Re: the mousidy post you reblogged just now about trans men in lesbian spaces
(sorry, can’t get a link as am on mobile). I almost left a comment, but I’d rather bring this to you personally, since we trust each other to discuss transmisogyny in good faith. Please feel free to disregard this ask if it’s too much on your plate.
I think posts like the one you reblogged assume lesbian is only the sum of its parts: One is a lesbian IFF (One is a woman) AND (One is attracted to women).
I think “lesbian” is more than the sum of its parts—it’s also a community, a subculture, and a way of interacting with the dating scene. By the time a trans man realizes he’s trans, he might have 10 or 15 years experience in “lesbian.” I don’t think he needs to disavow that experience for trans women to be welcome to lesbianism.
The impediment to trans women being accepted as lesbians is transmisogyny and bioessentialism. It comes also from trans men, but primarily from cis women. If a trans man claims connection to lesbianism for bioessentialist reasons, that is transmisogynistic. But the mere fact of a trans man’s connection to lesbianism does not imply the connection is bioessentialist. It can be formed at the individual level of history interacting with specific people and places. (eg he gets invited to lesbian parties in toledo because he has 50 lesbians from toledo on his contact list, the list being built up from his time living as a lesbian woman in toledo.)
IMO it would be better to ask trans men who have access to the lesbian community to leverage that access to help trans women gain entry, rather than asking them to leave. (he can use his inroads with toledo lesbians to get trans women invited to parties?)
Of course I don’t think so lowly of you, but I wonder if some of the support on tumblr for “trans men out of lesbian spaces” comes from oppositional sexism? aka: if one gender is welcome, the other must not be. Zero sum game thinking.
But then I also know there are myriad lesbian terfs who explicitly include trans men and not trans women in their lesbianism due to belief in immutable sex. I guess my point is those terfs are the enemy, not the trans men themselves.
I've been thinkin about this one for a while, but to be honest I don't think I can really say anything which Mousidy didn't already say more succinctly. Fundamentally, and the main thing to notice, is that the OP is NOT ABOUT trans men who identify as lesbian. Highlighting because this is really the only new thing I have to add that isn't just a more elaborate rehash of the OP. The OP is about people who say that trans men can be lesbians, and more generally it's about the discourse which tells trans people they are "allowed to" behave in exactly the way they already behaved when closeted. The difference here is extremely important, because it is literally the entire issue at hand.
I personally don't care if any trans man wants to identify as a lesbian. That's his business. I also know there can be tons of wiggle room w.r.t. nonbinary identities. But I, as a lesbian, will not be having sex with him. Not having sex with men, or masculine-identifying people, is kinda the whole idea of being a lesbian. Telling lesbians such as myself, that he can be a lesbian, sorta sounds like comphet to me. I know you don't intend this, but this is (one of) the material effects of this kind of rhetoric. I've had to deal with this exact situation, of a binary trans man who still seemed adjacent to or still inside of lesbian culture, and feeling pressured into having sex with him, even after having expressed I didn't really like the idea, because he was "kinda still a lesbian in a way". On the other hand, I am also panromantic, so I have happily dated trans men before (in a non-sexual capacity). And in my personal experience, as a second-hand outside observation, they usually don't like it when other people conflate them with lesbians, or when lesbians engage with them sexually. One of my past partners specifically expressed dysphoria on this exact subject.
We can talk all day about the subtleties of nonbinary identities and how labels are flexible or whatever, but most people do actually agree that "lesbian" means "woman/fem who is attracted to other women/fems", most people agree, including most trans men. Trans men are already coerced by all of society into performing femininity, they are already coerced into acting the exact same way they did when people thought he was a woman, and being a cis lesbian is more acceptable than being a straight trans man. We're not actually freeing trans men by saying trans men can be lesbians. That is already what society wants from him, to behave exactly the way he did before he transitioned. He can say he's a lesbian if he really wants to, but he typically doesn't, and being told over and over and over that he's "allowed to" starts to feel a lot less like acceptance and a lot more like shoving him back in the cis closet.
Admittedly I'm projecting some of my personal experiences at the end there, because I'm not a trans man myself, but I do assume the relationship between trans men & lesbianism is not too dissimilar to the relationship between trans women & gay male culture. Many of us did come from that (not me, but many of my sisters), it's what we identified as previously, and it's the culture we had, but it is not us, and it's not what we are or want to be seen as anymore. If anyone tells me, even a single time, that I'm "allowed to be in gay male culture", I find that to be deeply offensive and regressive. Incidentally, this is also comphet. I have also been in a situation like this, where a cis guy tried to coerce me into having sex with him because he viewed me as "basically just a gay male", two things of which I am neither. Society already wants me to detransition, or barring that, to behave like a heterosexual woman who has sex with men. Literal TERFs and open transphobes constantly tell us to "just be feminine men, just be gay men". That is what everyone is already saying. Whether we "can" is irrelevant. It is not freeing to be told this!
The fact that we also can't, in the case of transfems, is of course a component of the larger transfeminist critique of these ideas. Straight trans women are usually not accepted as sexual partners by cis gay men (nor, in my opinion, should she be), and she tends to have very poor interactions with cis gay men (acceptance by bi/pan men may vary). My very limited understanding is that trans men also face a general rejection from cis gay men, although I have not looked too deeply into it. On the other hand, trans lesbians are also largely rejected by lesbians. We are rejected from both cultures. But cis lesbians often still accept trans men & trans masculine people into their circles, far more than actual literal women, trans women & transfeminine people. This is of course in part due to transphobia against trans men, seeing them as "basically women", but materially it is trans women who are being physically and socially excluded, it is primarily just transmisogyny. This is not the "fault of" trans men, but their access to lesbian spaces is a privilege we do not have, despite often literally being lesbians. It is transphobic against him, and ten times as transmisogynistic against us. I agree with you wholeheartedly that his access to those spaces doesn't mean we can't be there, and also that he should use his acceptance in those spaces to advocate for us. But the OP doesn't even ask as much as that, it doesn't even criticize him, it criticizes the people who push this rhetoric in the first place, the fake "level 100" queer discourse of "labels don't mean anything", which is actually just running interference for level 1 discourse reinforcing that trans men "can" (should) act like women and trans women "can" (should) act like men.
A rule of thumb I have, for not accidentally reinforcing the status quo of oppression (fully generalizable), is this: if you really must say something which sounds exactly like what society is already telling us constantly, then you need to spend exponentially more time reinforcing the legitimately true but unpopular counterparts, and this goes double if the stakes are higher in the latter scenario.
If you really have to say it, then for every one time you say "trans men can be a part of lesbian culture" I need you to say "trans women can be a part of lesbian culture" like a hundred times over, or maybe a thousand. We tend not to notice our biases when we're steeped in them, but when framed like this, the sheer prevalence of "trans men can be lesbians" discourse starts to feel, really really jarring. Why is he being granted more lesbian status than me? He doesn't even want that, and when he does people let him. I do actually want that, and people are constantly saying I'm a monster for it. What gives?
Just say trans women can be lesbians. I guarantee you this is 100x more liberating, both socially and materially, than saying trans men can be lesbians. You don't need to tell him. Not only does he know, he literally did that already, and he doesn't want it anymore. You need to tell us. You need to say trans women can be lesbians.
