Thread by @SecretGamerGrrl

This (and the rest of the thread) is a point I see brought up very often (because it is plainly true and basically impossible not to observe), but I feel like people (as I'm seeing in the comments of this thread) really drop the ball on where all this externalized self-loathing

https://twitter.com/NoraReed/status/1450594613396324356

comes from.

Way too often, people look at these pathetic wretches and go, "ah, I know why they seem to hate everything about being a woman! They're all actually trans men in denial!"

So, first of all, this is one of those things where I think we all learned the hard way that

things go really badly when you make the wild claim that all the people who hate group X are secretly members of it. This happened with being gay for a good long while, and it lead to a lot of "allies" making shitty gay jokes about right-wing lawmakers and religious cranks, and

more people than would admit it shrugging all the violence and oppression off as some sort of internal dispute within a group they don't belong to and therefore didn't have an obligation to speak up about. And as with this, that of course wasn't true, and ultimately just lead to

people giving a pass to bigotry because it didn't personally affect them, with some weird justifications.

This is also ignoring how most of these people are actually men, and the few tokens who openly claim to be trans and the ones who don't play the "being a woman is miserable"

card, but now I'm getting sidetracked.

Point is, we don't say "oh they must secretly be X themselves" when we're talking about, say, white supremacy. When some idiot starts shouting about how his life sucks because "affirmative action took their job" and girls won't date him on

account of how relatively small his penis is and so on, we don't go, "ah, clearly he's secretly black and just in denial about it!" That would be ridiculous.

It's ridiculous here too though, we just have weird persistent myths about how you can always tell by looking at someone

immediately whether or not they're white, whereas there's no way to tell that someone is queer by looking at them. If you aren't completely sheltered from the world and have met a representative sampling of the population, you should know neither of these are really true.

Anyway

as we aren't inclined to look for that particular answer when it comes to white supremacy, we typically get to the truth on that one- these people are just absolutely the biggest losers in the world and looking for external sources to blame for how they've completely wasted their

lives.

This also applies to the die-hard transphobes, who by the way if you actually pay attention ALSO constantly spout off white supremacy on top of the anti-trans stuff. Fascists hate everybody, they just fixate on certain targets more than others.

Typically, they all come

from backgrounds of incredible wealth and privilege. They graduate from pricy schools, have their nice houses and their cushy jobs, etc. but then they all have these massive feelings of inadequacy and entitlement because they were promised the moon, and eventually hit a point in

their lives when it sinks in that while they're pretty well off, they aren't respected by anyone, considered the best at anything, and generally ignored by everyone as they focus on what people who actually have interesting things to say and real accomplishments under their belts

and rather than just doing some reflection and realizing "oh whoops, I just drifted through my whole life on my parents money without ever developing an interesting personality, making any real human connections, or acquiring any sort of talents or interests that make me worth

knowing, maybe I should start working on myself," they just kinda start looking for the external enemies who MUST have robbed them of what they were rightfully owed.

This tends to funnel straight into hating marginalized people because when you go looking for who denied you all

the things you feel you deserve in life, you're probably going to bump into someone trying to do something about actual systemic oppression, and get irrationally jealous when they don't drop everything to help you with your non-problems.

Meanwhile the particular sort that Nora's

addressing in that thread, while going through that process, often catch the nugget that sometimes all it takes to have a lifetime of struggling against systemic oppression is being a woman, and they'll go "yes! Aha! That's me, see! Give me all that pity and recompensation now!"

And the thing of course is that no. While SOME women face a lot of unjust suffering at the hands of systemic oppression, we're mainly concerned about the ones who can't hold down a job because every prospective employer keeps sexually assaulting them and end up trapped in abusive

marriages and living on the street. If you've got some cushy job at one of the biggest newspapers in the world or teaching at a prestigious university, and you don't even have anyone checking to see if you know the first damn thing about what you're publishing, or you live in a

freaking CASTLE somewhere, it seems to me that you did not, in fact, slip through the cracks of society, and are doing just fine.

But yeah they're still gonna throw that pity party. And the absolute worst thing for it is when some woman who's actually really suffered shows up as

a point of comparison. So like a brood parasite, they start trying to straight up murder women in truly dire straights (and if I were JUST talking about trans women I'd throw something in here about not allowing those eggs to hatch), and then do everything in their power to make

people think they're supposed to be in that nest, which, yeah, tends to take the form of talking like periods, pregnancies, and bras are the greatest threats to human happiness there have ever been or whatever.

So quit going around saying "they must all be closeted trans men!"