Oh I see. Yeah I can see how that would be confusing. Well, in the interest of sensitivity towards survivors of abuse since I don’t know exactly who’s gonna see this post I’ll mention two such incidents that were a long time ago (literally, like over 10 years ago at this point) and were widely talked about.
Content warnings: Rape, abuse, discrimination, transphobia, specifically transphobia against trans men.
One such example of the rapist and abuser tactic of being a prolific blogger and kind of a keyboard activist who wrote a lot of posts about how trans women are integral for trans women and you can only trust trans women was (sigh) monetizeyourcat AKA MYC. There are still some old posts up on my blog about her. Literally from back in the day people who knew her:
One other was “b8l” who was one of the original “baeddel bloggers.” Here’s a short retrospective post explaining who the baeddel bloggers were. Here’s a longer one, more detailed and in-depth on their ideology and has more sources. If it seems odd that i’m bringing up things that happened in 2014-2015, reading through that last post kind of makes it more clear that even movements that people can claim are “over and done with” have connective tissue to today.
All of the perpetrators I just mentioned fucking Posted Through It in the most egregious ways. Nobody willingly took accountability, people had to fucking proactively kick them out of their social circles and it took significant time and effort.
But there is one thing from the original post that I do think it’s necessary to expound on: The socioeconomic context of this. Because beliefs don’t happen in a vacuum, and neither does sexual abuse and rape. These things don’t simply happen because of “evil individuals,” even though I think it’s OK to describe rapists as “evil” because of what they did.
Transfeminine people, especially youth, are particularly vulnerable to abuse. Why is this? Because they are often abused or ostracized by their own families, and in places like the USA where there is practically zero social safety net, accepting an offer to join a sketchy housing situation by an older person in the same demographic as you is more likely. This kind of thing does not only happen to transfeminine people of course. But afaik it’s statistically slightly more common.
The other thing that makes us vulnerable to abuse is because we are feminized subjects in society. By “feminized subjects” i guess you could say “Treated in a woman-like way.”
Unfortunately, if you’re a woman, you will not only be treated as a woman by men, but also other women.
So, it’s a double-struggle, involving both transmisogyny and capitalism, at bare minimum. I don’t really know what this kind of struggle would look like for an ultra-wealthy trans person, so I’m mostly speaking about the working class here.
My reaction to this fact is not, of course, to say that people who merely don’t experience transmisogyny are a class of enemies. I know and have known trans men who are ardent feminists. Where, I say, is the ruthless criticism of parents who abuse and abandon their own children? Of religious leaders, politicians, and business owners who spread hate? And, lastly, if someone’s “found family” is an abusive found family, why can’t we criticize that?
In the current economic order, “found family” has basically the same inherent problems with its power dynamics as one’s “original family.” If you don’t make a significant portion of the household income, if you don’t own the house, if your name is not on the lease of that apartment, you may actually be an extremely vulnerable subject within your own household.
This is due to the current mode of economic production in society. And who maintains that mode of production?
The real and primary enemy, the particular class that is the biggest obstacle for transfeminine people, all trans people, all LGBT+ people, and the entire working class, is the fucking bourgeoisie. The capital-owning class.
But back to domestic abuse.
It’s not a sign of a socially coherent community if your town (or your state, province, county, parish, etc) has an intermittent exodus of LGBT+ youth out of it. That indicates there is something deeply wrong with your entire society.
I don’t look at places that were recipients of queer exoduses and managed a half-baked truce like, for example, San Francisco, New York City, Portland, and (sigh) Seattle as success stories. Rather, they became the sites of new forms of immiseration, even as they (and other cities, and some entire states) were held up as some kind of safe haven. Speaking generally, working class LGBT+ people in the modern era have historically had a slightly better time in cities as opposed to small towns, but a safe haven where you can’t afford the rent and have to live out of your car isn’t very “safe” in practice.
Note that one of the things that people (correctly) note as an indicator of some degree of safety is the presence of local laws against discrimination and the presence of the designation of “hate crimes.” But these have some inherent problems with them, such as the fact that if you are dependent on your abuser for income or housing, you kind of can’t accuse them without your life being turned upside down.
So, with all this in mind, one of the important things to consider about anyone’s political views is “Who benefits from believing this?”
If you are reading a set of beliefs that set trans women or transfeminine people as, like, God’s Perfect Special Victim Princesses who have zero capacity to do harm to anyone, that is a set of beliefs that will make it hard to distinguish between victim and perpetrator in cases of abuse between transfems. It can also be used as a smokescreen by white trans women to obscure their (our) own white privilege. I’ve seen that happen before as well, many times.
