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.

[sapphoslilhelper]

Seeing people who full-chest talk about how transmasculine people need to be decentered in feminism is genuinely ??? "Let women be feminine" levels of online. You can't decenter a group that has never been centered, and the worst part is, you're telling everybody that continued transmasculine erasure is praxis. Rather than organizing around social forces of oppression, you're explicitly abandoning one of the most vulnerable groups to patriarchal violence.

[tboy-cock]

while we talk about the fact that transmasc and trans man erasure is not a "casualty" or a "side effect" of trans womens hypervisibility but a deliberate effort to silence us made by both wider society and the trans community, we must also remember that trans men of color are DOUBLY affected by this. radfems (both trans and regular terfs) want to push the idea that transmasculinity is inherently "white" and that when we talk about the struggles that trans men experience that we are talking about white trans men in western countries, and they benefit off pushing this idea. we must remember and advocate for trans men of color and especially those who are in countries affected by american imperialism who are the most at risk group of a lot of the most violent acts of transandrophobia and antitransmasculinity, and never let radfems erase them in order to paint trans men the hysterical whiny bitches they want to

[genderkoolaid]

how many nonbinary people have come out publicly only to then semi re-closet themselves because people are so incapable of not being extremely exorsexist towards them immediately... ive seen this happen to nonbinary people across agab we cannot catch a damn break

[genderkoolaid]

also the way people tend to see misgendering nonbinary as like. "softer" or easier or more understandable than misgendering a binary trans person. like it doesn't even really matter, because it's basically just an aesthetic choice, and not anything to be taken that seriously

[genderkoolaid]

#i remember when mr beard came out and immidiately had to go back in the closet#because people were giving him shit for not changing his presentation or pronouns#its really sad

forgot about mr. beard but yeah that made so upset on his behalf!!!!!

and what's annoying is how often binary trans people just don't seem to react? like this is what i mean by people treat misgendering nonbinary people as "softer." a trans man or a trans woman getting harassed back into the closet is a tragedy, a nonbinary person getting harassed back into the closet is just another wednesday for a lot of binary trans people.

[genderkoolaid]

#yeah.#and then when we stand up for ourselves we’re ‘difficult’ and no longer ‘one of the fun chill ones’#i can be chill#but im entitled to the same god damn respect and i will insist upon it#get yourselves right i’m fucking tired

no this too. i do feel there's this. expectation. that all nonbinary people will be rather apathetic about their genders, that the "good" nonbinary people (who isn't "crazy" and "dramatic" and "trying so hard to be woke") don't really care about what pronouns or nouns you use, will be binarize themselves in whatever way is easiest for the binary people & system around them, will be largely unobtrusive about their gender unless it can be a funny joke for binary people (even "inclusive" ones).

& then this feeds into what i described above, binary trans people & cis allies treating nonbinary people being misgendered or going back in the closet as less serious and less tragic and less disruptive than binary people. the assumption that nonbinary people somehow have less stake in being trans, that we never physically transition, that we never have dysphoria, etc. instead of being horrified that recloseting or never coming out ever is so common that so many nonbinary people are so used to repressing their own wants and needs preemptively. using pronouns they don't really connect with just to not be seen as "unreasonable" but it doesn't hurt as bad if its not technically misgendering. there's a lot of pain in the nonbinary community that i think we have never been allowed to fully voice.

[hemipenal-system]

"why when someone mentions trans butches is it always transmasc butches? why are there never any transfem butches" well you also post about how you think all masculinity is toxic masculinity so if i'm being honest i think you probably treat transfem butches like shit and they don't like interacting with you

[hemipenal-system]

“what’s with the endless talk about he/him transmasc butches but there’s never the same for transfem butches” well see it’s actually the same reason there’s seemingly a dearth of AMABed nonbinary people! it’s because you treat them like fucking dogshit!

everyone in the trans community, including way too many trans women who call themselves transfeminists, plays this funny little game where if you’re transfemme you have to look as close to being a cis woman as possible and if you don’t it means you have internalized transmisogyny or you’re idolizing transmisogynistic caricatures. there’s “no” transfem butches because if you want to be masculine and transfem, you simultaneously have to deal with all the people who think you’re a predatory man and all the people who think you only want to be butch because you don’t understand your gender and the way it’s oppressed well enough.

it’s harder to find masculine trans women because being a masculine trans woman fucking sucks. ask me how i know this

[luckyladylily]

Yeah, it's a fucking problem. It's really insulting coming from everyone else, but how vile the trans femme community is to any trans woman or trans femme who is masculine feels like a personal betrayal. Being stabbed in the back by the people who should have your back most. I'm not even masculine by choice but it's really fucking clear the online trans femme community isn't for me anymore.

[disk-whorse]

some of yall love girls all the way up until they come out as men & suddenly he’s not worth basic human decency any more despite the fact that nothing about his person has changed

[yaoigaysexaura]

you can't say "stop making everything about men" about a group of marginalised people who have been historically erased and never centered in any conversations that affect them. that is erasure. you are perpetuating the system that leads to these people being trafficked, raped, and killed without ever being remembered as more than a "tragic woman"

[apollosfallen]

The argument of "trans men have privilege when they pass" is also so asinine because privilege isn't just "other men treating you nicer" it's getting unbiased and unrestricted medical attention, it's lower or no statistics of corrective sexual assault or impregnation, it's not having actual laws passed against your existence, it's not having to worry about passing in the first place, it's having historical figures retain their identity and not erased in some girl power misgendering bs, it's having your identity celebrated instead of treated like a loss of something pure.

If you think male privilege is just being treated like "one of the guys" in day to day life, you need to relearn a lot of things about privilege before you try to have these conversations.

[uhnonymoos]

i grew up around muslims, i am also trans and leftist.

people in every queer and trans community i go to set an expectation: i should ofrever abandon my muslim past, i should explicitly stop associating yourself with it whatsoever, you either get to be queer or you either get to be raised-muslim.

in reality, there's no such expectation for christianity, and none of them are ready to dismantle their "inner christian" in their heads as much as they expect be to dismantle my "inner muslim"

none fo them get to admit how most first world countries are culturally christian, because christianity is "default" to them, as well as first world, as well as white.

me having a complicated relationship with islam doesn't mean i absolutely despise every piece of it. it means i distanced myself from ummah, but won't hear islamic criticism from non ex muslims at all, because you expect us to dismantle "our inner muslims" in ways you aren't ready to dismantle imperialism and racism in you.

your expectation is us "acting white", you don't want us unless we're that, which means you don't want us at all.

a lot of people claiming to want to uplift brown queer voices and such don't procced to do anything meaningful for them, or for brown people at all. it's just virtue signaling, homonationalism. you'd only care of brown people being queer, and you want the "brown" part of it gone as much as possible.

a lot of people say they want the leftist agenda to stop being us centric and imperialist, but then it's just pretending to care about it. you already made is so little and unhearable you'd have to get out of your way to seek for us speaking. then you'd not seek or if you find us, you will just pass by. hoping someone else would amplify the voice you took from us? and that someone else would hope for that too, so what?

you want us only when we agree with everything usa says about us, you want us until our lives don't put you into too much discomfort. when they put you into too much discomfort, you don't ask why, you'll restore the comfort by banishing us again. your tolerability of us is so intricately conditional, to meet those a third worlder has to build themselves into a first worlder mindset. this is your (inter)nationalism hey.

anyway, islamophobia hurt me more than islam did. now what

[translatingpostsinfrench]

rebloging here because its safe to assume i have a solid french and queer following, and that's definitely something yall need to hear too. i live in france, was raised muslim, and pretty quickly understood that being accepted in queer scpaces means severing ties with islam, "acting white" and gobbling the homonationalist bullshit (french flavor rather than USA flavor, which is not much better).

[waterlilyworld]

i wish the trans community was more open and accepting and understanding. i think i’d really love to both understand myself as female and as man. there is something so sacred there for me. not in a way that takes away from my manhood but in a way that enriches it. a blending of the female, the decade of bleeding, the experience of being a hunted animal, the growing up in the small rooms tucked away where vulva is recognized in its divinity and the conversations that are had are bawdy and honest and free and the cis men stay on the outside as if there was an invisible force field repelling them, the reprieve of the cis male absence that lets the animal body relax, the blending of that and being a transsexual man. my strong arms held out for my loved ones, my gentleness and the problems i help solve, the small creatures i rescue and the soul i tend to, my soul. my female masculinity and male femininity combined. a man that understands what it is to go through the world perceived as nothing but a girl, nothing, a girl. i do not believe my proximity to this is something to be ashamed of, and i wish i could express that freely without being shoved violently into misgendering by other trans people. if the acknowledgement of my past and how it has shaped me is enough to delegitimize my transsexual identity then delusion is a requirement to be accepted. i reject that entirely. i am a man of the female experience and i believe that to be holy. the people who partake in harmless gender aberration should not be the ones being cruel about this, but they are, what has this community come to?

[waterlilyworld]

i’m not gonna lie the erasure of transmasculinity everywhere i turn is really starting to get to me lads. multiple characters that are either gnc or outright trans in their source material are being hyper feminized in their television adaptations. a cis lesbian lgbt historian’s video comes across my path and in it she asserts clearly that stormé delevarie is a cis woman, the comments all agreeing on what a wonderful womanly woman she was, no one does it like women do. another video someone with nearly two million followers posts a video essentially saying trans men don’t experience discrimination compared to trans women. it gets tens of thousands of likes. a video of a cis woman in support of trans people next, all the comments talking about how trans women must be women because they are oppressed like women are, i wonder what that makes me to them. two trans men dead this last month. another two trans men with their teeth broken from hate crime assault this week. one of them in a trans sanctuary state, in broad daylight, screaming out for help and everyone around him looks away. looking away. everybody is looking away. we are the thing in the corner of their eye that they would rather not see and what crime did we commit to be treated this way? are we truly seen as so pitifully grotesque for our harmless aberration from the female sex that it feels natural to pretend we are not there? that we were never there? i’m terrified. i’m terrified by what is going to happen to us in the silence. i wish i wasn’t.

[mephistopheles]

um so quick question you do know that the world isn’t divided into People Blindly Accepting Of Gender Roles and Smart Trans Ppl. the world isn’t divided into People In Romantic Relationships and Single Aros. the world isn’t divided into People Who Socialize Easily and Oppressed Autistics. the world isn’t divided into Enlightened Queer People and Stupid Misogynists. like you are aware of this ? i hope you are aware of this

[asteralpanda]

it makes me so angry when people use the mpreg emoji as a joke and when they get called out on it they're just like "oh we're not talking about trans men :) we're talking about 100% fully biologocal men!!" and then when i tell them it's still fucking transphobic because they're still making male pregnancies a joke they're like "agree to disagree :) let's not escalate this :)"

like BITCH this is how discrimination spreads because everyone's too uncomfortable to examine their biases!!!!! this is how it happens!!!

[transmasc-theory]

Trans man: I think I, and every other gender, deserve to be treated equally

Cis man: I think I deserve to be treated as a superior to all women

Transandrophobes: this is the exact same argument, wow. This is terrifying rhetoric. I can't believe trans men are talking exactly like Andrew Tate

[luckyladylily]

Considering how it is incredibly well know that a default distrust and hatred of masculinity led to radical feminism and trans exclusionary radical feminsts, a group that is incredibly violent and hateful to trans women, I find it fascinating (read: Incredibly short sighted and foolish) how many trans women are openly embracing that kind of rhetoric. They seem to alternate between "fuck terfs!" and "I really vibe with the idea that masculinity is inherently evil and corrupts everything it touches"

You get the feeling that to some trans women the problem is not that terfs are bigots, but that they target trans women specifically.

[resisteverything]

Fascinating how so many of them have rejected bioessentialism to instead sort of gendered soul essentialism where a trans dude is the same as a cis man due to an evil male soul, but in a way that is still bioessentialist because somehow trans dude having biologically female parts is a moral failing because you have an evil male soul and therefore aren’t supposed to be affected by systemic misogyny, that’s something that’s supposed to happen to trans women because they have good female souls and therefore are incapable of misogyny because no woman has ever been sexist before.

[smorksthings]

I am SO tired of hearing people say "masculinity isn't punished in trans men" because that requires the belief that no man is EVER oppressed and the direct refusal to believe in intersectionality.

To believe masculinity isn't punished and that all of trans men's problems comes from misogyny inadvertently requires you to believe that men of colour, disabled men, cis queer men and all other oppressed classes of men are not oppressed.

There is inherently a "wrong" way to be a man according to society and the patriarchy and that "wrong way" also applies to trans men as well. It's not all misogyny, it's also the belief that men should be:

- White

- Neurotypical + able-bodied

- Middle class to rich

- Straight, allosexual, alloromantic

- Cisgendered and perisex + is gender conforming

- Atheist (the culturally Christian kind of atheist) or Christian

You know, the normative white man.

And even then, I didn't include EVERYTHING that could be considered into what could alienate a cis man from society as a whole.

So, no, I don't believe that trans men's only problems stem from systematic misogyny. Part of it does, yes. But there is, in fact, a "wrong type" of man according to society.

[sodomit]

A lot of "egg" discourse can be improved by making it clear that it's less "you are gravely insulting a cisgender millionaire youtuber John Johnson by assuming being gnc makes him a woman" and more "you're assuming performing femininity is tied to womanhood around a lot of queer/trans/gnc people who have their own experiences with these things".

[porblematic]