“You think you don’t know who you are. lol.”

So today I got my first threat on Twitter. From… a lady clown. Or an “ethical hacker and atheist”, according to her Twitter Bio. But I just have her word on that, whereas I have some incontrovertible proof of clownery in the form of her tweets. She tweeted this to me after I asked her to cite a specific page # from an entire book about lesbian partner violence.

Apparently saying this makes me a “Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist”, or “TERF” for short. I would swear I’m not and never had been but it would feel McCarthy-ish. I actually had to look up the term.

“This is an amazing statistic to show the lack of a chance of violence from trans women.”

Wait, what? Maybe I’m missing something here. What is the expression “a lack of a chance of violence from trans women” supposed to mean? That trans ladies need to give us cis folks a retaliatory whuppin’? That the real tragedy is that trans women don’t have the same latitude to commit violence as their (cis)ter womyn? Is that what people think feminists are about, now?

Part of me wants to think she meant “chance of violence” like “chance of showers”, i.e. that violence disproportionately falls on the shoulders of trans people; but that wasn’t what she said. What she said is half-baked and incomprehensible, and couched in this notion that feminists are necessarily trans bullies. As a feminist, this strikes me strange; I just checked my manifesto (it’s printed on the back of the diploma for reference) and it says “trans people are alright”, between 3.) “it’s okay to be gay” and 5.) “gender is a spectrum, not a binary.”

This is standard issue Sarah Lawrence stuff. Wanting parity in violence is not.