They Came for this Trans Woman First. Sister, You’re Next
A 60-year-old transgender woman in South Dakota on why every feminist alive needs to pay attention right now.
I am a transgender woman, and I am writing this from my home office in Sioux Falls.
That is not how I usually open something. I am a graduate student. I write papers with abstracts and reference lists. I cite my sources. But the moment I am in does not call for an abstract. It calls for a conversation, woman to woman, across whatever distance separates us, while we still have time to have it.
So pull up a chair. Pour something warm. I want to tell you what is happening, why it should scare you, and why I think we are going to win anyway.
What Just Happened, and Why You Should Care
On January 20, 2025, the President of the United States signed an executive order with my name in the title.
Not literally my name. But people like me. The order, titled “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” does what the title says. It tells every federal agency that I am not a woman. It strips the gender markers off our passports. It pulls federal funding from gender-affirming care. It bars trans people from federally funded sex-segregated facilities that match who we are.
And here is the part I want you to sit with for a second. The title says it is defending you.
Three months later, on April 16, 2025, the United Kingdom Supreme Court handed down its ruling in For Women Scotland Ltd v. The Scottish Ministers. Five judges, unanimous. They said the word woman in the UK Equality Act means biological sex assigned at birth, full stop, and that a trans woman holding a Gender Recognition Certificate is not legally a woman under that law. The lawsuit was bankrolled, in part, by J.K. Rowling.
Two months after that, on June 18, 2025, the United States Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in United States v. Skrmetti that Tennessee can ban puberty blockers and hormone therapy for trans kids. Twenty-five states still have those bans on the books. More than 100,000 trans youth lost meaningful access to care that day, according to legal advocates tracking the fallout.
All of this in the name of protecting women. Women like you. Women like me, the law says, are the threat.
Here is what I want you to know. Every single one of those rulings was wrapped in a flag that said your name on it.
I Have Been Down This Road Before
I came out late. I am 60. I came of age politically in a women’s movement that, for most of my early adulthood, was unsure I belonged in it.
In 1979, the year I started high school, a feminist scholar named Janice Raymond published a book called The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male. Beacon Press. You can still buy it. In that book, Raymond argued that women like me were a phallocratic invasion of women’s spaces, and she proposed. I am quoting her here, that the problem of transsexuality should be “morally mandated out of existence” (Stone, 1987/1991).
Read that sentence again. A feminist, in a book published by a respected press, is calling for the moral elimination of a category of people. People who, at the time, were dying of AIDS in numbers nobody was counting, dying in alleys at the hands of men who hated us, dying by our own hands when the doctors and the lawyers and yes, the feminists, told us we were not real.
Eight years later, a trans woman named Sandy Stone wrote back. Stone had been an audio engineer at Olivia Records, a women’s music label, and Raymond had attacked her by name. Stone’s 1987 essay The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto is now treated as the founding text of academic transgender studies. She told us to “read ourselves out loud.” To stop hiding. To write ourselves into the discourses that had been writing us out.
I was 21 when Stone wrote that. I did not read it for another twenty years. I wish I had.
Two decades later, Julia Serano gave us the word for what was happening to us. In Whipping Girl (Seal Press, 2007; third edition with new afterword, 2024), Serano coined the term transmisogyny to name the specific form of misogyny aimed at trans women. Not just transphobia. Not just misogyny. The intersection. The thing that happens when both forces collapse onto a single body. Ms. Magazine named the book one of the 100 Best Non-Fiction Books of All Time.
Serano’s argument, and I think it is the most important sentence written about gender in the last twenty years, is this: transphobia is not a separate thing from sexism. It is sexism, doing what sexism always does, to a population that sexism has always hated. The hatred of trans women is the hatred of femininity in a body that the patriarchy did not authorize to be feminine.
Trans women are not a threat to feminism. We are a stress test for it.
The Numbers, Because You Deserve to See Them
I know how this conversation can feel. Theory is fine. Memoir is fine. But let me show you what the data say, because the data are unambiguous, and because anyone who tells you trans women are dangerous to cisgender women is asking you to ignore the actual record.
Every November, an organization called TGEU publishes the Trans Murder Monitoring report. The 2025 update covered the year ending September 30, 2025. Two hundred and eighty-one trans and gender-diverse people were murdered worldwide. Ninety percent were trans women or transfeminine. Eighty-eight percent were Black or Brown. Since the project began in 2009, the running total is over 5,300. That is who is dying.
In the United States, the Williams Institute at UCLA analyzed the National Crime Victimization Survey for 2017 and 2018. Trans people aged 16 and older were victimized by violent crime at more than four times the rate of cisgender people. Trans women and trans men have similar rates. So the people you have been told to fear in the bathroom are, in fact, the people most likely to be assaulted in any bathroom anywhere.
A 2025 study in Violence Against Women looked at 229 documented fatal attacks on Black trans women in the United States between 2013 and 2021 (Halliwell et al., 2025). The researchers found that the largest single category of perpetrators was Black cisgender male intimate partners. Translation. The same men who beat their cis girlfriends to death are the men who beat us to death. The patriarchy does not care about the technicality of which woman it is killing.
A 2026 systematic review and meta-analysis in JAMA Network Open synthesized the global data. They found that physical, sexual, and psychological violence against trans and gender-diverse adults is prevalent across every region studied, contributing to large health disparities. The Williams Institute reported in December 2025 that hate crimes targeting transgender and gender-nonconforming people had tripled in California between 2013 and 2024.
That is not the profile of a population threatening women. That is the profile of a hunted population.
