Katra Ariello, Golden Apple Audio

Voice Actress - Audiobooks - Audio Description Credits: Manhunt, Wrath Goddess Sing, and more! Neapolitan trans woman - Femminella - Aspiring Razorgirl she/her/doll/kallai

[katrafiy]

I think about this image a lot. This is an image from the Aurat March (Women's March) in Karachi, Pakistan, on International Women's Day 2018. The women in the picture are Pakistani trans women, aka khwaja siras or hijras; one is a friend of a close friend of mine.

In the eyes of the Pakistani government and anthropologists, they're a "third gender." They're denied access to many resources that are available to cis women. Trans women in Pakistan didn't decide to be third-gendered; cis people force it on them whether they like it or not.

Western anthropologists are keen on seeing non-Western trans women as culturally constructed third genders, "neither male nor female," and often contrast them (a "legitimate" third gender accepted in its culture) with Western trans women (horrific parodies of female stereotypes).

There's a lot of smoke and mirrors and jargon used to obscure the fact that while each culture's trans women are treated as a single culturally constructed identity separate from all other trans women, cis women are treated as a universal category that can just be called "women."

Even though Pakistani aurat and German Frauen and Guatemalan mujer will generally lead extraordinarily different lives due to the differences in culture, they are universally recognized as women.

The transmisogynist will say, "Yes, but we can't ignore the way gender is culturally constructed, and hijras aren't trans women, they're a third gender. Now let's worry less about trans people and more about the rights of women in Burkina Faso."

In other words, to the transmisogynist, all cis women are women, and all trans women are something else.

"But Kat, you're not Indian or Pakistani. You're not a hijra or khwaja sira, why is this so important to you?"

Have you ever heard of the Neapolitan third gender "femminiello"? It's the term my moniker "The Femme in Yellow" is derived from, and yes, I'm Neapolitan. Shut up.

I'm going to tell you a little bit about the femminielli, and I want you to see if any of this sounds familiar. Femminielli are a third gender in Neapolitan culture of people assigned male at birth who have a feminine gender expression.

They are lauded and respected in the local culture, considered to be good omens and bringers of good luck. At festivals you'd bring a femminiello with you to go gambling, and often they would be brought in to give blessings to newborns. Noticing anything familiar yet?

Oh and also they were largely relegated to begging and sex work and were not allowed to be educated and many were homeless and lived in the back alleys of Naples, but you know we don't really like to mention that part because it sounds a lot less romantic and mystical.

And if you're sitting there, asking yourself why a an accurate description of femminiello sounds almost note for note like the same way hijras get described and talked about, then you can start to understand why that picture at the start of this post has so much meaning for me.

And you can also start to understand why I get so frustrated when I see other queer people buy into this fool notion that for some reason the transes from different cultures must never mix.

That friend I mentioned earlier is a white American trans woman. She spent years living in India, and as I recal the story the family she was staying with saw her as a white, foreign hijra and she was asked to use her magic hijra powers to bless the house she was staying in.

So when it comes to various cultural trans identities there are two ways we can look at this. We can look at things from a standpoint of expressed identity, in which case we have to preferentially choose to translate one word for the local word, or to leave it untranslated.

If we translate it, people will say we're artificially imposing an outside category (so long as it's not cis people, that's fine). If we don't, what we're implying, is that this concept doesn't exist in the target language, which suggests that it's fundamentally a different thing

A concrete example is that Serena Nanda in her 1990 and 2000 books, bent over backwards to say that Hijras are categorically NOT trans women. Lots of them are!

And Don Kulick bent over backwards in his 1998 book to say that travesti are categorically NOT trans women, even though some of the ones he cited were then and are now trans women.

The other option, is to look at practice, and talk about a community of practice of people who are AMAB, who wear women's clothing, take women's names, fulfill women's social roles, use women's language and mannerisms, etc WITHIN THEIR OWN CULTURAL CONTEXT.

This community of practice, whatever we want to call it - trans woman, hijra, transfeminine, femminiello, fairy, queen, to name just a few - can then be seen to CLEARLY be trans-national and trans-cultural in a way that is not clearly evident in the other way of looking at things.

And this is important, in my mind, because it is this axis of similarity that is serving as the basis for a growing transnational transgender rights movement, particularly in South Asia. It's why you see pictures like this one taken at the 2018 Aurat March in Karachi, Pakistan.

And it also groups rather than splits, pointing out not only points of continuity in the practices of western trans women and fa'afafines, but also between trans women in South Asia outside the hijra community, and members of the hijra community both trans women and not.

To be blunt, I'm not all that interested in the word trans woman, or the word hijra. I'm not interested in the word femminiello or the word fa'afafine.

I'm interested in the fact that when I visit India, and I meet hijras (or trans women, self-expressed) and I say I'm a trans woman, we suddenly sit together, talk about life, they ask to see American hormones and compare them to Indian hormones.

There is a shared community of practice that creates a bond between us that cis people don't have. That's not to say that we all have the exact same internal sense of self, but for the most part, we belong to the same community of practice based on life histories and behavior.

I think that's something cis people have absolutely missed - largely in an effort to artificially isolate trans women. This practice of arguing about whether a particular "third gender" label = trans women or not, also tends to artificially homogenize trans women as a group.

You see this in Kulick and Nanda, where if you read them, you could be forgiven for thinking all American trans women are white, middle class, middle-aged, and college-educated, who all follow rigid codes of behavior and surgical schedules prescribed by male physicians.

There are trans women who think of themselves as separate from cis women, as literally another kind of thing, there are trans women who think of themselves as coterminous with cis women, there are trans women who think of themselves as anything under the sun you want to imagine.

The problem is that historically, cis people have gone to tremendous lengths to destroy points of continuity in the transgender community (see everything I've cited and more), and particularly this has been an exercise in transmisogyny of grotesque levels.

The question is do you want to talk about culturally different ways of being trans, or do you want to try to create as many neatly-boxed third genders as you can to prop up transphobic theoretical frameworks? To date, people have done the latter. I'm interested in the former.

I guess what I'm really trying to say with all of this is that we're all family y'all.

[t4t4t]

A section of Miss Major's Wikipedia page.

A trans sex worker named Puppy over 50 years ago getting murdered inspiring her to act more deliberately and collectively for the safety of trans sex workers. "...the start of her activism...."

"Since no one was going to do it for us, we had to do it for ourselves."

[kayla-denker]

You cut off an important part.

Stonewall became the epicenter of rebellion because it was one of the few queer bars that let trans women in.

The article also touches on how drag balls were originally created by trans women for trans women.

The entire subculture was appropriated by cis gay men in the late 60's who then barred trans women from participating.

The "queer culture" that so many tme people are eager to preserve is a culture of our exclusion. They're eager to take the art we create, the movements we start, they're glad to have us fight for their rights, and then kick us to the curb while saying it's "not the time" for our rights to be defended. They sing the praises of women like Miss Major while attending "afab only" events. They talk about how awful the abuse of trans sex workers is in "afab only" support groups. They cry about the plight of homeless "trans people" while sleeping in "afab only" shelters.

They love to talk about all the good Miss Major, and many other trans women, have done while actively contributing to our exclusion and oppression. Its very clear that they do not love women like Miss Major.

We are the Omelas Children of the queer world. Their gains are built on our suffering.

"Since no one was going to do it for us, we had to do it for ourselves."

[cannibal-flowerbomb]

"TME/TMA is about genitals" people have yet to address that this makes it sound like they genuinely believe that cis men all have pussies and trans women all have dicks. Neither of which is fucking true.

[kayla-denker]

Forcefem was a huge part of what helped me realize I'm trans and convince me to transition. I would always come across forcefem stuff and think "god, I wish that were me." Then someone told me "cis men don't wish that they were women" and it all clicked.

And I think all these chuds that claim forcefem is "tRaNsAnDrOpHobiC" know that. Especially since the stuff made by trans women makes it extremely explicit that the message is "it's ok to want to be a girl, you don't have to spend the rest of your life in misery pretending to be a man." It's extremely obviously not directed at trans men.

But transmisogynists view any trans woman that actually escapes the eggshell/closet as a tragedy, so they want to stop anything that helps us do so. They'd rather see a million dead closeted trans women than a single one of us happy and thriving as ourselves.

[thistleation]

"So do you defend trans woman X who did thing Y????"

Do you hear yourself? Do you see how you phrased that? You're confronting a trans woman with two choices: fall in line and validate your harassment campaign of one of her sisters, or rebuke you and thereby mark herself as a valid target for your hate.

You're not looking for healing or justice, you're just looking for more victims.

[jazzyloveswomen]

I hate that I feel the need to open this post- which will be speaking about abuse I have suffered at the hands of my ex boyfriend- with platitudes, but, to be entirely clear: I do not believe trans men are uniquely predisposed to be misogynists or abusers, nor do I think trans men as a always class have unconditional male privilege.

I was, however, in a relationship with a trans man who used the conditional position of privilege of being perceived as a man by our entire social circle, to abuse me, and I would like to talk about that experience.

For context, I am an intersex trans woman who prefers not to disclose my agab, and, within the context of intersex people's lives specifically, does not think agab should be the defining factor in someone's identity. I talk more about my lived experiences in my pinned post.

The boyfriend in question was a trans man who currently does not pass very well to the wider public, but who was accepted fully as a man by our social circle, which is entirely made up of queer people (it is worth noting that i am the only transmisogynized person in this social circle, every other person, to my knowledge, was a perisex nonbinary or transmasc person afab).

From the start of our relationship, be would behave in subtly transmisogynistic ways toward me. He would feminize me when it was convenient, to make me look small or frivolous, or when he wanted to play the provider boyfriend to make himself look masculine. But then he would turn around and make me feel lesser than the perisex women and femmes in our lives, comparing me almost cruelly to them in a way that made it clear I was a 'lesser woman'.

It was always a double edged sword, with him.

I was a woman, so I was expected to play into bits about me being his frivolous little wifey, but I was a trans woman, so he would mock me, if I were to make one of my roleplay characters a biological mother, or he would compare me to "real" women, making me feel inferior.

I was a woman, so he made me feel small, useless, dependent on him for everything, joked about me being a trophy wife, but then he would turn around and make me feel obligated to provide for him, financially abusing me, as well as coercing me into sexually dominant roles he knew I wasn't fully comfortable with and withholding affection for me for weeks when I didn't play the role right.

I was a woman, so he'd make me out to be a ditzy gossip who 'meant well' but had a head full of fluff to other people, and then, because I am a trans woman, he would make me out to be aggressive, scary even; one time when I playfully debated him in call he, distraught, as if afraid of me, yelled "Please just stop fighting with me, Mimi!", making me out to be an aggressor for a friendly debate, to shut me up.

And I was so desperate for connection, for the love he pretending to have for me, that I stayed through it all. I stayed when he cheated on me, when he publicly emotionally abused me in front of our friends, when he sexually coerced me in masculinizing ways, when he isolated me, when he tried to make me wholly dependent on him and convince me to move out of state with him with no job or savings or anything to fall back on.

He was outed as a groomer. I had no idea beforehand. I was the one the victim felt comfortable bringing the information to, and I was the one who gently pushed for that man to be outed to the rest of the friend group and reassured the victim none of it was their fault when the victim was insisting they didn't want to "ruin his relationships" by outing him. My love for that man died the moment I found out he was hurting a minor, and the victim repeatedly told me and others that I had never done anything to make them uncomfortable and that I couldn't have known about how bad things were behind closed doors.

You know what this man, my ex, did? When confronted with grooming a minor and being inappropriate toward four others? He blamed me. Said that I'd encouraged it, and that he, being a twenty year old widdle guy, couldn't have possibly understood what he was doing, so it was my fault, basically, because he (twenty year old man) couldn't have possibly known it was wrong to groom children, but I (twenty one year old trans woman) should have known better than to tell him his writing was good one time when he was roleplaying with a minor on a scene that wasn't even smut, which basically made me culpable.

I'm so, so lucky that nobody bought into what he said. I'm so grateful the victim stepped up to defend me, and that nobody fell for his pedojacking nonsense displacing the blame onto me.

But I've been thinking, ever since, on how he was able to weaponize transmisogyny against me. On how a lot of his abuse happened publicly and nobody in our very trans friend group said anything about it (and even after the abuse was recognized, i was the one who had to point out to them that it was transmisogynistic in nature before they recognized it). On how he felt so confident in his ability to weaponize transmisogyny against me that, when confronted for grooming a minor, his tactic was to pin it on his transfem girlfriend while infantilizing himself, and he expected it to work, because in smaller situations, twisting things around onto me had always worked before.

I love my friends, dearly, and I'm glad to have them, I'm glad they didn't believe his final attempt to turn everyone against me, I'm so glad I'm not alone now.

But he did get away with it for a year. Because within the specific circumstances of a queer space where gender identities are accepted, he had conditional male privilege over me (and he'd actually flaunted to my face a few times, the power he'd have publicly too 'when he passes better', enough to be seen as a man by passerby on the street), and I think it's important to recognize that, while trans men might not be an oppressor class as a rule, trans men can and often do gain male privilege in queer settings, especially over transfeminine people.

(it also made me realize how much i need a transfeminine community, because this all would have been easier if there were other trans women around or for me to lean on, but ah- i'm scared, to join transfeminine spaces, because i am intersex in a way that means my experiences are different from a lot of other trans women, and i choose not to disclose my agab)

[autogynophelia]

A lot of transphobia has this underlying assumption that people who transition are a random sample from their AGAB. Like, if you imagine a world where you took all the 10-year-old "boys" in your country and randomly selected 1% of them to go on to transition later in life, then that world would be essentially the same as this one.

And that assumption is useful to transphobes because it means they can uncritically extend properties of the AGAB group to the subset who transitions. E.g. they will say AMAB kids are likely to have behaved like X or experienced Y in their youth, therefore trans women are likely to have behaved like X or experienced Y in their youth. And they can say this without ever checking if it's true about trans women, because if everyone knows it's true of cis boys, they will assume that extension to trans women.

But like, if you took down the details of every 30-year-old trans woman right now, then went back in time 20 years, and studied that group of 10-year-olds, you would find they already had properties that differed from the 10-year-old-AMAB average in 2006. Perhaps they would be a little quieter, perhaps they would have a couple more female friends, perhaps they'd have fewer friends in general, perhaps they would have more anxiety, perhaps they would have more depression. Perhaps none of these and something else, idk.

But, the point is, people don't just decide to transition *at random*, there is a whole history of life experience in each trans girl leading up to that realisation "I am trans" and that decision "I should do something about it", and that common history of all these kids would be reflected in some group average differences from the AGAB cohort even long before that realisation took place.

And this is what makes "male socialisation" rhetoric so frustrating. Because the very fact of having all the life history that led up to your realisation that you were trans, the life history that *caused* that realisation, that very history marks you as someone with an atypical social experience compared to your AGAB average.

Literally if you had to select the 1% of AMAB people *least* likely to have had a typical "male socialisation", it would be the ones who come out of that experience thinking "you know what, I'm actually a different gender to all these men". And yet it's trans women who are tarred with the brush of "male socialisation" more than any other group.

[tpwrtrmnky]

There's cultural relativism and then there's naive anglocentric cultural dipshitism where you go "well, they have a word for a thing you put on your foot to protect it from the environment, but that word doesn't NECESSARILY translate to shoe because they make them differently from how we make shoes, so really they don't have a concept of a shoe the way we understand shoes, and also they have a more spiritual understanding of covering your feet when going outside, so really it's completely different" and then you ask someone from the culture in question, and they're like "yeah that word just means shoe."

[taliabhattwrites]

This post is about a lot of things.

One of those things is definitely gender.

[kayla-denker]

If you think for even half a second about what motivates a person to shout "but its ok to just be a feminine man!" every time "mtf" transition is so much as mentioned, it becomes very apparent what that motivation is: a beleif that men are under enormous cultural pressure to transition into trans women against their will.

Which is, obviously, some transmisogynistic conservative bullshit straight off of Fox News. The exact opposite is true; trans women are subject to unbelievable amounts of social pressure to stay in the closet and keep living as "men."

What's fucking maddening is how many liberals and even leftists, even queer liberals and leftists, are eager to push this narrative. Transmisogyny is truly the most bipartisan institution in the world today.

[tpwrtrmnky]

I do think "literally zero evidence indicates that gatekeeping medical transition does anything to prevent regret, but the harm done by gatekeeping is extensively documented" is a much stronger argument than "regret isn't real" cause there's always going to be some anecdote that puts you in a weak-looking rhetorical position for the latter, but the former is pretty unassailable.

[radio-jupotter]

"Saying how anti-trans policies affect cis women will get conservative cis people on your side"

1) no it wont, trust me when i say these bastards can rationalize any contrarictory belief

2) can we spend more time talking about how trans women are human beings deserving of respect?

Any reversal of anti-trans policies whose basis revolves around cis women is a pyrrhic victory. It addresses one symptom of transmisogyny, and does not adress the bigger issue of "people hate trans women enough to attempt to legislate us out of existence"

If we dont address the societal transphobia/transmisogyny, nothing of substance will change

[shortedbrain]

It seems extremely bad faith to argue "trans women don't experience reproductive discrimination" as a way to say trans men "have it worse" when trans women being exempt from reproductive discrimination is a side effect of 1. extremely unfortunate circumstances that make a lot of them miserable and 2. the unwillingness of the medical community to apply technology we've had for decades to trans people. If you told an infertile (or even just post-menopausal as opposed to lifelong) cis women that she doesn't experience reproductive discrimination as a way to say she has it better than you, she would be extremely offended and everyone on earth would think you're an asshole. Why did we decide this is okay to do to trans women?

[katrafiy]

It's also worth noting that in many parts of the world trans women are still subject to forced sterilization in order to have their gender legally recognized, and this forced sterilization includes not being allowed to utilize any kind of fertility preservation (i.e. sperm banking) in order to potentially have biological children later.

[exhaustedandannoyed]

Watch the understanding of intersectionality evaporate from a transandrobro the moment you suggest privilege is gradients and intersecting factors rather than an On/Off switch where if you have one form of marginalization you can't hold privilege ever.

[puppycat-boydyke]

I can’t lie, when “transandrophobia” first started popping up on my timeline, I thought “hey, these guys do have some salient points.” Some of them sounded really smart and reasonable. Some of them were accounts of transphobia that were extremely relatable to me. But instead of trapping myself in an echo chamber of MRAs, I put on my critical thinking cap, and I engaged with varying opinions on the topic.

I read comments and reblogs, I listened to what trans women were saying about the whole thing and read about how they were (are) tangibly impacted by the movement. Even when it was uncomfy and made me feel weird. Even when it felt like a woman was being unnecessarily mean or said something that felt unkind (bc what happened beforehand that pushed her to that?? Why wouldn’t she be angry when discussing her own oppression?? I know how this goes).

Under the seemingly reasonably surface of some of these transandrophobia posts, I found, overwhelmingly, transmascs refusing to take accountability for their harmful actions, denying their privileges (esp the white ones), intentionally degendering transfems, leading harassment campaigns against trans women who dared to disagree with them. (A woman was mean to me! Get rid of her! Be so ffr. The male fragility and violence is on full display here). I saw trans women disappearing from this site in droves for daring to be angry, daring to stand up for themselves, daring to be slightly annoying, daring to simply exist and be visible. I have since seen a version of this happen to a trans woman in one of the irl queer organizations in my city. This is NOT an exclusively online issue. This is having real impacts on real trans women IN REAL FUCKING LIFE. AT EVENTS AND IN SOCIAL GROUPS.

The most important lesson in all of this though? FUCKING LISTEN TO WOMEN ABOUT WOMEN’S ISSUES WITHOUT MAKING IT ABOUT YOU. LOOK at what is ACTUALLY HAPPENING AROUND YOU. Your brothers are intentionally tearing down and socially murdering our trans sisters.

I swear some of these tboys are so good at being men in the most depraved and patriarchal ways possible. I want to uplift all trans people. But I will never EVER uplift a men’s movement whose sole purpose is to prove they’re more systemically oppressed than women are. Like actually what the fuck is wrong with yall. Fuck.

[theabigailthorn]

AGAIN AGAIN

AGAIN AGAIN

Catch me as NAOMI in this lesbian time travel romance written and directed by Mia Moore and exec produced by Lily Wachowski.

It premieres on the 11th of May at the Seattle Film Festival, you can get tickets here: https://www.siff.net/festival/again-again

[cannibal-flowerbomb]

Transmasc classmate in a discussion abt misogyny revealed to me that sometimes he goes along with the misogynistic jokes that cis and trans men in his social circle make because he “doesn’t want to lose his community” and I think he was expecting sympathy and not me telling him that his “community” sucked and he was no better for putting up with it. If you can’t be bothered to find feminist trans men to build community with then you’re part of the problem sorry. Also it was funny because I, also transmasc who does not care to hold community with misogynists, was standing right there and he wasn’t asking me like, how to get out of there he just wanted to whine and find sympathy. Then he called me a bitch, lowkey misgendered me and walked off. Transmascs who whine abt anti transmasculinity are the first to be transphobic to their own so called “community” the second we tell them to stop being misogynists. funny how that works

That's exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about when I say I've been disavowed by other transmasc people! By refusing to play along with the expectation that misogyny is somehow gender affirming, I stick out like a sore thumb for ridicule. And once you've made that choice you're "not one of the community" forever.

[sapphicsounds1312]

Been thinkkng a lot lately, for no particular reason, about how transfeminine people who loudly stick up for ourselves, argue back when we're mischaracterized or mistreated, get mean when we see someone talking shit, are often framed as aggressive, hostile, bullies. This is even the case when you are a trans woman dealing with other transfems. And, in fact, since so often transfems do quietly allow themselves to be mistreated, when you're in a community full of transfems, loudly sticking up for yourself and arguing back can sometimes make you stand out all the more.