I am Mera (she/her). I am a black and Native American Marxist transfeminist who creates theory on underdiscussed topics.
I am a womanist, lesbian, intersex transgender woman.
Temporarily I am removing the link to my essay. It will be back up once it is altered with the intended changes.
For my other intro post.
At birth I was designated female. That event has impacted my experience with and relationship to transfemininity/transmisogyny. Regardless, like any other trans person, I do not identify with the gender assigned to me at birth. I identify as a woman, of which I was not assigned.
If you want to learn about it more, come talk to me! If you don't, do us both a favor and block me.
On this blog, “female” and female assignment refers to the patriarchy's idea of gender that determines that women should be defined by immutability, sexual subjugation and essential biological traits. Trans women too suffer under this assignment. Here, “female” does not refer to biological sex or gender identity. “Female” and woman are two different things.
My essay delves into this further.
I am several times more assertive of my identity and positionality than I used to be. Unless you have meaningful critique of my analysis, don't bother engaging with me. I've heard what you want to say before and I don't care to hear it again.
I'm open to honest conversation and discussion over my theory though I expect a basic understanding of marginalization dynamics on your part.
White people, that means stop making false race comparisons.
I won't tolerate transphobia (associating me with my assigned sex ie. calling me “an AFAB”) or purposeful misrepresentation of my posts or beliefs. If you treat me as “less trans” than other trans women or try to tell me I don't deserve a voice in transfeminine spaces then I will probably tear into you and/or call you pathetic.
TwERFS, transphobes, bigots, fascists/right wing, trans/misogynists, racists and serial harassers go fuck yourselves.
My posts of personal experience are based on my own struggles as a perpetual victim of transmisogynoir, I share them partly because this site needs more black transfeminized narratives and partly to illustrate how someone like me exists as a trans woman.
For more information, see my Bluesky, Substack, or Medium.
Black Native Transfeminist
Author of assignment theory
she/her 🏳️⚧️ @oddtransfem on Tumblr
As a dedicated transfeminist, I write in the context of political analyses relating to how gender is assigned and different subjects within
Read writing from Mera on Medium. As a dedicated transfeminist, I write in the context of political analyses relating to how gender is assig
Block #transmisogyny tw #transmisogyny cw # transphobia tw & #transphobia cw if discrimination against transgender people triggers you.
Check my featured tags in the search for more!
FAQ
Is this an AFAB transfem blog?
This blog doesn't especially focus on transfems assigned female at birth, it's not a mogai blog or a contradictory label blog. This is a politics blog.
It is mostly about transfeminized people in general. That includes transgender people who weren't assigned male at birth yet have feminine gender identities that fundamentally don't align with their assignments and that defy patriarchal gender norms. I consider them under the transfeminine umbrella.
Do you support AFAB transfems?
In large part yes, I've come to a lot of different conclusions having surrounded myself with the community and in short I can say that I do. If you strongly oppose that I frankly don't care and would like you to consider that your perception of them — like mine was — is based on your assumptions rather than any real source. That's not a good way to build your perception of a minority.
And frankly I don't trust you if vocally obsess over them.
I don't personally appreciate the fact that there is such an emphasis on “AFAB” as part of the label and think that is a large part of why so many transmisogynists identify themselves that way but I understand there isn't much of another common way to communicate the same concept currently. This is why I coined “assignment variant”.
Are you an AFAB transfem?
Even though technically I was assigned female at birth and am transfeminine, please do not call me “AFAB”. Referring to me as “an AFAB” associates me with my assignment which upsets me as it would any other trans person. I would never describe another trans woman as “an AMAB” so don't do that to me. Neither AFAB nor AMAB is a social category or identity, it is a description of the coercive designation society assigns infants at birth that determines what they're supposed be.
I am a trans woman because I am trans in relation to my gender assignment — of which I do not identify — and utterly and entirely a woman.
Are you TME or TMA?
Considering that I am literally a trans woman who's womanhood is subject to being revoked or used against me at any moment, as well as my being frequently targeted and affected by transmisogyny it would be mistaken to consider me TME. This acknowledges my material reality and lived experiences that, regardless of your opinion, directly tie into my oppression.
I have lived with the internal experience of being trans ever since I was born and an external one for years now; excluding transmisogyny from an assessment of my marginalization leaves out crucial factors that contribute to my social position.
Transfeminism?
I am a very avid transfeminist. My theory, my accounts, my blog are all based around it. I have done a lot of reading and a lot of living which has influenced my own analysis. Do not assume that because of my assignment I am somehow naïve around topics within transfeminism. I have intricate knowledge of gender assignment and the functions of marginalization especially.
Don't bother to engage with me if you can't explain to me how marginalization as a whole generally works.
I might make a longer essay about this but for now, I wanted to jot down some thoughts.
I'm well aware of the origins of the term, to my knowledge it began in the intersex community by people who meant well and sought to describe an experience intersex people noticed they were having. Understandable but even then there was a fatal flaw.
My biggest gripe with the label is the first word in it. "AFAB". Supposedly, this is an identity label, words that describe someone's gender, modality or alignment. Why is it then that the assignment is part of the label?
There's a pretty clear reason why. There's an acknowledgement that transfeminine people assigned female at birth will have a different experience to other transfems. Fine and dandy right? Well still not really.
I discussed this a little in my essay 'Assigned Femininity', how identifying with an assignment is harmful not only to trans women but also trans identity. The very point of transitioning whether social or medical is to remake yourself, to define yourself outside of society's strict gendered assignment of female and male. To use one of those assignments as part of an identity, even if it's meant to describe an experience, is counterintuitive to adopting a transgender identity.
Trans women have been pointing this out, why don't these people use intersex transfem instead of AFAB transfem? Again, I get why, wanting a distinguisher for people like you is an understandable and very common thing for a community to push for. In simple terms it's just a bad one, it doesn't do what it sets out to do.
One of those reasons being that it's made people extrapolate assigned female TO female, a tendency humans have to simplify. They assume someone assigned female was born a certain way, has certain genitals, was raised as a girl, retained their female assignment throughout their lives, etc. It associates someone's identity with how they were assigned, the opposite of the point of being trans. It too splits a line down the middle, distinguishing "female" transfems from "male" transfems, do I have to explain what's wrong with that?
It's no wonder then that TERFs have adopted the label. It was inevitable, emphasizing a "female experience" was bound to alienate transfems who frequently have their own assignment used against them. TERFS said they were the real trans women, explicitly saying that trans women were not real women themselves. Ignoring the trans part, this likely begun the notion that AFAB transfems were cis women invading the transfeminine community to adopt aesthetics and culture while simultaneously speaking over transfems on their own subjects. The worst part was, that really was and still is happening. Intersex people find themselves distraught that a word they created for their people has been co-opted by bigots and face the repercussions for it. It never should've been used in the first place but regardless of TERF status or transmisogynistic peddling, a group of people were overwhelmingly labelled as disingenuous. To say this was out of left field would be ignorant to the level of transmisogyny stirring in these spaces though the minimal good that could've come out of the term all went down the drain.
That's another difficult topic, how AFAB transfem despite all its issues is the most popular term for these groups of people. It makes a horrible distinction but the only real one considering the more obscure labels (honeybee transfem, wïfmull, trollfem) don't have much of a community behind them. All that's left now is a clusterfuck of bad information. Misunderstandings of what it means to be transfeminine. Harassment. Blatant, internalized or otherwise relatively subtle transmisogyny. There's too much to say about it, how so much is wrong with people determining themselves to be transfeminine because of a supposed disconnection to womanhood, the desire for a penis or a masculine body structure. How there may very well be an experience that deserves recognition that isn't being explained with very much tact at all.
For a long time, this conversation has scared me away. I thought I was a bad person because I couldn't find a way characterize my experience with womanhood as anything other than trans. I interrogated myself based on my knowledge of transmisogyny, why do I think this? What makes me so different from a cis person? I couldn't stop feeling like I was doing a bad thing and trust me, I tried to stop. I've never used the AFAB transfem label, I knew its issues but the word too caused me a great deal of dysphoria that sent me down several mental health spirals as well as one severe dissociative episode where my entire identity as a human being nearly crumbled. I looked for anything else, ipsogender, adfeminine, demigender, sensfeminine, any little micro label but it did nothing for me. It just isolated me from any sense of community or culture. I truly do have an understanding of the people who fight for the label so hard, I know that there's a genuine experience of gender underneath all of the shit. In my opinion though, it's time to let the label go. There are better options out there. In my essay I described in more detail who I called assignment variant transgender women. I won't describe everything here, for that, go read my essay on WordPress.
It's so interesting to read works such as those by Julia Serano and see parts that look a lot like what I discuss in my theory. I see the same from the transmasculine essays I'm seeing now too.
I hear Julia saying how obviously being forced in the male category for much of her life was violent and traumatic but also that being forced into a female category upon appearing as a cis woman to the world was also violent. I read about how a trans man discusses how no man actually achieves manhood, they simply spend their entire lives trying to fulfill it.
This is exactly what I mean by assigned male and femaleness. How they're not just present from birth but also inflicted as someone grows in excessive ways. Trans people are assigned both to varying degrees and are therefore determined neither.
I mean of cours you were assigned female at birth! I rarely see amab transfems being so accepting toward of afab transfems
So this is weird. I'm not different in essence from other trans women regardless of what I was assigned at birth. We are all women who transgress both gender assignments. I come to the conclusions I do partly because of my own experience and partly because of the theory I read, the theory of other trans women.
This is not an “amab” vs. “afab” trans woman blog. I am not an “afab trans woman”, other trans women are not “amab trans women” and associating me with my birth assignment makes me uncomfortable. We're trans, we're not our AGAB. That's kind of the point.
I'd just like to let people know, especially people who've been in my asks, that I haven't been the target of transmisogyny now just because I assert myself as a trans woman. In fact I don't, in real life I rarely if ever bring it up, the only references to it are a trans flag in my Instagram bio and a she/her pin over a trans flag on my bag.
Not everyone sees these things when meeting me, a lot of people think I'm a cis woman at first glance. That isn't particularly weird for trans women and it doesn't stop us from being targeted by or internalizing transmisogyny. It doesn't stop us being afraid in public or scared to use the washroom or okay when we see our sisters murdered or killed or alright when people project transmisogyny onto us when they find out.
I'm really not that different. If you met me in real life, at first you might assume I'm a cis girl, then you might find out I'm a trans woman and assume I'm like any other. Having a conversation with me you would never be able to tell that I was assigned differently and I never lie to the girls that I know. I exist in transfeminine spaces and that makes me happy.
I am a woman who doesn't identify with her assigned gender. I am medically transitioning to affirm my identity, I have been experiencing dysphoria since I knew what gender was. My body looks physically different to others as a result of my transition, I can never go back. It does not define my transfemininity though my intimate experiences with people are impacted by the fact I have a penis. Everyday different thoughts intrude into my mind about my body that make me feel like I'm too much of the wrong gender. I'm trans, I'm a woman, I'm transfeminine and also transfeminized. Those are immutable facts about myself that I cannot change whether I say I am or not.
I am not an AFAB trans woman. I am not AFAB. I am a trans woman who's assignment is unlike those with that same label.
If afab trans women exist, so do amab cis women, right ? What would make someone an ''amab cis woman'' ?
I've thought about this! And I honestly doubt they don't exist, there may be many intersex cis women assigned male at birth.
Honestly my presumption is that those women identify their womanhood with their assignment, which they receive, just not at birth. As I've said, many people especially women from what I've seen are assigned both femaleness and maleness. Some are assigned more of one than another woman is. Maybe a woman assigned male at birth does not consider her womanhood trans because it's associated with femaleness she was assigned in excess. That might be because she's intersex, because she was reassigned or for any other reason.
There's another conversation to be about how that woman is impacted by transmisogyny. You could still consider her transfeminized, there are many transfeminized people who do not identify with the term transfeminine. That's what the word is for. Unfortunately, in a lot of cases an identity can't exempt you from certain forces but you may internalize it differently. An AMAB cis woman might not consider herself especially emotionally affected by transmisogyny because she identifies with her assignment even if she's targeted by it. Marginalization affects people in so many complex ways, dynamics between identity, perception, personal history and community violence.
We're talking about complicated topics here but I assure you there's nothing I haven't considered.
I feel like so many models for "AV trans women" don't have any concept of the transmisogyny that happen in male spaces, the violence and the punishment of femininity in anyone assumed to be male. like ultimately any model that doesn't include being assigned male or being shoved in male spaces is not accounting for many many vectors of transmisogyny. thoughts?
I know what you mean, I think about that too. I will say not all AV trans women have those experiences substantially but some do. AV trans woman doesn't mean AFAB trans woman, it means a trans woman who's assignment is unlike other trans womens'. Some were assigned male at birth and reassigned female, some were reassigned male. There are other ways someone's assignment can be different, there are even other ways someone who wasn't assigned male at birth can be assigned male in significant ways later on.
You're not wrong, personally as much as I have had a little experience being forced into the male category, it doesn't compare to a lot of other trans women. At birth, I was not told that I should be a man, that did impact how much I was allowed to express femininity as a kid. I understand that, I don't deny my own reality. That's a facet of transmisogyny I explicitly acknowledge, the ways trans women are in particular assigned male is something I emphasize in my essay when I discuss how differently trans women and cis women experience punishment under patriarchy. Part of what I say about AV trans women is that from what I've seen, the majority of us have experiences being coercively assigned male in some way either from birth or later on during transition.
Those are the consequences of being who we truly are, not something we choose. I'd consider that to fit into the greater conversation of transmisogyny. There are definitively AV trans women who have been through less coercive male assignment than the average trans woman but I don't think that denies the reality of our experiences or identities. It isn't something that we are entirely exempt from as a whole either, just something that is often less prevalent.
This isn't something that's unique to transmisogyny either. Every other form of marginalization holds complexities like this. I will make a comparison to race because I am extremely racialized, I am black and Native American and my features are very very visible. I as a black person am very targeted for being black, I have dark skin, I have 4C hair, I'm a first gen immigrant, and I grew up in a third world black-dominated country. I am the frequent, intentional target of anti-black racism. There are also black people who are different to me. Some were born with paler skin or straighter hair and will either never or not nearly as substantially experience those forms of anti-black racism like I do (colourism, texturism, featurism, etc.). It doesn't mean they're not black, that they're not targeted by anti-black racism as a force, it just means they inhabit a different intersection within that framework.
This concept even applies to trans women assigned male at birth. Some (albeit very few) experience the joy of having their womanhood accepted by their families from the moment they express it, getting to exist in the world as girls from a young age. It doesn't completely exempt them from transmisogyny, they will still be frequently forced into third gender categories and even if they just see the way people like them are treated publicly it will have an impact on them because they are that specific minority target.
It isn't as black and white as "all trans women experience every single force of transmisogyny" and "anyone assigned female at birth who is also a trans woman doesn't have to deal with that by nature of their AGAB." No form of marginalization works like that.
Both me and my best friend grew up as trans women similarly. I didn't know I was trans, she didn't know she was trans. I went through life dissociated, vaguely miserable about my place in the world while not knowing why. So did she. Now both of us are expressing our womanhood in different ways and suffering for it. I am a public target of transmisogyny whether I express my transfemininity or not and she still suffers feeling unable to express herself femininely because she's rightfully horrified of what comes after that. My experience even has terrified her.
I would say she was and is currently assigned more maleness than me but that doesn't take away from the fact that transmisogyny is one of the main ways I am marginalized as a minority. Transmisogyny affects me differently than it does other trans woman and that isn't unique to me. The difference between me and a cis woman is that it is targeting me. Regardless of what is said out loud, the world targets all trans women including me because we're women who don't conform to gender assignment regardless of what that assignment was at birth. The world does not think trans women are men, it thinks they are failed women who can easily be dehumanized by assigning them maleness. It thinks that of me too, all of us for different reasons.
I'm happy that you've taken to time to talk to me and really consider my arguments, I was worried people would assume I'm being disingenuous at first glance which some have. I appreciate the opportunity to have my analysis taken seriously and evaluated with genuine criticism. Getting the opportunity to have a conversation about this has honestly made me a lot more confident and proud of my identity. I apologize if I've ever come across as antagonizing you, I want you to know I do appreciate it.
