MISOGYNY? DRAG? MY REFLECTIONS ON MY SECOND TDOV AS AN OUT TRANSWOMAN.

I remember when I was doing my undergraduate degree, a lecturer told us that a female colleague of his with two degrees could not obtain a bank loan to buy a house without a male guarantor. This was at the same time when a woman could not obtain a passport without her husband’s permission, or even a credit card. I saw a meme the other day saying that it was 50 years since women won the right to obtain these things that men have taken for granted.

Some of the anti-trans arguments put forward by TERFs are illogical and some of women’s hard-won rights will not be taken away by the rights that transwomen want. Women will not lose the right to obtain credit cards in their own right.

I can understand women’s concerns about single-sex spaces, but something else needs to be borne in mind. The number of transwomen who want to transition to undermine women is very low. Most of us who want to transition want to do so because all of our lives we have been put down by other males, and some women, because we do not have the typical male attributes. And I don’t mean physical attributes. I mean, we were the 12-year-olds who were forced to go and watch a demonstration of football that we had no interest in because our mothers thought we should. We were the 12-year-olds who wanted to learn to cook and had mothers who told us that we mustn’t. We were the 13-year-olds who were greeted with “Hey, p-word for homosexual,” even though we weren’t attracted to males. We were the ones who, even though we weren’t surreptitiously looking at the boys, were derided because we didn’t see the attraction to sex that the other boys boasted about.

While we may not have menstruated, we are respectful of women, and were even protected by females, especially older ones, when bullied by the boys.

Germaine Greer claims that transwomen are misogynists, and we have been referred to as drag queens by some TERFs, but here’s where they’re wrong. Drag queens can be divided into two categories; those who ridicule women generally, and those who pick out folly. I remember when despicable Australian politician Pauline Hanson was ridiculed by a drag queen. That drag queen satirized her speeches. There have been skits on some shows where a male comedian will don a wig to lampoon Michaelia Cash or Bronwyn Bishop, but they stick to something offensive that they have said or done. So, essentially, they are speaking truth to power. Barry Humphries, as Dame Edna Everidge, despite being conservative, was ridiculing an upper-class housewife.

Let’s not forget something else. If I show you some slides or a video of my time in Japan, what am I showing you? Well, Japan, obviously, but it’s my construction of Japan. A transwoman who wears a knitted pink sweater and a pair of jeans is no more lampooning a woman than a Western woman who visits Kyoto and tries on a kimono is lampooning a geisha. That transwoman is showing you their construction of the type of woman they want to be.

Many of women’s hard-won rights will be retained, and it’s important to remember that the vast majority of transwomen and transmen are law-abiding citizens, and that anti-trans activists are cherry-picking extreme examples of a minority of non-law abiding citizens. Many are just trying to get by in this world.