neach aiteach

i'm really tired of incessant transmisandry irl and online so here's a side blog to try and grapple with it | late 20s | call me Am (aw-m) | he/they/it

[fearanddeference]

actually feel fucking crazy that u can't discuss or attempt to navigate the gendered experience of being a trans man without fully deferring to literally anyone else on the topic. the current popular gender theorists i hear about are explicitly trying to build a radfem renaissance and the everyblogger quotes them in their smear campaigns against any word devised as shorthand for the thing that tboys have to go through. i wish i could talk and vent about this stuff like anything else but i can't find spaces to do so without being side-eyed and sent frothing hate. it's actually bizarre and i haven't felt this way since terfs depressed me into going back in the closet as a teenager. like i have to keep reiterating that because it feels like nobody's taking this seriously.

[bramble-klawe]

thing i made. is this accurate

idk im just kinda pissed off rn

[bitransblues]

Few people on this website doing trans discourse have any academic experience or understanding of queer theory and gender studies and opt to be confidently incorrect or spread misinformation instead and I hate it here. This is an anti-intellectual website and that's why it's a breeding ground for fascist influenced hot takes.

Trans men, transmascs, nonbinary people, intersex people, drag queens, GNC men - they can all be transmisogyny-affected or "TMA". Anyone perceived as a man/male who is feminine can be transmisogyny-affected. This is something Julia Serano has spoken about.* She has specifically stated that trans men/mascs can be affected by transmisogyny. This is not by any stretch of the imagination impossible, no one who actually understands gender studies or sociology in general thinks that it's possible for some people to be affected by a form of bigotry while everyone else is exempt with no exceptions. It is never clear cut like that in the real world. TME/TMA is a useless, nonsensical online discourse framework and completely irrelevant to transfeminism and transfeminist academia.

You'd have to have zero understanding of systems of oppression or the way that bigotry manifests to believe this and that's where so many people in online discussions are coming from. Tumblr users have to understand that even if people online act like they know what they're talking about, there's a good chance they don't because they are so wiling to spout information that is wrong, altered, or misleading in pursuit of some kind of personal objective.

I have never felt threatened or offended by the idea that people who are not trans women/transfem can share in the same manner of oppression I face as a trans woman. I have never felt like I should ignore data or facts about serious and deadly issues faced by trans and gender diverse people who aren't trans women due to some notion that listening to them would somehow impact me in a negative way. That would be absurd and cruel.

I feel like I'm losing my mind whenever I see people act like that and worse, that people actually listen to them out of guilt or fear that they may be doing something harmful otherwise. It's a symptom of the far right creep into every aspect of life, especially in online spaces that are otherwise progressive (allegedly). You don't have to feel bad about not listening to someone who is speaking from a bad faith position, arguing misinformation, and shutting out conversations of other marginalized people. This isn't how systemic and societal oppression works. They need to make higher education completely free so you can all learn that this isn't how oppression works but until then, I encourage you to "obtain" (wink wink) textbooks and academic papers and studies from reputable sources.

You don't have to and shouldn't integrate everything you read into your worldview. You should be critical and thoughtful at the same time you're being open-minded. Science and academia are far from free of bias. Many groups are understudied and underrepresented. Some researchers and academics have ulterior motives. But we're headed for a new dark age if we don't read and learn to discern what is misinformation, disinformation, reality, fact, or fiction. You will find that you need to cross-check and compare information, but this is an exercise that will benefit you in the long run when it comes to navigating the world and online spaces here and now.

In the meantime, stop letting people raised in fascist online culture influence your perception of reality. Start blocking people instead of debating them if they prove to be incapable of good faith discussion on trans and queer issues. It isn't losing the argument or admitting defeat. You are wasting your time debating people who haven't unlearned alt right and white supremacist tendencies, especially when it comes to 4chan influenced "debate" tactics, no matter their gender identity or sexual orientation.

I have seen so much complete nonsense argued as fact from across the queer spectrum at this point and I'm over it. It isn't a transfem problem or a transmasc problem or a TME problem or a TMA problem, it's an anti-intellectualism problem that extends beyond trans and queer discourse and we have to combat it because it's working as intended.

*Julia M. Serano, “Transmisogyny,” in Abbie E. Goldberg & Genny Beemyn (eds.), The SAGE Encyclopedia of Trans Studies (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 2021), Vol. 2, 868–868. https://www.doi.org/10.4135/9781544393858.n296 Julia Serano, "Outspoken: A Decade of Transgender Activism and Trans Feminism", (Oakland, CA: Switch Hitter Press, 2016), pp. 69–76.

[elasticveins]

If I see one more person do this I’m actually gonna tweak out. That cis guy character can be a trans man. That cis woman character can be a trans man. Headcannoning a cis character as trans is not killing anyone’s representation and that is pretty obvious.

[genderkoolaid]

i don't think "being trans has a meaningful impact on your position under patriarchy, and when people talk about systemic misogyny and androcentrism and just say "men" instead of "cis men," it ignores that trans men have quite literally never been included in any of this" should be this goddamn fucking controversial tbh. but now i've got people crawling out the woodwork to um actually me about how "this study shows that trans men in the US full time work earn 10% more than trans women in full time work and also v-coding exists and also afab housing so therefore trans men as a class have male privilege and benefit from patriarchy"

[genderkoolaid]

#I genuinely wonder where they got lost if they think ‘access to AFAB housing’ is *male* privilege tbh#yknow. group of people who by are by definition not granted the sex marker of male on their birth certificate#and if our birth certificate and legal sex ID was changed to Male then#maybe. and hear me out here. maybe that would make it difficult. to get into. AFAB housing. whoa.#maybe this is why the term AFAB privilege began to circulate lmao#bc there’s no way of arguing this as male privilege that doesn’t come across as some form of absurdist satire

oh its like talking to a fucking funhouse mirror with these people tbh. its the same with that one guy who was like "checkmate MRA, women in the 19th century were legally property and couldn't wear pants!!" when that. is literally an example of how trans men were also directly systemically affected by misogyny.

these people never stop for one single second to think of trans men who never get to transition. they never think about the countless trans men throughout history who have lived and died as women. who have been subject to child marriage and clitorectomies and been treated as legal property. they don't think about trans men in countries right now who go through all of those things, who legally cannot be outside without a male guardian because they are legally female, who cannot even get their own passport because they are legally female. its so fucking frustrating.

radical feminism has its hooks so deep in some parts of the trans community, and frankly a lot of people have internalized trans separatist talking points. even if they don't realize it they don't seem to think of trans people as a coherent group. all trans people's experiences are seen as just a shadow cast by cis men’s privilege and cis women’s oppression, and our experiences are reducible to cis men and cis women's experiences but slightly different.

and, i have to say this again: this is literally how TERFs think, but in reverse. TERFs also ignore how trans men are worse off than cis women, and how trans women are worse off than cis men, and insist that all trans experiences are reducible to "men are privileged women are oppressed." its literally just a matter of which trans people you cram into which side of the cis binary. this is not good transfeminism and it never ever will be.

[genderkoolaid]

from this post:

people will tell you that people seen as men are gender-policed much more harshly than people seen as women and every little deviation towards femininity is noticed and punished, and that's why trans guys have it easier. but you'll also hear people tell you that people seen as men have so much more wiggle room, men can be all kinds of sizes and shapes meanwhile people seen as women have to fit into this tiny little box, and that's why trans guys have it easier.

these are two entirely contradictory lines of logic, but they lead to the same conclusion. because the conclusion is the point. its a backformed theory of gender. people believe, for whatever reason, that "trans guys have it easier" is an objective fact, and then storytell an explanation for why that is that sounds right to them. [...]. its about people just feeling, on a gut level, that trans guys must have it easier, by which they really mean, transmasculine suffering isn't socially visible, and it isn't natural for me to imagine it, therefore it must not exist; yet, trans suffering in general clearly exists, so there must be some reason that transmasculine suffering feels so abstract and immaterial to me and others.

once you start to see this you can't unsee it. people will just say insane bullshit that could easily be used to make the opposite point they are making

here's an example of this in action:

"if someone masculine happens to have something feminine about them, it is dissuaded"

oh so you mean cis men can be feminine and no one cares and that's why trans men have male privilege? but i thought it was the reverse, that cis women can be masculine and no one cares and that's why trans men have male privilege? which is it? which is it? which is it? which is it? which is it? which is it? which is it? which is it? which is it?

[fearanddeference]

spent hours trying to research T brands today; decided on a new lab to switch to and i'm gonna try their cypionate 👁️‍🗨️

[frogsforthefrogwar]

I wish more people understood that sexual assault and harassment happen regardless of whether the perpetrator is attracted to the victim. Sexual harassment is frequently a social punishment for being undesirable

[frogsforthefrogwar]

god, so i saw a terf reblog this, which ive been worried would happen ever since it broke containment. To clarify, people's willingness to look away from sexual assault and harassment when it happens to people they deem undesirable is a large part of transphobia.

trans people are constant targets for for sexual abuse in a society that only ever sees them as perpetrators. This is not an accident. To a transphobic society trans people are inconvenient and undesirable victims. They are forcibly denied victim status and painted as monstrous to justify their continued abuse

[no-passaran]

Despite many people denying its existence, the truth is that researchers and activists have independently found asexuality many times. It hasn't been until recently that it has started to become a somewhat known word, so most of the time these writers weren't getting it from each other. It's not like us knowing what a unicorn is, not because we've ever encountered one in real life, but because we've heard other people talk of them; no, people looking at dissident sexuality were encountering asexuals again and again.

In 1869, the journalist Karl-Maria Kertbeny coined the terms "heterosexual" and "homosexual", giving them pretty much the meaning we all know today. But few people know he also included the category "monosexual", meaning someone who doesn't want to have sex with people of either gender, only masturbation.

The sexologist Magnus Hirschfield is another figure that always comes up in the history of early LGBTQ rights advocacy. He, too, wrote about people who don't feel sexual attraction (he used the term "sexual anaesthesia") in a pamphlet in 1872.

Same with Emma Throsse, the first known woman to write scientifically about lesbianism. She's most known for her 1895 publication defending the rights of homosexual people and in particular for her writings about lesbians, but she also wrote about "asensuals". Not only that, but she goes on to mention that "the author has the courage to admit to this category", meaning that she is asensual herself. (But even now, when looking for her Wikipedia page, it only mentions that she wrote about homosexuality).

In 1897, the sexologist Christiane Leidinger made the first modern definition of "asexuality".

In 1907, the activist Carl Schlegel published a document demanding "the same laws for all intermediate parts of sexual life: homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual, asexual, be legal now as they are for heterosexuals".

When the biologist and sexologist Alfred Kinsey (known as "the father of the sexual revolution") made the Kinsey scale to describe people's position in the Homosexual-Heterosexual scale (with various degrees of bisexuality), he also had to create the "Category X" for people who did not have any response that could be described as sexual attraction, because his experiments with both men and women were finding people who only fit this Category X.

And these are just a few examples. Contrary to what bigoted people say, asexuality was not "invented on the internet" and it's not a recent "trend". It's always been part of humanity, same way as it's also part of other animal species. The reason why you hadn't heard about it before is because it's invisibilized for going against the heteronormative and sex-normative moralistic views, not because it wasn't there.

[boycreaturefeature]

”transandrophobia/anti-transmasculinity isn’t real” When i was younger one legitimate thing o had against transitioning (in the future) was that instead of being a women scientist, instead of being progressive and boundary breaking, i would just be a man. What would all the little girls think if i abandoned them, left the harshness of female hood to become a man instead, become not the idol they looked up too?

[ted-undead]

literally used to get so upset that i would not be a “woman in STEM” and would be taking spots away from women who could be in STEM instead of a man like me. that once my gender changed i was the statistic we were trying to push against. who needs more men like me in STEM?

[boycreaturefeature]

Not to talk over you but use this as a way to get the conversation outta the tags — it’s younger trans men who needs men like you in stem. When you transition, the world doesn’t just lose a women in stem it also gains a trans man/masc.

@echoiiing said it very well.

So, for everybody that feels that strange shame and pressure of needed to be the Women Scientist, the Women Role Model in the room — you’ll instead be a Trans Masc scientist, a Trans Man Role Model.

[fieryfoxboy]

Queer feminists did all this work within queer spaces to denormalize cis gay men in particular talking about how disgusting and repulsive vulvas are, and to normalize the idea that vulvas aren’t something gross that should be stigmatized or talked about in a derogatory way (regardless of if someone finds them attractive on a personal level or not)- and even the idea that people who want to celebrate their yonic anatomy (after years of being shamed for their bodies) should be allowed to do that loud and proud.

And now because there are a lot of TERFs who use yonic and uterine imagery as a dog whistle, we have all these people in queer spaces acting like all yonic and uterine imagery in art is inherently bioessentialist, TERFy and generally evil, even though there’s nothing inherently bigoted about imagery of a vulva, uterus, etc in of itself, and whether or not the depiction of this imagery is bigoted should be determined based on context around the imagery, not just the imagery of a certain type of anatomy in of itself. I shouldn’t have to explain why it’s misogynistic to act like depictions of yonic and uterine imagery in art are inherently Bad and Icky, because it should really be obvious.

I think some of y’all are just misogynists and never unlearned it because you think your queerness automatically makes you progressive without you ever having to do the work of unlearning subconscious biases tbh.

[catboykatebush]

People who “don’t believe in transandrophobia” or “don’t believe that transmascs experience misogyny” are participating in mass trauma denialism towards a marginalized group and I think we should call it what it is more.

They’re calling traumatized people whiny bitches and cunts and telling them they should shut up… literally just for openly acknowledging and talking about the (very often) traumatic ways they’ve been treated for being transmasc specifically and/or being a transmasc person perceived as a girl/woman on some level.

[positively-manly]

Detransitioning or denying yourself your own identity is not an act that supports other trans people no matter what people say otherwise. Don't stop being a trans man/masc just because other people are uncomfortable.

If other people are making you feel like you as a trans man/masc being anything but a man/masc would be doing them a favour or be in their political favour these people are abusive bigots. If other people are uncomfortable with your pronouns and are telling you you're inherintly dangerous and a problem and they would be happier if you were a woman they are abusive bigots. Detransitioning or denying yourself your own identity does not support your trans sisters and siblings nor your cis sisters, do not let bad faith actors make you think it does. Your identity is yours alone and for you alone. You using he/him or undergoing a testosterone based transitioning does not go against your allyship nor have any kind of mark against your political beliefs or trans activism. A world without men is not possible nor would it be any good, it would be the death and detransition of millions who would be forced into early graves or lives that are transphobic and oppressive, you do not have to not be a trans man/masc because some idiot online is spewing radfem hatred. Please do not listen to this shit.

A world with you in it as your true self is a bright one, we need more of us able to be out, proud and alive! We don't need more sad, miserable, traumatised people forcing themselves through more trauma and oppression, the only way out IS via us all one day becoming free to be who we truly are! To say it slightly reductively WE DONT NEED MORE MISERABLE WOMEN WHO WISH THEY WERE MEN, WE NEED THEM TO FEEL OKAY BEING MEN! Do it for yourself and if you cant do it for you then do it so the next generation has more people like them to see, because none of us got to see trans men and mascs and know that could be us. We are so erased, we are so downtrodden, being louder and larger in number can only ever be a good thing. "Womanhood" isnt losing anything from you transitioning, you arent "betraying" or hurting anyone by being a man/masc. The only person being hurt is you if you deny yourself the right to your own identity.

A person who will not accept trans men/mascs is a transphobe. A person who is uncomfortable with trans men/mascs has internalised transphobia and/or is transphobic. A space that does not accept trans men/mascs is not a trans friendly space. Full stop. Do not let abusive bigots have ANY say in your life if you can help it.

And you may think i am using Abusive bigot too strongly here but i have to stress that yes, this is emotional coercion and abuse. It is someone trying to control you to the point of having a say in your identity. It is the same playbook as the emotional abusers who have hurt me throughout my life. Do not EVER listen to these people.

You will find happiness if you allow yourself to be you!! It may take time, it may be rocky at first but the world is brighter with you as your authentic self in it! You will find people who love you, who celebrate who you are!! Its all out there for you, never let anyone convince you to stop your search for it.

[willowbilly]

"No, this post joking about pregnant men isn't at the expense of real trans and intersex men who are actually able to become pregnant! It's not bigoted! It's only a joke about pregnant men! Whenever you hear a pregnant man joke you just have to know that it's implicitly about cis perisex men! Whenever you hear 'pregnant man' just think of erotic fiction about cis perisex men instead and then it'll be funny!"

Is one ever tired.

[not-sure-what-im-feeling]

“If men had breasts” “if men had vaginas” “if men got pregnant” “if men got periods” “if men” EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THOSE HAPPENS TO MEN.

[love-ardour-anarchism]

casting a spell to turn a million sad and miserable girls into the happy, fat and hairy men, transmascs and dykes they were always meant to be

[genderkoolaid]

i don't know why some feminists, who are genuinely trans-affirming and even actively try to challenge elements of cissexism in feminism, are so goddamn allergic to saying "cis men." its one word. three letters. just slap it in front of the word "man" when relevant. i know you know that cisness and transness are relevant. so why am i still having to read you say "men" over and over and over again when it is blatantly obvious you mean cis men!

[genderkoolaid]

like sorry to be a bitch about it (not really) but i do think it is that serious. i think you should be thinking about cisness and transness and intersexuality whenever discussing gender. it really all goes back to trans men's transmanhood being overlooked and erased as a site of oppression in favor of focusing on transness detached from manhood or femaleness detached from manhood and transness.

[fearanddeference]

the phrase "begone terf" is so real. like literally be gone from me.

genuinely though the song and dance of "i'm just asking in good faith why you identify with the gender of oppressor and feel uncomfortable when identified by others as the gender of oppressee. i'm just wondering because it sounds like maybe (just throwing it out there) you don't want to be a female due to the patriarchal oppression we women face and are therefore acting out of panic to assist and bargain with the patriarchy as a traitor to your sex... like i don't understand, why do pronouns matter to you? much love, just want to learn about your delusions and why you choose to disfigure yourself to wage a losing battle for recognition of your personhood in the eyes of the patriarchy. kisses, from wombanly female to wombanly female, you're always welcome at home because we can fix you there." it's fucking obnoxious man. consider that i'm transgender because my body feels good when it's getting tesosterone shots and when it has rough facial hair and a deeper voice. consider that i'm a big ugly faggy dyke and i like it that way and i'll do it forever. get out of my face. "just asking questions" you're transparent, drop the act. nobody wants to join your miserable cult of doom.