there is only one fault

they/them

[empireofnecessity]

so as not to give a false impression—which could well be our intention—the jumble of fragments that follows does not in any way constitute a theory. you can call them dawn

[transmascfeminism]

One more (last?) thing I want to add to the conversation is that it is not lost on me that the wider trans community on Tumblr has been talking for years at this point about forcemasc, about how lame and stupid and corny and problematic it is, and how it's rooted in misogyny and transmisogyny and a desire to steal culture women produce and engaging in masculinity rituals that harm women, etc. etc. etc., but has not had a single thing to say about detrans / ftmtf kink, misogyny kink, patriarchy kink, dykebreaking kink, forcefem/bimbofication kinks aimed at people AFAB (whose entire experience on earth from day 1 is forced feminization and getting coerced into becoming sex slaves) and yes, even detrans mtftm and transfem supremacy kinks, both of which are based on the mtftm detransitioner or the transfeminine person sexually humiliating an inferior, i.e. a person AFAB, through their superiority, represented as their phallic ability to sexually dominate, penetrate, and impregnate.

[transmascfeminism]

Actually no, I'm going to make a separate post from the tags I left here because I beliefe the state of the "ftmtf / detrans kink / fakeboy" tag is honestly appalling.

So much of the language and concepts in the community are mired in violent misogynistic concepts, like transmascs detransitioning back to female by being 'put in their place' i.e. hyperfeminized in a sexually humiliating manner, sometimes associated directly with transfems detransitioning back to male by sexually humiliating and dominating transmascs. I want to ask you all to refrain from the temptation to say that it's "just posts": the subcultures people enmesh themselves in and the kinds of thoughts and desires they cultivate absolutely affect their decision making in real life and the way they relate to other people on and off line.

One quick scroll through it will reveal to anyone who has the barest sense of compassion, and the ability to acknowledge the misogyny transmascs are put through, that the tag is rife with abuse and exploitation, both real and potential. There are posts on posts of people asking for notes in order to do things like stop binding, shave their bodies every day, throw away their hormones, change their pronouns on social media or in real life, and even detransition permanently after announcing it to friends and family. On top of that, many of these users, often very young (18-21), will post their full face, attached to images nude or in lingerie and sometimes to explicit videos performing sexual acts, in some cases with fully visible tattoes. In at least one case I saw, a kid posted a screenshot to his social media profiles with his full name on his intro post.

Now, I'm not against kink on principle, and if you're a transmasc in this kind of space and you genuinely feel that you're just having fun and this is not meaningfully affecting your conception of self, mental state and/or decision making regarding your body, then by all means go ahead. But if you're finding youself feeling demeaned or diminished, please, take a step back, take care of yourself, and reconsider your commitment to these spaces.

I don't want you to feel ashamed. I know how difficult it can be to have any kind of healthy and functional relationship to sexuality as a transmasc in a world that objectifies us (both pre- and post- transition) while constantly repeating to us that our bodies are undesirable and disgusting. If you're a queer transmasc in particular, the double bind of being socially and institutionally barred from masculinity while also being judged and shamed for displaying any kind of 'emasculating' desire outside of normative heterosexuality can really mess with your head. All of this before even mentioning how isolating transmasculine existence often is, how difficult it can be to get sexual partners in the regular spaces even other queer people use (apps, bars, clubs) since our erasure can make us illegible as a "subgenre" of queer person and thus functionally nonexistent in the hypercategorized box game that queer dating and hooking up can be. This isolation, this loneliness, can obviously contribute to the pull towards allowing others to define you, to mark you, even permanently, as long as it makes them find you valuable and desirable. It's what we're trained to do our whole lives after all.

If you're engaging with this type of kink, on or offline, I'm not going to ask you to stop doing anything, because I don't want to be didactic and condescending. But I just want you to know that you aren't alone, and there are many people who see you and understand what you're going through, even if it's not commonly talked about (like everything else to do with us.) And I wish you love and happiness and pleasure that come alongside being seen for exactly who and what you are and that don't come at the cost of your self-fulfillment and freedom.

For the rest of us, I believe it's about time we stopped turning a blind eye to this kind of thing happening right underneath our noses, one or two digital rooms over from where we sit theorizing about transmasculine self-determination and liberation. The fact that this phenomenon is so widespread; that its community has grown in popularity in such a relatively short amount of time; that some of its characteristic practices are so perfectly poised to lead to blackmail, manipulation, and abuse; that so much of its narratives are rooted in the same type of anti-transmasculine and misogynistic phenomena that we are always describing; that the community seems to attract non-transmasculine people who enjoy demeaning and insulting transmascs by using these very narratives; that there seems to be so much overlap with things like "patriarchy kink" and "male supremacy kink"; all of these things should make us be paying much closer attention to what's going on. I don't mean necessarily that we should be trying to “shut it down" and convince people to stop engaging in this type of play, but it seems to me at the very least that the prevalence of it and the fact it became so popular so quickly should warrant it being treated as a meaningful aspect of what's currently happening to the transmasculine psyche. We shouldn't ignore brothers potentially in pain or in need because engaging with the issue is painful and thorny from an optics perspective, and handwaving the whole thing away as "just harmless posts" is easier.

[transmascfeminism]

Selected parts of @amanofgreatexpectations 's comments (bold and color mine):

"[It] is not that temporal power-exchange in sexual contexts is wrong (I don't object to all BDSM/ageplay/CNC for example) but rather that kinks based in existing hierarchies of bigotry that make use of the subordinated or superordinated identities/positionalities of the participants by their very terms essentialize an inequality of moral worth to those participants in a non-temporal fashion which undermines their claim of being merely 'roleplay'. By this I mean that FTM detrans kinks/male supremacy kinks essentialize submissiveness to people AFAB that specifically undermines the temporal autonomy (and moral worth) of people AFAB in a way that does not cease after play because it makes use of the reality in which that inequality immutably underpins our lives. [...] These kinks by their very nature undermine possibilities for social progress and hedonic equality by using their cultural dominance to obfuscate the idea that the pleasures derived from them are available in other contexts that are more innately equitable. [...] There is a soul-deadening form of hermeneutic injustice that is perpetuated by these sexual fantasies - a normative denial of knowledge that renders our experiences, and the very possibility of FTM identity itself, as unintelligible.

Anecdotally, whenever I search for detrans accounts on bluesky so I can block the followers from interacting with me, the demographic makeup is always cis men>TMA in bio transfems>TME in bio detrans transmascs, without fail - we might ask ourselves if discouraging discussion of sexist oppression has encouraged male supremacist values in our community to the point that many are both politically and sexually gratified by our violent subjugation and erasure. We know that the surge of ‘tradwife’ culture is not something we should blindly accept, yet we turn a blind eye to a comparable ideology and culture in our own community because we can legitimate it through consent.

My stance is that [...] critique of [these kinks] can in fact enable new sexual liberty. I understand why people feel wariness when they hear the words ‘kink criticism’ because they may associate it with psuedo-authoritarian thinking that denies sexual autonomy, but personally I think of it more in light of the way I would think of ‘literary criticism’, a means of interpretation that honors the meaning-making potential of certain expressions. I think that such criticism is crucial to honoring our erotic imagination and embodiment, which are often the first dimension through which we come to know ourselves."

I would also like to shine a light on a reblogger's tag that says: "i've seen posts in those circles expressly - out of kink - denying the existence of [transandrophobia and transsexism]. [...] Ultimately this is another scenario containing people sexualising their trauma while unable to conceptualise it AS trauma."

Lastly, here is a reading list, again courtesy of @amanofgreatexpectations:

Robin West, Consent, Legitimation and Dysphoria

Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract

Thomas MacAulay Millar, Domism: Role Essentialism and Sexism Intersectionality in the BDSM Scene

Vera Bergelson, The Right to Be Hurt: Testing the Boundaries of Consent

[noblackwomannocry]

Police arrived to arrest her father for sexual abuse. But he was making it all up

Mark described abusing his daughter in a chatroom. Then it turned out nothing he had posted was true – and he walked free. With ‘fantasy abu

the article contains more information on the mother and daughter's confusion of the decision to drop the case against Mark, along with wider discussion of efforts to define behaviour like that in the article ("advocate, counsel or glorify child sexual abuse in text") as a criminal offense, but I wanted highlight these excerpts on the relationships between the parties involved here:

“They told me he had been caught on a chat forum describing how he had been raping and sexually abusing Emily for years. It was written as a confession. He’d even used her name and talked about where we lived.”

...

The police told Fiona they had a photo that Mark had shared in these chats. “I was terrified,” she says. “I thought it might be something explicit. But it was a photo I knew. Emily was young and wearing a new dress, I remembered taking it, her smiling at the camera. That was the absolute worst moment, realising that he had used that photo in these chats.”

...

Emily was certain her dad had not sexually abused her. But from that moment her entire view of him – of her childhood – began to unravel. Like her mum, she was in a space of complete horror and confusion. [...] “They made me doubt everything I knew about my dad and his view of me. I began to think back on every second we had spoken, every outfit I had worn, every hug he had given me.”

...

When she told the police that her dad had never abused her, she was telling the truth. His sex fantasy chats were just that – a fantasy. There is increasing concern about the policing of pornography and online sexual fantasies. A growing body of evidence suggests legal but extreme pornography mimicking illegal acts is a major driver of the online child abuse crisis. Convicted offenders are warning that porn algorithms are sending them down “escalating pathways” to ever more extreme material.

...

While Fiona was preparing to move, Emily was going down a rabbit hole into the darkest recesses of the internet. She began to read all she could about sex chat sites and was horrified to learn how easy it is to step straight into sexual chats about children. “I couldn’t believe people were on there openly talking about child abuse. My dad had a user name that was an obvious reference to child abuse,” she says. “It isn’t hidden.” She wanted the police to know Mark hadn’t touched her, but she wanted him to be prosecuted for sharing his child abuse fantasies online. And she wanted to be recognised as a victim, something the police didn’t seem to understand.

...

Mark walked away with no criminal record or any form of monitoring. He was not placed on the sex offender register and there is nothing he has to disclose to an employer or a partner. Fiona has seen Mark only once since the case was dropped: when she met him to get his signature on divorce papers. She saw then how happy he was to have escaped prosecution. “He made it clear that he considered it a prudish response, the public disapproval of a private fetish. We were prudes, the police were as well. It might have been embarrassing to have the messages revealed, but it wasn’t anything that should involve the law.”

...

But Fiona fears that for Mark there is no shame or sanction. When she saw him to get his signature on the documents that would separate their lives for ever, she felt a chill of fear at his lack of remorse. “He should have been charged for what he did, he should have been made to be accountable, and he is pleased that he wasn’t.”Instead he has been able to move abroad and reinvent himself. “He told me he was dating someone who had kids. It was like he was saying, ‘Look I’ve moved on, someone trusts me.’”

[razortouched]

And this is precisely why I believe that kink and fetish content is not above criticism.

His fantasies may have started out private, but through the continued encouragement of other people in these forums, he escalated to posting actual photos and personal information of his daughter online. Claiming to have actually sexually abused her, through false confessions tailored to the sexual gratification of other pedophiles.

This is not harmless. This does not exist in a vacuum. Had he actually kept his fetish private, there would be no issue here. But it wasnt private - it wad online where anyone could see. And it wasnt consensual once he started involving real photos of his daughter.

This sort of thing happens precisely because kink and fetish is being treated as uniquely above criticism, as if fantasies can never be exploitative. And yes, he never physically abused her but he did exploit his daughter's image for gratification.

Kink and fetish content, as with any other form of media, can and should be criticized when it not just reinforces, but actively rewards escalation towards exploitation.

[empireofnecessity]

the spot of chief fracture line that undoes near every attempt at synthesising gender abolitionism is tied between becoming hopelessly beholden to materialism—ymmv on whether you think this is a vulgar materialism or not—and/or getting stuck in the mud of whether the end goal would necessarily entail that people stop identifying in gendered ways. the common thread in both cases is the underlying assumption that transition necessarily be tied to a notion of authentic expression, either that of an inner ideal self or an expression mediated by 'biological reality', and the negation of abolition as a consequence. what would we be if movement within gender became the movement of the living?

there is an anxiety around the idea that abolition would necessarily thrust us into a space of being unable to locate ourselves accurately which makes many people flinch away from it, even though permitting willful movement across the varied axis of gender would entail the rupture of the essentialism of authenticity and the assurance of individual biopolitical sovereignty. you can't stop at wanting the borders to be porous because to border is to restrict, you must tear them down if you wish to move across them. every attempt to prescribe avenues of permitted movement—a third sex marker, demarcating whether you could have ever been a girl before being a boy, negotiating at what point you become equitable to one cisgendered, reifying the assumption that control of one's body ends at the point one has reached the sanctioned 'truth'—just serves to open branches that lead to the same dead-end.

should the ideal really be that being trans¹² grants you access³ to the correct hormones⁴⁵ and grants you all the necessary administrative amendments⁶ and treatment⁷ to ensure you are able to live as yourself⁸⁹?

or, maybe if we push on those fault lines, tear down the borders, we can split the labyrinth's walls instead of trying to navigate them.

formally diagnosed with gender dysphoria by a licensed medical practitioner, after a successful referral and assessment, who judges that you cannot be forced back into your birth sex in short enough order.

in a way that is legible as such to an outside observer to warrant recognition, referral, and treatment.

conditionally, within the confines of a legal system that assumes the requirement of this exceptional access to be in of itself anomalous.

and, if you're caught early enough and have accomodating legal guardians willing to advocate on your behalf, perhaps even puberty blockers!

ideally with the necessary endocrinologist support to ensure your health but really, we're accomodating you a lot already, it's a tall ask on top of everything else, you understand.

to records you have minimal, if any, input into.

according to what we seem necessary.

as we understand you, or how we can imagine you to be if we try hard enough.

since you keep fucking insisting on being difficult!

[empireofnecessity]

not to prescribe where we should start but maybe we shouldn't keep telling guys to get over themselves and accept going bald because that's what becoming a man means. like yknow small steps

[empireofnecessity]

the spot of chief fracture line that undoes near every attempt at synthesising gender abolitionism is tied between becoming hopelessly beholden to materialism—ymmv on whether you think this is a vulgar materialism or not—and/or getting stuck in the mud of whether the end goal would necessarily entail that people stop identifying in gendered ways. the common thread in both cases is the underlying assumption that transition necessarily be tied to a notion of authentic expression, either that of an inner ideal self or an expression mediated by 'biological reality', and the negation of abolition as a consequence. what would we be if movement within gender became the movement of the living?

there is an anxiety around the idea that abolition would necessarily thrust us into a space of being unable to locate ourselves accurately which makes many people flinch away from it, even though permitting willful movement across the varied axis of gender would entail the rupture of the essentialism of authenticity and the assurance of individual biopolitical sovereignty. you can't stop at wanting the borders to be porous because to border is to restrict, you must tear them down if you wish to move across them. every attempt to prescribe avenues of permitted movement—a third sex marker, demarcating whether you could have ever been a girl before being a boy, negotiating at what point you become equitable to one cisgendered, reifying the assumption that control of one's body ends at the point one has reached the sanctioned 'truth'—just serves to open branches that lead to the same dead-end.

should the ideal really be that being trans¹² grants you access³ to the correct hormones⁴⁵ and grants you all the necessary administrative amendments⁶ and treatment⁷ to ensure you are able to live as yourself⁸⁹?

or, maybe if we push on those fault lines, tear down the borders, we can split the labyrinth's walls instead of trying to navigate them.

formally diagnosed with gender dysphoria by a licensed medical practitioner, after a successful referral and assessment, who judges that you cannot be forced back into your birth sex in short enough order.

in a way that is legible as such to an outside observer to warrant recognition, referral, and treatment.

conditionally, within the confines of a legal system that assumes the requirement of this exceptional access to be in of itself anomalous.

and, if you're caught early enough and have accomodating legal guardians willing to advocate on your behalf, perhaps even puberty blockers!

ideally with the necessary endocrinologist support to ensure your health but really, we're accomodating you a lot already, it's a tall ask on top of everything else, you understand.

to records you have minimal, if any, input into.

according to what we seem necessary.

as we understand you, or how we can imagine you to be if we try hard enough.

since you keep fucking insisting on being difficult!

[violent-autoandrophilia]

I'm not for kink shaming but I'm gonna be real detrans and misgendering kinks can very easily be pipelines to groom trans men into detransitioning in real life. I feel like it comes from the isolation of being transmasc, and how we're only seen as desirable when we're performing femininity (you know the common story of young tboys being groomed by older cis guys who don't see them as men so they detransition? Doesn't it seem familiar?), especially performing femininity sexually. You either keep it very strictly fantasy and make sure you've got everything under control or you're at a pretty high risk of getting groomed.

[transmascfeminism]

Actually no, I'm going to make a separate post from the tags I left here because I beliefe the state of the "ftmtf / detrans kink / fakeboy" tag is honestly appalling.

So much of the language and concepts in the community are mired in violent misogynistic concepts, like transmascs detransitioning back to female by being 'put in their place' i.e. hyperfeminized in a sexually humiliating manner, sometimes associated directly with transfems detransitioning back to male by sexually humiliating and dominating transmascs. I want to ask you all to refrain from the temptation to say that it's "just posts": the subcultures people enmesh themselves in and the kinds of thoughts and desires they cultivate absolutely affect their decision making in real life and the way they relate to other people on and off line.

One quick scroll through it will reveal to anyone who has the barest sense of compassion, and the ability to acknowledge the misogyny transmascs are put through, that the tag is rife with abuse and exploitation, both real and potential. There are posts on posts of people asking for notes in order to do things like stop binding, shave their bodies every day, throw away their hormones, change their pronouns on social media or in real life, and even detransition permanently after announcing it to friends and family. On top of that, many of these users, often very young (18-21), will post their full face, attached to images nude or in lingerie and sometimes to explicit videos performing sexual acts, in some cases with fully visible tattoes. In at least one case I saw, a kid posted a screenshot to his social media profiles with his full name on his intro post.

Now, I'm not against kink on principle, and if you're a transmasc in this kind of space and you genuinely feel that you're just having fun and this is not meaningfully affecting your conception of self, mental state and/or decision making regarding your body, then by all means go ahead. But if you're finding youself feeling demeaned or diminished, please, take a step back, take care of yourself, and reconsider your commitment to these spaces.

I don't want you to feel ashamed. I know how difficult it can be to have any kind of healthy and functional relationship to sexuality as a transmasc in a world that objectifies us (both pre- and post- transition) while constantly repeating to us that our bodies are undesirable and disgusting. If you're a queer transmasc in particular, the double bind of being socially and institutionally barred from masculinity while also being judged and shamed for displaying any kind of 'emasculating' desire outside of normative heterosexuality can really mess with your head. All of this before even mentioning how isolating transmasculine existence often is, how difficult it can be to get sexual partners in the regular spaces even other queer people use (apps, bars, clubs) since our erasure can make us illegible as a "subgenre" of queer person and thus functionally nonexistent in the hypercategorized box game that queer dating and hooking up can be. This isolation, this loneliness, can obviously contribute to the pull towards allowing others to define you, to mark you, even permanently, as long as it makes them find you valuable and desirable. It's what we're trained to do our whole lives after all.

If you're engaging with this type of kink, on or offline, I'm not going to ask you to stop doing anything, because I don't want to be didactic and condescending. But I just want you to know that you aren't alone, and there are many people who see you and understand what you're going through, even if it's not commonly talked about (like everything else to do with us.) And I wish you love and happiness and pleasure that come alongside being seen for exactly who and what you are and that don't come at the cost of your self-fulfillment and freedom.

For the rest of us, I believe it's about time we stopped turning a blind eye to this kind of thing happening right underneath our noses, one or two digital rooms over from where we sit theorizing about transmasculine self-determination and liberation. The fact that this phenomenon is so widespread; that its community has grown in popularity in such a relatively short amount of time; that some of its characteristic practices are so perfectly poised to lead to blackmail, manipulation, and abuse; that so much of its narratives are rooted in the same type of anti-transmasculine and misogynistic phenomena that we are always describing; that the community seems to attract non-transmasculine people who enjoy demeaning and insulting transmascs by using these very narratives; that there seems to be so much overlap with things like "patriarchy kink" and "male supremacy kink"; all of these things should make us be paying much closer attention to what's going on. I don't mean necessarily that we should be trying to “shut it down" and convince people to stop engaging in this type of play, but it seems to me at the very least that the prevalence of it and the fact it became so popular so quickly should warrant it being treated as a meaningful aspect of what's currently happening to the transmasculine psyche. We shouldn't ignore brothers potentially in pain or in need because engaging with the issue is painful and thorny from an optics perspective, and handwaving the whole thing away as "just harmless posts" is easier.

[transmascfeminism]

i don't have an account i feel safe sharing on because transfeminists bullied me off of the internet when i tried to post about feminism that centers FTMs so i thought id just ramble in your anons and see if you have thoughts on this too.

trans men being so erased is always framed as a gift to us, which i find just laughable.

i don't know if other trans men experience this, but even on a small scale, every time i go to the doctor i have to explain myself and my transition. i typically have to explain myself via comparisons to trans women, which my doctor is typically aware of. i often have to repeat myself multiple times so they are not incorrectly under the impression im a trans woman and do not incorrectly assess my medical needs in a way that could hurt me. they don't understand unless i repeat i am the OPPOSITE of a trans woman. it seems like a lot of doctors don't even think it's an option to transition FTM. they are less able to understand this now that i pass 24/7.

then the moment they know i'm female they almost always switch to calling me she/her pronouns, even offices in accepting areas and that say they're inclusive. once i had a male doctor start coddling me midway through an appointment because he learned of my identity and treated me like a child through a very routine blood draw.

even on the smaller scale our erasure means we are only seen as men until we engage with our transness.

Hi anon, I'm really sorry about your experiences. I resonate with a lot of what you said, this kind of thing happens to me often, especially in medical and bureaucratic settings, but also just interpersonally.

It's always bizarrely humiliating to me because it makes me feel almost like, ashamed to exist? You have to explain what the hell you are and why you exist and why you're so weird and gross that no one has even thought a creature like you could exist, and you know that even if you try to stand your ground and not apologize for your existence and explain what you are in curt, matter of fact terms, people are summoning up images of your genitals, mentally speculating about your sexual history and development, trying to picture what kind of sex you have and with whom... It's really depressing and upsetting for me.

I think a lot of people see "transmasc erasure/hyperinvisibility" as us complaining about how nothing gets said or done to us when they don't realize that actually, we do interact with people in real life, physically and materially, and those real interactions being mediated through our invisibility and rhetorical impossibility often lead our interlocutors to paradoxically try to interact with our flesh-and-blood existence even harder and more intimately than they'd otherwise feel entitled to do to a queer/non-normative person whose existence they can conceptualize a little better (even if they're still bigoted against them).

[xtec]

This is what the average YouTube thumbnail looks like now

[noneuclideangarf]

spent too long on this

[empireofnecessity]

i think everyone who lives in a house should be killed and eaten

[transmascfeminism]

“I see my masculinity as a potential within myself that I am acknowledging and honoring by pursuing social/medical transition in order to change the way I am perceived by others, however, I will never be the same as a cis man because the gendered treatment and impositions I received in the first decades of my life as a result of being categorized as female make my biography and psyche fundamentally different than that of a cis man. So I’d like my gender identity to be seen as separate from that of cis men since we inherently have an unbreachable gap in positionality” -> evil, maintains the integrity of the male class category

“I have always been a woman because of my internal sense of womanhood, which is entirely independent of any historical and social constructions of gender roles created by the patriarchy to maintain and reproduce itself, and which I developed in complete abstraction from the gendered reality of the world I live in, receiving it directly into my soul from the world of platonic gender ideas where gender as a concept exists, sourced only by itself and always inherently true and real before and outside of history. Any gendered experiences I’ve had materially in the physical world are to be interpreted downstream of the a priori true notion that I, as a concept existing outside of space and time, am and have always been a woman.” -> sensible, materialist, abolishes gender-class

[bal-bullier]

Octavian Smigelschi

Young Man reading (1892)

[waterlilyworld]

Happy birthday dude!!!!!

i wasn’t originally going to respond to this, because i tend to ignore the particularly low hanging fruit, and because it discourages more attention of this variety when they don’t get a perceived rise out of you - but i have been having thoughts about this language so i’m going to use this little crane shit covered lily pad to jump off of.

i was there when this turn of phrase started, it was a little ways into me watching a particular hub of ‘trans radical feminists’, around three or so years ago, back when i thought it was niche internet muck, back when not nearly as many trans men were speaking up for themselves, me included. i saw it start with a cis lesbian. she was close with all of these trans radical feminists, and had been caught liking a tweet about needing to come up with better slurs for trans men because zippertits wasn’t satisfying enough, and another about resorting to just calling us cuntboys. she spent a fair amount of her time going after and harassing any trans man and transmasculine person she ran across the path of. oh, and also and as well she was a niece of a billionaire, and she may have been responsible for seven deaths in her family’s hotel due to negligence, not to mention the fact that her decade or more of viscously bullying people online in the writing community got a call out written about her that won a fucking hugo award. that is where i saw “birthday boy” start. that is the kind of environment this language propagated in.

it started with a cis woman who felt she needed better slurs for us. it started with gender essentialist trans women. some known for: not considering us really trans, believing we are aligned with the patriarchy inherently because of the “gender we chose to be”, calling everyone in the community but trans women and lesbians a half dead carcass that should be left behind, calling gay trans men (and straight trans women) straggots and saying that we should all die en masse, making up a nasty nickname for a transmasculine person that referenced their sexual assault, saying in response to the transphobia we face that we are just upset at being “emasculated”, constantly saying things with the intent of “emasculating” us through infantilizing and misogynistic language. (and more!)

all of this and they are well respected community members, published transfeminists, and published fiction authors. that is who was calling us birthday boys back when it was an unknown enough term they still had to post the screen shot it came from when they used it.

they have imagined us as a small, immature and ineffectual men, who will taunt and poke and harass someone, only to feign fragility and special status when they retaliate against us.

all that is required to not be a “birthday boy” is to never center yourself as a trans man or masculine person in your own feminism. to discount every horrible thing you’ve faced at the hands of patriarchy as not being “as bad as what trans women face” and to relegate yourself to being a physical shield with no regard to how that effects you, while never once asking for anything in return. to not be a whole person but instead to be a thankless protector, while you are in just as much danger but nobody is protecting you.

i feel “birthday boy” is an important thing to address if only because it is acting as a dog whistle.

it is language that can easily be dismissed when called out, by painting the person taking issue with it as infantile for treating such a silly word as anything serious. but it is communicating something with weight, even though the words being used are deeply ridiculous.

lastly, i’d like to note that i have already seen a trans man, who was being loved and affirmed in his gender, being called a “birthday boy” on his actual birthday, and flinching when he heard it. it is ugly that the community has let things get to this point.

trans men who have socially and structurally grown up as girls spend our lives being treated as small, ineffectual, inherently immature people who can fall back on “victimhood” to avoid “consequences”.

there is nothing revolutionary about repeating that exact same pattern when we come out as trans men.

[my point still stands as i’ve gotten explicitly hateful messages using this sort of language before that i have ignored but this anon was actually being sincere which is so so sweet]

[transfaguette]

when you get down to it the arguments against any sort of transmasculine focused theory is that when violence happens to us it is not noteworthy. oh, that’s just misogyny. oh, that’s just transphobia. Such a hollow and cruel dismissal treated as common sense fact; violence doesn’t happen to us and when it does its an accident meant for someone else.

they will do a disservice to the theory of transmisogyny by essentially pinning its validity against the invalidity of transandrophobia theory. when transandrophobia theory has never been an opposition to transmisogyny, has never refuted its existence or the mechanisms behind it, its literally just an expansion of transfeminist theory to include more robust theory and literature for antitransmasculism.

maybe you just have prejudices and biases against transmasculine people.

[cadaverer]

transmisogyny isn't 'girl transphobia' but also transmascs can't use that term ever. transfems are hypervisible but also transmascs are the 'default' trans. transmascs are lazy whining children but they're also running every lgbtq+ society on earth. society is systematically transphobic but also sees trans men as men and gives them male privilege. people afab can fall back on their agab for privilege but people amab never can.

[transmascfeminism]

“Stupid, confused, broken little girls” don’t get infinite love support kindness and care. That’s what the patriarchy tells you it gives them. What it means is they get locked in the home, raped, beaten, forcibly married, overmedicated into sedation, abused into insanity, institutionalized, and killed. You are listening to the patriarchy’s lies over centuries of voices of victims of misogyny. And by voices I mean the dying screams they didn’t manage to muffle.