#gender binary

[laciffo-natas]

Oh by the way if you view nonbinary people as having to be either transmasc or transfem, or being man/woman-lite, or tma/tme, or literally anything except what they tell you about their gender, you are transphobic

Stop forcing nonbinary people INTO A FUCKING BINARY.

[manichewitz]

trans men and trans women are not opposites bc men and women period are not opposites. man and woman are not two sides of the same coin they are two drops of water in the great gender ocean

[midwestemokilledmygrandma]

transsexual is not an old fashioned or outdated term. transsexual is not a term only used by transmedicalists, truscum and transphobic trans people. you do not have to like or use the term transsexual for yourself and no one is forcing you to, however you do have to be normal about other people using the term transsexual to describe themselves and their experiences.

people still use the term transsexual, transsexual is a term steeped in trans history and trans liberation because transness is not just about the gender binary but also about the sex binary. for many people transness is inherently related to their sex and they are trying to change their sex. sex is not an irrefutable, immutable fact and the sooner people accept that the sooner trans, nonbinary and intersex liberation becomes a possibility. I hate the sentiment that gender is a changeable social construct and sex is a biological fact because sex is also a changeable social construct.

stop buying into t_rf and transphobic rhetoric about sex.

[prokopetz]

New gender binary: either you exist or you don't exist.

[taliabhattwrites]

"Reinventing the Gender Binary"

CWs: Rape, fetishization, impregnation by assault, dehumanization, transmisogynistic degendering, misappropriating the language of racial justice, objectification, and worst of all, "infighting". I'm going to do something stupid---post about transfeminism on Tumblr again. The following is transcribed from two Bluesky threads:

I have a story.

About how "transfeminists reinvented the gender binary". About how "every trans person is subject to transmisogyny". About how "we're all faggots, deviants, perverts, so why demand specificity?" It begins with a transmasc individual saying "chicks with dicks" isn't offensive.

See, this individual identified as a chick with a dick. Or a man with a vag, depending. They revealed a lot about themselves over the course of the argument with a trans women. They were 19, married, a parent, and never availed of any transition care. They didn't consider this term dehumanizing.

When the trans woman they were arguing with told them that they didn't have the authority to deem whether a term fetishizing her was dehumanizing or not, they got very nasty. Trans women did not have any special claim over 'chick with dick', and to say so was to practically misgender them.

So justified, they talked about how trans women *are* just a sexual identity, a kink identity, and we did not have any special authority over transphobia or transmisogyny. Unlike them, who experienced real oppression. This is where they strongly implied that they had been impregnated by assault.

That's deeply traumatic, and violent, and something no trans woman will experience. So therefore, of course, we have no epistemic authority over misogyny. Or transphobia. Or sexual assault, and fetishization. Our suffering is always going to be a subset of "real" misogyny, see. Because no wombs.

This individual is young, and they do not know they are a TERF. Trans identity, to them, is a mask, a way to "escape being gendered". Oppression to them is intrinsically linked to reproductive exploitation, which is synonymous with misogyny, and trans women don't experience that. We costume.

Every time I hear someone say that "we've reinvented the gender binary", I sigh deeply. We never needed to reinvent it. Trans women, in the midst of the most queervoid-y of spaces, have always keenly been aware that our claims of oppression and experiencing misogyny are rarely believed.

You can say this was a young individual---but where are they going to learn better? Who is going to tell them that trans women's oppression isn't a costume, isn't a stigma for a kink, is more than just a mask we put on? That we are, meaningfully, women? Even without the wombs?

The gender binary is already there. The queervoided social spaces always cease to be queervoided when a tranny walks in, because these spaces recognize true trans people yearning to be free from (re)gendering and oppression, and "male pretenders who want to be gender I wish to escape, the freaks".

I am not the one who made the gender binary important. I am not the one who tolerated TERFs in my spaces, who encouraged the uncritical adoption of naturalized sex split from gender, and promoted a model of misogyny intrinsically tied to reproductive injustice.

I am the one who is offal.

Trans women are women who cannot be reproductive exploited, and we are too tainted to be allowed to be men ever again. So we are trash. Even to queervoids, because their "beyond the binary" ends at the threshold of a tranny demanding respect.

You think you are beyond sex? You think you have eliminated the need to divine what kind of gendered violence an individual is subject to?

I don't believe you.

I don't believe you, because I have seen gendervoids enact this violence on trannies, time and time again.

I don't believe you are beyond gender.

[Red, in a different post]:

I don't believe you are beyond gender.

I don't believe you are beyond gender.

YOU MARK ME AND MINE IN THE SAME WAY THE CIS DO, IN THE SAME WAY OUR MOST DEDICATED EXTERMINATIONIST FOES DO, AND YOU HAVE THE SHEER, UNREPENTANT, UTTER GALL TO PRETEND YOU ARE IN ANY WAY MORE ENLIGHTENED THAN THE GUTTER OF THE PATRIARCHY YOU EMERGED FROM?

You are not beyond gender.

Fuck your pronouns. You treat a tranny like this, your gender is fucking "sexist". Piss on your "gender abolition". It's worth nothing.

I will, in fact, be even blunter:

Trans women are not trying to say transmisogyny is "the worst oppression". We gave up on trying to stress the severity of it a long time ago. We are, at this point, trying to communicate that we *are oppressed at all*, to people who refuse to believe it.

I have seen fifty-year old men pull out the "I was a woman longer than you, tranny" card. I've seen people of every identity and experience go "I'll always be more of a woman than you, tranny, and don't you fucking forget it." Trans women are surveilled, scrutinized, targeted, and not believed.

The most gender-enlightened of us all refuse to deign to recognize trans women as meaningfully impacted by misogyny, as anything but second-class citizens of womanhood and feminism, as meaningfully oppressed because we are woman-gendered, sure, maybe, but we are not FEMALE.

And we notice that.

Then when we notice that even fellow trans people are more willing to self-regender to talk over us than BELIEVE US ABOUT OUR OWN LIVES AND OPPRESSION, or GRANT US THE PRIVILEGE OF SPEAKING AS THEIR EQUALS IN THE STRUGGLE AGAINST PATRIARCHY, we are called "divisive".

Fuck that.

Hear me, here and now: You will get nowhere but a singularity of a "gender-enlightened" movement collapsing in on itself because for all the yearning for a post-gender existence, no one is willing to grant the tranny the dignity of womanhood, to admit that she, too, suffers AS a woman.

If you want to tie the core of misogynistic oppression to reproduction and deem transness as nothing more than "gender-play", fine. I wish you luck.

Cassandra has spoken.

[zaebeecee]

I’m gonna start an ice cream shop specifically for all of the people who say gender is binary or make that “but nonbinary and binary is still a binary lol” joke

This ice cream shop will sell two flavors: vanilla and not vanilla

“What’s not vanilla?” I’m glad you asked, because I can assure you, it’s not vanilla

“But not vanilla could be a lot of things” oh you mean like how nonbinary could be a lot of things?

IT’S ALMOST LIKE BREAKING STUFF INTO TWO ARBITRARY CATEGORIES DOESN’T ACTUALLY MAKE IT A CHOICE BETWEEN TWO THINGS OR SOMETHING???

[elonmuskratsbussy]

Radical feminism will always boil down to “women are delicate flowers that are always victims” and “men are all rapist perpetrators of patriarchy” this dichotomy ignores the existence of intersex people, ignores the fact that women rape men quite frequently and the fact that it is highly underreported compared to rape against women, and the fact that women are highly capable of violence and abuse. Not to mention all the harm it causes to trans people

[catboykatebush]

I feel like the only time I ever see androgynous queer people mentioned in any relatively popular posts about queerness is to say that “nonbinary people don’t owe anyone androgyny”. Which, btw, is totally true! That, or, at worst, people with intentionally androgynous presentations are often subject to cringe culture perpetuating comments from other queer people. Meanwhile, there’s very little actual positivity or pride or allyship directed at us as androgynous people.

All that being said, I wish there was more appreciation and consideration of queer people who ARE and/or WANT TO BE (trans)androgynous. As a (trans)androgynous queer person, I often feel invisibilized and erased even within the nonbinary/genderqueer and broader trans communities themselves. Sometimes it really feels like other queer people view “androgyny” and related terms as antiquated, like we just shouldn’t even be using that terminology anymore, despite the fact that those words describe experiences of identity that one could argue are actually very common in queer people, even if they don’t choose to use that language to identify themselves.

I honestly think a lot of it comes down to pure exorsexism- a lot of people, even other queer people, feel uncomfortable with the idea of a trans person who’s not transitioning towards one side of the binary or the other. There’s so much pressure for nonbinary people to “pick a side”, even within queer spaces, and a lot of the time, the existence of androgyne people seems to challenge this mindset. Of course, none of this is to say that nonbinary people who do lean transmasc or transfem don’t face discrimination in and outside of queer spaces either, because as we should all know, any and all forms of nonbinary identity are considered to be unacceptable under patriarchal standards.

I hope this changes someday, and I hope we start to become more recognized in a positive light within queer spaces, but until then I’ll continue to be a broken record about it.