Simply gathering
Jean Hatchet on the misogyny in some of the reactions to that lunch in Hammersmith:
These women are very well aware that simply gathering in this way is a political act which will cause trans activists to seek to punish them for their audacity, for daring to show openly their love for other women. Predictably the backlash from trans activists to these photos was swift and it was vicious. Deep misogyny dripped through the internet like poison.
In the photos posted JK Rowling, in a flowery tea dress with a low-cut neck, looks stunning — elegant and graceful. She wears her 56 years happily, with pride. The tweets focused on her body and her looks, however. One user @effingfaded wrote, “This is what hate does to your titties #JKRowling”.
Stupid, aren’t they. You’d think they’d have the minimal common sense to avoid the most vulgar kind of Nyah nyah ya ugleee taunting if they want everyone to think they’re good decent progressive friends and allies, but nah.
The relentlessly facile trans activist India Willoughby went further and tweeted about one of the photos featuring a well-known and well-loved lesbian woman named Liane: “Here’s JK Rowling meeting fellow members of the GC movement today. Not being funny, but how come I’d be banned because my presence would ‘traumatise’ women — but not the woman on the right?”
Lianne is head of security for Filia and posed for an iconic photograph outside the Woman’s Place UK conference in January 2020. She is an effortlessly cool woman who many of us would love to sit at a table with. India Willoughby obviously fails to see that a trans-identified man performing a female stereotype in lipstick and heels, will never lead women to place a male body above a butch lesbian woman’s, in some strange hierarchy of Willoughby’s imagining. The inherent lesbophobia of the comment is striking and shocking but we know that this hatred and envy of women lies at the heart of the trans activist movement.
And particularly so in the case of India Willoughby.
H/t latsot
Relentlessly facile – I loved that.
Yes, that’s an elegant unexpected pairing.
Most people are thrown off the trail by the whole “trying to look like women” thing and never look beyond that. It’s a counterintuitive kind of misogyny: a crazy melange of revulsion, resentment, envy, and lust. But then, people often have a hard time understanding psychology that lies outside their experience. Just look at all the people who can’t accept that someone would really push the red button and bring on nuclear apocalypse.
Nullius: It’s not just wanting to look like women, but wanting to be women while being misogynistic that baffles me. Even being willing to bring on the apocalypse seems understandable by contrast.
*…by comparison.
I think Blanchard’s typology helps explain that. If autogynephilia is understood primarily as a sort of sexual orientation–an “erotic target location error,” as Blanchard puts it–then a man can be aroused at the thought of being female whether or not he feels empathy with actual women. Just as some heterosexual men dislike women but can’t help lusting after them, some autogynephiles dislike us while obsessed with the fantasy of possessing the kind of body they desire.
This explains the whole “I’m so hot don’t you gals envy me?” phenomenon India Willoughby demonstrates in a previous post here. All the surgeries, the hormones, the makeup, the heavily filtered photos, are in service to the fantasy, the male sexual fantasy of a fuck toy. The fantasy’s just turned inward, that’s all.
I don’t believe all men with autogynephilia are this shallow. Just as most heterosexual men can distinguish between fantasy and reality and don’t see real-life women as compliant sex dolls, there are autogynephiles who either resist transition, or find transition palliative but remain capable of empathy for actual women. Would there were more of those. But “TRANS WOMEN ARE WOMEN” dogma exists in service of the fantasy, the Pinocchio fantasy that “I AM SO A REAL WOMAN.” If the individual’s notion of Woman is “sexy plaything,” well, that’s what he’ll strive to be.