loutrace @loutrace - Tumblr Blog

Transfems read this thread

Biological anthropologist here: TERFs are dead wrong about estrogen/testosterone not changing the skeleton. They do so much to the skeleton we had to completely reassess one of the ways we estimate the biological sex of skeletons.

So, before the advent of cross-sex hormone therapy, one of the surefire ways to ID a biologically female skeleton of a person who had borne children (this is important) was by looking for pits of parturition. These form when the estrogen surge during late pregnancy tells your pelvic ligaments to loosen up in order to fit the baby’s massive head through the birth canal. Your pelvis starts to s There’s hypothetically only one normally occurring biological reason for a body to give that signal, and since you have to be nominally XX (or some variant of that where you can still carry a pregnancy to term), it was a pretty solid shorthand for sex!

Until we started looking for these things outside of female skeletons, and surprise! “Male” skeletons can have them too! Sometimes these are chromosomal variants, sometimes they’re men with a high estrogen or estrogen-esque hormonal component, and in the modern era? Sometimes these are trans women whose skeletons have undergone hormonal changes due to taking estrogen.

And then there’s testosterone. You know what that does, right. It makes it easier to build muscle. But what THAT does is put new and interesting stresses and pressures on the bones, making them more rugged and in line with the skeletal structure we see in people who have had high testosterone their entire lives. We don’t just see this in trans men- we see this in older cis women too. Once your estrogen production tanks after menopause, we see what we call masculinization of the face, where the features get more rugged and robust as tissue production changes. These changes don’t happen overnight, and we don’t have good data (yet) but my guess is that when we start looking at the skeletal remains of trans men who took T throughout their adult lives, their skulls are gonna look pretty damn masculine.

Now, hormone therapy isn’t going to change every aspect of your skeleton. Estrogen in particular doesn’t do too much to the cranial bones. Your skeletal height and limb length are unlikely to change. Things like the size and shape of the pelvic inlet, the sciatic notch, and other features that are used in sex estimation, are also unlikely to change. Professional anthropological sex estimation is a complex calculus where you look at many, many features of the skeleton to make the best possible estimation of what sex the person was. It has nothing to do with gender or gender presentation. It simply tells us the end result of your hormonal composition during life. So long as you’re taking hormones regularly for a while and giving your body a chance to change and grow, your skeleton WILL undergo changes based on your hormone levels.

kyidyl

Hey, one anth to another: I'd love to read some of this literature, do you have any reccs? Cause I always figured that hormones would change things like bone density and possibly some of the shape, but after fusing and ossification they cant change things like the sciatic notch and the bowl shape of the pelvis and whatnot. Because I know that in grad school we did learn about the pits of partirition but as like an outdated thing that isn't very useful for sex ID anymore (if anyone's wondering, these are the source of that "pregnancy leaves notches on your pelvis" post that was going around tumblr a few years back. It isn't true.). Tho I'd love to see a study on the hands thing the op mentioned. Like I know a lot about the skeleton at this point and I'd love to know how that happened. Was it remodeling? Did the hormones somehow "reactivate" the ephyphesys? Change the bone ossification? Or was it all soft tissue? Because we do know that males and females have different proportions to their fingers vs palms (that's how the handprint paintings in caves were IDd as done by women.), but is it bone or soft tissue? Idk man it's just really interesting.

kaijutegu

Yeah! Fair warning, a lot of these papers use terms that the trans community no longer sees as appropriate. The language standards that the medical community uses are not the same as the trans community at large (I’m sure any trans person can tell you that!) so you’ll see terms like “transsexual” a lot.

The TL:DR from all of this: there is good evidence for skeletal changes during adult-initiated HRT. We know that these changes occur, but there isn’t a whole lot of literature about exactly what occurs. Many of these changes are minute and you may not see them in a living trans human, but are more discernible in a skeleton. We need to study this more.

Introductory Stuff

A nice Sapiens article proposing how to improve trans visibility within bioarchaeology/forensics: https://www.sapiens.org/biology/transgender-intersex-forensic-anthropology/

Why it’s important to be able to talk about the bodily changes trans people go through as an anthropologist: https://journals.upress.ufl.edu/fa/article/view/1409

Studies of skeletal development in trans people taking hormones

Bone health as a part of trans healthcare: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S8756328208007722?casa_token=Q0yyPHewOLIAAAAA:f6VKhwq1uVylVHkVZtAX6c-t3WADx8aaymmIWtiUeci1dqVuYAMH9OXn2ofmm4T1thKw5dkutuw

Hormones and bone density: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1046/j.1365-2265.1998.00396.x?casa_token=o2l0Y9Nt4qoAAAAA:tO3_aIeM4RqBE0xyNpC8Ns8d7vipYNFzsdMdaX5ZcodO9JShKdEkh-Vw-66FKJAW13bDG2pCCKKUYeyc

Interesting paper on pelvic morphology changes: https://asbmr.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/jbmr.4262

(this one’s about people who started HRT before 18, but it’s still a really interesting read even if it isn’t directly applicable to OP’s situation since they transitioned as an adult)

10 year bone health study in transgender individuals: https://asbmr.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/jbmr.3612

Not hormones, but stuff on how FFS affects skeletal remains: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32200173/

Ok, so we’ve identified that there ARE bone changes. How does muscle affect bone structure?

Explains the bone/muscle relationship in typical cis men and typical cis women: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3189615/ (Note: by typical, we mean that their hormones are generally within the range that’s expected for their chromosomal composition.)

Comparing trans men on long-term HRT to cis women of the same age and looking at bone mass, body composition, etc: https://academic.oup.com/jcem/article/97/7/2503/2834495

Facial masculinization of the female cranium with age: https://digital.library.txstate.edu/bitstream/handle/10877/5250/NAPARSTEK-THESIS-2014.pdf?sequence=1

Cranial remodeling with age: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/joa.12247

(The aging stuff is important because hormonal composition changes drastically with age and it’s a useful analogue, if not direct analogy.)

Some interesting reads on the relationship between sex hormones and cartilage

Estrogen and osteoarthritis (aka cartilage loss): https://www.mdpi.com/1422-0067/23/5/2767/htm

More sex hormones and osteoarthritis: https://faseb.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1096/fasebj.27.1_supplement.1053.15

Generally speaking, HRT isn’t going to do too much to the cartilage. If you think your nose looks different, it’s probably because you’re seeing it in a new context since the fat deposits on your face rearrange themselves. They’re very close to the surface, after all.

Pelvic Scarring and how it’s not strictly based in pregnancy

Oops we found it in men: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/oa.2887

It’s also found in women who have never given birth: https://digital.library.txstate.edu/bitstream/handle/10877/8481/GALEA-THESIS-2018.pdf?sequence=1

Identifying transgender people within archaeology

https://miami.pure.elsevier.com/en/publications/the-fallacy-of-the-transgender-skeleton (good read on how human sexual dimorphism... isn’t. The spectrum of traits overlaps too much.)

surgery piece: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0379073820300827?casa_token=jy_vbV7_fXkAAAAA:nz2d-xCUT-JoYACam3CDliKmto1UFkB8-ft837QzSpjLZJ0uiH5DHNSH7M_fG_b5XWsln3yZZKk

As for the mechanism, it’s a combination of remodeling and changes in bone density. The bones don’t unfuse, so you’re basically stuck with the same structure, just with different sizes and densities. This is more notable in trans men- they can lose some height from bone density loss if they’re not careful. It’s usually not a lot and isn’t as noticeable in living people as it is in skeletons, because there’s a lot more tissue to you than just bone! It’s the same mechanism that happens in cis women with osteoporosis. Fortunately, most endocrinologists take that into consideration these days.

Right now, most of the research on skeletal changes is focusing on FFS because it’s much more visible and dramatic. There’s a lot of reasons we don’t really understand everything that HRT does to the skeleton- we know a lot of it, but not everything- and how any of it shows up in the archaeological record. One of them is that HRT is relatively new and we don’t have the representation in skeletal collections. Another is that most of our standards are written based on studying white people, and while you can’t truly identify race from a skeleton, you can associate a skeleton with certain genetic groups based on suites of traits. By only including white skeletons in a study, you miss out on a TON of variation.

I know this is a little disjointed, but I think it’ll help as a starting place for people interested in doing more research on the relationship between HRT and the human skeleton and how we can see some of these changes in the archaeological or forensic context!

catboybiologist

Amazing list of resources, and as a biologist in training imma take a dive into these.

But a friendly reminder: the key ingredient of HRT is PATIENCE. I've already read a lot of studies, and most seem inconclusive, but all agree on one thing: time on HRT (with appropriate levels) supercedes the majority of other factors involved with feminization/masculinization. Don't let someone tell you you're "done" at one year, two years, five years.... this is lifelong. Your body will adapt to the hormones it currently has at the age it is. Let it do that, and give it the time to do so.

catboybiologist

Oh wow it was me seeing this thread all along

But uh yeah bump for visibility

fai0

pelvis... rotated?....

traaansfem

We lost 3" of height that way! And yeah, they do that. Changed how we walk. :3

the-haiku-bot

We lost 3" of height

that way! And yeah, they do that.

Changed how we walk. :3

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

assignedmale

creepymutelilbugger

heritageposts

i saw the trailer for the new feel-good “anti-racist” US war movie about the carpet bombing of North Korea and started writing up something for this blog, partially inspired by the absolute shit storm i got for sharing that post i made with pictures of everyday life outside pyongyang

and then i gave up, because what’s the point? westerners can’t even handle a single picture of a north korean not looking miserable without screaming propaganda

meanwhile, there are no stories about the horrors of life in the ‘hermit kingdom’ that are deemed too outlandish to be believable. i can’t remember who said it, but it’s like the entire country has taken up permanent residence in the western imaginary as some silly little cartoon villain, where the leaders of the country does evil things for no discernible reason. they’re just silly and evil like that, and the citizens, of course, are silly, too. silly and brainwashed.

i watched a video recently of a tourists visiting an auto dealership in pyongyang, and the entire time he was just gawking at the employees and costumers, shoving his phone in their face, and confidently explaining to his youtube audience that everyone he’s interacting with are actually actors.

what level of dehumanization do you have to reach for that thought to even cross your mind? to think that the people you see before you are actors? that entire cities and shops are erected with to sole purpose that you, a western, will see them and be impressed?

what frustrates me the most is the casual cruelty that seeps into any mention of north korea, no matter how small. if north koreans are not being evil, they’re being silly.

a north korean newspaper reports that a group of archeologists in pyongyang have discovered an old rock carving with the words ‘unicorn lair’ (mistranslated), and the western press reports that north koreans now believe in unicorns.

a tourist at a hotel in hamhung is told by the receptionist to be careful at the beach: the waves can get high. that day the tourists goes to the beach, and there are no waves. she retells the story to her instagram followers, explaining that the poor woman at the hotel could never have seen real waves before because north koreans are probably never allowed to travel.

she adds a little teary-eyed emoji.

one of the cities i included in the post was sariwon, a densely populated city to the south of pyongyang. below are some pictures from its “folk customs street”, which was built to showcase old korean traditions and customs

here’s all wikipedia has to say about it

Built to display an ideal picture of ancient Korea, it includes buildings in the “historical style” and a collection of ancient Korean cannons. Although it is considered an inaccurate romanticized recreation of an ancient Korean street, it is frequently used as a destination for foreigners on official government tours. Many older style Korean buildings exist in the city.

it’s just north koreans being silly again. there’s no mention of what might motivate them to build a street like that — why the preservation of old customs, culture and architecture might somehow be important for the city

could it perhaps have something to do with how the U.S. air force dropped 635,000 tons of bombs, including 32,557 tons of napalm, over the korean peninsula during the war? the carpet bombings, which are now the topic of an upcoming hollywood movie about overcoming racism through warcrimes, destroyed an estimate of 85% of all buildings in north korea. some cities were entirely wiped off the map.

in sariwon they missed a few buildings, but not many — after an intense firebombing campaign the U.S. military estimated the destruction of sariwon to be at 95%.

none of this is mentioned on the wikipedia page for sariwon.

we destroyed entire cities. memory-holed the entire thing, called it the forgotten war. and now, 70 years later, we’re convincing ourselves that the people living in the ruins are actors.

and somehow the north koreans are the brainwashed ones

heritageposts

reblogging this again because genuinely, if you can exorcise the western demon in your head that dehumanizes north koreans to the point of caricature, and tells you their country is not worthy of self-determination, you will also have discovered the antidote to US propaganda in the process

amphibious-thing

Anyway here is your reminder that poor effeminate men existed in the 18th century and any reading of class that acts as tho every poor man was a hyper masculine rugged labourer and every rich man was a effeminate fop is an inherently flawed reading of class 🙃

asneakyfox

reblogging again for this extremely important point, thanks for putting it so succinctly @carfuckerlynch

officialbabayaga

One of my favorite paintings at the Portland Art Museum. I especially love the work they did showcasing the historical context.

tyrannuspitch

still so fucking weird to go from real life, where a cis man being flamboyant/effeminate/camp is judged like 70+% by how he speaks and carries himself, to online queer communities, which often seem to have no concept of male gender non-conformity that doesn’t involve wearing a skirt

tyrannuspitch

i promise you, a man can be fem to the point of being in danger while wearing literally exactly the same thing as a hypermasculine guy. a boring basic black suit. a t shirt and jeans. a UNIFORM. gender conformity is not only about what you wear

unbidden-yidden-deactivated20240

None of you have watched that heartbreaking scene in The Birdcage where Albert gives up wearing everything he likes to try and blend in for their son’s conservative prospective in-laws and is so awkward and uncomfortable that no one says much until finally he says, defeated, “I know what you’re thinking - dressed like this, I’m even more obvious, aren’t I?” and it shows.

unbidden-yidden-deactivated20240

Here, have your queer heart broken:

This is what I’m talking about. This is still literally how it is in most places in the Midwest if you’re trying to “pass” for straight/cis/whatever.

netherworldpost

I cannot begin to describe how hard I cried when I saw this scene the first time and how confused my conservative family was as to why I was crying.

kinka-juice

It’s so funny how literally the way a man holds his wrists is an indication of femininity but also people think it’s all about makeup and clothing. But we’re also at a point that if you have a suit that is any color other than black, dark grey, or navy, it’s flamboyant.

Men’s sartorial stylings are so rigidly controlled it’s painful. Tim Gunn here is at the very absolute bleeding edge of “acceptably masculine” here for most cishet men, just for some noticible stripes, patterns, and purple, and that’s before he even moves. This is how restricted it is.

But Trixie Mattel (out of drag here) wearing standard masculine garb is could still be deemed unacceptably feminine for body language alone.

flameraven

This is why we talk about “toxic masculinity” – the idea that any expression of emotion besides anger or even wearing colorful clothes is non-masculine and therefore restricted is horrifying. It sucks! Men should be allowed to express themselves outside of a tiny box of acceptable behavior, because they’re, y'know, people, and people have a wide range of expression in the way they like to look and move and act. I honestly feel like it’s gotten worse over the last couple decades, too. If you look at men’s fashions from the 70s and even into the 80s, there’s a lot of style choices that look pretty cringe to us, but…. you also see a lot more color and pattern in suits than you do now. I’m not sure when this started to shift, or if it’s tied in to the increasing lack of color in all consumer products, but it sucks.

gatheringbones

“Let’s pretend, for a moment, that you are a 22-year-old college student in Kampala, Uganda. You’re sitting in class and discreetly scrolling through Facebook on your phone. You see that there has been another mass shooting in America, this time in a place called San Bernardino. You’ve never heard of it. You’ve never been to America. But you’ve certainly heard a lot about gun violence in the U.S. It seems like a new mass shooting happens every week. You wonder if you could go there and get stricter gun legislation passed. You’d be a hero to the American people, a problem-solver, a lifesaver. How hard could it be? Maybe there’s a fellowship for high-minded people like you to go to America after college and train as social entrepreneurs. You could start the nonprofit organization that ends mass shootings, maybe even win a humanitarian award by the time you are 30. Sound hopelessly naïve? Maybe even a little deluded? It is. And yet, it’s not much different from how too many Americans think about social change in the “Global South.” If you asked a 22-year-old American about gun control in this country, she would probably tell you that it’s a lot more complicated than taking some workshops on social entrepreneurship and starting a non-profit. She might tell her counterpart from Kampala about the intractable nature of our legislative branch, the long history of gun culture in this country and its passionate defenders, the complexity of mental illness and its treatment. She would perhaps mention the added complication of agitating for change as an outsider. But if you ask that same 22-year-old American about some of the most pressing problems in a place like Uganda — rural hunger or girl’s secondary education or homophobia — she might see them as solvable. Maybe even easily solvable. I’ve begun to think about this trend as the reductive seduction of other people’s problems. It’s not malicious. In many ways, it’s psychologically defensible; we don’t know what we don’t know. If you’re young, privileged, and interested in creating a life of meaning, of course you’d be attracted to solving problems that seem urgent and readily solvable. Of course you’d want to apply for prestigious fellowships that mark you as an ambitious altruist among your peers. Of course you’d want to fly on planes to exotic locations with, importantly, exotic problems. There is a whole “industry” set up to nurture these desires and delusions — most notably, the 1.5 million nonprofit organizations registered in the U.S., many of them focused on helping people abroad. In other words, the young American ego doesn’t appear in a vacuum. Its hubris is encouraged through job and internship opportunities, conferences galore, and cultural propaganda — encompassed so fully in the patronizing, dangerously simple phrase “save the world.””

—

“The Reductive Seduction of Other People’s Problems” by Courtney Martin

(via

dietcokebisexual

)

Capitalism can’t save the world, but it can simulate the experience and sell it to you.

(via newwavenova)

roycevomit-deactivated20140731

Awhile back I stumbled onto this zine written by a radical butch trans dyke in 1997 and I just managed to find it again!

It was mostly written by a lady named anne tagonist and features her experiences at a woman only anarcha-feminist space, rants on trans monstrosity and an article by another butch trans woman on butchness in relation to transness. Another article touches on classism in trans woman narratives (!!). It also has a thing about a trans punk band named bitch hips and some comix and stuff.

Overall it’s pretty neat and super validating to have a cultural document that asserts we’ve been doing this shit for awhile!

You can download it here

Important note: As this was written 17 years ago, it has a lot of outdated / now offensive language in it.

fedupfestchicago

Check out this fucking awesome old zine from a Chicago punk trans dyke.

femmepathy

https://transreads.org/unapologetic-the-journal-of-irresponsible-gender-1/

thorne1435

(1st off, i am a trans man) personally, it makes me slightly uncomfortable when other trans men center their own experiences. don’t get me wrong, we have a right to talk about our issues, but i can’t help but feel like there’s a victim complex going on when some guys say that TERFs are “just as dangerous” to trans men or that baeddelism is a relevant issue (while brushing the misogyny and toxic masculinity in the ftm community under the rug). the fact that you made a post about trans unity and the first ask you got was about how trans men aren’t supported enough by trans women? but like, is that true? is it not ALSO an issue that trans women aren’t supported enough by trans men?

Okay, I hear you, and I acknowledge that I (unfortunately) have fairly limited experience with trans men but I don't know if I like the idea of discounting what they have to say as "a victim complex."

They just want to be heard. And I think they have a right to be upset, given how little representation trans men are given in media. I never saw any discussions on transmasc issues until I came to Tumblr. Never saw it on YouTube or Reddit. Online leftist circles--and even online trans circles!--don't talk about trans men! So, y'know what? If they're being a little melodramatic about their issues, maybe it'll off-set the lack of any knowledge of their issues in the first place.

And also, I think toxic masculinity and misogyny are sort of part of being a man, right now? Which certainly isn't to say it's inherent to men, but society does encourage it. That's what I think should change about being a man. This goes back to societal misandry, I think. Toxic Masculinity is just a manifestation of societal forces that encourage men to behave in unhuman ways, and I think it would be immature of me to expect trans men to perfectly avoid that, in their pursuit of masculinity.

Gender is a performance. We are all looking for the role that makes us most comfortable, but the baggage attached to the roles isn't something you can side-step so easily. Cis people have an advantage on this front, in that they are capable of proving their masculinity or femininity via means other than pure performance. Society *expects* them to be men or women and that means they can gesticulate towards genitalia whenever they're called into question. (They don't always do that, and it's sort of transphobic when they do, but the ones who are comfortable with themselves might say something like that, all the same)

A trans man will uphold toxic masculinity the same way that a trans woman will submit herself to misogyny: it is in pursuit of the perfect encapsulation of the role. Unless we feel like we adequately perform the role inherently, we are inclined to tolerate--and ergo embody, to an extent--the negativity present in the roles we desire.

I believe that lowering the standards for who can be seen as valid in masculinity will alleviate quite a bit of misogyny, whether that misogyny be among transmascs or cis men. So, in saying that, I hope I also illustrate why I'm quick to jump to their defense while also tacking on my ideas about societal misandry and its toll on men.

On the subject of whether or not transfems actually don't support transmascs...I guess I wouldn't really know. I'm not in trans communities because I don't live in a place where that kind of community could show up. I imagine this problem is being blown out of proportion a little bit, but the ask I think you're talking about did say that it was sort of a Tumblr thing? And internet discourse is just...fuckin...so unbelievably shitty. So I'm not too worried about it.

I mean, I'm not going to immediately assume any transfem I meet is inherently misandristic or otherwise bigoted towards transmascs, but I'm still gonna go to bat for transmascs if they get shit-talked, y'know?

roachliquid

Sorry to jump in after that fabulous reply, but I just need to add that it's not a "victim complex" to say that terves are just as dangerous to trans men as to trans women.

They want to force all trans men to detransition. They want to gaslight and brainwash us into accepting that we're "really" women. They want to force us to identify ourselves by our (alleged) reproductive capabilities, to divest ourselves from acknowledging and appreciating anything positive about manhood and maleness, and swear ourselves to the Holy Order of Womanhood. If we fail to comply, terves like Posey Parker want to force sterilization onto us, just to punish us for the crime of being men.

(We know this because she said as much. Contrary to the popular narrative, terves do in fact talk about trans men and the horrible things they want to do to us. It just gets swept under the rug because people want to maintain the "collateral damage" narrative.)

Some people don't seem to understand how nightmarish this scenario is. Maybe they're having a hard time getting their head around "what's so bad about being a woman anyway". But this isn't a scenario about being a woman. It's a scenario about being forced to act as something you're not, every day, for the rest of your life. Being infantilized and demeaned by your supposed "sisters" for the sake of bringing you in line, forcing you to submit to a worldview that denies your entire identity.

"That's still better than being murdered!" It literally drives people to suicide.

And since terves are just a hairs' breadth away from conservatives, away from literal fucking Nazis, let's take a look at what those groups think women should look like. That's right: submissive breeding stock. No bodily autonomy whatsoever, not even the right to say no to your husband when he gets a twinkle in his eye. A lifetime, on top of everything else I've already described, of being raped and forced to carry and raise your rapist's children.

I cannot emphasize how fucked up it is to look at that situation and say "at least you're not dead though". I'm not saying it's worse than death - frankly, it's apples and oranges - but if you think that this is somehow a "lesser danger", then you aren't paying enough attention.

fite-club

i can’t believe you’re serious. this is literally what i meant when i pointed out this exact victim complex.

“it’s apples and oranges” no it isn’t! it’s apples and apples! we are comparing the same thing! and there is some mental gymnastics required to consider “death or prison” to be just as dangerous as “being misgendered”. it should be OBVIOUS that one of those is more dangerous than the other. it’s not fucked up to say “at least they aren’t killing you”, it’s called checking your privilege.

really, do you HAVE to be the most oppressed? do you HAVE to be the one who suffers the most? why else are you insisting that trans women are not the primary target of TERFs? i never once said that trans men aren’t affected/targeted by TERFs, and i don’t think anyone else really thinks that, either. so why center yourself? why go off on this whole rant, if not to prove somehow that you’re more negatively affected by misogyny?

TERFs want trans men to be women. TERFs want trans women to be buried six feet underground. do you understand that? do you understand how transmisogyny is deadly on a scale that transmascs will never experience?

thorne1435

If being misgendered isn't a big deal, then you're fine detransitioning for the rest of your life, right? If it came to that, it wouldn't bother you? I mean, you seem to imply there's no material harm that comes from it, at any rate.

The pressures that trans men and trans women feel when they are relentlessly and maliciously misgendered result in increased suicidality for both. We know that for a fact. So yes, forcing someone to detransition, wanting trans men to be women, is just as bad as outright trying to kill them, because that's what will happen: people will die.

And this is disregarding where they mentioned the proposed forced sterilization of those trans men who can't be "fixed."

So basically, trans men are suffering from the same kinds of transphobia as trans women, barring exactly one thing, which is that trans men aren't being openly threatened by far-right politicians. But that's just for now. You think they won't come for you next? You think it ends at sterilizations?

We're the same people. We're both degenerate. They'll kill us all. You need to understand that.

fite-club

if being killed isn't a big deal, then you're fine with being killed? you'd rather i come to your house and bash your head in with a crowbar than misgender you?

thorne1435

You want to spin that around on me, but the thing is, I'm not arguing that one side has it worse than the other, so it doesn't make sense when you do it.

Anyway, I've thought about it, and yes. I find getting my head bashed in with a crowbar to be a good alternative. Both to being forced to detransition, and to continuing this argument.

doberbutts

Both of your replies to that person were fantastic and I'll gladly admit the "getting my head bashed in with a crowbar is a good alternative to continuing to talk to you" was exceedingly funny for my sleep-deprived brain to read thank you for always winning.

But I do want to add: it's not that lawmakers aren't talking about trans men. It's that they're not calling us trans men. The lawmakers screeching about mutilating children? Most of them are talking about top surgery for trans mascs. "Irreversible damage"? Trans mascs getting hystos and fearmongering about the effects of testosterone. "Social contagen"? The fear that "girls" will talk to transgender people (and, largely, trans mascs) and decide they "want to be boys" too. It's the fear that we will destroy our precious wombs and remove our precious boobs and no longer be beautiful and fertile women but instead hideous and scarred half-men.

It's not that we're not being openly threatened by the far-right. It's that the far-right considers us only good as breeding stock, and so they only talk about us as breeding stock instead of aggressive threats to be eliminated. Until we look too indistinguishable from cis men, or until we can be reasonably mistaken for trans women, and then we're grouped in as active threats too.

And it's when we stop looking like, sounding like, acting like good breedable women in their eyes, that they do blatantly attack and kill us. The trans man killed recently in a bathroom dispute proves that. The trans man killed recently defending women from assault proves that. The trans men who've come before, reported as and buried as women, prove that. We ARE being openly attacked and killed. We're just not being called trans men when it happens.

And, let's be real, even if lawmakers are pointing to one trans person or another for things, it still affects all of us. Lawmakers banning minors from surgery might be thinking about scarred chests and sterile wombs, but that still affects trans girls who need access to affirming care. Lawmakers handwringing about girl's sports might be thinking about the effects of testosterone on the bone and muscle structure, but that still affects trans boys who neither want to play with the girls nor do they think it's fair while they're on HRT. Lawmakers fussing about bathroom privacy might have a trans woman boogieman in mind, but it didn't stop a middle school principal from demanding to see a trans student's penis before he was allowed into the boy's bathroom. Lawmakers having a fit about trans men "poisoning" the minds of today's youth doesn't stop them from blaming trans women for trans visibility in the abortion debate. Bigots are stupid and bigotry affects us all.

So trans men who are tired of being left out of the debate are going to want space to talk about it. This stuff DOES hurt us. Are some trans guys assholes? Sure! Some trans women are assholes too, trans men aren't special and impervious to assholitry. But does that mean that because SOME members of an oppressed demographic are dickweeds, that suddenly their oppression is... justified? Deserved? Not worth caring about?

spacelazarwolf

i truly cannot imagine having so much extra time paired with so much anger pent up that i have to spend time on the internet arguing about which target of genocide has it worse off. “well they want to murder this group with a gun while they want to murder this group with poison!!!!! i will now argue about which is somehow objectively most painful and therefore the most valid—” SHUT UP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

romantorchdick

The irony of asking "why do you HAVE to be the most oppressed in response to an assertion that neither are the most oppressed like. Really???

#oops weong blog #long post #terf #murder #transphobia #transmisogyny

spacelazarwolf

a lot y’all think it’s Peak Ally to be like “i treat trans men the same way i treat cis men uwu” but that isn’t helpful when u treat cis men like garbage bc u believe all men are biologically evil and don’t deserve basic human decency bc then guess what happens. u treat trans men like we’re evil and don’t deserve basic human decency. which, considering there’s currently a genocide being carried out against trans people (including trans men, bc ik some of y’all need to be reminded of that) in at least one country, maybe that’s like. not great!

spacelazarwolf

like truly some of y’all see the word “men” and don’t even read the rest of the post. the post could say “gay man beaten to death for being gay while attackers screamed homophobic slurs in his face” and u would still be like “maybe men shouldn’t be so violent 💅 #feminism #girlboss #kam”

ardently-queer

This attitude only hurts the men you can reach - marginalised men, who are being oppressed and harmed by the same people as you and should not have to shoulder the burden of your misdirected trauma responses that they aren't fucking responsible for. Your hurt is not their responsibility and shouldn't be their problem when they have their own, usually caused by the same people! Grow the fuck up you shitty little neo-radfems

gaytrashfire

[Disclaimer, I am not a rad fem, just curious]

Is this an attitude that is really affecting people in real life though? I'm seeing a lot of this on my dash, and I completely understand it happening on the internet, but how much of that is filtering into the wider world?

spacelazarwolf

hatred of men and masculinity is inherently tied to the persecution of trans women and femmes (dangerous predatory men in dresses seeking to assault the poor weak women in female only spaces), bipoc (aggressive dangerous men who the poor weak white women must be protected from), disabled men (men are only seen as valuable when they can be producers and providers, and when disabled men can’t do that they’re seen as disposable), jewish men (simultaneously weak mama’s boys who are too feminine to be real men to the point where there is a medieval trope that jewish cis men menstruated, but also evil plotting elites who seek to control gentile men and seduce gentile women into degeneracy — see also the conspiracy theory that jews are responsible for the existence of gay and trans people to “spread degeneracy”). and of course trans men, who are consistently villanized and erased by other queer people, our trauma and the violence against us is ignored because it doesn’t fit people’s gender binary view of the world where Women Are Always Oppressed and Men Are Always Privileged. when trans people who go on testosterone start to look more masculine, we often face transmisogyny as well. many queer resource centers will prioritize “women and femmes” and actively exclude trans men from much needed resources because of the assumption that we are privileged.

and like not to be a dick but i am so so so so tired with people responding to posts like these with “but how does it affect you irl it’s just a problem on the internet” bc the people who are being violently transphobic toward trans men on the internet do in fact exist in real life too, and the way they treat us does carry over into our real lives. so many of us have made posts about how this affects us in real life, and i’m just really tired of having to beg people to believe us when we say this shit is literally getting us hurt and even killed.

dragonsatmidnight

So random thing that has been bothering me.

I found this series, amazing series, love it. Compelling, well written, stunning, amazing. Basically, Tales of the Arabian Nights setting, with a trans young woman as a main character. I don’t want to spoil the plot, if you want to know more of the plot, read Stealing Thunder by Alina Boyden.

There’s a straight up hijra (south Asian community term for trans woman) dynasty. No trans men. No trans masc people. No one nonbinary. But lots of trans women. And that’s fine, I want trans women to have rep. Most of the books I’ve read with trans characters are about teenage trans angst, and I lived through that, I don’t need to read about it.

Not entirely the point. I tried to use duckduckgo to find my way around the internet to find a trans masc equivalent for hijra. There isn’t one. Okay, let me try other cultural identities. There are a lot of cultures who have words for AMAB trans people, but nothing for trans masc people.

The closest I found, which was admittedly a really cool history fact, was Inanna. She was the most venerated Babylonian goddess, with the ability to change people’s gender. Her entire clergy was nonbinary folks, and people who presented as neither male nor female. Her temples are some of the earliest examples we have of cuneiform, or written language. Goes back to about 4000 BCE. Trans people have literally always been here.

But trans men don’t often have words. After thoroughly digging into transgender people in ancient history, I can tell you about hijras in India, kathoeys in Thailand, khanith in Arabia, nádleehi of the Navajo tribe, lhamana of the Zuni tribe, and galli priestesses in Rome, Greece, and Phrygia. All of these groups of people are immediately mentioned on the transgender history wikipedia page, where as trans masculine folks have “been referenced,” in texts.

After more digging, I can tell you that an island that is part of Indonesia, Sulawesi, has five different gender identities, including calalai, which is a term for a trans masculine person.

To be very, very clear on where I’m coming from. I’m glad trans women have words. I’m glad they have communities, and histories, and places they belong. I’m super glad this book exists, and I want to give Stealing Thunder to every single teenage trans girl I can find. Phenomenal book, phenomenal story, and a very rich cultural history. Those are all wonderful things.

My only point in comparing all of these experiences to trans men is because trans masculine history exists. We can find references for it, follow trails of bread crumbs, and sort out the “woman who dressed as a man to get ahead” and “AFAB person who dressed as a man because that’s their identity.” But I want words. I want to go back in time and figure out what words people used to identify, what words people used to find themselves.

And more than that, I’m tired of being a foot note. I’m tired of being “ah yes, you exist sometimes too!” I’m tired of feeling pushed out of my own community. I’m tired of finding these cool, amazing, wonderful books I love to reread and not seeing myself in them. Transgender men have existed throughout time. We’ve contributed to the community, been activists and caretakers and people who stood guard and advocated for safety. We’ve donated to ground breaking research, showed up to protests during the AIDS epidemic, thrown bricks at cops during Stonewall, and have otherwise contributed to and supported queer rights.

If you’re not seeing trans masculine voices, if you don’t see us in the community showing up and helping out, well. Either you’re not looking hard enough, or you’re erasing our contributions.

I refuse to continue to feel shame about the trans masculine people who predated me. I’m done believing the incomplete history I was told, that my people went full stealth, abandoned their community, and acted solely for their own self preservation. I show up when it matters. I know so many trans masculine people who show up when it matters, often thanklessly, often while being silenced on the oppression that they face in their day to day lives.

It is hard, and lonely, and I am feeling the centuries, and millennia, of gaps in my history and existence. I am tired of being erased. If you want to heal masculinity, start with the people who love it despite being punished for expressing it. Listen to trans masculine voices, and include us in the narrative of progress.

redshiftsinger

And also: can we fucking drop the bullshit "oh that's just happening on the internet, it doesn't affect real life" thing already???

The people you see being harassed on the internet are real people, with real lives and real feelings, who can experience real trauma as a result of harassment "just happening on the internet". And that's even when it really IS only happening on the internet.

And as explained above, it isn't actually only happening on the internet.

I can personally think of, off the top of my head, two women I know who have repeatedly and persistently engaged in discriminatory behavior toward men as a whole group. In employment-related contexts. That's men not getting jobs, or not getting proper job training as they're supposed to, because a woman is making her valid trauma that isn't their fault into their problem. I'm not gonna say that's systemic oppression, because it's not, cis women don't have systemic power over cis men. But transness is a separate axis, and trans men often don't get access to all the privilege that cis men typically enjoy. So when women take their unaddressed traumas out on men who haven't done anything to them, that DOES potentially contribute to the systemic oppression of trans people by cis people. It becomes a can't-win situation for a trans man. Either he's misgendered and seen as a woman, which hurts him, or he's treated worse for being a man, which also hurts him. And then to add insult to injury, the same cis women will turn around and tell him off for expressing that it hurts him, because either shouldn't he be glad they're treating him like a man??? or shouldn't he be glad that she's not kicking him out of the Good Person (woman) category???

stfudiscoinfernoed-archive

I hate the tendency to only accept people not wanting to be called queer because of trauma. It is possible to have issues with how the term is used for non-trauma reasons and those issues are not automatically rooted in trans exclusionary radical feminism despite what others might assert.

I don't like the way it is used academically, I don't like how people prescribe certain political beliefs to those who use/don't it (in particular the way people act as if it coincides with progressive politics and yet use it as the default term for the whole community), and I don't like the way that it often operates as form of bi erasure.

None of that makes me a terf and none of that should be dismissed.

butchbyte

Not to mention, nobody should have to disclose their trauma to be respected.

And I certainly wouldn't want to disclose any trauma to a group/person who had just called me a slur without permission and was probably planning on deciding for me if my trauma was 'bad enough to count'.

pinene

The cognitive dissonance with that word is honestly so bizarre. Even if it didn't have a long, violent history that's triggering to many, even without the flippant ways it is often used now in consumerist/academic contexts, we are a community of people who are often misidentified by others and have our self-identifiers steamrolled because society doesn't understand us and doesn't want to. Why then, so often, do proponents of this word -- people who often pride themselves on being the most radical advocates for said community -- turn around and say "no, you HAVE to use this term because *I* think it's the term for you and *I* don't have a problem with it". Does that not strike anyone else as odd?? If people don't want to be called a certain word, don't call them that.

thrashbeatles

SING IT LIKE THE KIDS THAT ARE MEAN TO YOU! is a collection of works about what it means to exist as a person of color in emo/punk/alt-rock/etc scenes and in online "bandom". crafted with love, lots of printer paper & staples, each zine is just a little unique, but all of them say the same thing: we belong here; always have, always will.

the zine includes 43 pages of poetry, essays, comics, collages & more. some are silly, some will make your heart ache; but all of them are worth looking at, and honestly, next to nothing brings me as much pride as being able to share this with all of you.

so check it out if you can! it'd be greatly appreciated.

our team: @cordspaghetti, 2.25mg (ig), @petewentzisblack1312, @crashqueen_kid (ig), @tigerserum, henmooon (ig), @soundoftheirwings, bameron coss, fola f.t., sweetlychii (twitter), @umadoodles (ig), & faerie. layout done by the always sweet @birdloaf

padawan-historian

🗣 DIVERSITY IS NOT SAMENESS.

conarcoin

the alt-right pipeline is a real and dangerous thing that i think needs more awareness. here’s some videos that can help you learn about it

the pewdiepipeline: how edgy humor leads to violence by noncomplete

pewdiepipeline 2: how to shut it down by noncomplete

how i fell down the alt right pipeline and escaped by xanderhal

joe rogan gateway experience (into the alt right) by the serfs

how to fall down the anti-sjw rabbit hole by three arrows

the alt-right playbook: how to radicalize a normie by innuendo studios

decrypting the alt-right: how to recognize a fascist by contrapoints

pewdiepie and the problem with (fake) racism by the serfs

how the far right weaponizes nostalgia by thought slime

vindogy

Out in the warm May night, a teenage white girl with "baby terf" in her bio opens her 2012 Dell laptop. It takes 5 minutes for it to boot up and another 5 to open Google Chrome. She checks her inbox hoping for anon hate. It's empty. She's sighs and checks her dash. She reblogs what she believes to be gender critical theory from user punished-nazbol-returns-88, without a single second thought. Cracking her fingers, she searches up the trans activism tag and comments on every single post she can find. Several hours later she's now transitioned to writing an essay about how Lady Dimitrescu is a terf and how she will fuck her once she's of age. She checks her inbox once more, hoping all those negative comments she wrote resulted in something. Empty once again. Deciding to end the night, she writes a post about how she's lonely and how trans people have made it impossible to find an epic terf gf with a tight as fuck vag and banging tits. She hopes to get a sympathy reblog from one of the many terfs that are currently grooming her. Finishing the night at 4am, she goes to sleep without showering or brushing her teeth and wakes up soon after, having to go to an 8am class. On her way to school she crosses the street to avoid passing by a black man.

transgenderer

i hate the prison abolition discussion so much, because like, whenever you actually talk to prison abolitionists about the extremely obvious problems with their opinion, it resolves with either crazy nonsense (in the communist utopia there will be no rape or murder, when prison is abolished we will simply kill rapists), weasel bullshit (sure, im a prison abolitionist, but i dont think prisons should be ABOLISHED, i just think they should be like, smaller and kinder) or the infuriating "the very fact that youre asking what we would do about rape and murder proves youre stupid and closed minded"

okay this isnt totally fair, some people bite the bullet and are like "yeah, not punishing rape and murder is worth abolishing prisons" and i can respect that

ofthefog-deactivated20220221

Let's use a metaphor. Say we are trying to invent waterproof fabric. Since it hasn't been invented yet, one conclusion we may come to is that it is impossible. One could bring out hundreds of thousands of examples of fabrics and clothing and have water seep right through. From this data, one might say that a quality of fabric is that water can go through it. But is that true? Karl Popper's contribution to the philosphy of science is useful here. There is no positively proving something, you have to use falsification.

What actually lets water go through fabric is that there is a big enough space between the fibres that water can fit through it. If we close up all of these, it becomes waterproof. And so, it was made and now we have it.

So too can we say the same thing about the causes of crime. There are a lot of material conditions that lead to crime just as there are a lot of holes in fabric. But this is finite, and if we get all of them then its done.

The only logical out to this is if there is some quality inherent that makes this impossible. Not much we can do about osmosis in cell membranes, for example. But is there a comparable crime gene inherent to humanity? Or is it perhaps more likely that we simply don't have the tools to close up everything yet?

In the meantime I'll be trying to close up everything I can.

trans-angel

but that still doesn’t answer the question? i’m for abolishing prisons but this is just another “we’ll just make crime not happen”

“we simply don’t have the tools to close up everything yet. in the meantime i’ll be trying to close up everything we can” so what do we do with serious criminals between now and, hopefully, a day where we can just stop crime from happening?

anarchistettin

It's two separate questions. The idea that cops / prison prevent or deal with violent crime is an assumption that's finally being examined.

The problems of assault and stealing aren't solved by cops / prison - there's lots of evidence to suggest the opposite.

Punitive approaches to crime appease the idea of justice; prevention is one of many tragically ignored & underfunded sciences. There are a lot of data to suggest that meeting people's basic needs prevents a ton of crime, not just stealing, but rage & frustration & dominance crimes also.

coral04c

A while ago I found a post explaining some of the points, if you need more detailed information you can search for yourself.

dumb-of-ass-pure-of-heart

bundibird

I dont really care if you use the term bisexual or pansexual, but what i DO care about is that you understand that bisexuality at NO stage in history was EVER trans-exclusionary. Bisexuality has always included trans folks, and non-binary folks, and the entire spectrum of gender between male and female, as well as Definitively Gender and agender. It has ALWAYS meant "attraction to more than one gender." It has NEVER meant "attraction to cis men and women only."

So, pan, bi, use whichever label you will. But do NOT buy into the recent-years innacurate concept that bisexuality is attraction to cis men and women only, because thats literally never been the case.

bundibird

@brassmama exactly.

^^ Like. Its literally right there in the middle of the flag.

And by contrast, this is what the pan flag colours mean:

So literally its just......

bi colours = "same gender, opposite gender, and other genders"

pan colours = "men, women, and nb people."

Those two things are...... not all that different to each other.

The purple has always, literally since the flag was created, meant "more genders."

And bisexuality included "more genders" in the definition before the bi flag was created, too. Thats why they included the purple bar in the first place, because it was reflective of bisexual people's attraction to and relationship with gender.

If you feel that pansexual suits you better, or you like the pan flag more, then thats fine -- but don't spread the misconception that bisexuality is remotely exclusionary. Because its literally never been.

daughter-of-sapph0

don't believe the lies that other LGBTQ people are your enemy

Trending Blogs

Recently Viewed Blogs

loutrace