What Makes A Woman?

 

This is not a question I thought anyone needed to address, but Facebook this week has shown me how wrong I am. Because wow, there was so much anti-trans bullshit happening among Black people, especially Black women this week.

So, to answer the seemingly uncomplicated question with a really simple and straightforward answer…

she does.

Her.

If she says she’s a woman then she is a woman.

This is uncomplicated.

Transwoman are women. End of fucking file.

The number of people who took it upon themselves to deny this and question the gender of hundreds of women directly this week…I wish I could say it surprised me but no, I wasn’t surprised. I was just disappointed.

The excuses these people used! Ugh and the really sad thing is that there was some actually valid criticism in the depths of all of the transmisogyny but you would be hard pressed to find it because it got drowned out in the misgendering and anti-everything-that-isn’t -heterosexuality. Yeah I saw that. Don’t think you got away with it.

Look, you can disagree with someone without misgendering them. You can even insult someone without misgendering them. Watch.

 

Caitlyn Jenner is the worst. She is absolute trash. I can’t stand her.

 

See what I did there? Identified the awful human as an awful human while still using the correct gender identifier.

Again, not that fucking complicated.

But no, rather than just type the most basically humane and decent thing a remarkably large percentage of Black people spent the week calling Black (trans)women Black men and pretending that they were doing so out of love for Black people.

That quickly segued into generally anti-Gender and Sexual Minority sentiment, which is actually a huge problem in Black activist circles. Unless they are specifically GSM led, they have an unfortunate tendency to be aggressively heteronormative. People who claim to be intersectional do love to open up their comments to “BLACK WOMEN ONLY” on relationship issues and then ignore and silence any Black women who point out that not everyone is in a relationship with a man.

Yep. All the time. Do better.

And while we’really discussing this, can we leave the term wombmyn and any variation thereof behind us forever? For real, y’all if your only definition of womanhood hinges on the reproductive system you’really just a misogynist in a slightly different outfit and you’re not fooling anyone.

So this is the point where a lot of the people who were agreeing with me are going to change their minds.

Remember when I said some valid criticism was lost in the fray? Yeah.

This is where you should imagine me making Tina Belcher’s uncomfortable groan. Because there was a hell of a lot of privilege being thrown around by white transwomen and a hell of a lot of overtly racist shit from non-Black women. In fairness, it came in reaction to serious transmisogyny but that doesn’t make it acceptable. Yes you were attacked but the fact that a Black person made you made doesn’t give you the right to devolve into racism. If you can’t avoid that under stress then you’re just a racist. Your gender doesn’t enter into it.

Please see the above example of how you can avoid being horrible while disagreeing with people.

It. Is. Still. Not. Complicated.

Black Lives Matter.

Trans Lives Matter.

Black Trans Lives are a thing.

Stop being horrible to each other.