In the United States, as in the United Kingdom, there are some self-identified liberals and leftists who insist on pitting cisgender women’s rights against trans rights, baselessly arguing that draconian discrimination against transgender people is necessary to “protect women and girls”.
As a transgender American woman, the willingness of such people to partner with right-wingers to put a target on my back is bewildering and painful. The fact is, after all, that trans people suffer violence disproportionately. Just this month, in fact, a non-binary, Native American teenager, Nex Benedict, was beaten by other students in a school bathroom in Oklahoma, and the school administration didn’t even call an ambulance to try to save them. Nex died in hospital the next day.
So-called ‘trans-exclusionary radical feminists’ (or ‘TERFs’) may not care that they have innocent blood on their hands, so long as the blood spilled belongs to people on the trans spectrum, though such thinking is of course both cruel and shortsighted.
