"Reinventing the Gender Binary"
CWs: Rape, fetishization, impregnation by assault, dehumanization, transmisogynistic degendering, misappropriating the language of racial justice, objectification, and worst of all, "infighting". I'm going to do something stupid---post about transfeminism on Tumblr again. The following is transcribed from two Bluesky threads:
I have a story.
About how "transfeminists reinvented the gender binary". About how "every trans person is subject to transmisogyny". About how "we're all faggots, deviants, perverts, so why demand specificity?" It begins with a transmasc individual saying "chicks with dicks" isn't offensive.
See, this individual identified as a chick with a dick. Or a man with a vag, depending. They revealed a lot about themselves over the course of the argument with a trans women. They were 19, married, a parent, and never availed of any transition care. They didn't consider this term dehumanizing.
When the trans woman they were arguing with told them that they didn't have the authority to deem whether a term fetishizing her was dehumanizing or not, they got very nasty. Trans women did not have any special claim over 'chick with dick', and to say so was to practically misgender them.
So justified, they talked about how trans women *are* just a sexual identity, a kink identity, and we did not have any special authority over transphobia or transmisogyny. Unlike them, who experienced real oppression. This is where they strongly implied that they had been impregnated by assault.
That's deeply traumatic, and violent, and something no trans woman will experience. So therefore, of course, we have no epistemic authority over misogyny. Or transphobia. Or sexual assault, and fetishization. Our suffering is always going to be a subset of "real" misogyny, see. Because no wombs.
This individual is young, and they do not know they are a TERF. Trans identity, to them, is a mask, a way to "escape being gendered". Oppression to them is intrinsically linked to reproductive exploitation, which is synonymous with misogyny, and trans women don't experience that. We costume.
Every time I hear someone say that "we've reinvented the gender binary", I sigh deeply. We never needed to reinvent it. Trans women, in the midst of the most queervoid-y of spaces, have always keenly been aware that our claims of oppression and experiencing misogyny are rarely believed.
You can say this was a young individual---but where are they going to learn better? Who is going to tell them that trans women's oppression isn't a costume, isn't a stigma for a kink, is more than just a mask we put on? That we are, meaningfully, women? Even without the wombs?
The gender binary is already there. The queervoided social spaces always cease to be queervoided when a tranny walks in, because these spaces recognize true trans people yearning to be free from (re)gendering and oppression, and "male pretenders who want to be gender I wish to escape, the freaks".
I am not the one who made the gender binary important. I am not the one who tolerated TERFs in my spaces, who encouraged the uncritical adoption of naturalized sex split from gender, and promoted a model of misogyny intrinsically tied to reproductive injustice.
I am the one who is offal.
Trans women are women who cannot be reproductive exploited, and we are too tainted to be allowed to be men ever again. So we are trash. Even to queervoids, because their "beyond the binary" ends at the threshold of a tranny demanding respect.
You think you are beyond sex? You think you have eliminated the need to divine what kind of gendered violence an individual is subject to?
I don't believe you.
I don't believe you, because I have seen gendervoids enact this violence on trannies, time and time again.
I don't believe you are beyond gender.
[Red, in a different post]:
I don't believe you are beyond gender.
I don't believe you are beyond gender.
YOU MARK ME AND MINE IN THE SAME WAY THE CIS DO, IN THE SAME WAY OUR MOST DEDICATED EXTERMINATIONIST FOES DO, AND YOU HAVE THE SHEER, UNREPENTANT, UTTER GALL TO PRETEND YOU ARE IN ANY WAY MORE ENLIGHTENED THAN THE GUTTER OF THE PATRIARCHY YOU EMERGED FROM?
You are not beyond gender.
Fuck your pronouns. You treat a tranny like this, your gender is fucking "sexist". Piss on your "gender abolition". It's worth nothing.
I will, in fact, be even blunter:
Trans women are not trying to say transmisogyny is "the worst oppression". We gave up on trying to stress the severity of it a long time ago. We are, at this point, trying to communicate that we *are oppressed at all*, to people who refuse to believe it.
I have seen fifty-year old men pull out the "I was a woman longer than you, tranny" card. I've seen people of every identity and experience go "I'll always be more of a woman than you, tranny, and don't you fucking forget it." Trans women are surveilled, scrutinized, targeted, and not believed.
The most gender-enlightened of us all refuse to deign to recognize trans women as meaningfully impacted by misogyny, as anything but second-class citizens of womanhood and feminism, as meaningfully oppressed because we are woman-gendered, sure, maybe, but we are not FEMALE.
And we notice that.
Then when we notice that even fellow trans people are more willing to self-regender to talk over us than BELIEVE US ABOUT OUR OWN LIVES AND OPPRESSION, or GRANT US THE PRIVILEGE OF SPEAKING AS THEIR EQUALS IN THE STRUGGLE AGAINST PATRIARCHY, we are called "divisive".
Fuck that.
Hear me, here and now: You will get nowhere but a singularity of a "gender-enlightened" movement collapsing in on itself because for all the yearning for a post-gender existence, no one is willing to grant the tranny the dignity of womanhood, to admit that she, too, suffers AS a woman.
If you want to tie the core of misogynistic oppression to reproduction and deem transness as nothing more than "gender-play", fine. I wish you luck.
Cassandra has spoken.
I'm surfacing these tags anonymously because I find them too important to leave there. Thank you to the author for sharing this---it couldn't have been easy.
CONTENT WARNINGS FROM OP STILL APPLY.
This is the important point I want to highlight enough to explicitly state it, and it's not "Trans women are the most oppressed."
I have frankly stopped caring who the most oppressed is, because I have found that marginalized communities cannot help but argue this endlessly in anti-solidarity ways. Especially since the ways in which we (as gender-marginalized communities) are all oppressed is so deeply interwoven and interlinked. You cannot understand transphobia, homophobia, or any of its intersections with other marginalizations without understanding the root of how misogyny, male-supremacy, and a patriarchal society operate.
However.
However, when transfems talk about how we are oppressed in unique ways that others do not necessarily experience (more on this in a minute), we are shut down in ways that aren't explicitly called out as "Oppression Olympics" or "divisive rhetoric" or "infighting" because it just makes sense to people that of course trans women, the non-gestational offal-women we are, don't experience as acute or severe misogynistic violence as those who have been saddled with the burden of reproductive injustice!
This is a point of fracture that is well-trod and yet not recognized as sex-essentialist, as 'TERF rhetoric' that is designed to make you dismiss transmisogyny and feel more aligned with transmisogynists than with your fellow trans people.
X screenshot very related.
And here's the thing ... my most-seen post on here is about my essay The Third Sex, an essay a lot of you have likely heard of, if you're familiar with my account at all, but perhaps not read.
The conclusion of that essay is, quite literally, that third-sexing, degendering, the discarding of sexual-chattel who are deemed 'defective', affects trans women most harshly, but it's a phenomenon that applies to all gender-marginalized individuals to different degrees. I talk about the treatment of infertile women in India, about lesbophobia experienced by non-transfem lesbians, and cite an essay by Dworkin (yes, that Dworkin) to show that even cis feminists have talked about this phenomenon, just in less concise terms.
I am, ultimately, of the mind that we should be a radinclu gendervoid gestalt in our struggle against patriarchy.
But it's not going to happen for as long as your refrain is "you will never understand the true pain of being a wombyn, tranny."
And if you don't realize who talks like that. If you don't actually understand misogyny, leave alone transmisogyny, and what its roots are.
Is this getting through?
It's actually so fascinating because in the same breath that transfeminists are condemned as exclusionary and TERF-like, actual outright TERF ideology will be deployed to exclude trans women
The term "gendervoid" might confuse some readers unfamiliar with the phenomenon being described here, so here's a quick try at addressing potential misconceptions:
Gendervoid as used here does not refer to a specific trans identity or cluster of identities, but instead a specific attitude towards understanding gender in trans communities.
The attitude of gendevoids can be summarised as a dismissal of the possibility of gender-based marginalization within trans spaces. It basically amounts to "because we're all trans, we're enlightened and have moved past that, it's a cis people problem"
The issue described here is that this unspoken attitude is itself a mechanism to ENABLE the gender dynamics it claims to reject, by silencing people who point out that there's a gender basis for their exclusion from the Gendervoid.
The fundamental problem is that the gendervoid ends up defaulting to bioessentialist notions of sex, and analysing the positionalities of trans people purely in a cissexist framework.
And this is why gendervoid spaces end up hostile to TRANS WOMEN.
I'd love to be a gendervoid as much as the next queer, but unfortunately I'm a tranny and therefore Marked by my Sin (which is either "clinging to womanhood" or "male essence" depending on which is more convenient for the interlocutor to bludgeon me with).
Surfacing more of the tags.
Yup. I will add that I experience this with regard to race sometimes too, despite progressive communities' louder declarations of commitment to anti-racism ('declaration' =/= 'undertaking'). The degree to which racism against Indian is normalized on social media these days is kind of horrifying, as a formerly Hindu tranny who has plenty of critiques of India that Westerners mostly are unaware of and do not echo. I have, however, been called "Hindutva" or "Brahmin" by Westerners who googled what those terms mean specifically to tell me, the woman who fled the nation's current regime, to shut up because I'm ontologically fascist or something.
Most queer communities leave their sex-essentialism unexamined, but it emerges when they try to speak on trans women's oppression and reveal that they invariable consider it less severe than Real Misogyny.
Thank you <3
"We're all queers" when trans women must shut up about our treatment. We're never "all trannies" in terms of standing with us when we're targeted, but we are "all transmisogyny-affected" or "all equally affected by transphobia" so shut up you divisive cryptoTERF transfeminists and endure being the monstrous specter invading Bathrooms, Prisons, Sports that we will invoke to silence you in discussions of patriarchy or misogyny.
Thank you <3
Required reading to follow me
