I am a cis woman, you are a trans woman, and here is why that distinction does not matter
By: Richa Udayana
Tags: Gender, Women, Misogyny, Transphobia, Transgender

“Silenced by men first and now trans women, will women ever not feel silenced?” she wrote. She was angry about having her voice ‘policed’ for the benefit of trans women, who she thinks are not truly women. She was bewildered that she’s been called a transphobe after saying things like, “my being born with a vagina matters in the conversation around the rights of trans women”.

Her anger also stems from the fact that trans women are pushing for a more inclusive vocabulary: ‘chestfeeding’ instead of ‘breastfeeding’, for instance*. Her understanding, as I understand it, is that granting trans women these rights somehow reduces, nullifies, counteracts the rights of cis women.

The author elaborately describes the ways in which the presence of trans women using ‘cis’ women’s spaces around her traumatises her. She writes, “Saying that because you are a woman, your penis is a female penis and should be seen as a vagina in change rooms… while women constantly still deal with being sent dick pics, and being flashed, and forced to see penises when we never consented to. As a rape survivor this can be especially difficult for me.”

She’s also mad at Caitlyn Jenner: “A celebrity rich famous woman who had been a man for so so many years and a woman for very few winning a women’s award over women who had far far more right.” **

Her entire piece essentially hinges around the point that since, according to her, trans women are not truly women (why care about what trans women think of themselves), they should not be allowed into spaces meant for (cis) women. Because apparently, “when a trans woman enters that space, cis women often feel invalidated, offended, and angry.”

It is important to note here that this is the kind of exclusionary talk that Republicans in the US have been rolling back protection that allows trans people access to bathrooms of their chosen gender. It is the very same brand of transphobia that encourages their exclusion from colleges, schools and workplaces — this toxic idea that they are the ‘other’, and that this otherness needs to exist somewhere else, somewhere we don’t have to look at them.

Much is said here (and has been said in the past) about how trans women are different from cis women, because, in the words of this author, they “looked male for part of [their] life, [they] experienced a different life. [They] got privileges.”

Earlier this year, Nigerian writer-feminist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie sparked a row after implying that trans women were not ‘real’ women because they enjoyed male privilege before transitioning into women — a statement that overlooked the abuse and discrimination that gender non-confirming people undergo all their lives as a result of their dysphoria.

So what does it take to be a woman? Where does gender lie? Is it in the organs we possess? Then, are women who’ve undergone hysterectomies or mastectomies still women? Are men who surgically give up their penises still men? We’re moving past these definitions, thankfully, and embracing gender as mutable and perceived personal identities that cannot be boiled down to a checklist of character attributes.

Trans women are women. They are as much women as ‘natal’ or cis women, and the ‘they have different experiences’ argument does not invalidate their womanhood. If it did, would we be okay with creating separate spaces for white women because their experiences were different from those of women of colour?

And this is precisely what makes the arguments of this author so hypocritical and baffling. On the one hand, she claims with fantastically faux magnanimity that she is willing to support “surgeries and pronouns” for trans women, while on the other, rejects their femininity altogether.