#this is an oversimplification tbh but it's also a tumblr ask that i'm trying to respond to promptly

[quinnfabrayapologist]

Do you ever wonder how exactly there came to be such a transphobia problem in British feminism?

Not really. Pretty straightforward IMO.

Britain is highly patriarchal and pretty much just an oligarchy at this point, given the majority of people in charge were born rich and went to one of a handful of private schools. Fair amount of them are also journalists to some degree, or work with journalists on the regular, so when those pesky feminists wanted to dismantle their little boy's club, they stoked up a culture war to give them a new target.

A great example is the NHS. There's been issues lately with supply of oestrogen. I have a former classmate who is a raging transphobe and in her fifties. She's constantly on twitter talking about how the reason she can't get her hormone replacement therapy for her menopause is that trans women are taking all the oestrogen. Her source? A right wing newspaper linked to half of the current PM's cabinet. The real issue? The Tories have been systematically gutting and selling off the NHS since they came into power, which is causing shortages now, because the Tories want the NHS to fail so they can say 'see? NHS doesn't work. Time to privatise the whole thing' and make a mint doing it.

So basically, the minority we should actually be worried about - the 1%ers who have had everything handed to them on a silver platter all their lives, including some of the highest powers this land has to give, and are using that power to take our country apart for profit in the houses of parliament - have convinced a decent portion of feminists that a minority with basically no power is the root of all evil.

And so, using their institutional power (being the law-making elites) and their influential power (clickbait articles they've usually written themselves), they've convinced a portion of feminists that the upper-class, born-rich, bred for rule, blue-blooded bullies who thrive off the patriarchy aren't the problem, trans people are, and so the sect of feminists they've successfully turned against trans people are now fighting to uphold the patriarchy on behalf of the Conservatives and calling it feminism.