As disgustingly abusive and detestably vile as such people often are, the focus of my personal fears isn't on such passionate radical feminists at present because I regard them as Disney villains. In my mind, unless somebody is already extremely biased then fundamental flaws in their thinking and their malice are immediately apparent. For instance, their consistent accusation that trans women are fetishists while trans men are trying to gain status can be, and often was or is, readily applied to sexuality. Using the same thinking as these radical feminists, lesbians can be reduced to women trying to acquire the status of men while gay men can be said to have appropriated the sexuality of an oppressed group for the sake of a fetish. For me, the fact that the vast majority of lesbian and gay people would reject this characterisation based on their self-understanding is as irrelevant in this scenario as the fact that most trans people would reject exclusionary radical feminist reliance on things like ->-bleeped-<- due to its total incompatibility with their self-understanding.
My personal fears are focused on people that are far more insidious and many liberal feminists. In the case of the latter, they often seem to use trans people as nothing more than a weapon against all radical feminists or other political opponents and often seem to assume their typically shallow support of trans people makes them somehow superior. I've seen far too many of them speak for and over trans people then turn on us as ungrateful or inconvenient if anyone dares to question it.
In the case of the insidious individuals, I'm thinking of obvious transphobes that profess to actually accept trans rights and are obviously politically savvy enough to realise that expressing the true extent of their feelings would be politically self-destructive. In my personal view, many of the feminists writing for the Guardian or New Statesman are examples of that.
They can't say that 'trans women are men and trans men are women' without causing any progressive audience they have to instantly shut down. Flowing from that, they'll do things like write essays about straw-definitions of 'cis' so they can claim it's a slur, a misogynistic term, or somehow reinforces gender restrictions. They'll try to create myths of shared girlhood and boyhood to exclude trans people and leave it implied that we're incapable of understanding fellow members of our gender rather than stating it outright. They'll try to resort to biological essentialism by referring to trans people as 'male women' or 'female men,' terms that perform no function that the modifier 'trans' cannot beyond being a malicious reminder of things trans people often hate about themselves. They'll try to portray TERF as some kind of McCarthyite term, as if the trans community has significant power, and lecture the trans community on who our real allies are or what real transphobia is despite the fact they'd validly rip men apart that tried to do the same to feminists. They create straw-definitions of 'non-binary' identities so they can erase the unique harms endured by our siblings via claims that we're all non-binary since nobody totally complies with gender roles. They'll claim to care deeply about victims of sexual assault and use the idea of them as a homogeneous group as a weapon against trans people by insisting we should be excluded from shelters because we might trigger victims. Naturally, the implication is that it's acceptable to silently misgender us and that, as Natalie Reed has so perfectly encapsulated it, our right to actually be safe is subordinate to the rights of others to merely feel safe. They take events like Laverne Cox appearing on Time to subject trans women to scrutiny they hardly ever apply to cis women, women that consistently present as femme hypocritically insist the femininity of people like Laverne means trans women uphold patriarchy (of course, the fact Laverne is also black is completely coincidental to them targeting her *rolls eyes*). They ironically use their vast platforms and columns in major publications to claim the trans community, a teeny tiny minority of the population with no institutional powers, are censoring and silencing them thereby reversing the dynamics in the eyes of their audience. They use 'sex dysphoria' instead of 'gender dysphoria' so they instantly exclude the rights of anyone that isn't transsexual without stating it directly. There are so, so, so many things they do on a daily basis that I can't hope to list them all. I don't think they consciously contrive such things but I'm concerned with the outcome of their tactics rather than their origins.
Most tellingly, they often closely associate with exclusionary radical feminists despite knowing their history of attacks and the nature of their beliefs. They quietly absorb the vitriolic arguments of exclusionary radical feminists and repackage them for respectable mass consumption. They're the public relations agents of exclusionary radical feminists and that's why I fear them most. Just as oppressors have done across time, they use their respectability and compliance with social conventions to generate authority and portray opponents as uncouth or irrational.
