#and like mocking transvestigators is generally a good thing

[communistkenobi]

What I’m about to say is probably a much less generous interpretation of what people usually intend when they say “transphobia hurts cis people too,” but the problem this framing runs into, over and over again, is the implied argument that often runs underneath it, which is that if transphobia were contained to just trans people, that if 100% of its targets were transgender, it would be somehow more legitimate or more reasonable, even if you still concede it’s wrong to be transphobic to trans people. Like the logic being used here isn't that transphobia at its core is destructive and irrational because it harms trans people, it’s that the people doing the transphobia are doing it “wrong” by picking the “wrong” targets. And I think this framing tends to put a lot of emphasis on individual transphobic actors or individual instances of transphobic violence (eg people attacking cis women who “look like men” in bathrooms, transvestigators, etc) by way of arguing that these bigoted people are incapable of governing their own bigotry appropriately, that it keeps spilling out into the broader cis public (where it ought not to be) because they’re too stupid to recognise their real targets and mistakenly keep picking the wrong ones, and because of this we need to do something about it. Like what keeps getting highlighted in conversations where I see people repeat this line are the bigots’ errors in judgement, that these pattern recognition errors (this continued failure to clock “real trans people”) are too frequent for the cis public to ignore - effectively, transphobia is spilling out of the transphobia department and into other departments of social life, and this is the problem that needs correcting. Fundamentally what I keep hearing when people use this argument is that reactionaries are getting too unruly, too imprecise in their targeting mechanisms, and that this is the cause for concern, not the underlying bigotry itself. Yes, transphobia is expansionary, it will continue to find fresh victims even in hypothetical futures where “the transgender problem” has been fully dealt with, but that shouldn’t be your primary concern lol