I’m so tired of seeing what amounts to basically the same post over and over again in these tags, of:
“Transandrobros are stupid. Yes trans men deserve a word. But it can’t be transandrophobia! [Describes almost word-for-word what people talking about transandrophobia have been discussing for years now] is how we actually should be talking about this. Too bad no one is. Transandrobros should be thinking this stuff instead of harassing trans women.”
It’s a very blatant broadcasting of a problem I desperately want to sit down and more thoroughly write about but I just don’t really have the resources to do justice to. I’m going to try my best here, though.
And also, ties into another post I see a lot in the tag:
“Why is the gulf between the conversations we’re having about transandrophobia and what they’re saying that we transandrobros are supposedly saying as ridiculously large as it is? Maybe even moreso than previous Tumblr queer discourses.”
People against the word tranandrophobia are, almost entirely, not actually reading anything posted by those of us making our own posts about transandrophobia. There are compounding factors as to why this is as pronounced a problem as it is:
1) There are, without a doubt, people who are bigoted at worst, or at least otherwise mean spirited, who speak about transandrophobia as well. And specifically in ways which make them the most likely first place you’ll encounter the word tranandrophobia, such as by de-railing a post about transmisogyny. Discussions of transandrophobia are far from mainstream, even within trans spaces. This means that the most visibility of the word transandrophobia will be from intrusions to whatever else people are actually aware of. Once you have a negative first impression, why on earth would you search through the tag? Many people, when faced with something new which they first have a negative impression of, will look in places which are more likely to confirm their bias, even if they don’t realize it. (I think people just need to keep this in mind more in general. We like confirming our biases. It’s uncomfortable to learn you are biased.)
2) There are plenty of blogs calling themselves transfeminist who are popular and who have made “PSA”s about transandrophobia which lie about what it is. In said “PSA”s, they tell you to put the word into your filtered and blocked tags/words lists so as to never end up reading a transandrobro post. “Just like” how you should be doing that with tags like “TERF safe” so that you don’t accidentally go reading their posts and accidentally fall into the trap of feeling like what they’re saying is reasonable. Meanwhile, actually, what people were advocating doing wrt TERF tags wasn’t to fully avoid those posts like cognitohazards because they’ll trick you into thinking their points are reasonable, but instead to have context about how they may use language manipulatively to make points which may sound reasonable until you know the context that they’re TERFs, which changes the meaning because of how it is known that they’re, say, using the seemingly reasonable “I want to protect young girls from predators in bathrooms” as a dogwhistle about preventing trans women from using public washrooms, where we can see that throughline in discussions where they are speaking amongst each other and so not bothering to dogwhistle. So, people have weaponized this misunderstanding of how dogwhistling works and why we advocate for people to filter tags, to make it so that people will never actually go to read discussions of transandrophobia from people actually discussing it. Because transandrophobia itself is the dogwhistle and the tag to be blocked all at once, which somehow changes the real, frank discussions about our lived experiences into actually meaning “trans women oppress me”, and so you can’t even read it and take it apart on your own you need to avoid anything that uses that word at all costs. (If anyone tries to convince you not to come to your own conclusions about something, that needs to be seen as the red flag it is. They can give you information which might change how everything fits together, sure, but when you can’t even look at it to form your own opinion? Nope. Not safe.)
3) The problem in 2 is basically the same here, but instead of with tumblr’s tagging system, the use of the extension shinigami-eyes. Even setting aside that there’s heavy anti-transmasc, anti-nonbinary, anti-intersex, and racist prejudice going on in flagging people red and green, fully pretending that the tool actually only flags people who are dangerous to the trans community as red, that still would not solve the issue of pushing for using that as proof itself similar to how the tag tranandrophobia itself is listed as proof of actually secretly meaning “trans women oppress me” while discouraging people from taking steps to form their own opinions.
It actually concerns me, and I wish I had the bandwidth left to really dig into why beyond the little comments in brackets I left, but I’m way out of steam at this point.
