I'm nervous to say this but it's currently eating me up and I have to get it out... And you're the only other person I know who talks about this. But the first time I saw someone call the ways TERFs hurt tme trans people "collateral damage," it hurt so badly. It makes me feel so insignificant. I have many thoughts right now, but the thing that's hurting the most is like...
The tme trans kids in the UK who can't get HRT or surgery anymore... Specifically because of JKR and her TERF cronies... They aren't collateral damage! They aren't! How the hell is that collateral damage? How is it collateral damage for any trans child to deal with that kind of despair and hopelessness?
I know people dont say this situation is collateral damage specifically, but by calling how TERFs harm tme trans people collateral damage in general, you call this collateral damage too. [TW: suicide, death, eugenics ] I mean, they do realize this will kill all kinds of trans kids? No matter if they're tma or tme? Death is not collateral damage EVER. No. Fuck no.
This goes for all trans people who have ever died as a result of TERF's rhetoric and lobbying. All of them matter and not a single one is "collateral damage." The death of any trans person not a side effect of TERFism. It's the fucking goal. They want to eradicate us all. [TW: End]
Acknowledging this doesnt detract from how violently transmisogynistic they are. It's just that they're dangerously transandrophobic and nbphobic too! Just because it's covert and hidden away most of the time doesn't mean it isnt there...
Absolutely. It’s incredibly disrespectful and erasive to call the very real harm TERFs cause to transmascs & nonbinary people as a whole “collateral damage”, and it’s ignorant of the fairly explicitly-stated goals of TERFs as well.
Abigail Shrier did not write Irriversible Damage because she hates and wants to hurt trans women alone, and everyone else is an afterthought. She wrote it explicitly and specifically about transmascs, because she wants us, specifically, not to exist.
These folks tend to believe that TERF rhetoric begins and ends with who TERFs include in feminism, and that isn’t even the tip of the iceberg that is TERF ideology & bigotry. There’s a lot more to it than that, and refusing to consider any more than that is enabling a lot of actual harm to trans folks.
You’re going to need to explain how there are a lot of transmascs TERFs and no transfem TERFs.
Some TERFs hating transmascs doesn’t erase the TERFs who ally themselves with transmascs and TERFs who are transmascs.
The target of TERFs are trans women first and foremost, and the goal of TERFs is the eradication of trans women.
The TERFs who hate transmascs and the TERFs who don’t hate transmascs and the TERFs who are transmascs are all willing to work together to eliminate trans women.
There are absolutely transfem TERFs. Here’s an interview with one.
If you’re asking why there tend to be more transmascs in the movement, though, the answer is fairly simple: TERFs actively want us there. What you’re misunderstanding here is why TERFs include and exclude certain groups, and how that inclusion and exclusion works.
For trans women, yes, the goal is to be recognized and validated as women; that means inclusion in feminism. So when TERFs say “no, we aren’t going to include you, you’re not women”, that is obviously counter to those goals & needs. It’s very easy to look over at the transmascs they do include and think, well, they’re getting what I want- that’s unfair.
But TERFs do include trans women, when it benefits them. If you read that article, you’ll see what I’m talking about.
“At the end of the day, a “gender critical” trans woman can only serve one real purpose, if required – to attack trans ideology as a trans person. It’s a kind of on-call duty: TERF accused of transphobia, intervene as trans woman to deny and offer character testimony.”
And why do they include transmascs? Is it because they care about our struggles, validate us as men, and want to help us fight the transphobia that impacts us? Are TERFs donating to transmasc transition funds and discussing ways to better include us?
TERFs believe that trans men are women, that they are victims of trans ideology, and that any day now a cleansing wave of detransitioning trans men will sweep through the population. (Urquheart)
They include us because they want to manipulate, abuse, and sometimes even sexually assualt and rape us into detransition. They want to “turn” us. They want to “save” us. They want to eradicate the transmasc population just as much as they want to eradicate the transfem population; they just go about the two differently.
There are no “TERFs who don’t hate transmascs”. There are TERFs who manipulate and abuse us into detransitioning by pretending to have our best interests at heart, and there are TERFs who manipulate and abuse us into detransitioning by openly hating and harassing us.
When a TERF says “I love trans men, I just want what’s best for them” and you listen to them- even as transmascs are telling you how dangerous they are, how much they hurt us, how much damage their rhetoric is doing to our community- you are choosing to side with the oppressor and the abuser. Stop listening to TERFs, and start listening to the trans people they victimize.
“They want to eradicate the transmasc population just as much as they want to eradicate the transfem population; they just go about the two differently.”
I’ve seen at least three transfem TERFs during my time here. It stunned me every time.
Using the fact that transmascs are targeted for indoctrination into a cult with the ultimate goal of coercing them into detransitioning and living miserably with their gender dysphoria until they become another suicide statistic to demonstrate that there’s an ‘allyship’ between transmascs and TERFs is… really ugly to me.
Almost as ugly as calling tme people ‘collateral damage’.
That's been my deep concern with this growing divide between tme and tma trans folks. While we experience different flavours of bigotry, it's ultimately the same hatred. They hate ALL trans people. It's called Trans Exclusionist Radical Feminism, not Transfem Exclusionist Radical Feminism. The transmisogyny is the opening gambit, but they don't and won't ever stop there.
