as someone who has long been committed to feminism it's unbelievably bleak to see how, in the UK, the need to "advocate for women's rights" has slowly become shorthand for "be really transphobic"
like now when you see someone talking in any context about how they want prospects for women to improve, you have to do a deep dive on them to see whether they're talking about the wage gap, the fact a woman is murdered by a man every 3 days, etc, or whether they actually mean "I hate trans people"
Boosting women's rights means addressing:
- economic inequality
- political underrepresentation
- health inequality
- reproductive rights and bodily autonomy
- gender-based violence+harassment
- underrepresentation in STEM etc
- de facto legal inequality
trans ppl using public bogs are not an issue
repulsive that the grassroots political and intellectual movement that has burgeoned over decades to improve these very real things has been harnessed by a project to drive a wedge into the LGBTQIA+ community that has captured some bored billionaires looking for a self-righteous cause
It's telling that the anti-trans tendency has to hitch itself to a vastly successful and widely-accepted ongoing political struggle of real consequence (i.e. feminism) because they know in all honesty most cis people are cool with trans ppl or at the very least not bothered + tolerant
To try to make trans panic stick, it has to be framed as a threat to women. the vehicle being hijacked to animate that threat in people's minds is feminism: transphobia is therefore tacked on as apparently being a feature of feminism, a wider political project to uplift/liberate women
this is an attempt to conflate "improve all women's material circumstances" with "diminish trans women's rights specifically". anyone who conflates things in this way should be challenged on their position on the actual material challenges women face; usually they won't care about those!
When they are desperate they will find a scapegoat and deal with them effectively; Always do. Now, when the scapegoat is gone and nothing changes, who will they blame next?
:( Yeah. This is one of the only things I know about the UK and it makes me feel bad for women over there. Like any attempt to uplift them from oppression is gone and replaced with christofash fear mongering about "the other" masquerading as a women's rights movement.
