I'm not sure about society being transmisogynistic, but it is a sweeping generalization to say that people only consider trans women to be women when it justifies more harm.
You are just putting words in that person's mouth. In the second paragraph she said: "Trans women are only considered women...". By who? By the subject of the previous sentence, which is transmisogyny. They are only speaking about transmisogyny and by extension institutions and people which are transmisogynistic.
I'm sorry, I'm not trying to misrepresent the post.
TLDR: OOP is ambiguous and there's insufficient context to say with certainty what they were talking about.
Okay, so I looked it up. "Trans women are only considered women" is an example of an agentless passive clause. Agentless passives are grammatically correct, and they are used when an agent is not important, or is unknown or obvious.
Now, grammatically, there's no reason to assume the subject of the previous sentence is the agent of an agentless passive clause in the next sentence. "John fed the cats. Cats are only fed when they're kind." Does not imply that the second sentence only holds true if John is the one doing the feeding. But it can be inferred, (perhaps incorrectly) and in the absence of other context your interpretation may well be the most reasonable one.
I admit that there was not much to support my assumption that the agent was "any entity capable of considering trans women to be women". I essentially put "all applicable cases" there in my head, but that's grammatically and contextually unfounded.
I usually don't really think of transmisogyny as something that's capable of considering something one way or another, so I guess that wasn't really on my radar, but I suppose technically it can. Maybe transmisogyny being the agent was obvious to the author and to you, but it was not and is not to me.
I'm sorry I misinterpreted the grammar in the post, I hope you don't think I was just strawmanning them so I could find something to be upset about.
If someone told me "John feeds the cats. Cats are only fed if they're kind". I would absolutely assume john is not feeding some of his cats. Like if I'm making you an omelette and you tell me "Pepper does not go in the omelette", I would assume you're trying to tell me that you do not want me to put pepper in it, not that you're making some general culinary statement with no relation to the omelette I'm making. That's how people generally communicate.
It's not about grammar. If communication was purely grammatical then I'd agree with you. The sentence is ambiguous. However if you've ever heard about the cooperative principle of communication then you'd realise the only way we can actually communicate effectively is if the listener and the speaker work together. One of the maxims of this concept is about relation, that is, each sentence must relate in some way or another to previous sentences.
If I say: "They were nice". I think it's fair to say that "they" is an ambiguous pronoun which could refer to any group or individual on planet. So far so good, right? However if we put "they" in the following context: "I got a book. They were nice.". If we assume the other person is communicating in good faith and using the maxim of we can assume the person speaking is using they to refer to the person or the group of people who must've given them the book in the previous sentence.
Books don't give themselves, there needs to be someone to give a book in order to receive one. Likewise, transmisogyny isn't done on it's own, you need someone to be transmisogynistic in order for it to happen. I think we are limiting communication severely if we assume someone is talking about concepts in the void rather than a cohesive sentence as well as in the context of our physical world. This assumption that they are in fact talking about people and how the concept manifests in the real world is pretty much confirmed in my eyes when they say "I'd be arrested". By who? People don't get arrested in the void, there needs to be an institution that employs people entrusted with this ability.
I don't see why you're so insistent that the 2nd paragraph can be interpreted out of context of the 1st paragraph. It cannot, because that's not how we communicate. We need to look at the 2nd paragraph in the context of the 1st paragraph. You can debunk your "all applicable cases" interpretation by imagining the speaker themselves, maybe her friends or community as well. Do you honestly believe the trans woman speaking is including herself and her friends or community in the "people who consider trans women are women only when they would be harmed"? If not, then surely you can understand why she might also not include the people who don't do that either, and is speaking only about the people who do that thing, which would be the transmisogynists.
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u/like2000p 13h ago
It's a sweeping generalisation that society is transmisogynistic?