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Just seen the best bit of commentary on transmisogyny I’ve seen in ages: if you want to know how a man treats cis women in private, look at how he treats trans women in public.

@goatsarah I don't see how this makes sense. It's perfectly possible for someone to be transphobic but have perfectly healthy and normal relationships with anyone who isn't trans. It seems quite the leep to say look how he mistreats trans people, he must, therefore, mistreat people who are not trans. 😕

@JustinMac84 and by the same token, it’s perfectly possible for someone saying what you just said to have a different definition of healthy and normal than the women in his life.

@goatsarah anything's possible, but the OP says "if this person does x, he must also do y". That's a generalisation that logic simply doesn't support. Given that transphobia and misoginy are different traits, there is nothing to say that a negative behaviour directed at one person for one cause would be directed at another for a different one. What I'm trying to say is that, if we both agree the things in my post are possible, it follows that the OP cannot be stated as fact.

@JustinMac84 @goatsarah Logically, let’s point out that since trans women are women, trans misogyny is necessarily a subtype of *general misogyny* the same way a square is a subtype of rectangle. Secondly, the mistreatment of both groups (cis and trans women) stem from the same underlying beliefs: bioessentialism, femininity as inferior, etc. and holding these beliefs always lead to the similar patterns of thoughts and behaviors.

@tina_snay @goatsarah I am working off the distinction the OP drew. If we acknowledge that there is a difference between sys people and trans people, we do or why the different terms, then there is the potential for the difference to exist in the ways they are treated. This isn't an "are trans women women" debate, this is a "can you say that a man mistreating a trans woman *would* mistreat a sys woman" debate.

@JustinMac84 @goatsarah batting southpaw and using left handed scissors are different observed behaviors with the same underlying root cause; I think most ppl w common sense would be comfortable presuming that someone who does one of those things might also likely do the other at some point.

@tina_snay @goatsarah No. I wouldn't. That's labelling. That's putting people in boxes. that's what bigots do. that's branding them of having done something without any evidence or logical basis to do so.

@JustinMac84 @goatsarah a misogynist is someone who mistreats some or all women on the basis of their gender identity. That is not a “generalization” that is simply the definition of the word. A generalization would be correlating misogyny with a random unrelated trait like eye color or astrological sign.

@tina_snay @goatsarah Yes. I'm sure we can all agree that if someone mistreats someone because they're a woman, stands to reason they will mistreat other women, trans or not, but, again, not what the OP said and I simply feel that the distinction was drawn in the OP for a reason. Someone mistreating a trans person may be doing it because they're trans or because of their genda. We don't know for sure so we shouldn't assume. That's it. That's all I was saying.

@JustinMac84 @goatsarah i think bioessentialism is the core presupposition of both transphobia and misogyny. I think that if a man holds these essentialist views, he will hold them across the board for trans and cis people but keep them better hidden when applying them to cis women since we hold relatively more political power in society compared to trans women.

@tina_snay @goatsarah And that's fair enough. It's not an opinion I share, but I can well understand it and in many cases, it's probably true. I just appreciate that you're not asserting it as fact. I really appreciate the discussion.

@JustinMac84 @goatsarah yes it is a fact. In order to believe men are inherently superior to women (misogyny), you must first believe that there is some fixed essence of femaleness that is fundamentally important to who one is as a person. And if this essence is fixed, then trans people aren’t valid (transphobia). That is the link and you still haven’t been able to disentangle that link.

@tina_snay @goatsarah Would you therefore say that someone expressing transphobia to a trans man was also missoginistic? Would you say that a female terf was missoginistic? I am not, as some believe, trying to be difficult. I just see the prejudices as inherently separate.

Tina🍉

@JustinMac84 @goatsarah yes terfs are always misogynistic because they attack trans women and reduce cis women to reproductive functions. I said misogyny and transphobia have a root cause in common. Not that they are exactly the same. Batting southpaw is not the same thing as using left handed scissors but the two behaviors are closely related due to sharing a common root cause.