What's your reasoning for finding it to be a problem that tansfems use TME to mean non-transfem people because it "implies" that nobody but transfems can be affected by transmisogyny but not finding it a problem for "transandrophobia" to imply the existence of general androphobia as a structural oppression in analogy to the construction of other intersectional terms? Why must only transfems be held to a standard of literalism? Why is it impermissible for transfems to reject the terms that other trans people use to describe their oppression but not for non-transfems to reject the terms transfems use? Why must transfems eternally be subjected to this kind of sadistic sophistry that reduces the space for analysis that we are allowed to occupy to less than nothing? Why is every attempt at communicating our own experiences and understanding thereof seen as an invitation for smarmy rhetorical reversals?
I feel genuine despair about how non-transfems talk about and to us on this website. I endlessly have to listen to people engaging in idealist amateur psychoanalysis that absurdly focuses on the mental state of my oppressors telling me "but transphobes perceive you as a failed man" as if transmisogyny was a mental defect that some people carry instead of a structural force that manifests (among other things) in a variety of mutually contradictory ideological claims.
Why must I ceaselessly suffer the incorrect and """indirectly""" misgendering claim that I, a transfem, am treated like a (failed, gender non-conforming, etc.) man (a purposefully selective view that strictly implies that either transfems cannot be identified as a distinct group and the specifics of being transfem have no bearing on how we are treated, or that trans women genuinely are men - as the only people who are actually treated precisely like transfems are transfems)? The ends to which this is done are totally transparent: so that men can claim the oppression suffered by trans women as data points of their own oppression with a gesture like "because you were perceived as a man, the way you were treated is actually indicative of how men are treated" (which neither logically follows nor is it actually true). When a trans woman is "treated as a man" that's transmisogyny. I completeley reject a framework that centers the psychological state of my oppressor. The ideological claim that trans women are men is no different from the ideological claim that trans women are raping the bodies of women by reducing the female form to an artefact or that they are colonizing womanhood or are grooming children into transitioning: It is a fundamentally incorrect idea on the basis of which no correct analysis can be formed, you cannot grant these things even for the sake of argument. When trans women are mistreated for being "seen as men" that's transmisogyny in the exact same way that these other claims are transmisogyny. To claim that it is transandrophobia (which is constantly claimed by users of that term, usually as an illustration of the idea that "all trans people are affected by transandrophobia") is an illegitimate appropriation of transfem experiences and it's absurd. It's like saying that when disabled people are perceived as faking their disabilities they actually suffer a sentiment directed at non-disabled people rather than ableism because they're "seen as non-disabled". If trans women are "seen as men" then that's the problem that needs to be addressed, not how men are treated. If trans women are "seen as predators" then that's the problem that needs to be addressed, not how predators are treated. If trans women are "seen as objects" then that's the problem that needs to be addressed, not how objectes are treated.
According to most transphobes we are not trans because there's no such thing as trans people. Should we take that to mean that trans people suffer from cisphobia? That the way trans people are treated is really indicative of how cis people are treated and not trans people? No! We cannot rely on transphobes to provide us a coherent framework for understanding their transphobia. They don't have to "see" us as trans to recognize us as trans. In the same way they don't have to "see" us as women to recognize us as trans women. It is their transmisogyny that leads the way from recognizing us as trans women to conceptualizing us as cis men.
I barely even want to explain myself anymore. I'll just get called a baeddel by people who are fully aware that it's an intersexist and transmisogynistic slur. I'll be subjected to hypocritical double standards where if my analysis has any remote implications about non-transfems I'll be told in so many words to stay in my lane, as the experiences of others are unknowable to me, but non-transfems can give direct explicit wide-reaching transmisogynistic accounts of our experiences (e.g. that we suffer from androphobia of some sort) and I ought to accept this as some kind of perverse eu-misgendering "inclusion". I'll be infantilized by complete misogynists who pretend that my grounds for rejecting their ideas (e.g. "trans women are treated as men by transphobes") aren't genuine ideological disagreements and I am instead just too weak-willed to face reality (which they think their own antifeminist analysis amounts to). I'll be hounded for sources and proof when I discuss my own lived experiences and I am told incorrect categorical statements about what I do and don't experience and why. I'll have transfeminism dismissed as an irrelevant niche ideology by people who follow a significantly more niche ideology themselves. And most despair inducing of all is having the opinions of transfems who disagree with me presented to me as if they override my analysis simply be existing - as if everything (e.g. misgendering by reference to a rhetorical observer or calling trans women "baeddels") had to be agreed to by all transfems everywhere to be transmisogynistic for non-transfems to even consider stopping.
It is grueling to constantly hear people espouse universal mores about how trans people ought to treat one another only for those exact same people to make no attempt whatsoever to actually apply those mores to how they treat transfems. I want you to feel how hollow appeals like this sound to me, especially when they command me to abandon my objectively correct materialist analysis of my own experiences and adopt views that are actively transmisogynistic (and not just a little). It's painful when people think materialism means "when stuff is made out of physical matter" as opposed to society being shaped by material (economic) factors and then justify equating people who were AMAB with cis men with appeals to this kind of vulgar "materialism". "Trans women are murdered so much because they are seen as men and people are more ok with killing men" I am forced to read with my own eyes with barely a thought given to the extreme structural (economic) marginalization of trans women of color that pushes them not just into sex work but also any number of other positions of extreme precarity (abusive relationships, addiction, homelessness, incarceration etc.)
To bring it back to TME/TMA: These terms are not their own definitions. TMA doesn't mean everyone who is ever affected by transmisogyny in any way and TME doesn't mean it's impossible to be affected by transmisogyny. The demand for literalism here is a mean spirited rhetorical game and there is no winning. If I hit you with the classic intersexist argument that since the "inter" part of intersex just literally means "between", it either ought to apply to perisex trans people whose sex characteristics are altered through hormones and surgery or be abolished in favor of a more precise term as the components of the term itself don't describe its precise meaning fully by themselves - you'd know that that's an absurd demand to make of terminology and you'd know that I was being not just a dumbass but also intersexist. Terms don't need to encapsulate the entirety of their meaning. They are allowed to have definitions and usages that go beyond what is implied by the literal meanings of the words they are constructed from. This is true for english terms just as much as it is true for latin and greek terms. But getting transfeminists to change their terminology is not the point of this exercise, the point of this exercise is to always put trans women on the back foot, to never give them an inch, to deny them completely any and all avenues for framing the discourse around themselves and their own experiences. Either you allow trans women the use of language in its normal capacity or you are a transmisogynist.
If you are TME, the way transmisogyny affects you is as a TME person. You can shoot through bulletproof vests, you can see invisible ink, you can eat inedible substances, you can say unspeakable things and water can be liquid below its freezing point. Your relationship to transmisogyny is a different one than that of a TMA person and that difference is what TME/TMA describes. The literalist angle is obscurantist on purpose. It is instrumentalizing the epistemic marginalization of TMA people against them to deny the epistemic marginalization exists to begin with. You deny us the right to exercise authority over what our own terminology means and use your own willfully transmisogynistic interpretation to imply that we hold reactionary views that we do not hold in order to further our epistemic marginalization. You can wrongfully accuse transfeminists of actually wanting to uphold binarist, essentialist and reductive categories and there's not much we can do about it because we don't get a seat at the table where our own oppression is discussed unless we say exactly what you want to hear from us.
I want to appeal to you to consider our positions, our terminology from an angle of self-advocacy in light of how invested others are in transmisogynistically misexplaining our own experiences to us, over us and against us. "Everyone can be affected by transmisogyny" is true in the same way that "everyone can be affected by intersexism" and "everyone can be affected by racism" and "everyone can be affected by ableism" are true. It ceases to be true when it's used to deny that there is a meaningful qualitative difference in how intersex people and perisex people relate to intersexism, how racialized people and those who aren't relate to racism, how disabled people and non-disabled people relate to ableism.
TME/TMA aren't essentialist, they don't reinforce a binary and they're not reductive if you understand them the way they are supposed to be understood instead of applying a hostile bad faith reading wherein transfeminists are a bunch of selfish greedy tyrants who want to hog all the transmisogyny for themselves in order to lord the immense standpoint epistemological social capital they derive from having their oppression over-specified and over-acknowledged over everyone else.
I'll remind you of this most famous example of intersecting discrimination: A targeted layoff of black women at general motors, which could neither be attributed to them being women alone nor them being black alone because black men and non-black women weren't laid off. Acknowledging the specificity of the oppression is the explicit point of intersectionality (because that specificity can and will otherwise be used to deny that it is oppression at all, that it is targeted at all) - it's not an "essentialist" misunderstanding of intersectionality. This neither implies that everyone who is ever laid off suffers from misogynoir nor does it imply that only black women can be laid off. It doesn't imply that black men and non-black women aren't discriminated against in other contexts either.
To say that there is a specific intersection that happens to people who are transgender women is not essentialist, we don't attribute any essential characteristics to anybody. Tautologies aren't essentialism, rejecting tautologies is a denial of logic itself. All it is saying is that some things happen to transfems specifically because they are transfems. To deny that specificity is straightfowardly anti-intersectional. To say "all trans people experience transmisogyny" as a rebuttal to discussions of the specificity of transmisogyny is reinforcing precisely those malformed patterns of argumentation that intersectionality is meant to address to begin with. If you redefine transmisogyny as something that can affect all trans people in comparable ways then what you defined is transphobia and the intersection is rendered conceptually invisible again. It ends up being a more roundabout, rhetorically involved way to deny the existence of transmisogyny altogether.
Reductive, transmisogynistic ideas of transmisogyny like that we only suffer transmisogyny when we are recognized as transfems (regardless of whether those doing the recognizing consider trans women to be women or not) or mistaken for men ignore the fact that even those of us who are "seen as" cis women all day every day have to completely structure their lives around transmisogyny. The fact that I'm a trans woman renders interactions with people who have no idea and even passive states that would have nothing to do with transmisogyny otherwise into transmisogyny because of the way they interact with the objective fact of reality that I am a trans woman. Transmisogyny is not a mental defect of transphoboes and it cannot be reduced to individual interactions or attitudes.
If a trans woman tells you something is transmisogynistic but you think it's not because you fundamentally disagree about the basic axioms of your analysis you have to recognize that. "If you agreed with my analysis you wouldn't consider my analysis transmisogynistic" is a totally inane statement that holds true for even the most obviously transmisogynistic analysis. Even terfs don't consider themselves transmisogynistic. Even terfs have some trans women who agree with them. You have to either make a good faith attempt to sort out that disconnect or move on in the knowledge that your views are fundamentally at odds with each other and it is logically consistent for a transfeminist to consider the things she considers transmisogynistic transmisogynistic and she's not just accusing you of transmisogyny in an attempt to unfairly smear you.
When you are transmisogynistic the reason you don't see it is that the ideology you check yourself against to determine if you are being transmisogynistic is the same ideology that led you to your transmisogynistic views to begin with. When you say "I'm not a transmisogynist" your reasoning is logically consistent but it's as self referential as saying "I'm not a transmisogynist because there's no such thing as 'transmisogyny' and there's no such thing as 'transwomen', just delusional men"
You might think that because you occasionally take umbrage with a few of the most egregious examples of transmisogyny coming from non-transfems, you have sufficiently fortified yourself against transmisogynist biases and occupy a somewhat neutral position from which you judge our views according to a higher-order ideological framework than the one transfeminists use to judge your views, but it is in fact just an opposing ideological framework. You deny the existence of transmisogyny not by saying "transmisogyny doesn't exist" but by supplanting it with your own homonym, a definition of transmisogyny that is alien to ours. You argue "A thing called transmisogyny exists, but not the thing you mean by it. And because it would be essentialist/binarist/reductive to say the things you say about transmisogyny if you meant by it what I define as transmisogyny, your analysis is essentialist, biniarist and reductive." You are engaged in two entangled efforts to deny us our language and framework for analysis: You redefine the term transmisogyny and then use that redefinition to argue that the derived terms TMA and TME have reactionary implications when you take them literally.
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