empathy-based politics

transfeminism requires liberation for ALL. attempting all conversations in good faith, i try to give you as much respect as you give me. not a discourse blog, more of a venting blog + space to boost voices i think deserve to be heard. blog title is for the pun.

[disk-whorse]

when a trans man dies because his murderer wanted him to be a woman and his masculinity defied that, regardless of how much misogyny motivated his murder, that man still died because he was a man. because he refused to call himself woman when he was told that was his place.

[disk-whorse]

many men would not be dead if we could simply hold our tongue and our breath and our life closed by continuing to be woman. but many men can’t. trying to do that kills us slowly. when we shed off that lie we can instead, at least, die violently, quickly, brutally, and then have our murder counted in femicide statistics without anyone recognizing that a man died because he dared to be a man

[disk-whorse]

systemic or nonsystemic, the personal prejudices people have against trans masculinity and female masculinity is ultimately for their masculinity and not for their “failure to perform femininity”. we can perform femininity as much as we want and transphobes will still kill us because we dared grasp for a label they do not want us to have.

[selkeie]

i dunno guys i'm personally still not with it on the mpreg jokes. men can get pregnant, it isn't for comedy relief, let's move on

[selkeie]

like listen. i get that the societal expectation for people perceived as women to carry children is hot garbage and we want to retaliate against that. but could we consider that the answer isn't being violently weird about people who want to carry children, regardless of their gender. maybe even stop talking about pregnancy like it's some kind of punishment you have to protect women from and 'joke' about putting on men. that's an option

[babeddel]

"transfeminists are trying to divide the community!" and the attempt to cause division in question is just.... asking trans men and transmascs to be conscious of their own transmisogynistic behaviors/beliefs and like, pointing out tangible evidence of them having privilege over us by virtue of not being transfem? how are we causing divisions when all we're doing is asking you to try not to contribute to our oppression? are you not the ones actively dividing the community by forcing us out of trans spaces with your transmisogyny and refusal to listen to even gentle criticism about the way you talk about and behave around your "trans sisters" that you claim to care so much about? it's always "protect the dolls" until we tell you that you're the ones making us feel unsafe in the first place, then you have egotistical meltdowns and compare us to our own oppressors. the divide begins and ends with your refusal to listen to us when we try to speak.

[babeddel]

remember what i said about egotistical meltdowns? yeah

[fishpilled]

it is true, though. studies show that trans men/mascs do face the highest sexual assault rates, and it is a fact that they make up the lesser portion of political figures

https://victoryinstitute.org/outforamerica2026/

https://www.thetrevorproject.org/research-briefs/sexual-violence-and-suicide-risk-among-lgbtq-young-people/

[arra-tech]

Failure to acknowledge v-coding, so worse than worthless.

Idk why there aren't more trans man politicians, but probably because they choose not to run?

[babeddel]

whether there are more of us in politics or not doesn't mean shit when we get paid less than trans men on average and even in relatively "liberal" countries like canada, a whopping 30% of trans women have been denied employment solely on the basis of their gender in the last 5 years. consider for a moment what our overall unemployment rates might look like because of this. as for your cherry-picked sources on sexual violence, i raise you v-coding and the fact that studies indicate that almost 50% of us have been or will be sexually abused in our lifetime. sexual abuse of trans women is not only enabled but rewarded by society - it is quite literally baked into the justice system in the U.S. thank you for proving the point made in my post though.

[waterlilyworld]

is it common for people to not read the studies they use as sources?

we as trans people all have incredibly high rates of sexual assault, and not one single moment of loss of sexual autonomy is acceptable whatsoever, trauma should never be compared, it is all shit.

but just like people bring up trans women having higher rates of nonsexual violence on a regular basis in conversations about trans people as a whole (to note: the study you linked here says trans women are four percent more likely to be physically assaulted, whereas the gap between trans men and trans women in the same study in regards to sexual assault is seven percent) this too is necessary to understand specifically what our communities are facing, and the likelihood of us facing them.

according to the 2011 study ‘injustice at every turn’ done by the national center for transgender equality, trans women were shown to be ten percent more likely to be assaulted in prison or jail, two percent more likely to be assaulted by police, eleven percent more likely to be assaulted in shelters, and five percent more likely to be assaulted in the workplace. do you know what all of those places have in common? they’re public. yet in study, after study, after study, after study, after study, including the one you linked, trans men have higher lifetime rates of sexual violence, with one of these showing a gap as large as seventeen percent between us and trans women, which denotes that said violence is happening to us in private. that does not mean it is not happening. there is nothing but horror to be had at even the concept of v coding, but that is not something that should be used, nor makes sense to use, when speaking about lifetime rates of sexual violence in the overall trans community.

speaking of the overall trans community, that hrc study on the wage gap says in the very first paragraph of methodology that this study should not be used to represent the entire lgbtq community. which you are explicitly doing. i again, can only imagine you must not have read your own sources.

if you were to have looked into this topic further perhaps you would have found this study done using the data from the 2015 u.s. transgender survey that expands on the nuances at play regarding transgender men and women and our incomes.

if you’ll notice, this study found that transgender men are more likely to work part time, and in the study you linked, they only included full time work in the data.

i do appreciate you posting that canadian study though, i have been looking for data on sexual violence in the canadian trans community for ages, and that really helped me out!

[genderkoolaid]

from "Promoting and Protecting Human Rights in relation to Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Sex Characteristics" by the Asia Pacific Forum of National Human Rights Institutions

For those who haven't heard of Shivy Bhat: he was 19 years old and already being abused by his family while living in California, when after asking his mother if he could cut his hair, she demanded he give her access to his phone and was outdated as trans. Under the pretense that they were taking a trip back to India to see his grandmother, Shivy's family kidnapped him, planning on forcing him to live in India in order to "fix" him by teaching him to be a "cultured Indian girl," and planning on forcing him into an arranged marriage. They had taken away all his identifying documents and his phone. He managed to escape with the help of a local queer feminist group, which then resulted in a legal battle as Shivy's family tried to accuse the group of kidnapping and sex trafficking to get access to him again.

This is not the first case of a trans man in Uttar Pradesh experiencing his family use the legal system to kidnap him after he escapes to a trans shelter. A trans man, 'Aditya', came to a shelter "starved and scared," telling shelter staff his family had confined him for days and he feared for his life. Three days later, in the middle of the night, police forcibly took Aditya from the shelter, without a warrant and without following the procedure of the shelter. In a different incident, a trans man, 'Deep', fled to the Asra shelter because his father, a police officer, was violently abusive, writing in a letter that "I know if I go [back home], I will not be able to come back. They will either kill me or marry me off" and that "I believe [my family] will lock me in the house and there is a threat to my life." Five policemen came to Asra and physically attacked shelter workers, arresting two trans men who worked there and taking them to the police station where they were assaulted further. Similarly, in this article trans man named Vivek Azad talks about his family beating him, having men sent to rape him, not allowing him to cut his hair, and having all his school certificates burned by his brother which prevents him from getting employed. A 17-year-old trans man named Manoj was beaten, tied by his hands and feet, and locked in a room in his family's house after coming out, and forcibly married to a man twice his age, although he was eventually able to escape with his girlfriend and get a divorce from the man he was forced to marry.

[genderkoolaid]

#these are heartbreaking#but also tie precisely back into what i keep saying about how violence against those reared into expected girl/womanhood is invisibilized#ie less political legislation is made specifically targeting these groups not because they are let off scot free#but because the unwritten social contract of a high-control patriarchical society says from the outset 'these are the people you are#EXPECTED to rein in. EXPECTED to discipline. shame upon the patriarch of the house if he cannot 'correct' a deviant member of the lesser#gender class.' and so because it is such a social shame this violence is carried out in the home and not publicly.#obviously this is not to say these groups don't also face public violence but that saying these groups aren't publically/legislatively#targeted is a) untrue b) conveniently obfuscates societally-sanctioned private violence as just a fact of this side of gendered rearing#the statistics on IPV alone corroborate this but are somehow dismissed as 'lesser violence'. default violence.#i keep meaning to write up a post about honor killings as gendered control mechanisms but i am so tired of this blog at this point#on a lighter note im mallu (not tamil but a closely related language) and learning the tamil word thirunambi from reading this did make me#go :) for a moment. yay queer terminology in L1s#anyway it is not an exaggeration to say in some cultures and parts of the world one is born into the property class of the familial unit.#and not even wanted property at that; the perceived girl child is a money pit and a burden to be foisted off on a man as soon as possible.

[charoitenigma]

no, white baby, racism isn’t a valid trauma response.

[transmascfeminism]

Off the cuff from some stuff I saw on the fyp: seeing a trans man with a uterus tattoo and thinking it’s aimed at you personally by calling it a “ywnbaw tattoo” (i hate that i even have to know what this 4chan nonsense means) is just treating trans men’s bodies as public property. A trans man’s relationship to his own uterus, an organ that HE has had in HIS body for as long as he's been alive, and any piece of art he may produce or relate to or any body modification he may get to express this relationship, is not a statement about or against you. Anyone who photographed it without his consent, commented on it, criticized him, and especially the commenters who called it a "ywnbaw tatto" or compated it to N*zi symbols, saw themselves as within their rights as a member of the social contract to criticize that man's choice of what to do with his own body in a censorious way. You can only express this intellectual position, while considering it to be a normal and acceptable statement no less, if you view the bodies of trans men as equivalent to a community bulletin or the wall of a public building. That is, if you view our bodies as public property.

This is misogyny, plain and simple.

[none-gender-left-man]

If "women" can become men, the whole charade falls apart. Remember that. That's how cis patriarchy views trans mascs. That's why testosterone is a controlled substance and intersex people forcibly assigned female at birth are pressured to feminize medically.

Trans mascs have our own experiences and unique systemic issues too. We aren't asking to be first in line or saying we have it the worst, we're just tired of fawning and walking on eggshells when discussing our material needs and restrictions.

Cut it out with the trauma Olympics. Mutual aid and solidarity is not a limited resource.

[creatingblackcharacters]

"Researchers sought to investigate whether violent behavior might run in families and to identify a biological basis for such behavior. The researchers claimed that the drug fenfluramine could suggest a genetic basis for aggressive or violent behavior in boys because it is a precursor of the neurotransmitter serotonin. Abnormal serotonin levels are implicated in many psychological states.

Administering fenfluramine once or for a very short period normally causes one's serotonin levels to increase, which in turn increases the amount of hormone prolactin in the blood. The researchers measured the blood prolactin to indirectly assess how much serotonin levels rose. But if prolactin levels increased too dramatically in response, this suggested to Columbia researchers a biological brain dysfunction that may signal a tendency towards aggression.

On the strength of this tenuous connection, the investigators claimed that by monitoring how precipitously the boys' prolactin levels increased after an infusion of fenfluramine, they could measure the boys' propensity for aggressive behavior. Why not simply measure the boys serotonin levels? This might not reveal pathology, because the blood serotonin concentration might not reflect brain levels. Prolactin, however, is produced only in the central nervous system.

But [Gail] Wasserman and her colleagues claimed that another risk factor fed the boys' purported violent propensities: bad parenting. Black boys were fated to be the violent products of "parental psychopathology" or "adverse rearing environments." Why? According to researchers, because of their poverty and their ethnicity."

Chapter 11- Medical Apartheid, Harriet A. Washington

[puppygirllaika]

talking about stuff like prison reform or the SO registry really quickly makes you realize how many peoples political ideology boils down to "look, just tell me who the bad people are so I know who we should be killing."

[puppygirllaika]

and this is not unique to one side of the political spectrum btw. right or left, authoritarian or anarchist, all are susceptible to the rhetoric of "who is the acceptable target?"

[noblackwomannocry]

very necessary addendum onto all the anonsee/storyweavingspider stuff where she strangled a woman and referred to her as "strangulation girl" and said she wanted to beat her up is that she has been banned from a queer bar for having multiple allegations of assault, and she was only banned from that queer bar after moving to DC allegedly to escape other allegations of sexual violence in her previous city. she was also literally a DEI consultant for the US Department of Defence. note that the victim user elizanomics is talking about is a completely different victim from the woman who anonsee calls "strangulation girl".

when the girlfriend of one of her victims spoke up about this on that very same tweet, anonsee's response was "well your girlfriend is racist because she said it's harder to get people to believe her because I'm a minority in a community concerned with protecting minorities that often coddles sex pests! AND she asked for it!"

when anonsee references Hot Allostatic Load/being "HALed" this is what she is talking about btw, having multiple allegations of sexual violence in multiple cities on top of being mocked for being a literal fed informing the US Department of Defence about trans communities in her areas. you all are actively supporting a sex pest fed and propping her up as your Black Transfeminist Icon.

[noblackwomannocry]

yes! like her linkedin, where she talks about being a federal informant!

which we know is her linkedin because when someone posted this she admitted it

and that linkedin was only shared publicly because anonsee, as part of her tangled web of lies about how she never assaulted anyone (she assaulted multiple women), made a claim easily disproven using her own linkedin history

having been banned from several queer bars (including As You Are, the one mentioned by a victim's girlfriend in the above post) is coming literally from the people in the community that go to those bars.

in the process of grabbing these screenshots I found a post from a completely unrelated person in anonsee's local area talking about anonsee getting banned from a club the two of them were in for assaulting women:

every screenshot here has been posted by another trans woman. the linkedin is the only thing that wasn't initially posted by another trans woman, and that was because a trans woman shared it to someone else to leak for her own safety, as anonsee's previous transfeminine accusers were not believed.

is that enough for you? do we need to fly to DC and get interviews from the women themselves? do I need an updated copy of her CV? are the trans women she strangled disposable enough that you all can keep "Yasss Say That Queen" a federal informant sex pest because the Hash Slinging Strangler is the only black person you've decided is worth listening to?

[kushblazer666]

[mutt-thingy]

already seeing people throwing around the term "birthday boy" and being transmedicalist about it.

[genderkoolaid]

literally why does anyone give a fuck about this guys tattoo????????

like this is genuinely fucking embarrassing for Y'ALL. if the fact that trans men have uteri and will talk about it and have feelings about it is this goddamn upsetting, go work on that yourself. i need y'all to reflect on why you love hallucinating the worst possible intentions when it comes to anything and everything a trans man does. this is so extremely a non-issue y'all just want to be an issue because the idea of trans men doing anything but quietly pretending to be cis men with extra steps triggers your internalized anti-transmasculinity.

not a single trans person on EARTH needs ANYONE'S permission to feel any kind of way about their sexed traits. not trans women or nonbinary with their penises, not trans men or nonbinary with uteruses, nobody. "its bioessentialist" TO HAVE?????? AN ORGAN YOU WERE BORN WITH AND WHICH IS HIGHLY STIGMATIZED AND SO HAVE FEELINGS ABOUT IT YOU EXPRESS THROUGH ART??????????????????? oh cry me a goddamn river. you know what you are soooo right let's ban every trans man from ever talking about having a uterus or abortion or pregnancy, because its kind of bioessentialist and transmisogynistic to talk about the highly stigmatized body you have!!!!!!!!!

to quote a person in the notes' very shitty defense of why this tattoo is "bioessentialist":

The replies on this post are absolutely full of trans men defending the bioessentialist back tat. Because it’s been buried in sealioning and mansplaining, I’ll say it again: if a trans woman got a tattoo like this depicting any of her cagab’s reproductive organs, she’d be put on a sex offender registry (or perhaps a kiwifarms thread). You people KNOW this tattoo looks terfy. It’s impossible to ignore. And that’s why you need to tie yourselves in knots to pretend it isn’t.

that a trans woman would get shit on for having a tattoo of her genitals (which i would also defend btw. i think trans women should Also be allowed to have art about their sex traits on their body, i don't think art of penises should be seen as inherently evil or disgusting) is irrelevant to why this tattoo is supposedly so bad. "trans women couldn't do this!!!" okay? that's unfair but it is, i cannot express this enough, not this guy's fucking problem.

i am Positive that there are cis people who would also freak the fuck out about this and bitch and moan and make a big transphobic stink about it, too. i don't know if you guys have noticed, but anytime a company dares to put top surgery scars on any kind of advertising, people have a meltdown over "celebrating the mutilation of young girls." transphobes are not normal about trans men either!

"people KNOW this tattoo looks terfy" i think ceding the grounds of ANY art made of one of the most stigmatized and controlled organs in a human body to TERFs is fucking stupid and misogynistic! & i also know if a cis woman did this y'all would not care even half as much, because you are all just swept up in the queer community's most recent Crabs In A Bucket discourse and you jump at ANY chance to paint trans men as evil transmisogynists rubbing their uteri in poor trans women's faces by virtue of. checks notes. talking about having their ability to have an abortion legally denied which can in fact kill people.

i do not know how to tell you people this any clearer

it is not bioessentialism for trans men to have uteri and talk about having a uterus and make art about having a uterus. you are just projecting bioessentialism onto trans men because you have deeply ingrained anti-transmasculinity and the present discourse has worsened it immensely. it is not bioessentialist to have an extremely stigmatized organ used by patriarchy to control people and to talk about that sometimes or make art of that sometimes.

[genderkoolaid]

I know the trauma of being a young man. No, not even young man, a little boy. But, like, there's a moment that every boy has in America, under patriarchy, where they have to start severing themselves from humanity. And it's not explicitly religious, but like, there's a three-year-old boy that's going to learn today that he's no longer allowed to cry. Does that make sense? Some three-year-old boy today is going to cry freely for the last time in his life.

— F.D Signifer, from this recent video on his second channel

[isuggesttakingestrogen]

None of the trans women I know have any “horrible things levied upon them” girl what the fuck are you doing

[britts-galaxy-brain]

If everyone you personally know has accusations that involve ABUSE AND SEXUAL ASSAULT, that says everything about YOUR circle. The demographic you fall into doesn't mean shit.

We aren't talking about trans women. We're talking about YOU.

[sphinxussy]

None of the trans women I know IRL or online, in a personal capacity, have ever been accused of rape or some other horrible thing. She's just crashing out because a bunch of other trans women realized she'll hardcore defend an actual legitimate rapist with a record, just because she's trans, while throwing several other trans women who were said rapist's victims under the bus.

[dissociative-tboy]

So, if you aren't aware. Skittybitty, a nonbinary Zelda youtuber, just got (in no particular order):

- Repeatedly called zippertits and theyfab, trans slurs including the t slur, the f slur, etc.

- Tons of misgendering and sexual harrassment.

- Outed as jewish by Octorok Reviews to his genuine neo-nazi lolicon twitter audience, who immediately started being violently antisemitic towards Skitty. This information was shared by Skitty in a private discord call after being lured into a false sense of security by Octorok. This is beyond horrifying.

- Got a Kiwifarms thread started about them.

- Was pedojacketed for having a "minor" role in their discord for obvious safety reasons.

- So, so many death threats. An insane amount of death threats. I don't know how exactly to emphasize that the amount of death threats was rampant, vile, and personal.

- Harrassed for being "racist against white people" or wanting "white genocide" for saying that white isn't a meaningful label in the sense that the definition of "white" has changed many times over the years to dehumanize the out-group. And saying to, just, generally not be racist.

This started because Octorok didn't like that Skitty responded to his incredibly racist video about the Gerudo people from the Legend of Zelda series with their own video. Octorok's video included so many blatant lies about the Gerudo's "lore", cropped porn, and many moments where this "lore" was incredibly obviously taken from said porn.

This is fucking insane behavior over video game video essay discourse and puts Skitty in genuine danger of real life harm. Several twitter users have called for Skitty to be doxxed.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, can we take one day where we're not arguing over trans discourse and say something about this?? This is real harm done to a nonbinary person. This is violently antisemitic. This has gotten to the point of a kiwifarms thread. The overton window has shifted dangerously far and all it feels like we're doing is eating ourselves alive.

All I'm asking is to please set down your discourse for a minute and talk about this, and things like this. It cannot be allowed to continue or be absolved in any form. Stamp it out.

I need you all to acknowledge real life harm done to other trans people and other minority groups instead of angrily arguing semantics, even if only for a minute.

That's all I ask.

(please correct me if i got any info wrong in the post. for reference, skittybitty uses they/them pronouns, and octorok reviews uses he/him and is a cis man as far as i can tell. if you misgender anyone, i will delete your comment. it is not productive to the discussion i want to cultivate. thank you for reading.)

[myirlnameiscloud]

B-but people with micropenises are my emotional support minority to bully!! 🥺🥺 B-but it's funny that their penises are small!! 🥺🥺 B-but I only make fun of BAD people by calling their penises small!! 🥺🥺 I have good reason to make fun of people with micropenises!! 🥺🥺 It's not intersexism if it's funny!! 🥺🥺 It's sooo funny because their penises are small!! 🥺🥺 Guys it's sooo funny come on!! 🥺🥺

[myirlnameiscloud]

Aaand here's some of the lovely comments under this post:

I think I hate tumblr.

Anyways BLOCKED!!!

[genderkoolaid]

There is no feminist way to participate in toxic masculinity, and mocking people for having fragile masculinity is toxic masculinity, point blank period. Its fundamentally patriarchal.

The idea that "having fragile masculinity" is inherently a personality defect or moral failing is patriarchal. So much of this kind of bullshit is people taking fundamentally patriarchal ideas of manhood (for example, that men being vulnerable is a defect or moral failing) and defining it around slightly more feminist values.

Like, the only thing that is different from bog standard patriarchy here is the inclusion of "macho." But like, the idea that there are "fragile" men who fail to be "real men" with unshakeable firm masculinity, and they also secretly have small penises and are biologically less manly compared to "real men" whose real manhood can be located in their large penises... babe that's just toxic masculinity. The same "macho" shit you hate those men for, you yourself engage in, just a little to the left.

Fragile masculinity is not a moral failing, and it doesn't intrinsically make someone a worse person. And tbh I think talking about "fragile masculinity" like this is kind of disgustingly individualistic, and doesn't do much to encourage conversation about how patriarchy constructs manhood and masculinity as tools of control and oppression (what some feminists might call misandry).

[rars]

saying this as a lesbian who loves women's boobs--sexually, even! but i don't think that we as a society should consider breasts inherently female or inherently sexual. a flat chest should not be seen as the "default" for gender neutrality but instead just one way a person can present. boobs should be normal. anyone of any gender can have boobs

[velvetvexations]

so much transmisogyny is "this trans woman is a bad person, how can I make it about her being a trans woman"

[love-ardour-anarchism]

That's precisely my issue with "Dump your Puppygirl"

[velvetvexations]

Dump Your Puppygirl has a lot going on with it that I don't think is solely a matter of it's transmisogyny, but it is like, extremely transmisogynistic on top of everything else.