Very very telling actually that when I talk about people who are raised under the socially imposed gender (SIG*) of "girl/woman" for large portions of our lives being, more often than not (this is statistical fact), survivors of domestic, sexual and general gendered violence and how that plays out in our adulthoods, lives and in trans spaces, people respond by telling me that I'm "saying they're all weak and defenseless"...so you view rape and abuse survivors as weak and defenseless and are here to lecture me on my feminism???
This is a direct quote of something that's been said to me more than once when I am talking about people with "girl/woman" SIG and our experiences of gendered violence.
If you view me saying that people of a certain SIG are highly likely to of experienced gender based violence as me saying that I think all those people are categorically weak, then you are a piece of shit actually.
No I don't think rape and abuse victims are weak tyvm.
Also find it very ridiculous that these people then accuse me of seeing "the penis as the rape organ" (direct quote again) and all people with SIG experiences of "boy/man" as being inherently rapists
1) Because actually trans advocacy 101 is knowing that you don't actually know what genitals trans people have.
I'm saying people's childhood/teen/adult (whatever applies) imposed gender socialisation, when not unpacked or even acknowledged and coupled with a culture of enabling and normalising abuse from that particular demographic under trans femme supremacist tmerf ideology is a contributing factor to abusive behaviours and dynamics we are seeing in community.
You are the one making it about trans femmes who have penises and saying that my analysis is based in this belief and the gender essentialist belief that "the penis is the rape organ"
I have also repeatedly said that I don't view trans femmes or trans women as men, they are women and femmes and definitely not men and I don't believe they have male brains, I don't believe gendered brains exist, what I do believe in and what science has continually backed up in every demographic and study, is that the environment a child grows up in, the way they are treated, the content they view and the way those around them act have HUGE and lifelong impacts on who they become as adults and how they see the world, these things can be unlearnt, introspected upon and interrogated but people's environments largely shape them (also if you are Marxist who denies that gender socialisation has an impact on trans people that's fucking ludicrous, it's material analysis 101).
I do understand that trans women and femmes experience transmisogyny as children growing up under their SIG and that any privileges they may experience growing up under their SIG are conditional and that there is often an aspect of oppression there too (obviously there is inherently oppression in any SIG that goes against the person's actual gender (or lack thereof) in the first place) in that trans femmes who show feminine traits while living under their SIG are punished for that & it is alienating & horrible experiencing a gendered childhood that doesn't feel right. I'm not saying trans femmes have male privilege.
I understand these things. I've explained on here before that my trans feminism (as is inevitable in the queer community where tmerf is centered) began with understanding transmisogyny and fighting for trans femmes and their rights.
I do get where the knee jerk reaction to anything that feels like people aligning your gender with masculinity or cis manhood comes from, I get why trans femmes might feel dysphoric or upset being told that they may have learned some similar behaviours around gender, consent and patriarchy to what cis men have, but you simply cannot engage with the reality of the fucked up world we live in by burying your head in the sand and shaping your ideology around never feeling uncomfortable and the ideal post gender society you want to live in.
We do not live in a post gender essentialist world, we do not live in a post patriarchal world, we do not live in a genderless world.
We are all shaped by the environment we grow up in and by how we are treated based on our SIG, yes there is nuance to this and no acknowledging that nuance and being brave enough to talk about it doesn't have to be a sweeping black and white statement that means it actually makes you your SIG or means people think that because of socialisation/learnt behaviours your actual gender is invalid or fake.
The fantastic thing about learnt behaviours from the nightmare world we live in is that we can all unpack and unlearn them but just as us white people can't unpack our learnt racism until we acknowledge it, none of us, no matter our gender, can unpack our learnt behaviours around patriarchy and gender without acknowledging them.
I don't believe trans femmes are inherently or uniquely abusive or dangerous, but I do believe that telling any group of people, especially ones where large portions have been taught at least some level of toxic, abusive and oppressive behaviour, that they don't need to examine that and that actually, anyone suggesting they should examine that hates them, is an inherently dangerous rhetoric to engage in.
This rhetoric alongside rhetoric that aims to erase, silence and minimise abusive behaviours from trans femmes (no matter how good the intentions of trying to protect trans femmes in doing so) has created a culture in our community where there is, a significant enough portion of trans femmes engaging in abusive behaviour with no mechanism or framework for accountability that it is causing harm to others in community and that is where my issue lies.
Having extremely vocal and numerically significant numbers of your community online engaging in slurs, violent threats, suicide baiting, rape apology/fantasy, sexual harrassment, misgendering etc is not fucking normal or healthy, the amount of violence I've seen from trans femmes in comparison to violence from other demographics in my community is not normal or healthy, the vile stories of extreme abuse from trans femmes coming out of the trans masc voices project is not normal or healthy, the routine erasure and silencing of victims of abuse from trans femmes in community that I have experienced, seen personally and heard about online is not normal or healthy.
No it's not every trans femme or even anywhere near the majority of trans femmes, but it is a decent enough chunk that it is causing real harm in community and the very trans femme supremacist tmerf inverted cis feminism so many in community spout is literally what's creating the culture that enables and causes this situation in the first place.
Almost every single story I have heard about a trans femme in community being abusive has been coupled with the weaponisation of the "trans femmes can't be abusive and if you disagree or speak about your experience with abuse you're a transmisogynist" type rhetoric.
Every situation I've experienced or seen first hand where a trans femme has been engaging in abusive behaviour she has used calls of transmisogyny as a shield to avoid accountability, this isn't a coincidence, when you create conditions for any demographic to feel that they are above personal and social accountability bad faith people will use that to justify their internal minimisation and worldview in which they believe they're not capable of abuse.
Telling any demographic that they're uniquely incapable of abuse is dangerous. I don't know what is so hard to understand about that, it's part of the same reason you get cis women sexually abusing school boys and believing they're not doing anything wrong.
2) Saying I view the penis as the rape organ is also wild because my childhood sexual abuser was a cis woman so I am intimately acquainted with why viewing rape and sexual abuse as something only people with penises do to people with vaginas is egregiously wrong and harmful.
I have had my experiences consistently minimised and invalidated due to the abuse coming from a woman, which is why it pisses me off watching trans people create the exact same dynamic in our community where we pretend femininity and womanhood = safety and goodness and masculinity and manhood = evil and badness when the reality is that it's never ever that simple.
* I am trying to move to SIG (socially imposed gender) over AGAB as it feels like a less gender essentialist, exrosexist way to get these ideas across.
I don't enjoy using AGAB or the idea of reducing people to their AGAB and understand why usage of AGAB can be upsetting, but, as outlined above, I also think it's unrealistic to pretend that SIG and the time spent being perceived and treated as your SIG have net zero impact on people's lives and behaviours.
I also think it's an important part of feminism material analysis to be able to have words to analyse the actual world we live in and the actual material conditions we live under.
I would love it if trans, non binary, intersex and 2spirit people were seen and treated by wider society as the gender (or lack thereof) that we say we are, but the harsh reality is that we don't live in a post gender essentialist world, we live in a white supremacist, gender essentialist, capitalist patriarchy and refusing to engage in analysis based in that reality because we don't like or agree with it, is foolish and frankly useless.
This is why I also encourage people who have only engaged in social political discourse online to log off and take a reality check, if you genuinely want to engage in analysis and work which has any chance of changing our realities you need to engage with the world where it's at and that includes acknowledging the status quo of wider society and the fact that trans discourse and social interaction on Tumblr represent an extremely insignificant portion of both the trans commit and wider societies opinions.
