There are a few places a trans person, like myself, feels safe in this world.
People can refuse food to us, refuse to house us, and even claim a "panic" as justification for murdering us. The trans bathroom issue made it clear that people don't even want us to exist in public.
So when I say trans people don't feel safe in many places, I mean it. Because oftentimes it seems like the whole world is against us.
I'm speaking from my experience as a trans man, but this goes especially for trans women of color, who face the majority of the violence and discrimination.
Pride should have been the one place trans people felt safe. Pride should have been the one place where transphobia was shut down.
Instead, the pride parade in London was lead for a few blocks by a handful of terfs, an acronym that stands for "trans-exclusionary radical feminists." They passed out hateful rhetoric against trans woman, including phrases such as "a penis can never be female."
Their argument is that trans women are not, in fact, women. Their thinking is that since they're lesbians, they're against trans women identifying as lesbian, because they still believe in the medieval notion that "gender=sex"; that accepting trans women would be fostering "rape culture" against them.
You might be thinking, "Whoa! Those are pretty radical claims there! Did they have any credible sources supporting this like you did when you sourced violence against trans people?"
Why yes, yes they did have sources, believe it or not. Credible? Not exactly. Their sources on these pamphlets were Tumblr textposts and tweets.
As anyone who graduated from primary school knows, you don't source claims as radical as those with text posts. I guess when you're grasping at straws to support your bigoted claims, you'll grab anything. It's almost laughable.
Except I'm not laughing. I wish I could even crack a smile at this absurdity, but I can't bring myself to. These people are dangerous. Violence against trans women is alarmingly high. Terfs don't care. They only care about being transphobic and sourcing Tumblr textposts for their untrue claims.
Luckily, the chair of LGBT+ Lib Dems Jennie Rigg stated, "This is a betrayal of the thousands marching. The Pride organizers should resign and offer a full apology." There was an outrage on social media against the terfs. There was only a handful of them versus the thousands of supporters. But the fact that they even had a voice at pride is disgusting. Terfs and their transphobia should be stomped out until every trans woman feels safe.
What terfs don't understand is that their thinking, being inherently transphobic, echoes far-right hate rhetoric. Maybe they do understand and just don't care.
So to my fellow feminists, I want to make one thing very, very clear. If your feminism does not include trans women, your feminism is garbage.
Trans women are women. They are women because they say they are women. End of story.
If you are an active feminist, you must include trans women in your fight. Yes, this means getting rid of the notion that all women have vaginas. So, no more "pussy power" or anything else like that. Trans women need us to stand by them and help fight for their rights as we would any other women's rights.
If your feminism does not include trans women, you are nothing but a hypocrite. You cannot fight for "some" women. You fight for all women or you fight no woman. You cannot call yourself a feminist and proceed to cherry pick which woman you want to fight for.
Trans women deserve to have their issues included the feminist movement. They deserve to have allies fighting with them.
They do not deserve to have terfs leading a pride parade.
