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@siobhanreef
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Hey, I'm Siobhan! She/her, trans lesbian. I like to write sapphic fanfiction, particularly the pairings of Chandra Nalaar/Nissa Revane (Magic: The Gathering) and Barriss Offee/Ahsoka Tano (Star Wars). I also really like Padmé Amidala. Read my stuff at https://archiveofourown.org/users/siobhanreef
what if, and hear me out here, it didn't matter whether a transmisogynistic caricature was "intended" to depict a trans woman. what if we could acknowledge that symbols carry meanings beyond what a creator put in them, and that you cannot divorce them from the society that will read them? what if we recognized that a character exactly resembling the worst stereotypes about a group of people will cause harm to that group no matter whether the text refers to them as a member of that group? what if it didn't fucking matter whether buffalo bill is a "real transsexual" because real transsexuals routinely get accused of being buffalo bills anyways
Nothing in the rule book says a dog can't play basketball. There are a couple rules against trans women, however, so she'll have to leave.
when I first moved out to live with roommates, also transfems, I still had a lot of healing to do from my abuser, and I was in a stage where I was starting to conceive of myself as a small and harmless Victim
what this did was make me an awful roommate who could not accept accountability. I had not learned how to apologize without having the apology forcibly extracted from me by my abuser. I had not learned how to accept my shortcomings or take criticism without having them beaten over my head by my abuser
I'm very fortunate I had people in my life who loved me and would be gentle yet direct and firm with me, and who would set firm boundaries with me. I couldn't treat loved ones well if I saw them as adversaries, if I expected them to act like my abuser. I wasn't protecting myself like I thought I was, I was just being a shit roommate
suffering doesn't make you a good person. surviving abuse doesn't mean you can't commit abuse yourself. that belief is actually a great way to ensure that you continue the cycle of abuse that your abuser brought you into. to break the cycle you have to understand yourself as a whole person, neither Victim nor Abuser
“A lot of people object to the fact that there’s a man in [the suit] at all. But the film is about human frailties; it’s not about monsters.”
—George Lucas, on Vader’s redemption
It will never not baffle me that so many Star Wars “fans” seem to object to the very things that set the franchise apart from other meaningless action movies. 🧐
It's really really deeply evil how much labour people can force out of trans women by convincing us we need to atone for some "male socialisation" or something.
I constantly find myself feeling like I need to do heaps and heaps of housework (even when staying with other people) partly out of the feeling that I'm making up for something/proving I'm a woman, and then realising "hey wait a minute, I'm a woman doing the fucking dishes for a man" and getting really really fucking mad. (but obviously they're never going to do it anyway).
oh were still doing trans infighting? dont you know we have bigger things to worry about than trans men being misogynists? theres bigger fish to fry than policing the misogyny of trans men, you know. The Enemy hates us all equally after all. we should really be ignoring how misogynist trans men are to trans women so we can join together against The Enemy. you know, The Enemy? misogynist trans men arent The Enemy, silly, you should be kissing them instead so we can Join Forces. your oppression by misogynist trans men doesnt matter, because we need to combat The Enemy. shut up about trans men and their misogyny. shut up. why wont you let them be bigoted to you. misogyny against trans women isnt like Real Misogyny. just be a good tranny and shut up and take it. theres more important things than you
it's like, definitely still mansplaining if the man is dominating the conversation unintentionally and he would totally stop if you asked him to, actually. like, the term exists to describe a phenomenon that arises from the implicit bias that women are expected to simply be less knowledgeable about things. it doesn't matter if he's doing it on purpose or not. he does it cause he expects women to not know things or to not have any input. maybe don't fucking expect women to stand up for themselves every single time they have to have a conversation with a man because that shit happens like daily for a lot of women
it's also kinda funny that 90% of the stuff the fandom has supposedly "agreed" on for star wars is never actually compelling it's always either "obi wan would make you chai and let you cry in his arms and also he's just a big cinnamon roll" or "anakin was mind controlling padmé for three years" and there's nothing in between
sometimes it's less like there's masculine and feminine things and gender neutral things, it's more like. there's gendered things and there's ungendered things. masculine things are ungendered feminine things are gendered. masculinity is the default and femininity is the abberation, the Gendered Experience. pants are for everyone skirts are for girls. suits are for everyone dresses are for women. you know
I end up complaining about transmascs a lot on here. The reason is that I am not really friends with many cis people irl because of their transphobia, except one or two friends I've had since childhood. And my transfem friends don't antagonise me very much. So basically transmascs make up a sizeable proportion of my social network because they are generally tolerable, but they are also where most of the problems come from because of the dynamics of oppression. It probably looks like I'm fixated on this one demographic, but really it's the fact that the demographic is generally good that means I am friends with them at all.
Anyway, with that out of the way, I want to talk about my trans guy friend Tom (not his real name). Over the last year or so there's been a pattern of:
I say or do something innocent.
He aggressively accuses me of bad behaviour.
I explain that he misinterpreted what happened, but apologise for it all the same and promise to do better.
He grudgingly says "OK".
We never mention it again.
It's got so bad that I panic whenever I get a message from him, and if it is one of his aggressive ones I go into a days-long anxiety spiral.
On Saturday I arranged a trip to Trans Pride in London for a group of trans people near me. I didn't want to arrange it because I'm burnt out, but there were a few people I knew who wanted to go but didn't want to go alone, so I felt I had a duty to arrange something for their sake.
One of them was a wheelchair user, so I made this detailed plan for how we would navigate our journey to and from the march avoiding steps and calling ahead to train stations to warn them if they needed to get a manual ramp ready for us. I posted this and Tom read it and thumbs upped it. In the end the wheelchair user couldn't come, so we used a different route instead.
On the way back from the march, I made a comment about how difficult the route we were taking would be if we had a wheelchair with us, because the station we were in had a load of steps. I also explained how there was a different route I had planned for wheelchair users. I was wrecked after that day, and honestly just wanted a week of being left alone to recover.
The next day, Tom messaged me to say he was really upset about the ableist comment I had made and he called me a hypocrite because I have previously criticised others for ableism. It turned out he interpreted "this would be really impossible with a wheelchair" as "wheelchair users are such a burden". He is not a wheelchair user himself fyi, although I have been in the recent past, and he knows this.
I apologised that he had been upset by what I said, but explained that my words didn't mean that, they were a reference to the plan I had made about wheelchair accessible journeys. He claimed he hadn't heard me explain this at the time, and he didn't remember reading my post about accessibility that he had thumbs-upped.
I was obviously in a spiral at this point because, not only was I the only person in our network who had shown any interest at all in helping a wheelchair user (which Tom could've done himself, but didn't), but also I was the only one being called out and called a hypocrite when I hadn't even done anything wrong.
My wife saw my reaction to this and she got annoyed on my behalf. She has seen how much I panic around messages from Tom and, since she was actually at Trans Pride and present at the time I made the "ableist comment" she knew it was bullshit. She sent a message to Tom saying that the way he talks to me is not fair and is totally disproportionate to the alleged offence, and that she has noticed that he never talks to her like that. (She was implying but not stating that there was a transmisogynistic motive behind Tom's different behaviour towards us, since she is cis).
Tom then went berserk. He started accusing my wife and I of talking about him behind his back, and basically accused her of letting me take her phone and harass him on two fronts. I weighed in to say I didn't ask her to get involved, she is just concerned about how he treats me.
There has since been 24 hours of me trying to explain how the way he talks to me is part of a wider context of trans women's actions being uncharitably misinterpreted and blown out of all proportion. I said that he could've said "Hey, what did you mean by this thing you said yesterday?" before going directly to accusations of ableism and hypocrisy which it turned out were unfounded. I said he could talk to me like a friend who cares about and knows me, and not like someone writing a complaint to a dodgy business or their MP.
He then started going into how he has learned a lot about communication styles and he is just doing best practice by naming the harm that was caused, that he is willing to be more gentle in future but that's a concession he is making because of my "fragility and defensiveness to criticism" and he is unhappy that I am not making any concessions in return. Never mind that I immediately apologised and promised to do better, even though I didn't even do anything wrong in the first place.
His position now is that my wife and I have ganged up on him and derailed what was originally a critique of my ableism into a barrage of unfair criticism of him, and we are fragile and defensive and he is sad that people who seemed good on the surface can be so different underneath.
He keeps using therapy-speak and social justice-speak to undermine any attempts by me to point out issues. If he is rude it is "best practice" and I am implied to be uneducated for not knowing that. If I mention something he did wrong, it's "derailing". If he accuses me of something I didn't do, it's him "naming the harm that was caused".
All this comes in the context that he has never engaged seriously with "transmisogyny" as a form of oppression, on the many times I've brought it up.
At one point, I was trying to explain why I felt the way he talked to me was unreasonable, so I reached for a recent situation where I felt he had done something wrong to show how I behave if the roles are reversed. I referred to a time 2 weeks ago when he said the world would be a better place if everyone with a Y chromosome died. At the time I thought "Wow, that's gross" but I said nothing because I used the wider context of knowing him to infer that he probably didn't mean it (and honestly I find it hard to call out men's behaviour, because they rarely react well to it). This was probably not the best example, because it's really an example of me being afraid to call him out, but it's what I reached for in the moment.
I brought this up and he said "It was just a joke". A day later I responded to explain how it's a transmisogynistic joke that at best only transfems can make, and it's not appropriate for him to be saying it. He then said "Yeah, I realised it was bad immediately when I said, I probably should've said something at the time."
So the pattern is:
I do something innocent.
He interprets it badly.
He accuses me aggressively.
I explain what I actually said but also apologise and promise to do better anyway.
vs
He does something actually bad.
He doesn't apologise in the moment.
I point it out much later in a different context.
He dismisses it as "just a joke".
I press the point.
He then says he shouldn't have done it.
I don't know how he sees these situations and sees me as the fragile and defensive one.
I have tried to explain to him how transmisogyny so often manifests as uncharitable interpretations of neutral statements that are blown out of all proportion, and that when he sends me a message doing exactly that it sits within the context of how this has been done to me and other transfems for our entire lives, and normally results in social exclusion.
Messages like his accusations are a Pavlovian bell to transfems that warns us social exclusion is coming, we know it because it has happened so many times to us. He says I should go to therapy and not put the burden of my anxiety on him to accommodate my irrational reaction to criticism. He won't accept that it's not irrational.
There's a social group we are both in. At a meet-up a few months ago, a trans girl said "I feel like the word 'bisexual' should perhaps be replaced by 'pansexual' or some other identifier to be more non-binary-inclusive." That's a perfectly normal thing to say, especially because this girl is bi/pan herself, and this discussion point is a very common one in bi/pan circles. After she said that we talked about how the meaning of "bisexual" has changed over time, about descriptive vs prescriptive identifiers, it was a good discussion. Also at this same meet-up, one of the transmasc organisers called all the transfems "guys" (I didn't hear this at the time).
After the meet-up, the same transmasc organiser privately messaged me and the other organisers to say they were concerned about the behaviour of the trans girl who had been saying "biphobic things". A few hours later, the trans girl (unprompted) posted a message in the group chat to say she was sorry if anyone had interpreted her statement about bisexuality badly, she said she is nervous and sometimes says things wrong, is really sorry and will try to do better. I calmed her down by saying that, as someone who has identified as "bisexual" myself, simply because it's the identity name we used when I was young, I thought her comments were perfectly reasonable and she had absolutely nothing to worry about. That drama blew over. Then a month or so later the transmasc organiser randomly mentioned that they felt bad for calling transfems guys at that meeting but didn't feel like they should apologise for it.
I think it is clear that the trans girl's reaction in this situation is a trauma response by someone who has been repeatedly socially excluded for her words being misinterpreted and blown out of proportion. She is panicking hard that she's going to get kicked out of the group, and wants to apologise in advance to head that off, even though she did nothing wrong. Meanwhile the transmasc actually did something wrong but didn't bother apologising and no one brought it up and no one expects any consequences for them.
That is the difference between being perpetually on the edge of social exclusion vs not being, that is transmisogyny in action.
Tom refuses to see it in this light. He only sees that he called out my ableism and suddenly my wife and I had turned the tables and were calling him out. He doesn't realise that him being called out this time is the result of a pattern of behaviour that's gone on for a year, it's the release of a build up of so many times he's called me out when I did nothing wrong and I had to apologise anyway to calm him down.
Perhaps it would be fragility if this had happened the first time he unfairly criticised me for something I didn't do. When it's the tenth, and I've been apologetic all the previous times, it's just me finally standing up for myself.
I know I should just stop being friends with him, it's what I would advise anyone else, but it is so hard when you're in the midst of this situation and your social lives are so intertwined as mine and Tom's are. It can be easier to just apologise and let him think he's won, then let the friendship die slowly over months rather than in a blaze of righteous indignation. I still don't know which of these paths to choose but I will have to pick soon.
I'm genuinely surprised this needs to be said, but it is fine to speculate that Kurt Cobain was a trans woman and it is not fine to speculate that [deceased trans woman] was a cis man. These situations are not equivalent because:
There is a social force called "cisnormativity" that assumes everyone is cis until explicitly stated otherwise. There is no opposite social force called "transnormativity". By "transing" historic "cis" people you are fighting back against the impulses of a transphobic society; by doing the opposite you are just doing what all of society already does, and I promise you it doesn't need your help.
If Kurt Cobain was actually a cis man after all, all you have done is misgender a cis man who is not even alive to hear it. And that's fine. A lot of people seem to have internalised "misgendering is wrong" as a rule without thinking about why it is wrong. It is not normally unethical for a trans woman misgender a cis man (although you can contrive hyper-specific set-ups involving additional marginalisations where it might be); but it is absolutely unethical for a cis man to misgender a trans woman no matter what . There is a very steep gendered power dynamic present in both interactions, the direction of which determines the morality of the action. You need to stop thinking about morality as a list of "good" and "bad" actions you need to memorise, and instead start thinking about whether actions reinforce or reverse pre-existing power dynamics.
i will go to bat for the fact that most of the queer coded villains you see aren't queer coded but specifically transfeminine coded
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.
There's someone I vaguely know who I'll call B who is, like, one of the most obvious eggs of all time (and so I will be using she/her, if you don't like that please bear in mind that I used to be in B's position and on the rare occasions someone used she/her for me it was an incredibly positive feeling).
B is quiet, sweet and gentle, has predominantly female friends, loves animals, spends weekends doing butterfly conservation with a group of elderly women, none of that makes her an egg but it's definitely unusual behaviour for a cis man.
No, what makes B such an obvious egg to me is how she is treated by everyone else. A lot of men just avoid her, they think she's weird and effeminate. Women generally like her well enough, but they still tend to keep her at arm's length in a way they don't do with cis men. In a way she is being third-gendered already, like there's no established pattern for men or women to interact with someone like her, so they just avoid doing so if they can help it.
Last year she asked out this girl Alice, and Alice said yes. They dated for a few months, broke up, and continued to be perfectly friendly. Alice started dating someone else, everyone moved on.
Then these whispers started that B was actually really creepy, people started saying they had heard bad things about her (unspecified), that she had abuser vibes, that she had done all this supposed bad stuff but no one was allowed to say what it was, but it was definitely bad. And, really unusually if B was a cis man, all the men and women and non-binary people in her circle all immediately stopped being friends with her. She was uninvited from events, people even cancelled one-on-one meet-ups with her, she was barred from attending the LGBTQ support group she went to (she is pan). And bear in mind that all this is stuff I heard only from the people who cut her off, I am at best a distant acquaintance of B.
I ended up at an organised-at-the-last-minute drinks event that was hosted by a cis woman acquaintance on the same night that B had a month earlier organised a boardgame session, and everyone who had been planning to go to B's boardgame meet cancelled to go to this drinks event, to which B was explicitly not invited (I didn't find this out until later, I'm not really part of this circle at all). Incidentally, the woman who hosted the event made a point of telling me she was concerned for my safety out in public at night, and then proceeded to call me a man 🤷.
Several months later, the details came out: the "creepy" thing she had done was to buy Alice a birthday present. Alice thinks that's weird because it's not normal for friends to buy each other birthday presents and so she understood this as B expressing a level of intimacy beyond friendship. (Again, this is Alice's perspective on what happened). I know for a fact that B buys her friends birthday presents often, because I know some of those friends. If Alice had originally led with, "B bought me a birthday present," rather than, "B is being creepy, and I don't want to tell you how just yet," it probably wouldn't've worked to socially isolate her, so she let everyone's imaginations run wild with ideas about what B might've done. Only when everyone had cut B off did she reveal the details, and I understand B's social life is very slowly recovering but there is still so much suspicion about her.
I've talked to enough trans women in my time to recognise this story well. I personally have been lucky enough never to end up in that situation, but perhaps that is because I tend to avoid friendship groups where possible and prefer to have individual friendships that don't join up. Perhaps that is a subconscious defense mechanism to avoid stuff like this happening to me, idk.
But during this whole saga, a common refrain from B's cis woman and transmasc former friends was to respond to mentions of her unspecified creepy behaviour with "I hate cis men". That is, to position her supposed abusive behaviour within the context of gendered violence, even while not actually knowing what she did. And, having met B a couple of times and got a vibe, it fell to me to point out that some people that they consider "cis men" are actually not, which raised the whole "male socialisation" issue and whether trans women are oppressed before coming out, and then I decided I couldn't deal with that conversation with a bunch of non-transmisogynised people.
But at this point I am sort-of thought to be the "cis guy defender". People will say they hate cis guys randomly, and then apologise to me as if I am personally offended. No, I hate them too. But I feel that with a handful of alleged "cis guys" I can see the woman beneath even if they are unaware of it themselves. And the thing is, I don't trust non-transmisogynised people to be able to see that at all. Or rather, I think they can see it, but I don't think they realise what they are seeing, only that they instinctively hate it and want to kill it, so ingrained is transmisogyny in our society.
And the fact is that most of these "I hate cis guys" people don't hate actual cis guys. They love cis guys. They go out of their way to spend time with them, they admire them, they seek their approval, their favourite writers are all cis guys, their favourite actors too. And that's not to blame them for that, we live in a world where cis guys dominate everything, that's life. But it is a problem when your hatred of cis guys is expressed only against someone who (it seems to me) isn't one.
To deliberately cut off B's social life based on no information, even as you still support Neil Gaiman or Johnny Depp, is not the action of someone who hates cis men's violence against women, but of a transmisogynist who doesn't even know there's a name for the bigotry they are perpetuating. It starts to seem that, coming from certain people, "cis men", much like "AMABs" before it, often functions ironically enough as a slur against transfems. And that's not getting into the issue of those transmascs who say "I hate cis men" not as a fact but as an affirmation, that effectively misgenders themselves in order to label themselves as ontologically non-oppressive, which is a whole other (but related) can of worms.
Privilege dynamics can be observed even if they can't be named by the people involved. If a woman can make a load of people including cis men instantly stop talking to another "cis man" by saying, "he did something really bad, but I can't talk about it," that doesn't mean that those people (and especially those cis men) have suddenly overnight become the world's most passionate feminist advocates and desperately keen to believe women's words. It means that there is another privilege dynamic going on that makes ruining that person's life something they actually want to do.
I dislike the idea that Anakin would automatically hate, be jealous of, or be possessive towards Satine and Obi-Wan. He would be upset by the hypocrisy of Obi-Wan having a romantic past while disapproving of his own. But I think he’d be more relieved that Obi-Wan had someone, so he’d feel less guilty about his own relationship with Padmé and might even open up to him.
At most he’d be amused at that relationship but he wouldn’t hate satine.
he is like, canonically their biggest shipper!
and I think that is somewhere prequels Anakin and TCW Anakin would align despite being different characters
