to look at. I know what it’s like to be treated like a fluff brain and be corrected about things I am an expert in by people who are clueless, but since they have the almighty penis, they are listened to. I know what it’s like to be hungry, cold, and tired, and have little hope of ever being anything else. (Fortunately, I ended up being in a better spot than I ever hoped…but when you can’t see the future, it’s just as painful in that moment as if I were to end up in that place I expected to end up). I know what it’s like to have boys on the bus throw tampons and pads at me because they suspect I might be bleeding, or because the tampon or pad failed, and they knew I was bleeding. Why these boys carried tampons and pads to school? I would guess for the purpose of throwing them at girls on the bus.
Yeah. Cis-privilege.
Here we see obfuscatory language doing half the work.
Misogyny= hatred of women
Transmisogyny=/= hatred of women because trans idenified males are not women. Find another word.
IT”S BECAUSE OF THEIR SEX FOR FUCK’S SAKE! No wonder there’s an epidemic of young women wanting to become men, if some of them think that by doing so they’ll be able to “identify out” of sexual violence.
How very telling. Sure, they tried to hide it like any decent person would — that failure to believe in gender identity, that deficiency in the human capacity to accept that people are who and what they say they are — but it slipped out. It always slips out. It’s very telling when it does.
It’s also a stupid construction. “Misogyny” = hatred of women, from μῖσος (=hatred) + γυνή (=woman).
“Transmisogyny” should mean “trans hatred of women”. Which is a very very common thing, common as dust. We could start using the word in that meaning.
Or, if we don’t want to mix Latin and Greek roots, we could say “Metamisogyny” (Latin “trans” = Greek μετά).
If they are accepted despite identifying as trans, then that proves there is no general rejection of trans people. Why then are trans women and not trans men rejected? Clearly, because trans women are male.
If you like, Ophelia, I can knock up some code that scrapes the text of your blog and inserts “white”, “whiteness”, “whititude” and/or “cis” at random. It won’t do much for your integrity but it should do wonders for hits.
I mean, that’s some crazy talk. However, and I hate to keep harping on it, the logic is completely consistent with the standard privilege analysis. The thing about privilege is that it’s not something that an individual can be demonstrated to have or not; it is merely a “fact” about groups. What’s more, even at the group level, measurable manifestation of the privilege is ultimately irrelevant to whether the group is judged to be privileged. All that is required is that the group be set in a hierarchical relation to some other group. Such a relation is per se necessary and sufficient for there to be privilege and for all members of the privileged group thus to have something about which to be ashamed.
It doesn’t matter that a girl has been oppressed, mutilated, raped because of her sex. She is cis (scum) and therefore possesses cis privilege. She needs to check her privilege and do The Work, so she can understand how her unearned privilege makes her complicit in the marginalization of trans and nonbinary folx. She’ll never be able to be anything but cissexist, but at least she can work to further anti-cissexism.
As someone who works in the VAWG sector it’s interesting to note that the helpline number given at the end of the article is for Galop. Ostensibly for LBGT survivors, it’s focus is on male victims, and they’ve been given a lot of support and training by the women’s organisations.
You see women working in VAWG jobs do recognise that men can be victims – for example young gay men involved in the chemsex scene are vulnerable to abuse while under the influence of drugs and are reluctant to approach the police because of the illicit nature of the drugs involved. While male victims can’t be accommodated within the women’s sector, women have given freely of their time and expertise to help build up organisations supporting men.
And how has the male sector repaid those women? Every damn conference or training that the men’s sector are invited to ends up dominated by the Galop staff whose first and just about only contribution is ‘what about the trans women?’ and ‘why won’t you help trans women in the VAWG sector as TWAW?’ Every time they have a trans victim they make a point of trying to approach women’s organisations for assistance. Despite the fact that they have the expertise to deal with the trans woman – and often more financial support – they try and foist them on the women’s sector, or try and use the women’s sector for ancillary support such as legal advice. I believe it’s known as ‘forced teaming’ but there’s also gleeful pleasure in trying to make the Terfs deal with a traumatised TiM, and surrender their boundaries.
The willingness or otherwise of the organisation to take up a TiM’s case is then noted and the information fed back to the men’s rights / trans lobby so they know who to target – that would be Nia, Southall Black Sisters and the Centre for Women’s Justice, as singled out in the article.
I’d bet a week’s wages that a few of those anonymous women workers in the article are actually the men at Galop.
According to the TRA point of view, the very fact of accepting transmen into a women’s shelter isn’t an act of acceptance, but rather an act of violent erasure. But even this they rarely mention, because they (or, at any rate, most of them) don’t actually care at all about transmen, only about transwomen — obviously due to their own misogyny.
Will THIS finally put a dent in the abuse of the notion of ‘privilege?’
At this point, victims of rape and domestic violence are confidently dismissed as ‘privileged’ since, not being trans, they can’t win the Opwession Olympics.
Re #9
First: *applause* Thank you for that. It is infuriating that you have to deal with such awful nonsense.
It reminded me that yesterday I came across this 2018 article by Jessica Eaton (now Taylor). She talks about the “what about the MEN” phenomenon, and she (similarly) doesn’t mince words. Not an identical situation, but close enough: can’t talk about women, must talk about men (however they identify). She has a particularly interesting background to discuss this issue, as she founded a charity for men’s mental health, and she never, ever gets “what about women” questions when talking about that charity.
https://victimfocusblog.com/2018/01/03/stop-asking-me-what-about-men/
[…] a comment by Vila Restal on The war on cis […]
Oh, this is just precious:Phipps believes many transphobic, white radical feminists also think that acknowledging their own privileges compared to the likes of trans women is tantamount to erasing their traumatic experiences.Or, to put it another (more honest) way: Phipps has just made up some shit about what women think, and having made it up now believes it and wants you all to believe it too.
It’s as if they think.. Right, not they think because Phipps has no idea what they think, so instead has thought up the most irrational, over-privileged response to a conversation that never took place and decided that yes, that is exactly what those bitches think.
I mean, honestly, that conversation would have to go like this:
“I was raped”.
“But you’ve got cis-privilege. What about the oppressed trans?
“Oh, right, thanks for reminding me. I guess I wasn’t raped after all. Silly old white radical cis feminist me, eh?”
Anybody else remember when it was a fair assumption that professors knew what they were talking about when discussing their own fields of expertise?
The sad thing is, AoS, it all too often goes much that way. Not exactly, not, they will acknowledge we were raped, but if we talk about it, we are “weaponizing our victimhood”, and what about the trans women, the most raped, most murdered, most silenced, most everything minority ever? And, just in case you don’t buy into it, throw in a mention of non-white women as a passing shot.
I fully believe that it goes that way, iknklast, and I’m aware that the TRAs are willing to ignore or play down the harms done to women in order to maximise the victimhood of the most oppressed people ever, but the completely invented narrative that Phipps has pulled from where the sun don’t shine, purely to justify that callous behaviour and pour another layer of hate onto women proves, if any more proof were needed, that there is no line they won’t cross in pushing their warped agenda.
What really baffles me is not the hate coming from the TiMs – women represent the one thing that the TiMs will never be able to be and the TiMs just cannot tolerate that, it’s the hate specifically aimed at white, middle-class feminist women from white, middle-class women who claim to be feminists (although all evidence points the other way). I cannot wrap my head around that one.
AoS, I think that hate from the white middle-class women is an extreme form of virtue signaling. They feel guilty about being white middle-classed women, and they are trying to show that they are “different”, and that they recognize their privilege, and possibly assuage some of the guilt without having to do anything all that different (other than tolerate peeing with men in the room).
But I do find it amusing that so many accusations of whiteness come from people who are white, and that so many bullying accusations of middle-classness come from people who are themselves middle-class. And for so many white, middle- to upper-class TiMs to accuse women like me who have known what it is to be poor, who have known what it is to be violated and abused, well, my irony meter couldn’t handle it. The explosion was…spectacular.