There’s a deep insecurity in recognizing that there aren’t “objective right answers” to a lot of things. Language is not a law, it’s a negotiated thing. Being a trans man doesn’t sunder me completely from the existence of living as a girl, and there are contexts in which my “assigned” sec does matter. The fact that abortion is utterly illegal in my state is just as harmful and terrifying to me as it is to the cis women I know.
These are people who desperately want to feel in control of the world, and the idea that they would not be able to put a person into a category based on their immediate evaluation of their sex makes them feel a loss of control. It’s attacking something of their ways of knowing, it’s an epistemological challenge that sends them reeling.
With lesbians - it’s the gold star lesbian types. They find joy in their identities as lesbians, which is great, but they treat penis in vagina sex as a contagion. It almost “horseshoe theory”‘s back into sounding like conservative Christians. They squint at some actually good critiques of porn and the way that human sexuality is marketed, and turn into a Holy War against the Y chromosome. This is not common - but it’s a very marked type of pathology. The TERFs are the type to actually be manhaters - to post things like “it’s a girl or it’s an abortion.”
There’s a deep insecurity in recognizing that there aren’t “objective right answers” to a lot of things. Language is not a law, it’s a negotiated thing. Being a trans man doesn’t sunder me completely from the existence of living as a girl, and there are contexts in which my “assigned” sec does matter. The fact that abortion is utterly illegal in my state is just as harmful and terrifying to me as it is to the cis women I know.
These are people who desperately want to feel in control of the world, and the idea that they would not be able to put a person into a category based on their immediate evaluation of their sex makes them feel a loss of control. It’s attacking something of their ways of knowing, it’s an epistemological challenge that sends them reeling.
With lesbians - it’s the gold star lesbian types. They find joy in their identities as lesbians, which is great, but they treat penis in vagina sex as a contagion. It almost “horseshoe theory”‘s back into sounding like conservative Christians. They squint at some actually good critiques of porn and the way that human sexuality is marketed, and turn into a Holy War against the Y chromosome. This is not common - but it’s a very marked type of pathology. The TERFs are the type to actually be manhaters - to post things like “it’s a girl or it’s an abortion.”