If you actually care about cis women’s safety, you have to care about trans women’s safety
Aspen Ruhlin (they/them) Mabel Wadsworth Center Community Engagement Manager
Transphobia causes significant harm to transgender people across the spectrum, whether in the form of physical violence or social othering, and many things in between. This fact is enough reason to take action and oppose this hate. While all trans people are harmed by transphobia, trans women and transfeminine folks often face the brunt of this harm, as they are most often the victims of transphobic violence and are frequently targeted socially and with anti-trans legislation. We’ve seen this targeting across the country and here in Maine, with the harassment and doxxing of a trans minor by a certain State Representative and the multiple pieces of proposed legislation attacking trans women and girls in sports. It is abhorrent, and it is inexcusable.
Harm to trans people is enough reason to oppose transphobia in any form, but we know that hate harms more than its named targets. We have seen time and again cis people, particularly cis women, harmed by misdirected transphobia. This makes perfect sense when we remember that, ultimately, transphobia is a tool of the patriarchy.
Patriarchal power structures demand an adherence to a rigid binary that simply doesn’t exist in nature. If this rigid binary did exist naturally, no one would have to try to force themselves or others into it. In this system, women are expected to be petite, weak, lacking in body hair, and more. These characteristics, along with being rooted in white supremacy, either require significant effort to achieve, like hair removal, or are just not possible for many women to fit into. Plenty of cis women are tall, like Gwendoline Christie and Meg thee Stallion, and will never fit the patriarchy’s rigid notion of acceptable womanhood. With Meg thee Stallion in particular and her experience as a tall Black woman, we see the intersections of misogyny, misdirected transphobia, and racism.
Transphobia is a tool of the patriarchy to police all women’s bodies, trans and cis alike. We saw this play out on a global stage in the 2024 Summer Olympics with the “transvestigation” of Imane Khelif, an Algerian women’s boxer who was accused of being trans for not fitting white notions of femininity. Recently, a cis woman was kicked out of a bathroom in Boston after being falsely accused of being trans. It’s important to note that it is legal for trans people to use the bathroom associated with their gender in Massachusetts.
As transphobia gains more visibility, we unsurprisingly see more cis women experiencing misdirected transphobia. Trans people are the named target of transphobia, but transphobia works to control cis people as well, forcing them to either adopt narrow expressions of gender or risk harassment. Even when misdirected transphobia isn’t on the table, the same patriarchal values that uplift transphobic beliefs harm cis people, particularly cis women. One example of this is physical strength. We are bombarded with messages from birth that women are inherently weak, though we know this isn’t true. When women are discouraged from being strong, who benefits?
Every attempt at defining womanhood in a way to exclude trans women also excludes countless cis women. Every attack on trans women is a direct attack on countless cis women and an indirect attack on the rest. If you actually care about cis women’s safety, you have to care about trans women’s safety.