You may have come across trans women, and not known it. Some of us look and sound indistinguishable from other women. And some of us you could spot a mile off, because we look like men in drag; but if you talk to us you will see we are not like men, being culturally feminine, and often humble and unassuming, or badly hurt.
Hate works best with a kernel of truth. Tell the truth, first, to create a feeling of righteous anger. If you started by dehumanising us, people would see through it.
The first truth to tell is general, about the difficulties women have. There is no such thing as female privilege. Male violence against women and girls is everywhere: FGM, honour killing, immolation, rape, sexual assault…
This is all true. Remind women of what they have to be angry about. The hope is that you can then get them angry about something new.
The next step is the half-truth. “If Government proposals go ahead, any man will be able to declare himself a woman.” It’s probably not good to dwell on this too much. After all, apart from trans women, who would? Perhaps a few anti-trans campaigners. Graham Linehan might try, to prove a point. However he probably would not succeed. How can you swear before a magistrate that you intend to live life-long in the opposite gender, when presenting male? If he dressed up for the occasion, he would still not be protected from possible charges of perjury.
So it’s better to rush over that bit. Don’t elaborate, or people will see through it, unless they are predisposed against trans people to start with.
Then you start on bad things that trans women have done. Unfortunately, the Times and other media publicise trivial things which put a trans woman in a bad light. Tara Wolf has done us a great deal of harm, made worse by all the publicity.
Then, you start on particular issues. Keep negative. It does not matter that the problem is always something else: on trans women in women’s prisons, the problem is the underfunding of prisons and the authoritarian drive to imprison people who should never be there. Karen White was in a women’s prison because the authorities failed to implement their own rules properly, and did not have proper security. But that does not matter: Karen White is the perfect monster, to allege The Tranny Threat.
If your audience is inclined to be sympathetic with trans people, you can claim to be too- but only in theory, never in practice. You do not oppose the decent transsexuals, you say, the ones who want no trouble; but you claim that any actual trans woman is not truly transsexual. You say they have autogynephilia, and ignore the fact that theory is discredited. You claim they have penises, though most trans women want surgery. Insist that they are all men. Act as if absolutely everybody is clearly a man or a woman, and deny that culture has any effect on this. Yes, people have been transitioning all over the world for millennia, but if that gets mentioned deny it and move swiftly on to anger issues.
You must never allow any of the positives of trans recognition to be mentioned. Just deny them, and keep emphasising anything women should be angry about. Drown out all mention of the tiny proportion of the population that is trans: 0.1%, but even were it 1% that is still very few people. Trans people subvert gender by obviously not conforming, but insist that they enforce traditional gender roles against all the evidence.
And then you will have created a new hate group. Your right wing, authoritarian funders will rejoice (its probably better to deny the right wing funding). You will achieve nothing for feminism, because you will divert feminist energy against a non-existent problem. But you will have a delicious feeling of righteous anger.
Audre Lorde explained: Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people. As members of such an economy, we have all been programmed to respond to the human difference between us with fear and loathing and to handle that difference in one of three ways: ignore it, and if that is not possible, copy it if we think it is dominant, or destroy it if we think it is subordinate. But we have no patterns for relating across our human differences as equals. As a result, those differences have been misnamed and misused in the service of separation and confusion.
Spreading hate does the Masters’ work.
Clare Flourish 