#wriggling thoughts

[waterlilyworld]

i’m not gonna lie the erasure of transmasculinity everywhere i turn is really starting to get to me lads. multiple characters that are either gnc or outright trans in their source material are being hyper feminized in their television adaptations. a cis lesbian lgbt historian’s video comes across my path and in it she asserts clearly that stormé delevarie is a cis woman, the comments all agreeing on what a wonderful womanly woman she was, no one does it like women do. another video someone with nearly two million followers posts a video essentially saying trans men don’t experience discrimination compared to trans women. it gets tens of thousands of likes. a video of a cis woman in support of trans people next, all the comments talking about how trans women must be women because they are oppressed like women are, i wonder what that makes me to them. two trans men dead this last month. another two trans men with their teeth broken from hate crime assault this week. one of them in a trans sanctuary state, in broad daylight, screaming out for help and everyone around him looks away. looking away. everybody is looking away. we are the thing in the corner of their eye that they would rather not see and what crime did we commit to be treated this way? are we truly seen as so pitifully grotesque for our harmless aberration from the female sex that it feels natural to pretend we are not there? that we were never there? i’m terrified. i’m terrified by what is going to happen to us in the silence. i wish i wasn’t.

[waterlilyworld]

one of these days i’ll be able to put into words why my skin crawls every time a trans woman says that trans men are lucky because at least the patriarchy sees us as useful because of our reproductive abilities. i’ve heard it over and over and over again and it causes waves of repulsion to move through my body every time but it’s too loud for me to find the words to properly express why.

[waterlilyworld]

trans men not only exist in feminism and women’s demographics and spaces, we fucking originated in them. why would you expect us to leave a movement and space the moment we lose more rights and become more vulnerable? the moment we self actualize and find a home in our bodies? and you want me to believe it isn’t meant as a punishment for our transition?

[waterlilyworld]

i really do believe we must start straight up asking some of these people what they think trans men were before our transitions, because other than the small amount of lucky ones who got raised as boys and transitioned young, we were all perceived and treated as girls, and for some of us not just as girls but as gender aberrant masculine girls that experienced transphobia as well as misogyny at a young age perhaps before they themselves even knew they were trans.

[waterlilyworld]

pro tip: you ever see someone, anyone, making reference to trans men having short heights or small sized bodies or small genitalia even, that is immediately your sign that that person is deeply hateful and should no longer be given the benefit of the doubt or engaged with. 

there is this odd sort of plausible deniability that is happening these days because references to things that make trans men physically dysphoric is not widely seen as an issue, (because if we take issue with it we are just upset about being ‘emasculated’ and are not trans people with dysphoria. obviously.) and that leads to people talking about us in explicitly transphobic ways with minimal to zero push back. 

if someone was constantly referring to the large height and size of trans women in disparaging or fetishistic ways i’d hope you’d be able to clock how fucking weird and transphobic that was, and this is no different.

[waterlilyworld]

i really am at a loss these days, when i tell you that every time i have ever had a back and forth with a trans person who is adamant that trans men oppress trans women, and i lay out trans statistics for them, back up my sources (sources like the trevor project, the kirby insititute, ucla and the national center for transgender equality), and sincerely ask them to engage with that and tell me how a group that has such high rates in comparison to the other has oppressive power, the conversation immediately ends. i get blocked, or they just stop responding entirely.

at this point, all i want is for someone to genuinely engage with the actual reality of trans people, specifically trans men, and either show me how that translates to us being oppressive and stick to their guns, or let what i’ve shown them change their mind. i am tired of spending my time, sincerely and genuinely trying to bridge a gap of understanding between me and other trans people only to be met with silence the moment i give reputable sources for where i’m getting my information and why i think what i do. it’s exhausting and disappointing because it makes it look like people don’t actually care very much about the lived reality of trans people, which makes it seem like they don’t care very much about our liberation at all, because how can we get anywhere if so many of us are refusing to look at where we’re coming from? it comes across like they care more about the gender euphoria it gives them to either be oppressed by trans men or be an oppressive trans man, than they care about actually engaging with material reality. it’s disappointing, and frankly, i have secondhand embarrassment. what am i supposed to do with all of this?

[waterlilyworld]

a group that has been statistically proven to have some of the highest rates of domestic violence, sexual assault, negative experiences with law enforcement, low life satisfaction, medical discrimination, youth homelessness, suicide, and violent victimization is not experiencing privilege over a group that has proven lower rates of every single one of those things btw. a group that also experiences reproductive oppression on top of it all btw. that isn’t what privilege looks like. we’re in this shit together, suck it up and start caring about other trans people.

[waterlilyworld]

it being a popular and regular thing to see people insist on specifying ‘cis’ when talking about things pertaining to womanhood that trans women do not face in order to not implicitly leave them out of discussions of womanhood while having feminist conversations, and yet when it comes to ranting about the evils that (cis) men do and a trans man asks that you specify ‘cis’ suddenly he’s just too sensitive and should automatically know whats being said doesn’t apply to him.

EDIT: i made this post quickly and in a sour mood, i don’t like that i generalized the way trans women are treated here, nor that i took the low road of comparing, i don’t think this was a fair or accurate assessment to make. what i said about trans men i stand by, but everything else i find uncalled for, i apologize for putting more unnecessarily divisive shit out there. not an excuse but i haven’t been myself lately and life has been asking a lot of me so i am not at my best. i will be much more careful and mindful in the future.