“Trans panic remains a potent idea outside the law because it is circular. On the one hand, it charges that trans women are not women, because their "gender" is really a dangerous sexuality, reducible to an inherently violent penis (though actual men with penises, who outnumber trans women in the world by massive numbers, are conspicuously not the central targets of such TERF campaigns). On the other hand, it claims that non-trans "sexuality" is truthfully a matter of gender (or sex, used synonymously). Women are biologically endangered by penises, and men are driven to legitimate homicidal rage at their sight. When it is convenient, the TERF will ontologize gender as sexuality, turning trans womanhood into a sexual perversion. But, just as soon as it suits her, she will turn around and ontologize sexuality as gender, making non-trans sexuality derivative of immutable manhood or womanhood--of fossilized biological sex. It is, ironically, one of the most ideologically structured accounts of gender to be found anywhere in the world. This closed circuit forms the resilience of trans misogyny.”

• Jules Gill Peterson - pg137 a Short history of trans misogyny

“Strangely, for street queens in the midcentury, the problem of becoming a woman created a situation that shared much in common with the monarchs after which they were named.
The street queen, like a monarch, had two bodies. One was the earthly body into which she was born as a mortal: male and flawed. The second was a metaphysical body, the promised form of high femininity and womanhood to which she strived. Miss Destiny had received a divine messenger early in childhood to announce the dilemma, a fairy voice and femme conscience named Miss Thing. At a young age, Miss Thing explained what it meant to have two bodies as a comedy of errors. "Why, how ridiculous!-
" she reassured the frightened
trans child. «That petuh between your legs simpuhlee does not belong, dear."6 That "petuh" was not an intractable mark of failure, the proof that she could never be a girl. On the contrary, Miss Thing taught Destiny that it was a signal of her fate. She was destined for a higher calling. She would transcend the ridiculous and become a real woman.
The idea that a king or queen had two bodies was the legal foundation of the Tudor-era monarchy in England.37 Although the king was a human being with a mortal body called the
"body natural," he was understood to have also a second body as ruler, his "body politic." This second body was metaphysical and angelic, invisible to be sure, but perhaps the aura of power that accompanied him everywhere.” - Jules gill-Peterson - short history of trans misogyny - pg118-9

“At the interpersonal scale, however, trans misogyny testifies to the uncomfortable thickness of social bonds across hierarchies of gender, class, and race. When a straight man lashes out after dating or having sex with a trans woman, he is often afraid of the implication that his sexuality is joined to hers. When a gay man anxiously keeps trans women out of his activism or social circles, he is often fearful of their common stigma as feminine. And when a non-trans feminist claims she is erased by trans women's access to a bathroom, she is often afraid that their shared vulnerability as feminized people will be magnified intolerably by trans women's presence. In each case, trans misogyny displays a fear of interdependence and a refusal of solidarity. It is felt as a fear of proximity. Trans femininity is too sociable, too connected to everyone--too exuberant about stigmatized femininity--and many people fear the excess of trans femininity and sexuality getting too close…

The defensive fear and projection built into trans misogyny, whether genuine or performed, is an attempt to wish away what it nonetheless recognizes: that trans femininity is an integral part of the social fabric.”

• Jules Gill-Peterson - short history of trans misogyny - pg27