can't wait for people to increasingly narrow what they say what counts as normative womanhood to try to keep trans women out, with the side effect of also disqualifying more and more cis women from their weird ideal
On a basic, day-to-day level, the norms used by Terfs to judge and assign or deny womanhood are the norms of white women. I've seen so many instances on Twitter of white Terfs looking at images of cis women of colour and misgendering them, because body types, face shapes & features, etc, don't match what they associate with their own white womanhood.
Heck, even average white English people sometimes misgender me in a way that I can tell is racialised, if I am not performing feminity by wearing make up, or earrings, or a skirt. Eg: I remember the clueless bank teller who kept repeatedly calling me "Sir" even when he had my bank account details right in front of him, and could see at a glance that my title is "Ms".
On a deeper, structural level, as Kyla Schuller puts it: "sex difference is itself a racial structure."
Sexual difference, as a concept, emerged as a function of race. This is particularly salient in the nineteenth century, the era in which modern notions of race and sex difference solidified.
[... A] wide variety of scientists, writers, and reformers articulated full sexual differentiation as the unique achievement of the civilized. The binary entities of man and woman were newly understood as thoroughly distinct in terms of mental, physiological, emotional, and psychological capacity. Sex difference was presented as the singular attainment of a teleological evolution moving toward ever greater specialization. The primitive races, by contrast, were cast as unsexed, as insufficiently evolved in both anatomy and character. The category of womanhood emerged in modern times as a unique quality of civilization. Its ramifications are still visible in electoral politics across the country.
That's from here:
More good thinking from that write up:
The legacy of womanhood as itself a stabilizing structure of whiteness reverberates loudly today and is particularly resonant in the trope of the white woman voter. The conservative ideology in which women’s role is to protect the private sphere is an element of the biopolitical logic that women’s role is to secure the stability of the civilized races. White Republican women who vote for sexual assaulters are not identifying with their whiteness over their gender, as has often been claimed. Rather, they are enacting their womanhood itself: both absorbing and smoothing over the flow of sensation and feeling that makes up the public sphere, ensuring that white men remain relatively free from the encumbrances of embodiment and are susceptible only to further progress. Our anger at white women conveniently spares the white male voter, who supported Trump and Moore in even larger numbers. The problem with white Republican women is the problem with woman as a category in the first place.
If people want to learn more I would also recommend Prof Sunny Singh's takes on all of this, as she is always very sharp on the relationship between white feminism, transphobia and racism.
Eg: here she is on Caster Semenya and other Black women athletes being targeted: