You really can’t disentangle racism from TERF ideology: the one is fundamentally predicated on the other, but in a way where white TERFs can’t bear to acknowledge it, because doing so reveals a giant hole in their already poor ideology.
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It’s therefore no surprise that Black female athletes are often the first suspected of being insufficiently female to compete against other women - because *white womanhood is the yardstick TERFs are using*. But they can’t acknowledge that. Because if they did -
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- they’d have to admit their default way of reading gender and gender presentation is based on (often very racist and homophobic) socialisation and cultural assumptions far more than it is on chromosomes. Which is exactly the opposite of what they claim to be doing.
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If it was really about chromosomes and the genitals you were born with, they’d have to acknowledge chromosomal variations, intersex conditions (certain of which are way more common than realised) and the fact that *you can’t tell just by looking at someone what those things are*-
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- because even among cis people, base-level human variety is such that the eye-test is hugely fallible. But they *need* the eye test to work - how else can they get outraged about random people in shops and bathrooms? So they try to force it to work by substituting visual cues.
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You can’t know for sure what’s in someone’s pants without looking, but you can judge their haircut and bodytype as being suspiciously butch. You can’t tell chromosomes at a glance, but if a Black woman runs too fast, you can demand she be tested to prove your suspicions.
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See someone in the ladies’ room with a slight moustache? It can’t be her normal level of body hair (again coded according to white European beauty standards, which leaves very little room for, uh… most of the world) or a sign of PCOS: nope, gotta be a Sekrit Trans!
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“Oh,” the TERFs will say, “oh, but we didn’t mean THEM, that was just an honest mistake!” Bitch, there was nothing honest about it. “Mistakes” aren’t a bug; they’re a feature. TERFism wants all women to present as white womanhood’s idea of femme, so white ladies can feel Normal -
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- instead of being forced to view their specific flavour of womanhood as one option among many. Because if their type of womanhood IS an option, they’d have to admit to either having chosen it or being forced into it, instead of not having to think about the parameters at all.
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And given how many TERFs furiously define their womanhood through a kind of inherent discomfort, or martyrdom, or experience of sexism? The idea that their experiences aren’t universal, or that they can stop caring about certain beauty standards - that’s way too confronting.
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It’s like those posts on tumblr where someone says “you don’t need to wear makeup every day!” and gets a slew of oblivious relies about how this person agrees, you really only need a little foundation or lipgloss, because so many women cannot compute the idea of NO makeup.
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It’s the same thing with TERFs, railing about how women are forced to present as feminine in the workplace, but never stepping away from that enforced femininity themselves, to the point of branding the thing they hate as The Only Real Womanhood.
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“I had to suffer through this, and that suffering will be invalid if anyone can choose otherwise, so the suffering must Stay” is as bad an argument for enforced gender roles as it is for student loan forgiveness. Stop being a fucking martyr for a cause you already hate.
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