Olympic Transphobia and the Politics of Purity
Here’s something that I need to point out because it’s important is how exclusionary bigotry functions. The fallacy at play here is something called the ‘No true Scotsman’ fallacy (or more formally known as the ‘appeal for purity’ fallacy). It goes like this:
Angus: “No Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge.”
Clyde: “I put sugar on my porridge.”
Angus: “But no TRUE Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge.”
Now this is a funny example, but how it gets weaponised by modern politics is via the creation of the political ‘other’ via purity politics: “So and so isn’t ‘white enough’ because his great grand father was a black man.” (cf. the one-drop rule in which in the US legally if you even had one ancestor of black heritage you were/are considered black.) This gets weaponised against everyone who isn’t white enough, straight enough, cisgender enough, able-bodied enough, healthy enough, fit enough, wealthy enough. There is no threshold you can overcome because purity politics are a posteriori designed to exclude the “wrong kinds of people” from the get go.
So let’s talk cisgender women being targeted by transphobia now. (Notice how they’re all women of colour? The further down the line you are from white-cis-het-able-bodied-men-etc… the easier it is to target you.) This is the problem with exclusionary bigotry because the goalpost is created to be mobile.
Transphobes: “No women are XYZ.”
Cisgender women: “I am a counterexample.”
Transphobes: “NO TRUE WOMEN ARE XYZ!”
And the joke about this kind of bigotry is that it can target any person at any time. Any woman who doesn’t fall in lockstep with patriarchy can at any given time be deemed a man when failing the capricious rules of purity because “true women” can mean whatever it needs to mean when the status quo… that of white people and cisgender people… is being disrupted.
Here’s the joke.
You can become disabled tomorrow. You can become poor tomorrow. Hells, it can happen to you in the next five minutes. The goalpost is designed with you as loser of the game in mind. Women’s “purity” is designed to be fallible.
a) Because young pretty little girls are easier to control and dominate than crazy old hags who can be called men and or crazy and or fat and or ugly at the drop of a hat,
b) because women are not seen as human by the systems of patriarchy that treat women and womenhood as an infinitely renewable resource.
Trans women and women of colour are just the current punching bag.
If you think your whiteness, or your wealth, or your health, or your status in society will protect you… think again. You. Are. Next.
That’s how this game works. It was designed with you as the loser in mind.
People joked that JK Rowling is one gin and tonic away from saying only white women can be “real women”.
That’s not a new concept. There are horrific words (that I won’t write here), that basically call black women and Jewish women <slur>-ess, that were historically used to dehumanise and de-woman black women and Jewish women.
Trans people have been warning you about this for ages. It’s happening again, except it’s being championed by white cisgender women who think that if they uphold the patriarchy hard enough then they will get to sit on the throne of patriarchy too.
