“Purification is meaningless because anyone can perform these rituals—an effigy burnt in digital. And their inflexibility provides a place where abuse can thrive—a set of rules which abusers can hold over their victims.”
- Charity Heartscape
Linked above and briefly quoted is an article from Charity Heartscape, a trans woman, detailing her experiences with the “Predatory Trans Woman” myth and how it stirs abusive harassment even within LGBTQIA+ communities. This is usually done in a hasty mob with little thought, a fervor whipped up on the basis of insular community protection. But so often trans women are accused of the most heinous things possible with zero evidence, and forced out of their existing support structures over little more but rumor. This focused forced isolation alongside pervasive harassment in other forms is part of the science - people have a method for embracing transmisogyny in such a manner, and in dissecting her experiences Charity brings to the forefront some of the major components of this harassment and how it happens.
If you claim to care about trans-feminine people or trans women at all, you need to read this and understand it. You need to be able to see what transmisogyny is and what forms it takes. You need to listen to us.
“So when people write all those apologist articles about call-out culture and other instruments of violence in feminism, I don’t think they understand that the people who most deserve those things can usually shrug off the effects, and the normalization of that violence inevitably trickles down and affects the weak. It is predictable as water. Criminal justice applies punishment under the conceit of blind justice, but we see the results: Prisons are flooded with the most vulnerable, and the rich can buy their way out of any problem.”
For those who won’t read the full thing, here’s a few important notes about this phenomenon from the article that I feel are worth sharing:
