"Do your own work but not the work you've already done because I don't like it because despite claiming to be a communist who claims to value materialist analysis I get uncomfortable when people analyze their own material reality when it challenges my simplistic, cis binary-centric understanding of the gender binary and oppression."
It was Audre Lorde who said "For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change."
In the discussion on trans oppression and liberation, the master's tools are the insistence that trans people slot neatly into cis-based gender dynamics. Insisting that TRANSGENDER men, just by virtue of existing as men, benefit from and uphold patriarchy is you trying to temporarily beat the master at his [ or in this case "her", since we're talking about building off a foundationally cis woman built framework of oppression ] own game.
It absolutely benefits you as a trans woman to use oppositional sexism to insist that your oppression is parallel to that of cis women and that subsequently trans men's positions in society must parallel cis men's. It gives you the spot at the feminist table that you do deserve to have..... in an underhanded way that throws other trans people under the bus and bars us from conversations on gendered oppression despite the fact that ALL transphobia experienced by ALL trans people boils down to being gender identity based oppression.
Is the feminist movement NOT founded on gender identity based liberation at its core? Is that, at the very least, not ALLIED with the rest of the trans community in a meaningful way where both might mutually benefit from a deeper understanding and analysis of gender that does include talking about masculinity and manhood and the social construction of gender as a whole?
It's not about centering men, you sound like the truscum and transmeds that used to fearmonger about how acknowledging nonbinary people will be the death of binary trans liberation in the 2010's.
It's about bare minimum just acknowledging that manhood is an important construct in the conversation on gender liberation and that marginalized manhood is an important vehicle for discussing and dismantling gendered systems of oppression too. It's about imagining gendered oppression more complexly than woman hurt/man harm. It's about finally fucking throwing the master's tools out the gd window. And that's NOT what has been done. At all.
Talking about the gendered oppression of trans men IN ADDITION TO - not above, not before, not centred, but just alongside all other trans experiences is vital to our broader understandings of gendered oppression within transfeminist and broader feminist discussions precisely because it throws a wrench in cis-centered understandings of gendered oppression.
If you can't see that you're dogshit at material analysis.
You're telling us to "do the work" and then get pissed off when we don't do it the way you want us to but you don't want to do the work yourself but we're still always doing it wrong no matter what, so what the fuck should we all do then? What's your solution?
