If You Wanted To Look Like You Were Protecting Women...

...and if you had no conscience and not a single smidge of shame...

I have never understood the logic behind thinking a man would put on a wig and a dress, thus making himself vulnerable to the violence a trans woman risks just by existing, in order to prey on women, when it’s so very easy for him to skip to the last step and prey on women.

It’s not hard for a man to prey on a woman. It happens all the time. That’s why we have to be so alert and keep our keys in our fists when we walk out into a dark parking lot, after all. It’s why we’re advised to carry pepper spray take a self defense class. It’s why we never leave a drink unattended on a date, and go to the bathroom in groups.

Why would a man take the tactical advantage he had in being a cisgender male, the very top of the violence food chain, and throw that away by choosing to disguise himself as a trans woman?

It’s EASIER for him to assault us if he’s passing as a man, than if he’s pretending to be transgender. Transgender women are MORE vulnerable than men. Maybe a man passing as a man can’t sneak into the bathroom quite so easily, but he can do just about anything else he wants.

That’s not to say I don’t understand why a person with no conscience would scapegoat a transgender woman and claim they were doing it to protect other women, of course. I can understand why somebody would.

If you belong to a political party which claimed it was the party of Christianity, family values, and common sense— a party whose judges are responsible for women dying of sepsis all over the country. If your party just voted in a president who was found by a jury of his peers to have dragged a woman into a dressing room and digitally raped her, and found by another jury to have cajoled a disgusted woman into sex that traumatized her and then paid her six figures not to talk about it, and then committed business fraud to hide the payment. If, upon that president’s election, young men all over the country started harassing women by saying “your body, my choice.” If that president-elect’s first pick for his cabinet was a man who paid off the lady he raped, and the second pick was a man who trafficked teenagers for sex for enormous sums of money, and the third pick was a man whose wife killed herself when she found his diary where he tallied up the affairs he’d had. And another cabinet pick, a woman, had been sued for enabling sexual abuse of children. Well, maybe you’d want to change the subject very quickly and try to make it look like, far from being perverts, you were protecting people from perverts.

The problem is, you don’t want to choose a real pervert to protect women from, because perverts have become your party’s base.

In that case, it makes perfect sense that you’d turn around and start making cruel rules to harass a trans woman. That would make it look like you were doing something to protect women, while not offending anybody who actually wants to hurt women or anyone else. Your cruel base would praise you for your cruelty, and people who didn’t think very hard would think you were looking out for safety. Nobody you cared about would be hurt, just a trans woman.

You would be a quisling and a traitor to women for doing that, but I can understand what you were thinking.

It would be just about the most cynical, amoral, sociopathic thing you could do, but I see the logical progression.

I wish I didn’t have to say that the behavior of the Republican House members was predictable, but it is. Because that’s the kind of people they are.