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@1000thoughtsinatrenchcoat
the way many of you engage with trans women with the implicit belief that they cannot possibly have any understanding of or personal experience with sexual violence, despite the social and economic factors of transmisogyny making them very much both the most vulnerable people to it within queer communities and the people with the least recourse and fewest survivor resources, is deeply deeply unsubtle
Sorry but I’m exclusively attracted to afab people. I wasn’t sent to conversion therapy twice as a teenager only to have people on the internet guilt me into trying to like people assigned male just like the Mormon counselors wanted. I will always advocate for trans rights but this kind of rhetoric will only hurt you. You cannot guilt or coerce people into sleeping with you or rather, you can, but you should’t.
I've been wanting to unpack this particular terf argument for a while but I'm not even sure what I wrote that you could be responding to here. yes it's bioessentialist to see trans women as our assigned sex before what we actually are, but that fact alone does not obligate you to sleep with anyone
it would be fatphobic to announce that you don't want to sleep with fat women, and someone simply calling that out alone would not constitute pressuring you to sleep with anyone you didn't want to
it's not carte blanche to announce all the minorities you don't want to sleep with and aren't attracted to
these nefarious mormon conversion counselors are always telling young cis women to fuck trans girls on account of it's not gay if she has or had an outie
I hate how the cause for intersex liberation has been defaced in the name of hurting trans girls! I hate how the conversations around genuine intersex struggles have turned into new ways to push TWERF rhetoric into queer spaces. I hate how actual intersex trans girls have been completely erased from conversations surrounding intersex liberation and abolishing the sex binary! I hate how intersex TMEs (who cannot accept that that they can exempt themselves from transmisogyny in a way that intersex trans girls can't) have tried to claim ownership over every single word we've coined to talk about our oppression (ones that trans girls literally had no issue with them adopting, like "CASAB" language). And if they can't find a way to, they'll just lie and say it forces them into a binary ("TME"/"TMA" or "transmisogynized"). I hate that intersex liberation has shifted towards hating trans girls (especially intersex ones who point out the way they're alienated in conversations about intersex liberation) so so much! I hate it, I hate it, I hate it!
it just gets to a point. it just gets to a point!! sometimes it just gets to a point!!!!
TL;DW: panel of TME's saying that "trans women closet during college and so are more socially mobile", and insulting us, calling us crossies and transsexuals [derogatory] within ten minutes. by a PhD. a doctorate-holding trans man is lecturing us about class mobility by calling us fucking crossies
It Just Gets To A Point
yk @manipulated-pieces its actually really on the nose how transmascs will push-push-push the line "transmasc invisibilization is not a privilege, the closet isnt a privilege" when it comes to them, but for us, bam, immediately its "YOUR CLOSET IS A PRIVILEGE YOUR INVISIBILITY PUTS YOU AHEAD OF ME"
Having listened to the rest of the 20 minute panel I have a lot of thoughts because the part at the end was making me lose my mind a little. The first speaker, Kaji Amin, ends his panel by arguing, "trans studies without class analysis merely forwards the elite class interests and class tastes of those able to make our trans careers in academia." Which, like, I do absolutely agree with, & it does reinforce the claim made at the beginning of the video, which was that trans studies has undervalued analyzing the relationship between gender & class. The panel moderator in the beginning specifically says that they're excited to address that before giving the mic to Amin. And so it's just crazy to then proceed to give a 20 minute panel in which you talk almost exclusively about the privileges associated with staying in the closet for trans women. like, yes it's important to analyze the relationship between gender and class but if you were actually devoted to doing that you would be talking more in-depth about the ways in which being transfeminized affects one's socioeconomic status, instead of focusing on the situations where the transfeminized person is actually granted the opportunity for socioeconomic mobility (with almost no thought given to the cost that comes with staying in the closet). and while Amin argues that this is a widespread phenomenon, in the example with Denise D'Ann he acknowledges that D'Ann's ability to avoid sex work & the street queen way of life was "No small accomplishment during the mid-century" (do you think it might be worth talking more about how so many transfeminized persons in the mid-20th century needed to do sex work or become street queens to survive?) and so I'm just baffled by the myopia required to end off your section of that panel, on a panel with no transfems present, by acknowledging the fact that without adequate class analysis, trans studies, is doomed to reflect only the ideas of those able to make their trans careers in academia. I wonder if there might be a group of trans people who notoriously have a more difficult time building a career in academia? Maybe class analysis could even help us identify this problem? There's probably no point to it though, I'm sure trans studies as a field doesn't have, like, a reputation for being exclusionary to trans women & transfems or anything. Now to just take a huge sip of my drink and
choice selections from this dogshit lecture:
"Black, Latina, poor, working-class, and sex worker trans women actually try to pass"
...as opposed to whom, exactly?
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translation: "you see, trans women transition male-to-faggot, and i wish i could transition into a faggot in the same way they do. i am a gay trans man now but i dont want to be, i want to be a transfeminine faggot. i wish we lived in the timeline where transfems were in gay male spaces (read: where i still had access to them sexually as males). gay male spaces which are not, somehow, as ive criticized elsewhere, not white-dominated"
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> translation: "trans lesbians actually hadnt existed until at least 1980-whatever"
nevermind that Transsexual Empire was responding to a preexisting phenomenon of trans lesbians that cisbian radfems felt at threat from
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translation: "trans lesbians don't actually live transfeminine lives, don't actually live as women. instead, as above, to really live transfeminine lives and live as women, they need to be attracted to men. coincidentally this has No Bearing Whatsoever on my assertion elsewhere that transfeminine ppl should be in primarily gay male spaces, as a subset of gay males, and that those are more legitimately transfeminine, and who i can maintain sexual access to"
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translation: "lesbian trans women arent actually oppressed
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translation: "the most important part of actually being a trans woman is to internally recognize yourself as an internal girl, as opposed to a "social" or "material" girl. but actually, im gonna contradict myself literally the next sentence, and say that the most important isnt just seeing yourself as a girl but embodying a girl, which im not actually gonna define how that works, and thats because trans lesbians all have unilaterally good jobs or whatever.
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author's note: the section under 7:30 is a quote from Denise D'Anne's autobiography, in which she specifies that she didnt start transitioning until age 36. the section under 7:41 is from the speaker, "Dr." Amin, whom i have been dragging. Additionally, it says "Dan" in reference to D'Anne, but this is just a youtube transcription typo
translation: "even though ive established that social and life transition actually results in a severe drop in socioeconomic status and significant exacerbation of social violences, im still going to describe it as a luxury and act like the imperative to transition is precluded by relative poverty, rather than precluded by transmisogynoir/y which is then functioned through poverty and impoverishment as punishment. "this assertion, also, has no bearing on my asinine assertion that white trans women dont actually give a shit about passing, unlike more marginalized trans women, because they actually have careers, nevermind that Ms. D'Anne lost her career, could not take advantage of having a degree, and had to move across the country to actually pass, which she, in fact, gave a huge fucking shit about."
That second screenshot is fascinating to me. Beyond what you've already mentioned re:desire for tme people to have sexual access to transfems, is it a mystery to Amin why trans women aren't prominent in gay male spaces in the same way trans men are in lesbian spaces? Is this just what happens when all of the academic spaces you find yourself in don't have trans women or transfems in them? I don't really think it's hard to figure out why trans women & transfems wouldn't want to be sexualized by gay men, but maybe that's just me
I missed this watching it originally but the bit at 19:41 is insane, the implication here is that being in the closet means you're not actually living a transfeminine life which is a crazy assertion to make. the part at 12:26 is similarly ignorant, it's really clear that Amin thinks closeted trans women & transfems basically live identical lives to cis men, otherwise I don't know how you could argue that their material conditions are identical
The bit at 19:52 similarly is just a really silly thing to say, like I promise you any trans woman choosing to come out of the closet is weighing many different things in her mind and if she chooses to stay in the closet because of how she's evaluated job prospects, how she'll be accepted socially, personal safety concerns etc that does not place her in a privileged position
A lot of these get into what my broader problem is with the panel I think, which is that Amin assumes that when trans women & transfems take years to come out after realizing that they're trans, it's broadly because they're too attached to the privileges of staying in the closet (downplaying the cost of this is how he's able to assert it as a privilege in the way that he does.) If he talked about the deeply harmful consequences of the social forces keeping transfems in the closet, his analysis doesn't make as much sense, so he hardly acknowledges it. Like, how often do you hear transfems saying I wish I had stayed in the closet longer, I wish I hadn't come out as soon as I did? Now compare that to how often you see transfems saying they wished they had come out sooner, started e sooner etc. it's just a really silly argument to make!!
on TME/TMA: being mistaken for a transfem and catching strays is not the same thing as actually being a transfem: the actual targets of transmisogyny
I know a lot of trans men want to be TMA reallllll bad because someone mistook them for a transfem once and called them a tranny, but the "Affected" in "TransMisogyny Affected" doesn't just mean you have been Affected by transmisogyny at some point--it means it affects you, inescapably, in uncountably many more ways than just random harassment, every minute of your damn life. and it worms into your brain and stays there, because you ARE the tranny they were talking about
you may be a tree near the target and catch the occasional stray, but you are not the target
I had a really good example of this pop up on the bus a while back. TLDR an older cis woman accused of being transfemme was protected by several people, while I, visibly transfemme, was not when the same person started threatening me.
💬 11 🔁 1676 ❤️ 2448 · Transphobia is so fascinating sometimes because I just got an example of why “everyone is transmisogyny affected” is
Reading this is chilling. It shines a glaring light on how so little people believe us that we need TME people to weigh in about catching strays just to have our lives acknowledged as real. That our voices carry so little weight merely for being transfem is frightening and it should freighten you too. You, TME person who's yet to understand all this, make this scary.
We know how this happens, how transmisogyny worms its way in, the thoughts that itch at the back of our minds that make TMA people so easy to doubt. I was programmed to think the same assumptions too, and when I dug inward I found the same dirt you will:
It's usually some vague thought or feeling along the lines of "what if the trans fems are lying or exaggerating about how badly they're treated because they're [almost like a man suddenly dropped into womens' skin merely shocked from experiencing misogyny for the first time]; or [weird feminine men desperate to have experiences of misogyny validated as a bizarre form of gender affirmation]; or [weird guilt-ridden men desperate to experience misogyny as some kind of repentance]; or [weird feminist men desperate to exert unique expertise over women]; or [men desperate to position themselves as 'more oppressed' so they can regain their lost sense of gendered power among the voices of women]; or [perverted men who just transitioned for sex reasons overreacting with anger about being treated like the weirdo they are]".
All of this thinking and the roots of ALL transmisogyny come from this fucked up assumption that we are in some way or another always still men. Transmisogyny tells the fiction that a "male essence" supposedly remains at our core and is either morally corrupt, innately digusting, or both. THAT is the lie of transmisogyny, the lie that no matter what we do or who we are, our lives before transition somehow hold some kind of fundamental, inescapable corrupting influence over us today.
It is bioessentialism at its most pure. People take one look at the sex characteristics that we can't escape and transport themselves into a made-up world where some horrid element of male gender must therefore still exist within us. They stop seeing us as men or women and instead begin defining our entire personhood as if we are wolves in sheep's clothing; misguided men at best, immoral freaks at worst. They throw at us all the baggage that comes with a person asking "what kind of man does that?".
We are not men. The easiest way to check for transmisogyny? Stop reacting to us as trans women, as transfems, or as women who are trans; and just react to us as women.
"afab only housing" is honestly beautiful. it's #progress to use inclusive language when discrimating against trans women
you might as well just say "no men, and yeah I think men includes you trannies (but trans men aren't men you ladies are welcome 🥰)"
^^^
I will also that trans men or non-binary people of any agab will often also be kicked out of these shelters and housing, bc they are deemed too masculine. In the UK there are specific additions to the rules around trans people being their agab, that state trans men can be removed from women's spaces if they are deemed too masculine (this does not grant them access to male spaces)
So its not quite as simple as 'trans women are misgendered and barred, and trans men are only misgendered' bc if they can punish trans people for existing, they will do so.
how are you drawing an equivalence between men being barred from women's spaces and women being barred from women's spaces
Um what? The very first entry read “AFABs only” and I believe this person was pointing out how even that sometimes isn’t adhered to when you present a certain way or you’re on T?
It was perfectly on topic.
@oojamaflip-whatchamacallit
And someone in a screenshot claimed “only trans women are denied housing” which this person corrected. Trans men are in fact also denied housing.
Did you just miss the screenshot reblog?
And sorry but a trans man trying to go to a men-centric shelter is TERRIFYING.
So even if it were the case that trans men could get in, and the claim that trans women have it ‘so much worse’ were true, that just completely ignores the still-awful plight of trans men. Who are at risk of rape and pregnancy. What happened to solidarity?
(Whereas the fear is the other way around for womens’ shelters- because patriarchy and trauma)
This isn’t because of any sort of misogyny unfortunately. It’s the penises.
it’s funny that the poltical climate is like ‘Hmmm genital checks for underage kids playing sports, hmmm yes’ but genital checks for literal adults who can consent and simply get a doctor’s note for such isn’t suggested for the most vulnerable vagina-havers to feel safe. Like if bottom modification was required that wouldn’t fix the problem- but it would at least extend housing to those trans women. And maybe in some places it could be pushed to even those who have had orchi even if they hadn’t had full surgery.
Orchi is much simpler, cheaper, and less recovery-involved than doing the whole thing. It provides the benefits of a measure of feminization of the whole body without the multiple potential complications. (Now if only we could get the state to fund it … much easier budget push than the more involved ones, too. Baby steps.)
"trans women should be required to remove their organs to access shelter"
why can't homeless cisgender women just ring up their primary care providers to fax over their medical records to avoid an invasive genital check
why can't homeless transgender women just get major and expensive surgeries to remove their organs. surely they have insurance right? the state will pay for it
(I tried to put this in the tags but kept messing them up so I'm putting it as a reblog feel free to ignore me Op. This is to the transandrobros still giving me shit in my asks/replies)
This shit is exactly what I was talking about in my post that yall (transandrobros) jumped on me for. Yall kept insisting I had the wrong idea about yall because I'm getting my info from transfems. NO. Yall jump on transfems posts and pull this shit. Talking about rape organs and hijacking posts. I see what yall do, that's why my view of yall is bad. It's your own fucking behavior. Yall have the gall to say I'm "transphobic" and "tone policing" then act like this. Okay, fine. I'm tone policing. I don't like how some of yall act and I'm tone policing, so be it. Yall wanna jump on me for being insensitive, intentional or not, but yall don't wanna jump on the people I was talking about. Fuck off
when you post about a study that only applies to the us could you include 'in the US' in the post please. thanks
if you're talking about the trans wage gap, there's a study out of Canada that shows similar. Admittedly Canada is pretty similar to the US socioeconomically, and those two obviously aren't representative of the whole planet, so I'd be willing to accept that this pattern doesn't hold true for everywhere on earth.
This Survey out of PKU doesn't give any specific numbers sadly for income, but does state "In terms of ability to find employment, levels of acceptance at the workplace, and freedom for gender expression, analysis of this survey determined that, on average, transgender women face the most challenges at all stages of employment", and does show other indicators of worse treatment across across the board (higher dropout rates, high rates of rejection by loved ones, higher rates of self-harm/suicidality etc.)
(There's a more recent survey from 2021 though, though they don't talk about income at all, only about improving conditions for trans people across the board and the need for further improvement still)
This is a generally understudied topic, and I am limited to english, so if anyone knows of similar studies, please tell me. Given what existing data shows, and what "transmisogyny" as a social theory suggests, we don't have a reason to expect that the pattern of trans women getting paid the least out of any gender demographic would be the case at least most of the time.
You can't assert that something "doesn't apply outside of the US", and immediately discount the data, you'd need a specific reason why trans women are being treated worse in the US (AND Canada and China) that wouldn't apply elsewhere to dismiss it.
The Netherlands also has published research by the Dutch government (SCP) about the disparity in income between trans women and trans men.
"Generally, the differences in socioeconomic circumstances are slightly larger between trans and cisgender women than between trans and cisgender men. Also, if you compare trans men and trans women amongst each other, you see that the position of trans women socioeconomically is even more precarious: they have a lower income, a lower net worth, own a house less often, are employed less often, and are on benefits more often. This cannot be explained by way of differences in levels of education: the amount of highly educated persons is actually higher amongst trans women than trans men" (SCP 2022: 79).
This follows research by Transgender Netwerk Nederland (TNN) and the Universiteit voor Humanistiek in 2017 about the pay gap between trans people and cis people, with trans women facing higher incidences of formal discrimination (TNN et al. 2017: 2). The report emphasises these results have changed little since 2017 (idem: 3). It unfortunately didn't clarify any difference between trans men and trans women, but it did indicate that 28.8%(!) of trans people earn less than €1000 a month, which is far under the poverty line of about €1600 a month for a single individual (Centraal Bureau voor Statistiek 2025; TNN et al. 2017: 2).
While this doesn't provide a concrete marker of income levels, only publishing data for categories of statistics in the SCP's research, trans women still have lower incomes, less net worth and less reliable housing, which paints a particular picture. The Netherlands is also seeing a spike in hate crimes relating to being trans which makes these statistics even more worrying (Transgender Netwerk 2025).
This is an understudied field, and something I considered doing research on for my Master's thesis actually. If you want, I can provide more background about either specifically the Netherlands or the UK, as evidence in trans healthcare in the UK is what I did my Bachelor's thesis on.
Sources cited:
Centraal Bureau voor Statistiek (2025): "Rise in poverty rate after five years of decreases", https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2025/51/rise-in-poverty-rate-after-five-years-of-decreases. Consulted on April 25 2026.
(SCP) Sociaal en Cultureel Planbureau (2022): LHBT-monitor 2022. The Hague: Sociaal en Cultureel Planbureau. Accessed via https://www.scp.nl/documenten/2022/07/05/lhbt-monitor-2022. Consulted on April 25 2026.
(TNN) Transgender Netwerk Nederland*, Universiteit voor Humanistiek, Universiteit van Maastricht en Gendertalent (2017): Transgender en Werk. Amsterdam: Transgender Netwerk. Accessed via https://www.transgendernetwerk.nl/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/TransgenderenWerkfactsheet2017-1.pdf. Consulted on April 25 2026.
Transgender Netwerk* (2025): Meldingen Transgenderdiscriminatie 2025. Amsterdam: Transgender Netwerk. Accessed via https://www.transgendernetwerk.nl/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/2025-Meldingen-transgenderdiscriminatie-.pdf. Consulted on April 25 2026.
*Transgender Netwerk Nederland changed its name to Transgender Netwerk between 2017 and 2025.
this isn’t directly related to anything you’ve posted and idk if it’s insightful or not but I feel that the reason some transmascs join the MRA movement is because it’s free community building that transmascs haven’t bothered to do otherwise and transmascs are very jealous of the community building that trans women have done (like cis het men are of cis women and honestly also of lgbt people). it’s a space that, for the price of hating trans women, you can be told that your transmasculinity and your “afab” status is intrinsically valuable and that you are worthy of love(bombing) and protection. Similar obviously to mainstream cis MRA shit (complaints of “male loneliness” bc women have actually built supportive communities for themselves/ignoring the fact that women are statistically more isolated and depressed). Just with a group of men that have truly experienced a lot of societal ills, and have been offered a more vulnerable scapegoat to blame for the fact that we haven’t built the kind of community transfems have for themselves (outside of the one where we all band together to talk about how much transfems suck). The pipeline to becoming a terf is also pretty obvious. It’s really depressing, and just maddening, makes me want to live in a cave.
from my perspective, the reason trans women have built such communities in the first place is because broader "queer" communities are much more hostile to us than they are trans men. my interpretation is that tMRA thought is much more reactionary against not necessarily our spaces, but our organization and theory
transfeminist belief seems to be increasingly popular among us, and I think certain transmisogynistic trans men are feeling threatened by this, because it positions our exclusion not as the fault of individual character flaws on our parts, which is typically how our exclusion is justified, but the actions and privileges of the queer communities that do the excluding in the first place--something many of them carry out or are complicit in
transfeminist thought reveals the lies behind the veneer of "justice" usually painted over our exclusion, and I think it's leaving many of the men who do exactly that scared. they're not underdog heroes protecting their communities from predators, they're just weaponizing prejudice against an especially vulnerable group of queers, and they'll do anything to convince you this isn't the case
i can't stop thinking about this one very formative moment i had while talking to one of my trans guy friends at the time. i was like a year or two into transition, and all of my friends were in person. he was talking about a trans girl who really annoyed him for some reason or another, but i distinctly remember that he was really annoyed that she would whine a lot about passing, how to pass, and if this friend thought she'd be able to pass. he whipped out his phone at some point and pulled up a picture of her and said something backhanded like "oh this is what she looks like btw. like i don't think she wants to hear what i really think"
at the time it was really shocking to me, because i was still like yeah the trans community is all supportive or each other, so at first i was just like wow, what a vile thing to say about someone who made the mistake of annoying you. and why would you say all this to me? but the more i thought about it after the fact, the more i realized that he and the friend group like, didn't see misgendering as too low of a blow. that if you're a trans woman who annoyed him enough, he'd label you as an annoying reddit trans fem, gossip behind your back, and purge you from the social circle. he told me all of that as either a threat - like he was telling me how i shouldn't act otherwise face the same treatment - or it was him sort of accepting me into the group. like, he felt fine telling me all this because he thought i was a chill trans girl rather than an annoying one. it was just, textbook transmisogynistic violence in action.
every time i see a trans woman being purged from a social circle it makes me so angry and i think back to this moment. and don't let anyone ever downplay this phenomenon or tell you it's an exclusively online problem
Transfeminism is incomplete without an understanding of how our white supremacist patriarchy operates, and this is my understanding:
All women are treated as property of white men under the patriarchy, but white, cisgender women specifically are treated as prized property, rather than disposable property like the rest of us
This means that white cis women have some level of protection under the patriarchy--they are necessary to create more white babies and "secure the future of the white race," after all. White men will go to great lengths to defend what they see as their property from external threats. Many of them outright hunger for an opportunity to do so. Consider how many white men love to fantasize about committing brutal murder to home invaders
This gives white, cisgender women a bit of leverage over their white male oppressors. Because white men hunger for an opportunity to defend their property, white, cisgender women need only paint a disposable class of women as a threat to them to direct white men's violence against them. And, because a woman's supposed inherent harmlessness is the reason they need men's protection in the first place, their targets cannot really be portrayed as women like them, so they masculinize them
"Women are weak and ineffectual, so we need men to protect us. ...How can this class of women be strong enough to hurt us, then? It's because they're basically actually men"
"Male" enough to be dangerous, but still female enough to be disposable property of the patriarchy for white cis men to kill freely, that is
This damselization is how the terf movement operates. Terfs largely do not build their movement around organizing to directly protect themselves from the supposed threat trans women pose. No, they simply damselize themselves, and call upon higher structural, patriarchal powers to do the actual protecting. The damsel does not protect herself from the dragon, after all. She calls out to the knight instead
Terfs don't endeavor to challenge the white supremacist patriarchy, despite how dangerous they say "men" are, because when they say "men," they're not talking about white, cis men--they're talking about trans women
Their movement is about creating and upholding a dragon so that they can maintain the meager amount of leverage they have over the class that oppresses them--but to do this requires maintaining said oppressor class as well, or there is no power to leverage in the first place
From this vantage point, the route to freeing themselves from their oppressors is obvious: organize with the groups they oppress
They don't do this, though. Maybe they're just comfortable enough in their relative privilege, and, being conservative, would rather maintain their position than fight for better. Or maybe it's because, to become a terf in the first place, you have to have internalized the idea that you are below the white man, that you are the damsel and he is the knight, that you are only safe if you are his property
Your so-called trans-theory does not include or even mention trans men, at all. Typical. ☕
I had several paragraphs on trans men, but I cut them because the post was already very long. they were about how white trans men often damselize themselves when harassing trans women by referencing their own agab to align themselves with white womanhood, degendering themselves to leverage patriarchal power
something about reading your bio gives me the impression you would not have liked trans men being "included" in that way
I think some of you don't even read transfeminist theory, you just skim it for references to trans men and get upset if you don't find any. not everything's about you brother. if you can accept that tho, I'll happily have you at our table with us to discuss the forms of oppression we do share, and you can share what kinds of oppression you uniquely face too. you will have to endure the intense discomfort of listening to conversation that isn't about you quite a lot though. I can provide an ipad so you can scroll youtube shorts and pay half attention when we're not talking about you, if you like
Intersexuality isn't as complicated as you're saying. No, afab transfems cannot exist. No I need you to learn that aligning with your assigned birth means your cis. This does not matter if you're intersex. You being intersex doesn't change that. Yes, intersex people can be transmisogynistic. No, we aren't more informed and better at gender and sex because we're intersex. No intersex isn't a third sex. No being intersex does not make you trans in a different way, due to intersexism it gives you a complicated one, but not something entirely different. Treating intersex identity as this rare special thing that people cannot fathom because it's so magical and rare is in fact intersexist. We are in fact still people! Fun fact!
Stop using intersex identity to be transmisogynistic because you're a coward.
What the fuck? You do know that (C)ASAB often doesn't even match our (as in intersex people) SIG, right? Which is also often inconsistent when intersex? Regardless, queering one's gender in ways that offend the patriarchy doesn't become unavailable just because someone's intersex. We're sorry you ended up believing what you do, but it's not transmisogyny to be queer differently due to being intersex.
@thisis-intersexism
The idea that someone is afab transfem because they developed facial hair, a penis, etc is transmisogynistic. The fact that's how many people define afab transfem shows me that this is clearly a label that focuses on the idea that agab does matter tells me everything. And was quite literally made to be transmisogynistic.
Degendering intersex women is anything but intersexist. And it is transmisogynistic to believe that. like. You become less of a woman so much so you're considered a man because you develop traits that you deem "only for men", then you become transfem. Because you have vibes. And the fact that people view transfeminity this way is abhorrent. You are degendering women. Intersex women. Intersex transfems, and transfems in general.
You folks scream that agab should be demolished then hold on to it for dear life.
And yes I do know because I'm intersex myself and I actually listen to transfems of my community instead of favoring people based on "everyone's valid" and "what makes me feel good without critical thought" vibes.
I'm sorry you believe that intersex trans women are not women and truly hold contempt for transfems and trans women within our community. Please unlearn your transmisogyny and intersexism.
it really is surreal to observe what's going on in the misogynist transmasc crowd as an asian american lol. like hey i've seen this one before
it's almost like this specific type of misogynist backlash against feminists within marginalized groups happens again and again and again
you can explain the material things that could be done to make trans women's lives easier, and someone who thinks misandry is real will show up like "that pales in effectiveness to my strategy, abolishing gender". and then they wont abolish gender
What the fuck is wrong with thinking misandry is real?
under the imposed sex-gender hierarchy (sexism), men are empowered over women, or women are disempowered relative to men. misogyny is a word used to describe the manifestations of sexism that assigns women and femininity to a social status less than, and typically subservient to, men and masculinity. the term "misandry" likewise would imply that there are manifestations of sexism in which men are inferior to other men.
some men are oppressed. there are of course men who are black, disabled, gay, trans, etc., but these men are not oppressed based on their perceived manhood or masculinity. they experience oppression based on various other systems of domination and double standards i.e racism, ableism, heterosexism, cissexism. the traits that mark these men as inferior, and the rhetoric used to explain the supposed inferiority, are not the same as with sexism and have different underlying causes and effects.
that's not to say there is no overlap at all; disabled men are often treated as "lesser men", or not men at all, because their disability prevents them from fulfilling the social, physical, intellectual, and economic expectations of men. black men have been denied masculinity as far back, and even before the atlantic slave trade as part of the rabid dehumanization of racist and colonialist exploitation. gay men are derided as weak and effeminate faggots, experiencing sexual attraction to men because they didn't have a masculine role model, or because they were sexually abused as a child, or because of mental illness (ableism), etc.
i've personally avoided engaging with discourse on the topic of "transmisandry" as much as possible, but i will point out here that the sexism experienced by transmasculine people is not indicative of misandry being a real systemic force. transgender men are not oppressed on the basis that they choose to be men- why would they be? manhood is supposed to be an aspirational quality, indicating physical strength, intellectual superiority, deserving of all the privilege assigned to it. everyone should want to be a man, by this logic. cissexism denies manhood to transmasculine people because "transgender" is a social category that is deemed unworthy of manhood, in a similar (but again, not identical) way that ableism and racism attempt to strip disabled and racialized men of their masculinity.
the constant in these examples is the imposition that feminine = bad, and therefore bad = feminine. luckily, there's actually a word that describes this phenomenon much better than "misandry", and it's already used in common parlance- even outside of feminist circles! and that word is... misogyny. no, really, i mean it. when people talk about how men experience sexism and describe it as "misandry", what they're describing is misogyny being wielded against men, in the service of other men, and often motivated by other marginalizing factors.
when a boy is told he's not allowed to play with dolls, this is misogyny. taking care of dolls is feminine; femininity is inferior to masculinity; boys are supposed to grow up and claim masculinity; therefore, boys can't play with feminine (inferior) toys.
when a man who has been sexually harassed, assaulted, or raped isn't taken seriously, this is misogyny. he was forced into a position of sexual submission; sexual submission is feminine; he must not have been masculine enough; therefore, he deserved it for not being able to defend his masculine sexuality.
when men are told they shouldn't express strong emotions, this is misogyny. men are supposed to be intellectuals; emotions inhibit intellectualism; emotions are unintellectual and so they are feminine; therefore, men who cry are acting like women .
those are a few examples of common "misandry" talking points that are demonstrably motivated by misogyny. i could keep going with this, but i think ive made my point by now, and don't want to make this post longer than it needs to be. that said, however... this post is 90 percent about men, and 90 percent of everything is about men already. i really need to talk about women now, because you know who's hurt by all of these things more than men are? women!
sure, it might be unfortunate when a man is told "just suck it up" when he's crying, but women's grief isn't taken seriously either! what about when a woman is called an unreasonable angry bitch for daring to stand up for herself? what about when feminists theory is dismissed because "women should leave the thinking to men"?
men aren't taken seriously when they're raped, but whenever a woman is raped it becomes a game of "what did she do to deserve it?" she shouldn't have walked home alone, she should've covered up more, she shouldn't have been drinking with friends, she should've just noticed the signs sooner.
you might suggest that girls aren't punished as severely for being masculine as boys are for being feminine, and the thing is, i would agree with you! however, this specific transgression is still motivated by misogyny, as well as cissexism and heterosexism. parents don't want their boys to grow up into trannies, or faggots. aspiring to be feminine is considered a far worse transgression than aspiring to be masculine.
i don't mean to dismiss the transphobia or racism experienced by trans and/or racialized men, but women absolutely have it worse than men along the lines of cissexism and racialization. women make less money than men across all races, more women experience housing instability than men (especially black and indigenous women!). among trans people, trans women face higher rates of fatal violence, with 83 percent of trans people murdered since 2013 being transgender women, and 63 percent of those women being black.
so, what the fuck is wrong with thinking misandry is real? what's wrong is that it isn't real. it's misogyny dressed up in sweats and a wifebeater. it's ultimately just a word that distracts from the way that sexism affects women by pointing to the ways it affects men and acting like they're equivalent. a system that hurts a specific oppressed group will inevitably hurt individual members of the dominant group sometimes, but this doesn't change the fact that the oppressed are the class that suffers the most from the system, as its primary target.
*liberal voice* the "Throw Trannies in a Woodchipper Act" is bad because what if a real person gets thrown into the chipper by mistake?
"what if a real person has to have their personhood questioned to avoid throwing them into the woodchipper by mistake?"
Transmisogynists hate the terminology of TMA/TME but every time they sound the alarm about bills like this the crux of their argument is always predicated as "This bill does not have adequate safeguards for non-transfems to exempt themselves!"
if you can't hear "trans men are privileged over trans women" without also hearing "trans men face NO oppression and should SHUT UP" then that's kinda on you
"stop with the oppression olympics" has always been a thought terminating cliche, but i feel like around a decade ago it at least sometimes tended to be used in response to those sort of completely incoherent Privilege Calculation Charts and the discussions they sparked, which didn't really deserve any meaningful engagement anyway because its a useless way of trying to understand power and harm.
now it is almost exclusively used by people who categorically reject the idea that there are groups who are observably more at risk than others, and you should consider it a red flag whenever you see it. anyone trying to convince you that we're all on equal footing is not ever doing this to uplift anyone and develop a sense of community. it's the move of someone who just wants to abdicate their own responsibility for understanding their relative social position, because they have built up too much of their identity on being, in all circumstances, the victim.
it really is surreal to observe what's going on in the misogynist transmasc crowd as an asian american lol. like hey i've seen this one before
it's almost like this specific type of misogynist backlash against feminists within marginalized groups happens again and again and again
