Non credo

Another particularly surprising bit of dialogue from a thread on the AUSA Womensfest page. I’m calling the characters A, B and C even though all this is public, in case they don’t want their names bandied about on some blog.

A: like straight up if you’re worried enough about two cis women in a position of power being called cunts very implicitly for, you know, actively enacting transmisogyny that you’re bothered with that immensely more than with the transmisogyny (which, you know, at its absolute tamest involves being called much, much worse), as someone who kind of has a cunt depending how you define that: you’re a cunt.

it’s often cis women who are the most violent to trans women because it’s one of the few ways in which cis women benefit from the policing of womanhood, that they’re “more authentic” than trans women.

B: Okay. I don’t want to make this nitpicky, but I am genuinely surprised – you’re saying MOST of the violence committed against transwomen comes from ciswomen?

Yes, I’m aware of the policing of gender, and the way oppressed groups benefit from oppressing others. But literally, literal physical violence? Transwomen are most often murdered, not by cismen, but by ciswomen???

C: As a trans woman I can absolutely confirm that cis women – feminists in particular – have been the most violently and insidiously transmisogynist towards me + ppl I know.

B: what [C] said. also: the group of people most fervently dedicated to getting poor trans women fired (and — it is near impossible to get hired as a trans woman, a lot of the time, so this is a death sentence), evicted, and otherwise deprived of the basic essentials of life are a large group of cis women.

like, virtually none of them are cis men.

hundreds. of cis women.

A: Oh, yes, of course – even as a ciswoman (maybe? we could go with queer but I want to avoid labels here), I can confirm the kinds of insidious, horrifying, nonphysical (and occasionally physical) violence I have experienced at the hands of women of all kinds.

That is horrendous, and in no way to be dismissed. But I was talking about the kinds of physical violence that goes with – and that I have experienced with – being called a cunt.

B: lmao ok so basically what you’re saying is “i don’t believe these frail female-bodied cis women could beat up a trans woman”, is that right? if not, please clarify why you’re so disbelieving of this

it has happened to my friends. it happens most often when groups of cis women jump one trans girl. i’m not going into this further out of respect for the trans women on this thread who don’t deserve to be traumatized for the sake of proving something to you.

So there it is: the claim is that women are the source of violence against trans women. Not men, but women. Especially feminists.

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