it’s infinitely more accurate to characterize a trans woman as a woman pretending to be a man than it is to say she’s a man pretending to be a woman
This is such an important point, and it hits at the crucial problem that even when cis people do genuinely try to wrap their brains around trans people, they tend to have trans men and trans women entirely reversed.
When a cis man tries to imagine what it would be like to be trans, invariably that man imagines what it would be like if he “wanted to be woman,” because that’s what many people think trans women are.
Instead, he should be trying to empathize with trans men. He should be thinking about his own childhood and relationship to manhood, and then asking himself how it would have felt if he’d grown up being told he was a girl, forced to wear dresses, never recognized by other boys as a boy, and then experienced the horror of going through the wrong puberty and becoming a giant estrogen factory.
Many cis women, particularly in LGBT spaces, will fall all over themselves trying to empathize and identify with trans men, because the same transmisogyny that tells them that trans women and cis men are connected tells them that cis women and trans men are connected.
Instead, cis women should be asking themselves what it would have been like if they had never been allowed to have their womanhood acknowledged. How would it have felt to grow up being told you were a boy, not allowed to deviate from male stereotypes (often with violent repercussions if you did), always viewed by other women as an icky boy or predatory male, exposed to the utter horror that is being a woman in male spaces where they think no women are around, and had testosterone distort your body irreparably only to have everyone around you use your anatomy and appearance to forever deny your womanhood and where your best possible outcome is to transition and live your life in abject poverty fighting loneliness and dysphoria and surrounded by people who think you’re a disgusting, subhuman monster who should be locked away or put down?
If you want to worry about men pretending to be women, pay more attention to trans men. They are men who are forced to pretend to be women, and while that is immensely fucked up for them to go through, it doesn’t change the fact that they are MEN in WOMEN’S spaces, and many of them take advantage of transmisogynist ideas about gender to stay in those spaces even after coming out and transitioning. Just look at all the trans men at women’s colleges – schools that in most cases will not allow trans women.
Trans women have always been women. Trans women have always been female.
Trans men have always been men. Trans men have always been male.
A trans woman cannot be a “man pretending to be a woman” because by definition we aren’t men and never were.
Studio Mauerer Hendrichs’s lazy-susan table makes ingenious use of
iconic skateboard trucks and a glass top to provide the mechanical
back-end for the system. Lovely. (But expensive and ripe for a homebrew
remake!)
