Defining White Woman Victimization Brain

Tara Knight’s recent series of essays on self-vicitimizing puppygirls has caused quite a stir across the transgender internet. I think the conversation that’s ensued from her publishing them has been really worthwhile, including the many objections that the pattern of dodging accountability, emotionally volatile helplessness, and guilting romantic partners in domestic servitude and sex that Tara has described isn’t just the purview of transgender women, but something that people of all identities are capable of.

(I also think it’s pretty clear that Tara is describing a pattern she observed in her own relationships, which were with trans women, so of course the composite characters she has written are, too. I also believe that if we enjoy luxuriating in the drama of her life as much as many of us clearly do, then we as readers can forgive her using a bit of a poison pen. The reader is a participant in the meaning-making. If you don’t like what you’re seeing on your screen, you have the agency to move on.)

If you haven’t read the Puppygirl series yet, I recommend you check it out here:

Some readers initially took issue with the parallels that Tara drew between the weepy, helpless puppygirl and the weaponized incompetent boyfriend who never learns how to load the dishwasher correctly. They believed that by drawing any comparisons between the two groups whatsoever, Tara was implying that some trans women are men.

I didn’t get that impression. And I think that it’s worth noting that ‘weaponized incompetence’ — the practice of pretending to be less capable than one really is, to manipulate others into taking on more work — has never been an exclusively male phenomenon.

The term “weaponized incompetence” came from an article in early 2000’s advising overworked employees on how to get away with cutting back in their duties. Since then, the term “weaponized incompetence” has frequently been applied to anyone who uses a combination of perceived helplessness & privilege to offload responsibilities onto another person, typically a person who is more marginalized.

White people do it to Black people. Trans men do it to trans women. Cis women do it to trans women. And really anyone is capable of it, depending on the situation they are in, the power structures they have at their disposal, and if they are shitty at communicating their needs. I have written about the complexity of “weaponized incompetence” accusations, and how often those accusations hurt disabled people here:

Honest Communication Kills Weaponized Incompetence

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May 1, 2025

Welcome back to Autistic Advice, a semi-regular advice column where I respond to reader questions about neurodiversity, accessibility, disability justice, and self-advocacy from my perspective as an Autistic psychologist.

When I read Tara’s puppygirl series, I recognized a pattern of vulnerability and claims to epistemic harmlessness that emerges in another/intersecting group quite often: white women.

I have written previously about the phenomenon of “white women victimization brain,” which leads many people who are capable of presenting themselves as helpless and harmless to not take responsibility for their own growth and to avoid direct confrontation as much as possible.

I first articulated this phenomenon on my Tumblr years ago. But I haven’t posted my working definition of white woman brain on here yet, and I think now, in the context of puppygirlgate, it’s the optimal time. There is a ton that the puppygirl has in common with the fragile white woman.

Once again, as you read through these descriptions of “white woman victimization brain,” keep in mind that it is not actually a white woman-exclusive phenomenon. Trans guys who are white or light-skinned often find it easy to weaponize a perceived proximity to white womanhood in order to avoid accusations of male toxicity, or simply to be violent against transgender women, for example. This is part of what’s responsible for the “birthday boy” phenomenon.

Nonblack people can typically leverage white-woman-style behaviors against anyone who is Black, but particularly if the Black person is darker or bigger than them. Anything that gives you proximity to the European ideals of white beauty — smallness, thinness, wealth, a soft voice, a seemingly delicate disposition, etc — can give you the possibility of pulling some real white woman bullshit on people who lack those qualities.

I understand the mechanics of white woman brain well because I have been able to use it to my advantage for my entire life. True power often hides itself, because then it is more difficult to identify as a threat. I am small, light-skinned, thin, and have flouncy nonthreatening mannerisms. In a conflict, people are primed to sympathize with me. When my back is up against the wall I still hear the siren call of white womanhood, knowing that I can cry and shrink down and act overwhelmed and get my way. Because I am comfortable with the sides of myself that are self-serving, I feel fine admitting this. I think it is responsible to face it.

I also come from an intersection of cultures that allows me to see how white fragility develops and how it contrasts with other cultural ways of being. One side of my family is mixed, Appalachian, comes from poverty, and has a tendency to tell things like they are and readily leap into conflict. The other side of my family is white, middle class, uncomfortable with strong emotions, and quick to use methods like triangulation and minimization to keep others silent.

These two sides of my family had a very hard time understanding each other. The “whiter” one shrunk away from the more colorful and loud one and act overwhelmed by it, even though it was the whiter side of my family that possessed more status and power. I have spent a lot of my adulthood trying to get back in touch with the less white-culture-assimilated side of my family and the way that I behaved around that family when I was young, because I found it to be far more honest and less manipulative and neurotic than the white family and its culture was. The parts of me that are not basted in this white woman bullshit are the parts I find the freest and most expressive and able to bond with others.

But okay, all this throat clearing aside, what the fuck is white woman brain? Here are its core features:

1. A view of oneself as a helpless victim that is constantly in threat of being attacked, especially by strangers (even though statistically, this is not the case).

2. A refusal to consider oneself as capable of doing harm to others, especially a lack of consideration toward others’ body autonomy or consent. (Even while being highly concerned about one’s own autonomy and consent).

3. A generally passive or passive-aggressive orientation toward the world: seeing oneself as a romantic or sexual object to be approached, but never wanting to initiate (or feeling that one never can), never feeling comfortable directly communicating displeasure or one’s desires, believing that others instead must guess at it. (And then resenting people when they don’t, but never expressing it).

4. A tendency to cry, excessively berate oneself, complain about feeling “unsafe,” or give up when criticized or challenged, especially when challenged by people of color.

5. A tendency to associate a person’s body type with how much of a threat they are. For example, feeling unsafe around people with penises and expecting a social space to accommodate that fear to cater to you, a fear of people who come from cultures where it’s common to speak loudly, a fear of those who are large, assertive, and/or darker-skinned.

6. Instinctive fawning-type responses to stress, and a pattern of feigning happiness, agreeability, and ease when one is not genuinely feeling it, and expecting all other people (but especially other women) to feign happiness as well, paired with a deep-seated resentment of anyone who violates this illusion and expresses any negativity (being especially punitive toward women of color).

7. Instinctively “smoothing over” conflict between other people before it even begins, even when healthy conflict is necessary and not at all your business– often performed by gossiping behind other people’s backs, triangulating information when it is not yours to share, asking people to alter their behavior in order to avoid a reaction from somebody else, presenting your concerns as if they were somebody else’s (“what will people think!”), tone-policing the airing of grievances, derailing hard conversations with more light-hearted topics, and excluding people who are known to be candid and assertive.

White woman victimization brain is both evident in the puppygirl, and in the behavior of the excessively caretaking, conflict-averse, information-triangulating polycule that surrounds her and enables her. Many queer communities that are majority white are absolutely beset with this pattern of avoiding direct discussion of conflicting needs, and collapse in on themselves because of this incapability.

When the relations of a group of white-woman-brained people begin to break down, it often comes in the form of everybody jockeying for the most victimized position in the narrative, because victimhood means moral status. Hence, lots of DARVOing, abuse allegations, rewriting of history, and erasure of one’s personal agency. We see this even in some of Tara’s initial writing about the puppygirl: the women who have decided (of their own free will!) to feed her and pay her bills and anticipate her every need feel trapped and controlled because they, like the puppygirl, can’t face that they could actually make different decisions. The only problem is the decision to dump the puppygirl might make some people upset or be unpopular, and so they avoid it at all costs.

But there is another way of being. No matter your identity, you can be less white and less fragile. You can choose to say how you are feeling and figure out a way to not be constantly beloved and small and yet still survive.

Dump the puppygirl. Stop being a white woman.

Previously:

Transmisandry is Not Real

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January 22, 2024

There is a certain class of transmasculine person who is very adamant in claiming that trans men’s struggles represent a distinct form of oppression, fundamentally different from anything faced by cisgender women, nonbinary people, trans women, or cisgender queer men.