Carolina’s Reviews > A Short History of Trans Misogyny > Status Update
Carolina
is on page 30 of 182
❝For these reasons, I maintain a difference between trans femininity and trans womanhood or trans women. The first is meant to signal a broad classification by outside observers, including aesthetic criteria and the history of ideas attached to people who have been trans-feminized. Trans womanhood and women, on the other hand, name people who saw themselves as intentionally belonging to a shared category (...)❞
— Apr 01, 2026 03:25AM
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Carolina’s Previous Updates
Carolina
is on page 61 of 182
❝Their common experiences suggest that by the late nineteenth century, trans panic and its characteristic violence were a threat to anyone caught in public visibility, men’s desire, and the retaliatory violence that conflated femininity with sexual availability.❞
— Apr 01, 2026 03:52AM
Carolina
is on page 60 of 182
❝While the old woman’s Christian charity may have traded in ignorance that Kelly wasn’t the same kind of woman as her, the stares of everyone on the streetcar were proof enough that she was probably using that cover to protect a fellow passenger. Kelly arrived at 1410 unscathed, only to find it was just as bad as everyone had warned.❞
— Apr 01, 2026 03:51AM
Carolina
is on page 60 of 182
❝Looking trans feminine in public was a huge risk to her safety— it didn’t matter if she was only dressed that way for work. “Everybody that was on the streetcar was lookin’ at me. I didn’t say nothin’, I just sit there and crossed my legs.” ❞
— Apr 01, 2026 03:50AM
Carolina
is on page 60 of 182
❝Petrified, Kelly was saved by the old lady across the aisle, who beckoned her. “Come here honey. Come here. Come here honey, sit over here.” Kelly took the offer up with a sigh of relief, settling in beside her. “We women are not even safe anymore,” the old lady confided. “That old …” she said, gesturing to the drunk man, “I would like to curse him but I’m a Christian, you know.” ❞
— Apr 01, 2026 03:50AM
Carolina
is on page 50 of 182
❝What was trans about the panic was not that the people being targeted themselves were inherently trans women, but that they were trans-feminized by the conflation of male femininity with immoral sodomy and sex work.❞
— Apr 01, 2026 03:50AM
Carolina
is on page 49 of 182
❝The striking similarity between the actions of the police officer in the NWP and the federal agent on the Crow Reservation is evidence that the trans panic of the nineteenth century was global in scope. This doesn’t mean it was coordinated but rather that colonial states were similarly incentivized to target populations through trans panics as a way of securing sovereignty.❞
— Apr 01, 2026 03:49AM
Carolina
is on page 49 of 182
❝It was in this widespread panic and trans-feminization by the state that individual men learned to experience and wield trans panic, too. Psychology followed the example of the state.❞
— Apr 01, 2026 03:48AM
Carolina
is on page 48 of 182
❝The colonial state appointed itself the political right to exterminate hijras to satisfy panicked British moral order. As we have seen, doing so meant ending the hijra way of life, but it also empowered men— namely, police officers— to look for and attack hijras in the street.❞
— Apr 01, 2026 03:48AM
Carolina
is on page 48 of 182
❝Although the intervening history is too complex to reduce to any one cause, the British trans panic in the colonial era seems to have played a lasting role in sexualizing hijras and actually pushing them toward sex work by criminalizing their previous way of life.❞
— Apr 01, 2026 03:47AM
Carolina
is on page 47 of 182
❝The law manifestly failed in its extreme goal of exterminating the population, and its implementation withered by the end of the century. But the assault on the hijra way of life did have lasting consequences.❞
— Apr 01, 2026 03:47AM
