Feminists Standing in Solidarity with Trans Women and Girls

When you said "women's rights are human rights," did you mean only women who look a certain way, act a certain way, and have a certain type of body? Only women who aren't too strong or too fast?

Cisgender women are not threatened or victimized by transgender and gender expansive people. If you are a White cis woman who is appropriating the language of women’s rights to inflict life-threatening harm on trans, Black, Brown, Indigenous or other marginalized communities who already experience widespread discrimination, you are not a feminist; you’re a fascist.

Throughout modern US history, the call to protect women has not moved us towards collective liberation but served as a smokescreen for oppression:

🎯The so-called war on terror was never waged to “fight for the rights and dignity of women.”
🎯Racial terror and violence against Black men and boys has never been about protecting white women.
🎯Mass incarceration of poor people of color and other marginalized groups has never been about preventing violence against women.
🎯Transmisogyny--including attacks on transgender athletes and women presumed to be transgender--has never been about protecting (cisgender) women and girls.

In all of these cases, "protecting women" is not a clarion call for gender justice; to the contrary, it reinforces what bell hooks famously calls imperialist white-supremacist heteropatriarchy.

White cis women, we should be standing in solidarity with all of our sisters/siblings, not weaponizing our womanhood and femininity against transgender women, gender expansive people, and Global Majority people.

Weaponizing transphobia for political gain is the antithesis of feminism.

Image credit: Bitch magazine, 20th anniversary edition. https://us.e-activist.com/page/email/message/view?templateId=92429