Trans* Women Are Women

[Content Note: Transmisogyny; gender policing.]

There has been, for various reasons, a whole new highly visible round of "trans* women aren't women" garbage lately.

Sometimes, the argument is that trans* women aren't women, full-stop. Sometimes, it's a variation (in rhetoric, but not effect) that ostensibly concedes trans* women are women, but not "real" women.

I'm not going to link to any of it, because the people who make these rancid arguments can fuck off.

Trans* women are women. As evidenced by the very words trans* women. Trans* is a descriptor; not a caveat.

There is no one right way to be a woman. And it's no coincidence that the trans* police tend to be the sorts of people who subscribe to the notion of a One True Womanhood, or a very limited spectrum on which most of us won't find ourselves.

And inextricably associated with those privileged, reductive, exclusionary ideals of womanhood is the fear, which inevitably manifests as hatred, that broadening the spectrum of acceptable womanhood will somehow diminish the women who fit and fiercely guard that ideal.

As though womanhood is a zero sum game. As if there's not enough womanhood to go around.

This is absurd. It's not womanhood that is eroded by inclusion; it's privilege. And privilege doesn't need protection. It needs rigorous dismantlement.

Trans* women are women.

I'm not saying that because I believe I get a vote on whether trans* women are women. They are women because they say they are women, and they are authorities on their own lives. I'm saying it because I want to reiterate that it's not up for debate in this space, and it never will be.