Those are good points— that, yes, wearing pants translates to certain kinds of power (symbolic and actual), and unfortunately one manifestation of that power (its negative mirror image or projection) is pants-choosers shaming others for their choice to wear skirts. i.e., I make the right clothing choice. What's wrong with you?
Though Jeffreys doesn’t get into details in this half-hour video, it does seem she’s giving her blessing to the rational choice to wear pants while implying skirts are an irrational choice, because (regardless of an individual person’s sex) each cultural “costume” has objective power value, so a rational person would choose the more powerful trousers. But implicit in that schema, as you point out, is the shaming of femininity: she's not merely observing that others cast shame on femininity, but actively participating in the shaming. e.g., Why would you wear a skirt? How could you? not as genuine inquiry, but as moral judgment.
(Of course, I'm using "pants" and "skirts" as shorthand for the broader, vaguer, less pindownable idea of "masculine" and "feminine" presentation. Jeffreys is a seated talking head in this video and could be wearing a skirt. The general point remains.)
There was one Jeffreys quote from this video I decided to leave out of my article, only because I wearied of her transphobic talking points and thought it better not to repeat them all at once. But now I think it’s relevant to what you brought up. Jeffreys said that taking trans women "seriously...is not just insulting but detonates a bomb under all the huge amounts of work that feminists and all those concerned with social justice have been doing for decades." Her claim is that social justice is about addressing material oppression (for cis people, who, allegedly, are the only ones who have material reality or can speak coherently about it), whereas trans inclusion is only about concepts and self-perceptions (and the life of the mind, for some reason, becomes a problem mainly when trans people’s minds are involved). I’m especially focusing on her word “seriously” here. People have language/ideas/feelings (which are non-material, I guess, if we’re using that mind-body dichotomy), and people make clothing choices (material). She’s saying we can’t combat oppression if we take transgender ideas seriously (even if trans women philosophers wear pants?) or if we take material skirts seriously (including for cis women?) or something along those lines.
If she believes in abolishing gender, then she can be anti-femininity, but for consistency, she ought to be anti-masculinity in equal strength and for same reason (i.e., because all gender is fake and invalid). Identifying a form of masculine power (pants), seizing it and leveraging it for herself, and shaming everyone who makes a different wardrobe choice hardly abolishes the concepts of masculinity/femininity and their material manifestations. It perpetuates all that stuff.
Taking trans people "seriously" would likely cast more light on this fundamental contradiction in her thought, which helps explain why she rejects the very possibility of doing so. Sort of like: I don't take certain people's perspectives and life experiences "seriously" because doing so "detonates a bomb" under my worldview.
The phone rang as I was forming this thought yesterday, so I may have dropped part of the insight, but this is what I have to share now!
