it feels like a massive wall, sometimes. like a huge impassable barrier between my actual experiences, and the way so many people who aren't transfems talk about trans women's experiences. i dont know how to climb over that wall. i dont know how to break that wall down. i only know it will never fall so long as they keep adding bricks to it.
the feeling of being behind this wall is the feeling of being the only transfem in groups of TME people, including people of colour, intersex people, people who are recognised as feminists, recognised as anti-violence activists and knowing that none of them can even begin to conceptualise the gender dynamics, the power dynamics, that led to me being raped repeatedly by transmascs and cis ppl afab, and only raped by them. knowing they will think me hysterical if i even try to explain... the rape threats i started getting from girls at age 12. the first painful sexual experiences, just getting through them to keep my partner happy. the way the world closed around me, exiled me, and called me an abusive male even as i was sexually abused repeatedly. the way every single one of my rapists used feminism to isolate me and cast my autonomy as abuse.
did you even know that trans girls can fake orgasms, if we have to, if it will make our partners happy enough to stop raping us in that moment? that rapists use pregnancy against us, to isolate us, to blackmail and extort us? have you ever had multiple feminist rapists afab corner you and berate you for not loving them authentically enough until you cry? been raped almost every day for months for the crime of getting erections? have you ever had a transmasc rapist tell you that transmisogyny isnt real? and then scream at you and accuse you of betrayal for simply mentioning you want the exact same gender-affirming surgery that they received? has your rapist ever accused every single trans woman they know of sexual abuse, and told you not to interact with them ever again, over and over and over? have you ever sat there, internally screaming, while your tme rapist made you sit down with your other tme rapist while they badmouth the transfem they exiled? the transfem they made advances on, then accused and exiled as soon as she got an erection? had your rapist call you a misogynist for listening to music by transfems? for raising your voice? have you ever been kidnapped, and then called abusive for pushing your way out, because you should just let people of that gender kidnap you, it's wrong to ever touch them in anger?
have you ever had the experience of realising, finally, that your transmasc rapist will never really love you in a real way - and not realising this because of their mistreatment of you, but because you finally realise that after years of having arguments with them about transphobia, in which they never listen, in which they never ever read a single thing written by a trans woman who uses the term transmisogyny, that they literally never even learnt what the term transmasc even means?
feminists often know about what it is to be a cis girl growing up surrounded by abusive men, fleeing from rapist to rapist, experiencing polyvictimisation, financial abuse, social isolation, emotional abuse, in a society in which it seems like there is no escape. they know what it is to grow up as a 'girl' in a man's world...
but do they know what it is to grow up as trans girl in a TME's world?
that's the world we live in. a world in which we don't even have to interact with men at all, (let alone interact with cis men!) to get the full experience of all-encompassing rape culture that specifically isolates and targets people of our gender
