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i know it does in fact suck for cis women with short hair! but they are not the target! maybe there's a category of people mentioned by name by the people making these bills! the worst part is this might actually be the best way to make cis people care about this because cis people mostly don't seem to give a shit about us. except sometimes they just put in the work to make sure the bills only hurt us and not them
In the same way that "Anti-immigrant" legislation just ends up being used as a cudgel against anyone with an unseasonable tan, I see a lot of the TERF shit (particularly the really deep "Every celebrity is Trans!" conspiracy-tier discourse) as this method of excusing harassment of anyone who looks remotely queer.
Complete gender fascism is inevitable when you seriously want to go through with returning to a world were less than 1% of the population realizes they're trans, that genie's just out of the bottle and you need total, all-encompassing control of all media to ever again effectively stop trans people from realizing who we are. And that's just the knowledge and cracking part, keeping people from being trans in public requires equally overarching control over every single public space. So yeah, you could make a point that runaway transphobia will, if left unchecked, inevitably reach a point where it will drastically infringe on the rights of cis people. That's undoubtedly true.
But when you're discussing that, you've already ceded the point that having less trans people is, in itself, a political goal that's ok as a subject of public debate. That means you're letting transphobes control the debate you're having, because that debate is then about what level of transphobia will start affecting cissies, not about making transphobia in itself unacceptable.
So the "transphobia affects cis people, too" line of thought is undoubtedly true, but it is also a loser strategy that already throws me under the bus before the argument has even begun. It verifies that the only thing to worry about are the rights of butch cis women, while mine are at best an afterthought.
it's a little valid as a response to "this is to protect cis women!" but even then you can't make that argument without conceding the point