*gripping my hands so hard on a young trans persons shoulders that their bones are about to break*
do not log on to 4chan.com. do not get involved in passing olympics. you will always lose. do not put afab/amab/tma/tme, that is cisgender society trying to know your “real” gender. you do not exist to please cisgender people. there is no ‘right’ way to be trans. learn your goddamn history, listen to your elders. listen to other disenfranchised groups. listen to intersex people and check yourself for intersexism. listen to trans poc and check yourself for racism. listen to disabled people and check yourself for ableism. be open to learning always. labels are meant to fit you, not the other way around. you are not weird or predatory for simply being attracted to others. you’re fine if you’re not a skinny white twink or a barbie doll. you’re fine if your body is ‘weird’. you’re fine if you don’t have heavy or any dysphoria. it’s okay if you actually don’t want to transition or anything like that. life is worth living at any stage, you deserve to be happy. I SWEAR THAT YOU ARE OKAY!!!!!
i agree with all of this and agree that putting this stuff in your bio is generally unnecessary, but tma/tme are terms made by transfems/trans women to talk about experiences with transmisogyny.
tme refers to cis men, cis women, trans men, transmascs, and other trans/nonbinary people otherwise-not-transfem, aka the people who are not the primary/directed targets of transmisogyny (except for misdirected bigotry due to being mistaken for a trans woman/transfem)
its not a cis attempt to know your "real" gender unless the two "real" genders are transfem/trans woman and Everyone Else
In the interest of also being non-combative and informative, that is a deeply flawed framework of how bigotry, suppression, and oppression operate. The terms TMA/TME also don't actually align with the way Julia Serano — the woman who coined and originally defined the term transmisogyny — has defined transmisogyny over the years. Ultimately the terms really just seek to define groups of people out of very real bigotry and danger that they also experience and diminish their experiences.
Serano's original articulation of transmisogyny in Whipping Girl isn't always very clear about this because the book, in Serano's own words, is the position of one trans woman at one point in time and is filled with personal anecdotes that she would remove had she known the book and her terminology would have taken off like it has.
However, she has gone on the record several times over the last two decades to clarify that transmisogyny as a term is meant to describe the experiences of anyone who sits at an intersection of femininity/feminine expression and real or socially perceived male identity. She has stated many times that drag queens, crossdressers / transvestites (yes people still do use that term for themselves), GNC men cis or trans, intersex people, women of color who experience the racialization of the genders, etc. are also all direct targets of transmisogyny that are not any "less than" trans women.
You cannot experience a "misdirected" form of bigotry when you are included in the process of identifying and articulating that form of bigotry. You cannot be exempt from a form of bigotry when the language meant to identify that bigotry explicitly seeks to give you a voice for your experiences as well.
Anyone who tries to diminish the experiences those groups of people have with transmisogyny by saying it's just "misdirected" and that they're actually exempt as targets of transmisogyny because they're not trans women, is explicitly denying the work of the trans woman who gave them the language they are misusing in the first place.
And just generally - a bigot attempting to harm a marginalized person does not care if they are "correct" in their bigotry. A bigot, someone actively seeking to harm, subjugate, or eradicate, marginalized people generally wants to hit as many targets as possible, not refine their bigotry. As such, the language we use to discuss their bigotry cannot be narrow. This is a concept that is commonly accepted in many racial justice coalitions and in Black Feminist works. Julia Serano was inspired by Black Feminist authors like Audre Lorde and bell hooks when she wrote Whipping Girl. As such, I think we should be applying that understanding to the concept of transmisogyny as well.
It does us no good and serves us no function to create terminology that divides us, especially when it is made from of language that very explicitly wasn't meant to.









