this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2023
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I'm wondering if the person who called OP not a real woman was coming from a similar place to drunk and angry you.
Most charitably, she probably thinks it's okay to call what she thinks are "pick me" women "not real women," because according to her you can never arrive at that opinion unless your worldview is unduly influenced by trying to please men, unless you are actively trying to come off as "on the men's side" so that some man sees you say that and rates you a little higher in his "dateable or not" scale. No real woman with non-man-pleasing motivations would ever disagree with her on that topic unless the woman was actively trying to get picked by a man. Dismiss all disagreement by namecalling them as "not a real woman."
Or she probably thinks that having (what she sees as) an extremely harmful opinion justifies hurting the other because hurting them teaches them not to have bad opinions... somehow.... Having a "pick me" opinion means your entire gender is fake because non-trans women would never ever once have the Bad Opinion, and trans women are "fake" women who don't have the Real Lifetime Gender Experience to arrive at the One True Good Opinion.
That ain't it. We don't misgender awful cis people, so why are we doing it to trans people? The answer is "to hurt," but it also has the extra effect of "if you step out of line your identity is no longer valid, trans acceptance is entirely conditional on always having the perfect opinion, otherwise we'll whip you back into shape with some prime invalidation." Of making onlooking trans people doubt whether they're really accepted, whether they pulled out the invalidation to be hurtful and they still are for trans rights, or if they pulled it out because they genuinely think you can't be trans but are willing to pretend for the nice people and go mask-off when sufficiently angered.
Her exact words after "well, you're not a real woman" were "well it's true? right? you're not a real woman". The meaning was clear.
So, either clearly transphobic or clearly willing to act as such when a gun is not pressed to her head. Either way, not acceptable.
The context gives me terf vibes so I'm going to say the woman may have been thinking something like "If you were a 'real woman' you'd have dealt with sexual assault yourself as a victim and would have more empathy." Which ignores how often trans women are victims and just like, falls apart when you look at things like the scores of cis women still supporting Chris Brown. Men don't have a monopoly on unfeminist opinions.
It also tells women privileged enough to not have a sexual assault story, like myself, that we must have experienced THIS much suffering to be allowed gender. No woman can ever be free of this, there’s no hope or good in the world whatsoever, every single woman has an assault story (and the ones who don’t simply don’t count as women anymore!). Imagine being in a post-oppression world, except not really because you are denied a gender on account of not suffering enough. About the 2838281st time TERFs try to invalidate trans women and inadvertently whack cis women like myself. If your exclusionary belief always ends up excluding the people you consider “real women” try expanding your definition out to include trans women too 😒