Aw, thank you! I’m honestly a bit disappointed in myself that you even had to ask such a question, because I am absolutely against transmisogyny in all of its forms, and I’ve always considered TERF ideology to be not only violent and dangerous, but also inherently hypocritical. I’m not transfeminine and I would never claim to fully understand the extent of their suffering under transmisogyny, but as a dfab lesbian who has dated trans women I have definitely seen first-hand the horrifying lengths to which TERFs are willing to go to frame trans women as predatory, manipulative, and deserving of violent assault. Trans women are one of the most marginalized groups in society right now, and any feminism that does not include them is not actually advocating for women at all.

The reason that I identify myself as a gender nihilist and not a gender abolitionist is because mainstream gender abolitionist theory tends to be, yes, written by TERFs. Gender nihilism is a term coined by Alyson Escalante, a trans women of color, as an expansion of gender abolitionism that points out the hypocrisy in attempting to dismantle gender only to preserve sex. Here are some excerpts from her original essay:

This is not to say that those who identify as trans, queer, or non-binary are at fault for gender. This is the mistake of the traditional radical feminist approach. We repudiate such claims, as they merely attack those most hurt by gender. Even if deviation from the norm is always accounted for and neutralized, it sure as hell is still punished. The queer, the trans, the non-binary body is still the site of massive violence. Our siblings and comrades still are murdered all around us, still live in poverty, still live in the shadows. We do not denounce them, for that would be to denounce ourselves. Instead we call for an honest discussion about the limits of our politics and a demand for a new way forward.

[…]

The violence of gender cannot be overestimated. Each trans woman murdered, each intersex infant coercively operated on, each queer kid thrown onto the streets is a victim of gender. The deviance from the norm is always punished. Even though gender has accounted for deviation, it still punishes it. Expansions of norms is an expansion of deviance; it is an expansion of ways we can fall outside a discursive ideal. Infinite gender identities create infinite new spaces of deviation which will be violently punished. Gender must punish deviance, thus gender must go.

And thus we arrive at the need for the abolition of gender. If all of our attempts at positive projects of expansion have fallen short and only snared us in a new set of traps, then there must be another approach. That the expansion of gender has failed, does not imply that contraction would serve our purposes. Such an impulse is purely reactionary and must be done away with.

The reactionary radical feminist sees gender abolition as such a contraction. For them, we must abolish gender so that sex (the physical characteristics of the body) can be a stable material basis upon which we can be grouped. We reject this whole heartedly. Sex itself is grounded in discursive groupings, given an authority through medicine, and violently imposed onto the bodies of intersex individuals. We decry this violence.

I highly recommend reading the entirety of this essay, as well as it’s sequel, which addresses the more concrete actions that we can take to dismantle the European colonialist gender structure.

This got long, so TL;DR I hate trans exclusionary radical feminism and I would walk across hot coals for trans women.