“Not the Right Kind of Woman”: Transgender Women’s Experiences of Transphobic Hate Crime and Trans-misogyny

Transphobic hate crime is gaining significant attention within the United Kingdom, and internationally, in academic, political and social spheres. However, transmisogyny is under-reported and also under-researched within hate crime scholarship. In this chapter, an overview is provided of the current state of transphobic hate crime within England and Wales. This is contextualised within broader conceptual debates surround genderism and the tyranny of gender (Doan, 2010). The methodological approach adopted for the research that informs this chapter is also outlined, providing an overview of the ways in which participants were recruited and a breakdown of participant’s demographics. This chapter ends by providing a critical exposé of transgender women’s experiences of trans-misogyny. These experiences are contextualised and explored within two dominant spaces: LGBTQ+ spaces, and sex-segregated spaces. It is demonstrated that trans-misogyny operates within various contexts and may be motivated by different reasons within different contexts. The empirical results are first contextualised within the often complex relationships between cisgender gay men, masculinity and femininity. As such, it is illustrated that trans-misogyny is a manifestation of ‘femmephobia’, the cultural rejection of femininity and those associated with femininity. The empirical results are then contextualised within sex-segregated spaces, in which stereotypical, potentially misogynistic tropes around the ‘ideal woman’ are drawn upon to delegitimise transgender women who do not meet, or conform to these gendered expectations