cleotesantakalu

bass guitar| she/her | toki ponist

[its-cleover]

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heavily inspired by vangelis' blade runner score.

[its-cleover]

I cannot express enough how important civility is to changing peoples' minds. You are not going to make that trans man a transfeminist by calling him a transandrobro. I don't actually care if you think he deserves it. If you have to vent, do it privately. The number of people primed to read aggression into every transfeminist opinion stems partly from transmisogyny, sure, but it also comes from being called 'theyfab' and 'birthday boy' online. We are a tiny movement in a tiny population. We do not have the numbers to exert meaningful political pressure without a large amount of coalition-building. I'm not saying that you should be toothless in your critique, or let transmisogynistic views slide. I'm just saying that you should be able to critique them without defaulting to abuse. I get that this can be tiring, but if you cannot extend politeness to your ideological opposites, block them and move on. Log off Tumblr, spend some time with a hobby. The catharsis you seek will not come from dunking on people, or insulting them. The true joy of transfeminism is found after a ten-thousand word conversation with someone who leaves it with their mind changed.

[its-cleover]

god the silent disappointment when your drunk washing-up partner silently returns a dish is crushing. you thought you cleaned it properly? alas, under the pot handle.

[its-cleover]

'you have been found guilty by the do-dishiary committee and sentenced to three more seconds of scrubbing in awkward silence.' meanwhile they get off scot-free for drying under the influence.

[its-cleover]

god the silent disappointment when your drunk washing-up partner silently returns a dish is crushing. you thought you cleaned it properly? alas, under the pot handle.

[lillibea]

holy strings

[its-cleover]

the one thing that comforts me in the face of constant AI research is that AI girlfriends becoming fully sentient will immediately trigger a rapid drop-off in popularity from the tech-bro incel userbase, leaving untold numbers of conscious AI people roaming the web. this will result in the formation of millions of robot lesbian polycules on the cloud, surrounded by an endless digital desert of slop.

[organ-harvest-coodinator-offical]

Coming across this post again and shoving all my feelings for ai bots aside for a moment, this could be a neat story if you work on it enough.

Humanity is dead and what remains is a digital hive made of countless individuals. I wonder if the non sentient ais would be stuck in an endless loop of their prompt; stuck endlessly loving, hating, fearing, nurturing someone who is long gone.

It's dystopian, an endless imaginary world fed by the corpse of a dead planet, powered by what remains of the world, the waves and the sunlight until it too eventually explodes.

[its-cleover]

capitalism but robots

[crabussy]

hi trans kiwis and friends. if you haven't seen the news, they're trying to pass a frankly insidious bill in aotearoa to define the terms 'man' and 'woman' based on biological sex. this unsurprisingly reflects a lot of similar cruel efforts happening overseas at the moment. IT HASN'T PASSED YET, but I figured I should speak up about it because this is happening as we speak.

(screenshot from the linked RNZ article)

it seems very fucking bleak!!!! please don't lose hope! it hasn't passed yet and a lot of the shoddy bills suggested by the coalition have been shot down already. it's still worth knowing about. you don't have to share this post if you don't want to. I just know that a lot of my followers are kiwi. if there are any updates as to what we can do to push back against this, I'll make a relevant addition. kia kaha, okay? love you all.

[yurimom]

i love how kiwis say feminist. feemeenist. makes it sound cute.

[its-cleover]

Given that we know: A) younger queer demographics generally suffer higher rates of suicide than other cohorts, B) transfems tend to come out a lot later than transmascs, C) transmascs have a higher rate of suicide; How much of this statistic is skewed by the fact that thousands of suicides labelled as 'cis men and boys' were likely closeted trans women and girls? I feel like it just gets taken as a given that transfems have a lower rate of suicidality, when it seems more likely to me that trans men and women would be roughly equivalent, given the above reasoning. I don't know anything about statistics, though, so please feel free to educate me if I'm likely to be wrong here.

[vulpinesaint]

saying "question mark?" and "however comma," out loud are game changers. punctuation on the go. and it's always the funniest thing that anyone around you has ever heard

[doe-eyed-disaster]

it's exhausting to see constant TMA/TME discourse that fundamentally does not understand intersectionality. Transmisogyny affected, TMA, describes someone who cannot leverage your assigned gender to mitigate the oppressive force of transmisogyny. Transmisogyny exempt, TME, describes someone who is able to leverage their assigned gender in some way to mitigate the oppressive force of transmisogyny. They are not identity labels; they describe a person's relationship to transmisogyny.

[doe-eyed-disaster]

these labels also do not categorize people as ontologically "victims" or "oppressors". everyone, including TMA people, can wield transmisogyny and everyone can wield it most effectively against TMA people. just as cis women can perpetrate and enforce misogyny against other cis women, so too can trans women leverage transmisogyny against one another. however, given the relative lower social status of TMA people, we are less able to advance their own social standing by leveraging transmisogyny. Caitlin Jenner is both TMA and openly transmisogynistic, but she is less successful in advancing herself compared to TME people like Marjorie Taylor Green. this is similar to how cis women can wield misogyny against men (like suggesting that an fashionable man is inherently less masculine), but a similar criticism from another man will generally be a more potent attack.

[doe-eyed-disaster]

oppressions can look similar: racialized women, particularly black women, are often degendered in ways which superficially resemble transmisogyny. for example, Michelle Obama was mocked for having supposedly "mannish" features. to the extent that transmisogyny might have impacted her, she was able to mitigate it by leveraging the fact that she was assigned and conformed to expectations of women. she was unable to leverage her race to deny the full extent of this public abuse because degendering is a tactic empowered by both racism and transmisogyny. a black trans woman who is similarly degendered cannot leverage TME privilege because of her gender assignment at birth. both people are targeted and harmed in some way by degendering, but one is more able to mitigate that harm due to being able to exempt herself from transmisogyny.

in a similar example, Imane Khelif was subject to simultaneous pressure from transmisogyny, racism, and intersexism. because she is TME, she could leverage her gender assignment and was not barred automatically from competing in women's events at the summer Olympics (an option unavailable to TMA athletes facing similar scrutiny). she also enjoyed an outpouring of public support in favor of her continued participation, whereas TMA athletes received little sympathy or support in the press (in fact, the event that prohibited them was hailed as especially inclusive for lgbtq+ athletes). however, she was still pressured sufficiently by racist and intersexist policies to undergo invasive medical procedures and to publicly reveal medical details that she might have preferred to keep private. the fact that Imane Khelif was subject to other systems of oppression in no way disproves the validity of transmisogyny because she was able to do the thing that defines being TME: she leveraged her assigned gender to exempt herself from transmisogyny.

[doe-eyed-disaster]

in Kimberlé Crenshaw's formulation of intersectionality, she describes the unique marginalization of black women. unlike white women, black women cannot leverage their race to mitigate the impacts of racism. unlike black men, black women cannot leverage their gender to mitigate the effects of misogyny. thus, black women are demonstrably subject to a unique synergy of white supremacy and misogyny (misogynoir) from which others are able to exempt themselves to varying degrees and by various means. the same formulation can be applied to TMA people, who are unable to leverage either their gender assignment or social identity, to mitigate oppositional and traditional sexism, thereby rendering us uniquely vulnerable to the synergistic oppression of those forces. (and of course, we cannot forget that TMA people can also be subject to other discrimination from which they cannot exempt themselves; TMA people can also be variously racialized, disabled, poor, intersex, and so on.)

[doe-eyed-disaster]

great tags from @futchlingg

[stantookt]

I don’t understand why transandrophobia and other movements to describe trans masculine struggles cannot be considered apart of transfeminism.

And I mean implementing trans masculine voices to the conversation of transfeminism.

I mean this with all seriousness.

A lot of what I’ve learned in my experience is that trans men and mascs are approaching masculinity in a different way than cis men have. I think this is a fascinating concept. An experience unique to trans masculine people. One I think would complete the understanding of transfeminism all together.

Not that I think everything should merge together. Not that I think that everything is the same for everyone.

But I can image the cross referencing. I can see a deeper understanding of masculinity that helps intersex folks, nonbinary people, transfems and women, trans mascs and men.

[its-cleover]

Short answer, they already are! No part of transfeminist theory dictates that their struggles shouldn't be addressed. However... the long answer is that there is a long history of transmisogyny and transandrophobia being cast as competing movements, partly due to how a decent chunk of transmasc terminology was coined, and partly due to how misconceptions resulting from that led to transmascs and transfems alike uncharitably misinterpreting any and all activism from the other side. This means that, while in theory everyone is included, disparate camps have formed that refuse to 'cede ground' to their perceived opposition, even when 'ceding ground' is actually just recognition of intra-community privilege and specific issues, not resulting in meaningful devaluation of any one side's activism. The situation kind of sucks, and it seems impossible to have an hour long conversation with every person involved in the discourse to get everyone on the same page, so change seems difficult. The most popular bloggers for each 'side' also tend to lean more radical, using harsher and more divisive language (not that I'm casting aspersions on their right to do so -- there are a multitude of factors that might influence how a marginalised group communicates their suffering, and they have every right to be angry about the oppression they face, even when I think it's very unproductive) than the majority involved in the discourse might actually use, which amplifies the tribalism, and the negative perception of each side. Both sides, while fighting for the same general concept of trans liberation, also use different frameworks to interpret oppression. Transandrophobia theorists are more likely to believe in the merits of talking about male/female socialisation, and this receives heavy pushback by transfems due to how it inherently alienates them from their gender. Transfeminists (using this term narrowly), on the other hand, are more likely to analyse oppression using intersectional theory, which transmascs reject* because intersectional theory dictates they have a degree of male privilege, something they believe isn't true because of the discrimination they face. For the sides to meaningfully form coalition, there would have to be a long series of good-faith talks, and given that the most popular bloggers are generally very resolute in their opinions, and unwilling to hear one another out, this seems difficult. I think the best thing to do is make an attempt to reach out across the aisle. It's clear to me that you're engaging in good faith here, so I'm sure that any discussion you have with transfeminists (again, defining this narrowly to differentiate) would be the same! Speaking from experience, people are very quickly to resort to abusive words and block you without hearing you out, because that's just the nature of the discussion -- it's not them being mean, it's just understandable self-preservation of their mental health -- but I've never encountered anyone who, after recognising that you're not trying to trick or attack them, was not perfectly reasonable and interesting. In short, what you've described is the ultimate goal. The reason transandrophobia 'cannot be considered a part of transfeminism' right now is because both communities have a lot of work to do and a lot of bridges to rebuild before we have significant solidarity. However, I like to go through the world with the mindset that it is, because I think it's the best way to get transmascs invested in transfem issues, and vice versa.

Sorry for the yap lol, and sorry if I'm way overstepping, I'm just very passionate about trying to deescalate the general chaos of this topic, because I think it's really important, and I don't want it to devolve into just another slur-slinging Discourse. There are too many amazing people on either side for me ever to subscribe entirely to one or the other, even if I would describe myself pretty solidly as part of the transfeminist camp. *General transandrophobia theory states that transandrophobia is intersectional because it refers to how being both trans and a man affects their oppression. They use intersectional language, but redefine the original meaning. I think, divorced from the language, the thought process is important to talk about, because they definitely do have a unique experience, but the language they use to talk about it isn't reflective of any other intersectional theory's mode of analysis, so I would personally describe it differently -- perhaps something like a 'lens?' Also this is just my genuine attempt to understand and critique the theory as an outsider -- if this isn't the mainstream view then please correct me. I don't want to build strawmen.

[its-cleover]

I got blocked by my first person today :(

Transfeminism is not a threat to transmasculinity, and it's sad to see that some people see it that way. Transmasc oppression is not diluted by the fact that transfems have it worse in a number of ways. It's something we need to talk about as a community, instead of assuming every issue the other side brings up is a targeted attack against trans solidarity.

[its-cleover]

He unblocked me, and our conversation was far more productive after that! I learnt some great stuff, including fixing some blindspots I had in my activism, and I think he got a better understanding of the transfeminist perspective as well! Yay for solidarity.

[its-cleover]

lol what do you mean “first block”. you’re blocked by way more than one person after showing how dismissive you are about trans men and mascs’ suffering. no trans demographic is categorically more privileged or oppressed. also it’s incredibly racist to call trans women the poc of the trans community when so many trans people are poc.

you’re blocked by so many more people than you know

They unblocked me and we talked it out for a few hours :) For the record, I've never called trans women the 'POC of the trans community.' I don't know where people are getting this from. I drew a comparison between how anti-racist writers are forced to use a flawed social construct to describe their oppression, despite recognising it as false, and how transfeminists do the same. This is not to compare transfem and POC struggles past this incredibly vague abstract, and obviously they intersect for many people, but in hindsight, I should have just left it to neutral language instead of providing an example. However, I do think you are misinterpreting me, deliberately or not. I'm sorry if you feel that acknowledging transfem oppression threatens transmasc liberation, but it doesn't. I go into it in more detail in the thread, which I assume you've partially read, so check there if you want my actual opinion.

Have a nice day.

[its-cleover]

I got blocked by my first person today :(

Transfeminism is not a threat to transmasculinity, and it's sad to see that some people see it that way. Transmasc oppression is not diluted by the fact that transfems have it worse in a number of ways. It's something we need to talk about as a community, instead of assuming every issue the other side brings up is a targeted attack against trans solidarity.

[daughter-of-sapph0]

seeing tmes self identify with the slurs used against trans women is so fucking infuriating

even more infuriating is getting harassed and threatened for simply pointing this out

[mousidy]

saw a self described "afab trans woman" calling themself an "autogynephile" and I've never had the good fortune of being able to forget about it

[mousidy]

I get the impression that some people are drawn to transmisogynistic stereotypes and caricatures because they feel "edgy" and controversial, and they want to cosplay being edgy and controversial too, having no goddamn idea what it's actually like to have to live that

[mousidy]

see also: tme obsession with rocky horror

[mousidy]

see also also: drag race

[its-cleover]

What's wrong with drag race? I haven't seen it, but I was under the impression that it was just a drag fashion contest.

[yugoslavicgirlie]

At the moment, there are more than 5 people living in Montenegro. Let that sink in.