You know the thing with impostor sydrome, where it’s quietly understood that some of the people who claim they have it are actually, gasp, not that great at whatever it is they fear they’re not that great at? What if something similar is true of the girls who imagine they’re not like the other girls. Imperfect analogy but it is, as you will see, merely a starting point.
As we have established, I think transness, as a topic, gets 10,000 times more attention than is needed, a development I’m not persuaded is a net good for trans people themselves. What I do find compelling, and worthy of more analysis than it gets, is the way… I truly do not know how to put this that will not annoy everybody but fortunately for me I don’t care about this and will press on. (I have a bit of the Diana Trent in me, I suppose.)
Among the British but not only ‘TERFs’ but not only, there’s a certain common backstory. A girlhood marked by dread at impending womanhood. Maybe there was a severe eating disorder involved, maybe the crisis restricted itself to the mind of the then-girl now-woman (and crucially not now-man or now-non-binary-person), but this was their feeling. They liked the tomboy, androgynous freedom of youth, scraped knees and climbing trees or whatever 8-year-olds do that sounds mildly dangerous yet wholesome, but found the prospect of getting leered at or turning into a housewife frightening. They are not now and were not then lesbian-identified, and indeed are by all accounts happy with male partners.
Women with stories like these will then look at the assigned female at birth people who identify as transgender men, or (more often, and more to the point, and I will get to why) non-binary, and not find it all that convincing.
As in, if I may put words into the mouths of a straw British woman I only half disagree with (getting to that):
‘You think that your lack of interest in wearing lipstick / in life as a tradwife / in gossiping with the other housewives down the fishmongers’ means you’re not a woman, hmm? Well! Have you not met actual women, who are also uncomfortable with gender roles? In fact (and, let me, Phoebe, interject, here’s where it gets dicey), all women feel like this about female gender roles, which was and is the whole point of feminism!’
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