Untitled

22 lesbian she/her mdni

[autogynophelia]

Something that happens a lot in non-binary spaces is that a new member of the community will ask a tone-deaf transphobic question like "Hi, AFAB here, I was wondering if any other AFAB NBs had advice about swimsuits? My AFAB chest means I can't wear swimsuits for AMABs," and an established community member will have to gently explain that not only are we are a community of people who often change their bodies to a degree that certificated sex becomes a useless way to describe anatomy, but we are also a community of people who often join the community explicitly to get away from our birth sex assignment, and so referring to people that way can be really offensive.

And no matter how gently this is pointed out, the newbie will often initially feel instinctively defensive towards what they perceive as scolding. Which means that when another community member comes along and says "Don't worry about the language police 🙄, many of us think AGAB language is fine, it's a useful way to refer to the kind of formative experiences you had as a child," the newbie will latch on to them like a life raft.

And yes, we live in a transphobic society, a lot of people coming into the trans community will have uninterrogated transphobic views, but that just makes them more vulnerable when there is always someone in the community willing to tell them "no, your transphobic views are fine actually, and in fact here are some more you might not have thought of!"

It means a sizeable chunk of newly-out NBs are swiftly radicalised into increasingly extreme transphobia and transmisogyny simply as a defense mechanism against having their own comments criticised. One day they're just happy to join a community where people supposedly don't judge you on your birth sex, and the next they're talking about the importance of "AGAB socialisation".

It's a really big problem and I don't know what we can do about it.

[sorin-sunchild]

I think about this every time someone joins a community for trans and/or nonbinary people with something like; "Hi I'm nonbinary (AFAB)!"

Because I really want to guide them to question what it is they are volunteering when they tell us that. What do they want us to know when they use it as an identity label?

Yes, you can use ASAB language in a variety of discussions to talk about experiences but applying it to people to reference their bodies is a bias exercise.

An 'AFAB' body could look like whatever. An 'AMAB' body could look like whatever.

And many of us do not use that language for ourselves for a variety of reasons and do not like it when others indicate that everyone falls nicely into those boxes or should.

In the example - how does that person know that 'AMAB' people don't have advice? There are those who fall into that category who have or had breasts.

Which is what was meant. Can people with breasts help me because I also have breasts.

Neutralising medical language is often talked about, but then we let people in our own communities do the same thing. Just say directly what you mean. Talk about body parts and types of people without making it about birth sex and full of assumptions.

I get it, you were told that ASAB language is the correct and right way to refer to your sex, but you should honestly be unlearning the part of you which feels that your birth sex is important to announce. Critical even. A thing everyone should openly volunteer otherwise they're being difficult and weird.

Otherwise you become part of the problem - categorising trans and nonbinary person based on an experience (ASAB) and acting like it's an accurate measure of their bodies.

And I'm just gonna say it...only AFAB people seem to do this. I don't know why, someone smarter could analyse it maybe.

[olives-and-sunshine]

My brain is a bit fried rn, so I'm gonna try to make sense lol.

But I assume AFAB people do it because

1. male is the "default" in patriarchal society. but the nonbinary community is a place seperate from gender roles. someone who has freshly realize they are enby have yet to start to deconstructionalize these concepts.

2. they have probably yet to learn things like the connection of ASAB language to the intersex community and why it exists. they also probably have yet to learn the difference between ASAB, gender you were socialized as growing up, biology and the multiple factors that make up sex not someone's ASAB gender etc. So they are probably clumsy with language and concepts

okay. so now getting to the meat of it

3. afab people/people socialized as girls growing up are told that it is incredibly important. it means you are at higher risk of SA, of mental illness (untrue but we are just starting to accept mental illness in men), that women are paid less, sometimes even should only stay at home and have kids, men only talk to you cause you're pretty and s woman, etc. it is basically since a young age emphasized what misogyny is and that it is Bad and Dangerous and literally gets women killed (especially woc) but also often internalizing it. kinda along the lines why women have to "mature faster" etc. people socialized as women from a young age are told how important being a woman is for how everyone treats you and your every experience. meanwhile, for people socialized as men growing up, it doesn't necessarily define their existence as much as not hinder them actively. (obviously men of color have a different experience slightly but they still have privilege as a man. same with trans men who pass, at least till their transness is revealed.)

4. so almost how non-straight people feel the need to come out, afab enbies feel a similar obligation, except one laced with misogyny. to say "hey! i'm seperate from the rest and have a different experience" except it's due to them being AFAB getting specific significance rather than it being actually important to the conversation.

cause i feel like most times I've seen ASAB used by someone not intersex is often by transwomen highlighting that they didn't experience misogyny in the same way growing up but did/still do experience transmisogny. inversely also used by AFAB people explain the specific experiences that they had as someone perceived female from a young age. or I see it used when talking about/in medical contexts when it comes to either talking about things that mostly effect people AFAB. or I think it's used as shorthand for having certain sex characteristics (like body type) or perceived gender.

anyways. back to the subjecy, I also i think the highlighting of AFAB voices in nonbinary spaces over AMAB people is a big issue and plays a part in it all.

side note:

personal question but but I often use AFAB as someone with endometriosis/pelvic floor issues/breast fibroids and heds/pots/mcas/autoimmune disorders while also mentioning being perceived as a women but being nonbinary on paper, because in combination with these being "woman's health issues", really effect my medical care. and i feel like it's unfortunately sometimes the easiest way to get the point across because of how most people understand ASAB langauge. if I was talking about one sex characteristic or my life experience, that would be one thing, but with such a intersectional topic, it's difficult to phrase. but I've genuinely wondered for a while if I should use something else in this case, and not known who/where to ask or even research. cause it is not intersex's people's job to educate me, but idk where else to. so is an answer or even a place to look for one, i'd appreciate it.

i've recently been familiarizing myself with the complexity and issues with ASAB language and am trying to work on not using it/being intentional with my language. it's late for me, so this was probably not as succinctly put as it could be. in this case, it was mostly used as an example/us actively talking about ASAB language. but that being said, if there are better ways I can put things/better words and language to use in the future, please let me know.

[autogynophelia]

I think you are seriously overcomplicating this issue. In trans and non-binary spaces, being "AFAB" grants you privileges that those who are "AMAB" cannot access. Why would someone reveal something that grants them privileges over other people? It's a question that answers itself.

I know the vast majority of "AFAB" non-binary people are not consciously aware that this is what they are doing, but I can tell you that the vast majority of "AMAB" non-binary people are very aware of it. It is like this with all forms of oppression, the victims of the oppression are aware of it while the beneficiaries of the oppression don't even notice it exists. As you say yourself, women grow up being well aware of misogyny and how it positions them socially, men grow up not needing to be aware of it at all. It's like a force of nature to them, they don't need to think about it.

When I was younger, it was very common for women on internet forums to hide their gender, while men had no need to do so and would openly talk about being men - the women did this because they knew that revealing their womanhood would result in oppression at the hands of the men on the forum, and they were better off being vague about gender when possible. Being transfeminine in a non-binary space is exactly analogous to this - if you reveal that you are transfeminine the way people interact with you markedly changes, you get increasingly sexually objectified and the things you say are taken less seriously, if you complain about some microagression you will be accused of being unreasonable and "crazy". It is misogyny plain and simple.

I do have to push back on a few of the things you said. The idea that the non-binary community is a place free of gender roles is nice dream but it's not the reality. I can tell you right now that if I (transfem non-binary) am hanging out with my transmasc non-binary friends at the community centre for example, it is me who will be washing up the plates, cups etc we used for tea/coffee/cake, it is me who will be remembering to bring food in the first place, it is me who will be reminding everyone about the meetup in case they forget, not because I want to do any of this particularly, but because if I don't do it no one else will, and if it doesn't get done the blame will rest far more on me than on the others. That's the very definition of "feminised labour", and in trans and non-binary circles the feminised labour is generally done by transfems (obviously).

Also the idea of "gendered socialisation" is kind-of an odd one to bring up in the context of a group of people for whom that socialisation was by definition unsuccessful. Gendered socialisation in my case means just this: if I had been a "proper man" I would've been socially rewarded, but I wasn't a "proper man" so I wasn't rewarded. Does it make sense to refer to me by saying that if my personality had been different I would've had a higher social status? What does that have to do with anything? The very fact that I am not a man makes "gendered socialisation" a meaningless way of thinking about things. Yet gendered socialisation is referenced constantly in non-binary and trans spaces for a quite different reason: it's because if for once I don't wash up the cups and plates and ask one of my transmasc friends do it, someone will make a joke about how a "male-socialised" person (me) is making a "female-socialized" person (my friend) do the washing up. Gendered socialisation is not a useful way of thinking about trans and non-binary experiences, but talking about it is a way of forcing transfems to do the feminised labour of a group or else be misgendered and cast as abusive. Obviously transmascs who do this are often not aware that they are weaponising misogyny to force transfems to do labour, but neither are cis men misogynists when they weaponise misogyny to force cis women to do labour. You don't need to know you are doing oppression in order to do it.

Finally I'd say there is no resemblance between gay people coming out and "AFAB" non-binary people revealing their ASAB. Non-binary people come out when they come out as non-binary, that is when the oppression happens, that's when people bring out the enbyphobia, say stuff about "there are just two genders" etc etc. In contrast, revealing that you are "AFAB" in a non-binary space is actually more akin to coming out as straight: it's what most people assumed about you anyway, and it results in *better* treatment in the community, not worse. They are hardly saying "I had a different experience" to a group that is dominated by people with the same experience as them. You yourself mention there's an issue with "AFAB" non-binary voices being privileged over "AMAB" non-binary ones, this is what that privilege looks like.

[autogynophelia]

The thing about "we're all equally oppressed"/"we're all equally affected by transmisogyny" is that, if you think that, you're probably working off an inadequate theory of oppression. Theories like "transmisogyny" are not divine scripture or anything, they are invented by people to try to explain what they observe about the real world, the theory comes after the reality.

First, we observe that there is such a thing as gender hierarchy that, all else being equal, places trans women right at the bottom and cis men right at the top. We observe this via gender pay gap statistics, IPV statistics, hospital admission data, etc etc. Then we come up with a theory to explain it, and if the theory explains it we can adopt that theory until more data comes along to contradict it.

So if you are using a theory of oppression that seems to imply that trans women are not uniquely at the bottom of the gender hierarchy, all you are doing is pointing out that that theory (or your interpretation of it) is wrong.

Saying "transmisogyny is defined as [xyz] therefore we're all equally affected by it/we're all equally oppressed" is doing everything backwards. You can check for yourself if "we're all equally oppressed" is true, you don't need a theory for that! And it's not true! We're not all equally oppressed! You can't prove things about oppression by deriving them from a theory, the theory is just a description of a reality that already independently exists.

Gender is a sport we play without having access to the rulebook. Theory is our attempt to reverse-engineer what the rulebook probably says, based on careful observation of how the game is actually played and refereed. There is no point appealing to our reverse-engineered pseudo-rulebook to show that some manoeuvre A and some other manoeuvre B are penalised equally harshly. Our pseudo-rulebook might be wrong, or you might be reading it wrong, but in any case it is not the actual rulebook! You can literally just watch the game and you'll see people keep getting yellow cards/warnings for A and red cards/ejections for B.

[autogynophelia]

A lot of G*nd*r Cr*t*c*ls like to say, "I don't iDeNtIfY as a woman, I simply observe that I am one," and great, yeah, me too! I'm not sure I have a gender identity as such, and even if I do have one it feels more like an approximation to inadequately describe a whole cluster of traits.

What I do have, though, is a social class that I am placed into whether I want to be or not, and that social class is "woman". It is not a choice I am making, it's a choice society has made about me.

My two closest friends are cis women. When we are hanging out together, it's me who cooks and me who does the dishes afterwards, it's me who remembers birthdays and me who keeps track of the time to make sure we're not late for whatever we've got planned. And not because I want to be doing these things, but rather because over the decades we've known eachother, we've got into this pattern of labour and labour expectations, so that if this labour doesn't get done there is an unspoken sense that it is somehow my fault.

And even though everyone involved is a woman in one way or another, it is me that most occupies the social role of "woman" while we are together, and it was like this even when I considered myself to be a man. And it's like this in almost every group I'm in, and even more obviously on those rare occasions I'm in a group of men.

Yes, "woman" can be a gender identity, but it can also be a social class that is imposed on you whether you want it or not. I've been "simply observing" that I am a woman every time a man speaks over me or steals my ideas at work, every time a doctor rolls their eyes at me for hypochondria because I've booked three appointments within a single calendar year, every time I've been paid less than a man for the same work, and every time a man has presumed my sexual availability to him.

You know, I would actually like to fully embody being a perfectly androgynous mysterious non-binary genderfuck creature who defies gendered expectations, but in this society I don't get to be that, because I would be a genderfuck creature who is still expected to do the dishes.

[autogynophelia]

There's this phrase beloved of the British media, "white working class". It is supposed to refer a specifically neglected group of the population whose views are routinely ignored and whose needs are consistently unmet. There's a tradition of journalists going to towns in northern England to interview "white working class" people to find out what such "real people" think about immigration, environmental protections, trans rights, calls for slavery reparations, and other hot-button issues, and the predictably horrific takes these people have are framed as the final word on these subjects, due to the supposed authenticity of the "white working class" people who hold them.

It is obviously a wildly untrue, totally racist and fascist project to frame a group of explicitly white people in a white-supremacist country as being particularly neglected by an establishment that supposedly favours their non-white counterparts. The idea that the children of Caribbean or Bangladeshi immigrants, for instance (people who moved to Britain precisely because of the vast difference in quality of life that was artificially created by the extractive British Empire ruining the countries from which they came), are somehow privileged over white British people is totally absurd.

On top of that is the fact that the "white working class" are pretty much always imagined as specifically English, perhaps because journalists are aware that a "white working class" person in Wales or Scotland might have views that don't quite fit the mould. And then there's Ireland: it is utterly trivial to find someone in County Antrim, for instance, who holds views more right-wing than anything you've ever heard in your life (an artefact of the settler-colonial mindset that persists centuries after that colonisation), but Northern Irish voices seem to be considered somehow foreign from the PoV of the British media. Plus the "white working class" are not allowed to be Polish, Romanian, or other nationalities of white British residents, because it seems you must be a citizen to have a space in the class system, a total joke in a country with such a sizeable immigrant worker population.

Then even within northern England, there are specific towns from which "white working class" people are not allowed to come. Some cities like Bradford or Sheffield are off-limits by virtue of not being white enough; others, like Manchester or Liverpool, are too metropolitan, too young, too vibrant; others, like York or Durham, have too many tourists and students. Once you cross off all the "inauthentic" places, you are left with a handful like Macclesfield, Doncaster, or Barrow, whose populations are sufficiently white and old to have the views you desire.

But on top of all that is the issue of "working class". You have to ask, if you stop people for an interview on the high street of a northern English town at 10am on a weekday, what kind of people do you expect to find? It's not going to be domestic cleaners, it's not going to be Amazon warehouse workers, it's not going to be supermarket checkout workers, it's going to be retired people, over-65s typically, who often live off their private pensions. Which is to say, the "white working class" are typically people who don't work at all.

For example, my wife's grandfather is 79, white, lives in a northern English town, and is likely to be the kind of person stopped by the journalists for an interview. He would call himself proudly "working class", and most people would probably agree. He owns a 5 bedroom detached house in rich part of town, has three cars, goes on 4 foreign holidays per year to places like Vietnam and Peru. He hasn't worked since he was 57, and his very high income comes from the fact that he saved 10% of his salary during his working life, invested it in stocks, and is now living off the dividends and growth in those stocks. Which is to say, he used to sell his labour to survive, but he now survives by owning portions of companies and living off the labour of others which produces profits and growth for those companies. He has moved from "worker" to "business owner", and through the miracle of the capitalism doesn't even have to administer the businesses he owns. He lives a life that, a few centuries ago, even a Duke would envy.

And yet, the idea that he is somehow "working class" is one that the large majority of British people would agree with. People would point to the fact that his parents didn't attend university, that he was not privately educated, that he reads "working class newspapers" like the Daily Mail, that he watches football, that he drinks beer rather than wine. And they would ignore that he is very rich, has domestic servants to do his gardening, cleaning, and ironing, and that he doesn't even work himself!

In Britain, your class (as generally understood) is composed of two things: your parents' class, and your aesthetic tastes. But also you can only move upwards. If you live in a Georgian house in North London, drink wine and read literary fiction, you are middle class no matter whether your parents were factory workers or landlords. If you live in your car and work 12 hour shifts at the Amazon warehouse to afford enough food to survive, but your parents were doctors who sent you to private school, you are still middle class, just a middle class failure.

Which is to say, class in Britain is totally disconnected from your relationship to capital. The "white working class" who are interviewed by journalists are pretty much always wealthier than average and living off their investments, i.e. the labour of others. It's pretty striking to realise that "working class" is totally unrelated to "working".

This is not to say that wealthy 79-year-olds should be working, only that we need to be honest about their class status. British society has been set up in a way that virtually guarantees that, as you age, your class interests gradually shift from "working class" to "business owner". A 25-year-old Amazon warehouse worker is personally invested in legislation about safer working conditions or limits on shift length; a 45-year-old Amazon warehouse manager has some interest in those things, but increasingly is also interested in their sizeable chunk of Amazon stock increasing in value; a 75-year-old retiree has no personal interest in working conditions and is entirely invested in their Amazon stock continuing to grow. Retired people with private incomes, no matter what jobs they did in their youth, have class interests that align with other wealthy people: to call them "working class" is absurd.

There is a parallel here (as always) to transfemininity. Specifically in the sense that the class that society will admit that you have is very different to the class that you actually embody. Trans women occupy a social role similar to the homeless Amazon warehouse worker whose parents were doctors. The supposed privileges of your youth are used to deny you the right to name your relationship to capital as "working class"/your relationship to sex-gender as "woman", even though the reality of your lived experience places you right at the bottom of the class/gender ladder, even far below those who are allowed to be "working class"/"women".

Both economic class and sex-gender class have two meanings: a nominal one that describes only how society expects or wants the world to work, and a material one that describes how it actually works. The misalignment between the two allows for privileged people (like my wife's grandfather) to be widely understood as underprivileged, or for severely underprivileged people (like trans women) to be unable to access what little support there is for the underprivileged on the basis of their alleged privilege. Both in the case of journalists spouting "white working class" nonsense, or social attitudes to trans women, I can't help but feel that this misalignment is precisely the point.

[autogynophelia]

I think it makes to sense to consider the term "AMAB" to be a transmisogynistic slur at this point.

It is a term that is pretty much always used with transfems in mind. Even though 99% of "AMAB" people are cis men and 100% of cis men were "AMAB", the term does not convey "cis men plus some other tiny groups included on a technicality", but rather specifically focuses your attention on the alleged similarities between cis men and transfems.

For instance, a phrase like "men's attitudes towards women" hints that men are generally misogynistic, whereas "AMAB attitudes towards women" suggests that transfems specifically are no different from cis men in their misogyny. The act of co-categorisation is in itself a political position.

I am only comfortable hearing "AMAB" from other transfems, and even then only if I trust that they understand it in the same way I do. Hearing it from anyone else is like a disorienting jolt or a slap in the face, barely different from the T-slur.

[brave-enchanter-1203]

i think theyfab is closer to a slur than amab but transfeminists use it often. (for reference i think both are bad)

[autogynophelia]

I mean, I don't say that word personally, but I don't think it's comparable because transfems saying that are punching up, but people using "AMAB" to refer to transfems are punching down. There is such a thing as a gender hierarchy, and transfems are right at the bottom.

In addition, that word is not used to refer to they/them users who were "AFAB" in general, it's specifically a reference to a type of non-binary person with whom we are all familiar, who weaponises their AGAB because (whether consciously or subconsciously) they know it confers privileges in queer spaces.

Transfeminists who use that word are criticising the fact that these people implicitly misgender themselves in order to reap the social rewards that come from doing so, something that transfem non-binary people are simply unable to do.

[autogynophelia]

There's so much asymmetry between transmasc and transfem experiences, but one that always stands out to me is how common it is for early-transition trans men to appear to be reluctant to be considered fully men by wider society. I've recently had a trans man friend (a really great guy usually) complain that he is unfairly considered "not fully a man" by the cis men at our climbing gym, then a few minutes later declare that trans men are not a threat to women because they're "not men in the way that cis men are". Is he really expecting the cis guys to be less transphobic towards him than he is himself?

The most absurd example I've seen of this is in the coining of the term "malgendering", where the example is used of the Ukrainian military insisting that both trans women and trans men count as "men" for the purposes of the draft. I find the idea that this gender validation constitutes a kind of specific oppression of trans men hard to understand: I can only speak for myself, but if the women in my country were all expected to undergo some horrible experience I would not want to be exempted from it on the grounds of my birth sex, I would expect to suffer alongside them, it's called solidarity! Also how is your first instinct on seeing that that it is trans men rather than trans women who are the victims of the greater injustice?

There is a meme about certain trans men that they don't believe transition does anything, that they regard themselves as a type of woman who is called a "man", rather than actually a man. This is has a kind-of parallel in transfemininity in the internally-transphobic trans girls that are quite common on places like 4tran, who hyperbolically regard any transition that starts after the age of 16 as doomed. But I don't think these are fully mirrors of each other, because the hypothetical internally-transphobic trans girl regards a "passing" transition as something desirable but available only to the young or rich, the trans men I'm talking about seem to regard a "passing" transition as a genuine impossibility for everyone ever (even while so many of their trans male peers are living happy, often stealth, lives as men). It's less doomerism and more unfounded bioessentialism.

I think this comes back to the issue of asymmetry. A lot of trans men initially come out as men only to find that society merely shifts from viewing them as "weird girl" to "deluded girl", the misogyny doesn't stop, it just gets combined with an increase in transphobia. Meanwhile, for a lot of trans women, their coming out experience is the sudden transition from "weird boy" to "T-slur", there's a massive and immediate change in life experience that comes after asserting "I am a woman" that doesn't really have a transmasculine parallel. The joke slogan "trans 👏 people 👏 are 👏 women" has a grain of truth in the sense of how wider society views early-transition trans people, irrespective of transition direction. For transfems, the mere act of coming out (even if you don't transition medically) massively changes your social positioning in a way that doesn't really happen in reverse.

I think a lot of the reluctance of early-transition trans men to consider themselves fully men is simply down to a material assessment of how wider society views and treats them. It's no surprise that trans men who are far into medical transition tend to be much more willing to regard themselves as fully men, since at this point many others are treating them that way too. The difference with transfems is that we are treated as particularly marginalised women immediately on coming out, and (depending on how the closet went for us) often even well before that, maybe for our entire lives.

There's a similarity to the "double-empathy problem" in which autistic and allistic people struggle to understand whichever experience they haven't had themselves. Growing up as a closeted trans girl, the way I interacted with the closet was to ignore the heavy social pressure to perform "manhood" and just be myself, resulting in me facing a whole lot of misogyny from basically the moment I could talk. I used to think the closeted trans boy equivalent of me was undergoing an opposite experience at the same time, one of actually being treated like a boy to some extent, but in fact he was just also facing a whole lot of misogyny too. We were both treated like girls, although the only one of us allowed to name ourselves as "girl" was the one who didn't want that in the first place. That's not to say our experiences were the same: the transmisogynised occupy a much lower social position. Only that the attachment a lot of early-transition trans men seem to feel towards womanhood is understandable given that they still occupy a misogynised social position.

I think understanding this asymmetry is key to understanding trans experiences generally. I only wish that the sizeable chunk of early-transition trans men and other transmascs who recognise their misogynised social role were more aware that their transfem equivalents do not have the inverse experience. We are not treated like men in the same way that they are often treated like women. The totally reasonable transfem resentment at being excluded from support for the misogynised is not based on some putative wish-fulfillment desire to be misogynised rather than seen as men, but merely a reflection of the reality that we are actually heavily misogynised from (at the very latest) the moment we come out. That experience doesn't have an equivalent for you, but that's the reality of living in a patriarchal system.

[autogynophelia]

Today I went to Trans Pride in London. I wanted to go with just one or two friends because I'm really burnt out from organising atm. But I knew several trans people who wanted to go but had no one to go with, so I ended up organising a (mainly transmasc) group anyway because no one else was going to do it and I didn't want them to miss out. I had an OK time, but 90% of my energy was spent on making sure everyone else was having a good time, which is exactly what I'm burnt out from, so that was frustrating.

On the way there, one of my transmasc friends asked if I was coming climbing tomorrow. I didn't know what they were talking about, so I asked and it turned out that another transmasc mutual friend had organised a climbing session for a small group of us who used to climb together last year. Except they hadn't bothered messaging me about it because apparently they thought I would find out through other people so there was no need to contact me directly. They even explicitly mentioned that I might be coming to others, they just never told me.

This mutual friend is someone who I went really out of my way last year to incorporate into our pre-existing small climbing group. I knew that they were new in town, unemployed and lonely so I made a point of deliberately inviting them to join us and even rearranged the times of our regular climbing sessions to suit them better. They moved away a few months ago, but they've come back for a week and organised this meetup, only without messaging me.

The clincher is that everyone in the small climbing group apart from me is a cis woman or transmasc. This is a group I went out of my way to create to help specific people feel included. And the twist is how easily it lapses into an effectively AFAB-only climbing group just through these little accidents and oversights that I would never dream of doing in reverse. And that me trying to explaining how the fact that it is coincidentally the one transfem who is mysteriously "unintentionally" sidelined, is so easily brushed off by others as an overreaction by me to an accidental oversight.

I am so so tired of being the one person who goes out of my way to give a damn, to care about others' wellbeing, only to never get any of that in return because I am mentally categorised by others as something less than a full person. It is always weird to be in a group of people who, deep down, almost certainly believe that they have a more innate connection to womanhood and misogyny than me, while I'm the one actually doing the feminised labour of caring for them. And that I, like the trope of the overworked mother who is "accidentally" left out of a family activity that her husband and kids are off enjoying, can't complain about it without seeming like a petty harridan.

[autogynophelia]

Update to this post: the morning after, I got a text from one of the transmasc attendees at the Trans Pride group I organised accusing me of ableism and hypocrisy (since I have criticised ableism in the past, and there's one trans man in our social circle I specifically criticised for deliberately excluding disabled people from his events). The evidence was a comment I made about how difficult the London Underground is as a wheelchair user. This he decided to interpret as a comment about how annoying wheelchair users are to cater for. He is not a wheelchair user himself, to be clear. Although both I and my wife have been at times and I am well aware of the issues from both the PoV of a user and a carer.

For context, one of the people who I organised the trip for is a wheelchair user. He had expressed sadness about how inaccessible London is for him because of the transport system, and so he never got to go to Trans Pride. I said I would make it possible for him this year. I made a full plan and itinerary of how we would cover the various parts of the journey, taking into account which forms of transport don't require ramps (parts of the Elizabeth line and Jubilee line mainly) and which parts require ramps but where we can phone ahead to the station to make sure they are aware we are coming. I posted this in a group with my transmasc friend who read and thumbs-upped it.

In the end, the wheelchair user couldn't make it for different reasons, so we ended up not using that itinerary but a different one I also planned based on minimising steps because of people's tiredness. My comment about the unusability of the underground was a reference to how the route we ended up taking would've been horrific for a wheelchair user: a lot of stairs, dense crowds, it just wouldn't be possible.

I can't help but feel that this transmasc friend has been waiting for an opportunity for me to slip up, even if he has to manufacture it out of nothing. I don't think he's doing it consciously, I think on some level he's frustrated that an uppity woman criticised a man for something and is just exercising his class solidarity to say "see, you're not so perfect yourself". And now my (calm) explanation back to him that he misunderstood my meaning is clearly being interpreted as an inability to take accountability for my sins and an example of my fragility.

Except I can help but notice that out of everyone in our social circle I am literally the only one who did anything to make the wheelchair user able to attend. My transmasc friend could've gone out of his way to do that too, right? Except he didn't bother and so it fell to me as it so often does. Why is it that the one person who goes out of their way to help a disabled person is also the one who gets all the vitriol? It's ok, I know the reason. It's called womanhood.

[deadeyed-dykething]

hey can we listen to some weird jazz way too loud thru kind of tinny speakers while your gloved hands feed me funny things and everything that's not you collapses into a vibraphone solo that gives me dread....

please

since you asked so nicely <3

[autogynophelia]

I was just called a "flat earther" by a "Gender Critical". It's quite funny because I've been thinking about how the study of oppression is often similar to something like astronomy in the sense that the scientist can observe their subject but can't directly affect it.

We can't study misogyny via an experiment where we put one woman in a world with misogyny and another woman in a world with no misogyny and see what happens, we just observe this world and come up with theories to explain it, theories that can be tested when new data comes in.

The "Gender Critical" theory (if it can be called that) is that your birth sex (or chromosomes, or gametes, or intended gametes (???)) determines whether or not you experience misogyny. OK, we can test that quite easily, and it explains misogynistic oppression for well over 90% of the population. Great.

One problem though, there's this specific category of people for whom it doesn't seem to work at all. The data that comes in from our sociological "telescope" is stuff like the gender pay gap statistics, and that tells us that, accounting for other marginalisations like race, sexuality, disability, there's around 1% of people who according to GC theory should be at the top of the pile but are actually right at the bottom.

Their theory cannot explain the observations that we see, so there must be something that their theory is missing. It's just like the Michelson-Morley experiment that disproved the existence of aether or Eddington's observation of light being deflected by the sun's gravity. The old theory cannot explain what we observe, so we need a new one.

We can try out a theory from Julia Serano that says that sexism actually has two forms: one that venerates masculinity and abhors femininity; and another that rewards adherence to the gender expression that society has decided is appropriate for your birth sex, and punishes deviation from that gender expression.

It follows from this theory that someone who was assigned male but has a gender expression that society has decided is "female" will be uniquely hurt by sexism twice over, by virtue of being at the intersection of these two forms of oppression. And that group is also precisely the group at the bottom of the gender pay gap statistics! Awesome, the new theory can explain the observations, so we adopt it going forward.

"Gender Criticals" are like adherents of Newtonian Gravity who not only refuse to accept that it has been experimentally disproved, but also go out of their way to disrupt further observations by smashing all the telescopes sensitive enough to measure the relevant phenomena and use their political power to close down University departments that believe in General Relativity Ideology. And yet they call me a flat earther.

[autogynophelia]

Get called a "guy" repeatedly by a trans man acquaintance.

Get your trans man friend to mention to him in private that it's not OK, because you know he won't listen if you tell him.

He apologises profusely to your trans man friend, but not to you.

Your trans man friend replies "No worries, everyone does it, just bear in mind that some people are really sensitive about this stuff 🙂"

Your trans men friend and trans man acquaintance bond over your sensitivity to being misgendered.

Just be glad that you weren't kicked out of the social group for making a fuss 👍

[autogynophelia]

Three things have happened in my local trans community in the past month:

A transmasc drag queen made a call-out post about how a newly-out local trans woman is a sexual predator. (The sexual offence was that, 6 years ago, before she came out, she was at a drag show with the drag queen (who was her friend at the time) and joked that the drag queen's makeup looked a bit like semen.) The trans woman spiralled, got drunk, got hit by a car, and is currently in hospital.

A newly-out trans woman and a trans man met at a local trans support group. They decided to meet up again at a local pub. She apparently asked questions about his transition that he considered invasive, and in a voice that was too loud and risked outing him to other people in the venue. She now faces being banned from the support group.

The only trans woman who volunteers to run that support group is being kicked off the team by the trans man who is in charge of it. The reason is that she once told the guy in charge to "stop talking" when he was giving her several instructions at once, and also that a different transmasc volunteer has said they find her "creepy" and don't want to be alone with her.

All three trans women are autistic, isolated, and don't have much practice with irl socialising. Maybe they're a little bit loud, maybe a little bit abrasive, maybe they misjudge the appropriateness of sexual comment to a friend at a drag show, maybe they're too keen to make a new friend that they get excitable and speak too loud and ask too many questions, maybe they get overstimulated by being told too many instructions and need you to stop for a second to give them space.

Maybe their behaviour that you consider weird and unsettling is actually a trauma response to a childhood and adolescence of isolation and bullying.

And you know what the funny thing is? I have been sexually harassed at a drag show by the drag queen in (1), who was performing and making sexual jokes about various people in the audience. I have been in a public place with the trans man in (2) while he asked me loud invasive questions about my HRT regimen and about child abuse I suffered. And I have been misgendered and deadnamed repeatedly by the trans man in (3).

And do you know what I did about any of these things? Nothing, beyond saying "Hey, I'd appreciate if you don't do that next time 👍 No hard feelings 🙂". Because, not only am I aware that people make mistakes, and I consider trans men and transmascs a vulnerable demographic and it would be a totally unjust overreaction from me to attempt to socially isolate them for these offences.

But also, I don't have the social power to do anything about these things anyway, even if I wanted to. My normal response to experiencing even serious abuse at a queer event is to simply stop attending it, isolating myself, and perhaps telling a few close friends about it. Because I already know that my complaints will not be taken seriously.

Trans women are being isolated irl every day for behaviours that other demographics can do with impunity. They are not given any grace, any benefit of the doubt, any second chances, and complaints about even the smallest offence will be taken seriously and escalated. And they will not be able to fight back, because a trans woman who fights back is just confirming all the bigoted assumptions that the wider world already has about her.

[autogynophelia]

The main reason it took me a while to come around to transfeminism was that statistic about transmasculine people being much more likely to be victims of sexual assault than transfeminine people, a claim that is apparently backed by multiple independent surveys.

To me, this claim always seemed somewhat surprising and at-odds with everything else I knew about transphobia, but that only suggested that there must be something about transmasculinity that I didn't understand, some specific form of oppression going on that I was unaware of. So I spent a long time listening to people we'd today call "transa***ophobia theorists" to try and get a better understanding of this oppression.

Eventually the irl evidence of my eyes and ears became too strong and I had to look for an explanation beyond "we're all equally oppressed", and I found that explanation in transfeminism, but I still wonder about that specific statistic. What is going on with it?

The study I see cited the most is this one by Abern etc al. It's not really a journal article, it's actually a letter (specifically a Concise Research Report), which is a much shorter publication, albeit still peer-reviewed.

The letter in question is entirely about a single survey with 996 participants with the sole aim of determining what proportion of transmasculine and transfeminine people had experienced sexual assault in their lifetimes.

The exact results are a little tricky to ascertain because, although it's a short letter, they are stated twice and with different percentages each time (seemingly due to confusion over whether to count people who skipped the question altogether), which does not reflect particularly well on the quality of the peer review, I guess. But I think the correct interpretation is that 50% of transmasc respondents had ever been victims of sexual assault, vs 37% of transfems. That is the statistic that stuck in my mind for so long.

Something that's a little odd about this survey is that only 21% of respondents were transfem vs 79% transmasc. That is an unusually stark difference. Does that discrepancy reflect a bias in how the respondents were selected?

The authors themselves admit that the overwhelming whiteness of the respondents reflects some bias in the selection. In fact, the majority of respondents also have private health insurance but also very low income and have graduated school but not college, which suggests to me that a very large portion of survey respondents were current college students, which would also go some way to explaining the lack of transfem respondents (since transfems transition older on average).

It's hard to work out exactly how respondents were recruited. For instance, we are told "social media" was used, but not which forms and in which way. The survey was actually done in 2017-2018, a time when most transfems of my acquaintance predominantly used Twitter and sometimes Reddit (that's just anecdotal ofc). If the study was only shared on Tumblr, for instance, could that explain it? We have no way of knowing.

We also don't know what question specifically was asked. Was it "Have you ever been the victim of a sexual assault?" or was it something that gave examples of the kinds of things that might constitute assault? Could the question have been interpreted as implying (without meaning to) forms of assault where the victim is presumed to have specific anatomy, such that people without that anatomy might answer "No" irrespective of what they had experienced? We don't know the question, so we can't know.

Furthermore, if the question merely asked about sexual assault without defining it, might there be an issue with certain demographics being more or less likely to characterise sexual assaults they had experienced as sexual assaults? I know from my own experience that I have been sexually assaulted many times but it took me a long time to understand that that was the correct term for what I had been through. I think many people have a mental image of what a sexual assault looks like, and if their experience doesn't match that image they may not characterise it as assault, even though it is.

All these things were questions that a good survey designer would hopefully think about before doing the survey, but it seems no one did in this case. But ultimately, it doesn't actually matter, because even if this survey is really flawed, it cites an earlier survey that was much more thorough, so we may as well look at that one instead.

That is the 2015 US Transgender Survey, which had 28,000 respondents, a really good sample size. And we're off to a great start because there's a 43/57 transfem/transmasc split this time, which is much better.

I'll just give a quick run-down of the main points as they relate to trans women's experiences in comparison to trans men (it's much harder to generically compare transfem to transmasc here, because the non-binary category is generally not separated into transition direction, so this is the only realistic way of doing the comparison).

Compared to trans men, trans women...

...start transition about 10 years later on average.

...are more than twice as likely to say other people can tell they are trans most of the time.

...who came out to a partner were twice as likely to be broken-up with over it.

...who have kids were more than 4 times as likely for their kids to stop speaking to them because of their transition.

...are more likely to experience family rejection.

...were 3 times as likely to have temporarily "de-transitioned", mainly due to family pressure or harassment.

...who were perceived as trans at school were twice as likely to be physically attacked.

...who were perceived as trans at school were more than twice as likely to have been sexually assaulted.

...who were perceived as trans at school were more likely to have left school due to harassment.

...who were perceived as trans at school were more than twice as likely to have been expelled.

...were more likely to have left college or vocational school because of harassment.

...were more likely to have lost a job due to gender identity or expression.

...were more likely to have been assaulted at work in the past year due to being trans.

...were more than twice as likely to have done sex work.

...who had an interaction with cops who believed them to be sex workers were more likely to be arrested.

...who had interactions with cops were more likely to be misgendered.

...were more likely to have been made homeless in the past year due to being trans.

...were more likely to have been denied housing in the past year due to being trans.

...were more likely to have been attacked by or forced to engage in sexual activity with cops.

...were more likely to be verbally harassed by strangers.

...were more likely to have been physically attacked by strangers in public.

...were more likely to have had bad experiences on public transport in the past year.

...were more likely to have had a bad experience at a domestic violence shelter in the past year.

...were more likely to have had bad experience with a legal professional.

...were more likely to have been sexually assaulted in a public bathroom.

That is all exactly what I would expect, based on the experiences of the trans people I know. It paints a picture of a world where trans women experience a whole lot more oppression, much of it violent, including sexual assault, at school, by police officers, in public bathrooms, the list goes on.

So what is going on when this survey also states that 51% of trans men have been sexually assaulted, vs 37% of trans women? (Yes, that's basically identical to the other survey) How can that possibly make sense in the context of basically everything else in the survey?

We can't blame the survey itself this time, because we know exactly what question they were asked, and it did detail what kinds of things are considered sexual assault. So, then, what's going on?

This survey essentially states that trans women are more likely to experience sexual assault, but are also less likely to have experienced sexual assault. So that must mean that we have to look at pre-transition experiences for the explanation.

Is it true that closeted trans women are less likely to experience sexual assault than closeted trans men? Maybe. It would've been nice if this survey had established the answer to that question for us. But if so, it would explain at least some of this statistic.

It would imply that a trans woman's risk of experiencing sexual assault jumps up from moderate to very high at the moment she starts her transition. Anecdotally, there is definitely a substantial increase in oppression when you start openly asserting your womanhood, although I and virtually every transfem I know was on the receiving end of sexual violence long before that, there is no doubt that it gets markedly worse.

If this is the explanation, it does rather raise the question of why surveys ask for "lifetime sexual assault" rather than "sexual assault in the past year", for example. I would like to be able to put this down to survey-designer bias, and indeed neither of the co-leads on this survey were transfems, so transmisogynistic bias would hardly be surprising. There were also some parts of the writing that stood out oddly to me:

7% of the "AMAB" respondents were categorised not as trans women or non-binary but as "crossdresser". There is no transmasc equivalent of this for obvious reasons, but this asymmetry is not mentioned by the authors at any point (even though that asymmetry is basically the canonical example of transmisogyny).

There is no acknowledgement of the "non-binary woman" identity that so many transfems have - such people are just classified as "trans woman", which is why the non-binary category is 80% transmasc. This is one classic way in which transfems are denied access to non-binariness.

Quite a lot of the statistics were not broken down by gender, even though it would've been interesting to see, and I suspect would've demonstrated a strong gender gap: things like alcohol and tobacco use, salary, unemployment, whether they had supportive classmates at school.

At one point, the authors make a point of mentioning that, even though trans women make up the majority of trans sex workers, transmasc non-binary sex workers should not be forgotten - that's all well and good, but the chart they use to show this demonstrates that transfem non-binary people are actually more likely to be sex workers than transmascs, and they aren't mentioned at all.

In short, I felt like there was a thread transmisogyny throughout the study. But, even if the co-leads weren't, two of the other authors are trans women, so I'm not sure that argument holds up. Maybe it does, idk. In any case, I am not convinced of it, even if I have an uneasy feeling.

But ultimately the issue is this: the sexual assault question is framed in such a way that it ends up weighting pre-transition experiences very heavily compared to post-transition. This is exactly the trick that transmisogynists like to pull so often, to give the impression of a trans woman as someone unworthy of sympathy due to an alleged earlier life of great privilege, even if she is suffering a lot right now.

The only way I can make sense of this statistic in the context of everything else, is that a closeted transfem is less likely to be sexually assaulted than a closeted transmasc, but after transition it switches and the transfem is much more likely to be sexually assaulted. Does that reflect a particular form of oppression faced by transmascs? It seems an odd way to frame the situation, to say the least.

But also, I think there may be something else going on with the relatively low sexual assault rate for closeted transfems. I have experienced forms of assault as a woman that I instantly recognise as assault, but I remember experiencing exactly the same things when I considered myself to be a man and back then I didn't consider it to be assault.

When you think of yourself as a man, and another man gropes you (for example), it can be really difficult to conceptualise that as "sexual assault", even though it is. And even looking back now, I still find it hard to refer to some of those experiences as sexual assault.

There was a man who sexually assaulted me 20 years ago and I said nothing, and then he did the same things to a cis woman who made a complaint and he rightly got punished for it. If someone had surveyed me after that, I still would've said I had never experienced sexual assault. As a closeted transfem, I was in a position where there clearly was a power dynamic but it was one I couldn't understand, and without understanding it I couldn't put the words "sexual assault" to the actions. Part of being a closeted transfem is being unable to conceptualise your gendered oppression as oppression, because on some level you regard yourself as a gendered oppressor and that can be reflected in the language you use to describe your oppression even long after the fact.

So, perhaps it's true that closeted transfems experience less sexual assault. But equally perhaps it's not, and they just find it harder to refer to it that way. I don't know. But I do know that it's absurd to take a survey that shows over and over again that transfems are right at the bottom of the gender hierarchy, and cherry pick the one statistic that appears to show the opposite.

[autogynophelia]

So a trans guy friend came over to my house for dinner last week. Somehow we got onto the subject of public toilets and bathroom bans, and I made the point that back in 2010-2011, when I co-founded a feminist society/pressure group at University in London, desegregation was basically our main policy position.

And this was not unusual for feminist groups at that time. There was a sense that we were close to the end of a century-long struggle to desegregate society: Universities and most schools were now mixed (my own former school had just become co-ed at this point), youth groups like the Scout Association had recently made it mandatory for all groups to admit girls, there was growing public pressure on men-only spaces like The Garrick Club to admit women, most modern swimming pools had co-ed changing facilities, and gender-neutral bathrooms were starting to become more common.

One of our campaigns was to make all bathrooms in the Students' Union building gender neutral. In the end this failed because of pressure from a group of (white, wealthy, English) men in the Conservative society who insisted that sharing bathrooms with women violated their devout Christian beliefs - they weren't even Christian actually but they managed to spook the lawyers enough in light of the recent Equality Act.

We also frequently discussed desegregating sports - it was widely understood by our (pretty much entirely cis women) members that sex-segregation was a misogynist project that resulted principally in women being paid less. The long mission to get equal prize money at Wimbledon had been won only a few years earlier, and there was pressure on other sports to follow suit. Now we were discussing introducing mixed-gender University sports teams to play competitively.

Bear in mind that the issue of trans women basically never came up in these discussions (mainly due to ignorance: the only reference to trans women I had ever encountered at this point was Ace Ventura). It was principally a matter of desegregation as a moral position that positioned the logic of segregation as part of the systemic oppression of women. The fact that it was right-wing men who were the ones objecting to desegregated toilets (something that has been true throughout the history of toilet segregation) just solidified this point.

Anyway, I gave all this as context to my trans guy friend to explain why I felt frustrated at recent attempts to paint bathroom bans as a win for feminism. That it's depressing to see the feminist activism of 15 years ago sacrificed on the altar of transmisogyny.

This guy has been medically transitioning for a little over a year, and has been discovering feminism in that time too. He recently learned about things like the gender pay gap, and will try to explain it to me like he thinks it's news to me. The gendered nature of domestic abuse is also a favourite topic of his. Before he transitioned, back when he referred to himself as a woman, he tended to take a more liberal normie "men and women are equally oppressed by gender expectations, just let everyone do what they want" line, but tbf we didn't talk about feminism much back then anyway.

The combination of being an early-transition trans guy who is also learning baby's first feminism can be a really dangerous one. He is only now discovering how much he has suffered at the hands of this form of oppression called "misogyny", but at the same time he is a man. He is reading all this literature that positions "men" as the oppressor but also positions people like himself as the oppressed. The easiest way for him to resolve this conflict is to mentally transpose "men" with "AMABs" and "women" with "AFABs", even if he's not aware that's what's happening in his brain.

So in response to my frustration with bathroom bans he starts saying all this stuff about women's reasonable concerns about male violence, how it's difficult to balance the various needs of different groups, how trans men are "obviously" not a threat to women so they should clearly be allowed to use women's toilets. He views the existence of trans women as a spanner in the works of an otherwise rational system with cis men on one side and AFABs on the other.

I try to point out that toilet segregation is actually a real concrete problem for me, the flesh-and-blood person in front of him who he has been friends with for years. That I am risking violence no matter which toilet I use, no matter what clothes I'm in, no matter whether I'm wearing make-up or not. If I use the women's I will get harassed for sure. If I use the men's I have a high chance of being assaulted. His only response is that he also is nervous about using the women's because after a year on T he already passes for cis in nearly all situations. The idea that he should just use the men's since he's a man who looks like a man gets a blank look from him: why should he not be able to use the women's, he's experienced "AFAB oppression" too, hasn't he?

By this point I'm getting quite frustrated. We're talking about feminism as a leftwing movement and I bring up the kind of socialist guy we all know well who says stuff like "misogyny isn't really a priority for me". He hasn't really been listening but he hears me quote this hypothetical man and assumes I'm saying it in earnest. "Did you say misogyny isnt a priority for you?"

Suddenly I, the woman who has been involved in feminist activism for 15 years, am having to defend myself against accusations of misogynist bigotry from a man who discovered feminism a year ago because he decided to not bother listening to what a woman was saying until it was something that sounded incriminating as a soundbite.

At this point I sigh and put my head on the table, exhausted of trying to explain this to him. Later he messages to say that the way I behaved made him feel really shit about himself, like sighing is the rudest thing he's ever heard. I apologise for sighing and go and wash up the dishes from the meal I cooked for him. He goes home and thinks about his innate connection to womanhood.

[adelaidethekitusne]

Reblog to make prev tease their tits and get them hornier~

[pinkofatom]

Mmmmmm~

Couldn't resist~

But then...

No resistance left~

[ballerinabimbobambi]

No need for thoughts

[mousidy]

to those of you who need to hear this: there are absolutely surgeries that give you both a penis and vagina at the same time, they're called salmacian surgeries! look them up!

[mousidy]

I told someone these existed and they told me that was exactly what they wanted, but they'd been afraid to look it up for fear of how devastating it would be to find out there's no such thing. well there is! which means we need to start handing out flyers and running ads

[mousidy]

there's also nullification surgery if you want Nothing

[hyenagirlpenis]

broken attachment styles are so cute. awww, you have no idea how to relate to others, form healthy boundaries, or navigate intimacy? poor thing, let me take care of you. yes, I know that will make you panic. it's okay, it's for your own good! now keep struggling.

[hyenagirlpenis]

of course it all feels bad! it's scary when I refuse to leave you alone and when I'm gone for any amount of time. nothing feels right: sweet and nurturing, scary and violent, distant and cold. that's the best part! you'll never like it, no matter what, until maybe you're lucky enough for your sense of self to erode completely. and then you'll be the ideal toy, a shell controlled by conditioning and startle reflex.

[hyenagirlpenis]

now, now, of course I understand real love! why else would I be doing this to you? *takes your hand while maintaining continuous eye contact despite your obvious discomfort* :) *holds your hand so tight that you can't pull away as your unease slowly but surely blossoms into panic*

see? you're a natural! 🥰❤️‍🩹