This TikTok makes a point that deserves more oxygen: While TERFs engage in transphobic rhetoric and indeed act out of bigotry by equating trans women with men, they can at least reasonably argue that their primary goal is defending cis women from the threat of SA and other violence by men. The point of disagreement is whether trans women are women (they are) or men (how TERFs see them).
Meanwhile, cis men (including gay men) who are engaging in transphobic rhetoric often care little about the safety of women (cis or trans), they’re just leveraging what Derrick Bell called “interest convergence”.
Bell’s term was used to explain the sudden cultural support for school desegregation that was enough to push SCOTUS to change its mind. When it came down to it, large swaths of Yt America weren’t ready to accept having Black youth in THEIR children’s classrooms, but many of them were ready to accept the THEORY of desegregation … because it showed we as a nation were better than the Commies. What yt people got out of supporting the theory of desegregation was improved international prestige, but (as the Ruby Bridges story in the South and Milliken v Bradley case in the North, among other stories, showed) they weren’t ready to accept the REALITY.
People in power don’t willingly give that over unless they see something they can themselves get out of it. In both the Brown example used by Bell and the current TERF situation, that “something” they get out of it might be cover so they can at least pretend to be morally superior to who they really are.
I do not in any way support TERF rhetoric, but I have more understanding of it than I do the anti-trans cis male rhetoric that is cynically exploiting a convergent interest in order to justify their own need to suppress and oppress people based on their own distaste.