Here it is: a pinned post for you to know things about me before interacting with me. Heads up, I am incapable of not being long-winded. It's okay if you ignore this or just skim it, but it's here for the curious and nosy.
-- You can call me Fruity or Fruit. Some people call me Uncle due to my username, and that's fine too.
-- I use any pronouns*, but my main ones are they/them, he/him, and ve/vim/vis for cool people who make an effort with neopronouns. *Don't use she/her for me or use terminology that ties me to womanhood without explicit permission. Some people are allowed, but if you aren't 1000% sure you're one of them, keep she/her out of your mouth.*
-- I'm multigender, but I typically say I'm a nonbinary trans guy, because that's how I primarily present myself to the world. My gender contains multitudes, though, so go ahead and leave any assumptions you may have made about my gender identity at the door.
More under the cut!
-- I am 34-years-old. I don't really care if minors interact or not. I try to be an approachable adult if a kid needs community or advice or whatever else. I don't post NSFW stuff on this account, so that shouldn't be a concern. I won't put a specific effort into making my blog "appropriate" for minors, though, so if you're a minor and anything I post bothers you, you are welcome to unfollow me or block me and never think of me again.
-- Due to having a rich and busy life outside of the internet, I also have a bad habit of not responding to DMs or anons very quickly. You are more than welcome to send them, but if you're trying to have a big/complex conversation about theory or social justice or anything else, expect my response time to be Several Months. It just takes a lot of energy and focus to respond sometimes, and I often only come to Tumblr to kill time or post about specific things on my mind. If you send lighthearted or small interactions or have a quick ask, those are more likely to be answered quickly.
-- DO NOT send me callout posts or slander campaigns about a different Tumblr user. I don't care who it is or what sort of evil they've allegedly committed; I am not interested in helping with harassment campaigns against your personal enemy. If someone has caused harm to you or your community, kick them out and block them everywhere. Talk to the people they've harmed and offer support instead of revenge. Make your own post. Don't involve me. I will not play along.
-- DO NOT send me donation posts or mutual aid requests. I don't have time to vet these kinds of posts to avoid spreading scams, and I don't know/trust any other Tumblr users well enough to let them vouch for someone's credibility. When I'm able to, I make personal donations and contribute to mutual aid efforts offline, locally, and to people/groups abroad that have been vetted by real life activists I personally know and trust. I also usually don't have any money I can reasonably spare, so just don't ask.
-- I block extremely liberally. I block people who annoy me too much. I block people who try to spread misinformation, fearmonger, or ragebait in my posts. I block people who just want to argue in circles or harass me or make accusations with no evidence to back them up. I block people who openly make their whole personality about hating men (yes, even cis men). I block bigots of all sorts when I recognize bigoted behavior. I block TERFs and TRFs and gender/bioessentalists on sight. I block bullies and trolls and fuckos. Above all, I block based on *my* whims. I'll delete shitty comments, too, so truly do not waste your time. I encourage everyone to block obvious trolls and malicious bigots -- it's the best way to maintain actual online safety from bad actors.
-- If I'm marked red on Shinigami Eyes it's probably because I post about transandrophobia, intersexism, and exorsexism. Let it be known that I believe in trans unity and intersectionality no matter what color my username is. I think all trans people are systemically oppressed, all of us deserve support and recognition, and none of us should be gatekept from contributing to transfeminism. If that reads as hating trans women or transmisogyny to you, kindly fuck off. Furthermore, I think Shinigami Eyes is a bad tool at its core. In a time of misinformation, devaluation of critical thinking skills, and rampant fascism, I think putting your trust in a Good & Bad People List without learning how to make a judgement for yourself is foolish and dangerous.
With all that bullshit out of the way, a couple more (fun) things!
-- I am an artist, but my art isn't posted or linked here. This account is separate from my art stuff, sorry! But I'm still happy to talk about art or encourage artists or reblog other people's art here! Never feel shy about sharing your art and stuff with me! I love it!
-- I reblog videos of animals doing cute things and stuff. I love opossums, cats, and all sorts of lil critters! Pet pictures are always welcome in my inbox.
-- I enjoy reading! If you like sci-fi/fantasy, I recommend The Broken Earth trilogy by N. K. Jemisin! I actually can never stop recommending that trilogy; it's so good! But I like plenty of other things too, so hit me up if you ever wanna talk books. I read a lot of classics and nonfiction and some sci-fi/fantasy -- if and when I actually have the time to read!
~☆~
Anyway! There's more to me than that, but that's just a few things about me that might help you interact with me with more information than just "some rando on Tumblr."
I've seen so many posts lately like "trans men have got to get more feminine" and it's lowkey pissing me off because we haven't even normalized trans men being masculine yet. Have you not been paying attention to trans men when they talk about being kicked out of LGBT spaces for "appearing too cishet" like can we lock in and understand that sexuality and oftentimes gender aren't something you can visually tell before we start trying to normalize something that's already normalized
OP, I'd like to add something that is absolutely not meant to detract from your very good point but rather to enrich the discussion, I hope it's okay.
Something else I have noticed on top of what you describe is that very often transmascs (of any ‘type’, gender identity, sexuality, and so on) that are not medicalized or not medicalized enough to pass are ALSO sidelined and dismissed, if not outright treated with hostility, in LGBT+ spaces, including ones that explicitly say they are 'trans inclusive'. So we are also sidelined if a person in these spaces deems us to be 'too cishet', but in the opposite sense - too much like a cis woman whose masculinity is not 100% irrefutable and unclockable.
And this applies not just to transmascs that choose to have a more 'feminine' gender presentation, but also just as much to transmascs that DO style themselves as masculine as possible but get still read as ‘tryhard girls wanting to feel special’ by onlookers entirely because of physical characteristics they cannot (yet) change such as facial features, voice, height, visible breasts even through binders &/or tape, body fat distribution, etc.
So we’re essentially damned if we do and damned if we don’t: we either aren’t trying hard enough and are silly little girl interlopers bothering the Real Queers or, the second we start to pass a bit too well, we’re evil rapey threats scaring the Real Queers.
The entire system is rigged against our existence in LGBT+ spaces as equal and valued participants, because people either don't care if we live or die or actively want us to disappear.
i don't think "being trans has a meaningful impact on your position under patriarchy, and when people talk about systemic misogyny and androcentrism and just say "men" instead of "cis men," it ignores that trans men have quite literally never been included in any of this" should be this goddamn fucking controversial tbh. but now i've got people crawling out the woodwork to um actually me about how "this study shows that trans men in the US full time work earn 10% more than trans women in full time work and also v-coding exists and also afab housing so therefore trans men as a class have male privilege and benefit from patriarchy"
#I genuinely wonder where they got lost if they think ‘access to AFAB housing’ is *male* privilege tbh#yknow. group of people who by are by definition not granted the sex marker of male on their birth certificate#and if our birth certificate and legal sex ID was changed to Male then#maybe. and hear me out here. maybe that would make it difficult. to get into. AFAB housing. whoa.#maybe this is why the term AFAB privilege began to circulate lmao#bc there’s no way of arguing this as male privilege that doesn’t come across as some form of absurdist satire
oh its like talking to a fucking funhouse mirror with these people tbh. its the same with that one guy who was like "checkmate MRA, women in the 19th century were legally property and couldn't wear pants!!" when that. is literally an example of how trans men were also directly systemically affected by misogyny.
these people never stop for one single second to think of trans men who never get to transition. they never think about the countless trans men throughout history who have lived and died as women. who have been subject to child marriage and clitorectomies and been treated as legal property. they don't think about trans men in countries right now who go through all of those things, who legally cannot be outside without a male guardian because they are legally female, who cannot even get their own passport because they are legally female. its so fucking frustrating.
radical feminism has its hooks so deep in some parts of the trans community, and frankly a lot of people have internalized trans separatist talking points. even if they don't realize it they don't seem to think of trans people as a coherent group. all trans people's experiences are seen as just a shadow cast by cis men’s privilege and cis women’s oppression, and our experiences are reducible to cis men and cis women's experiences but slightly different.
and, i have to say this again: this is literally how TERFs think, but in reverse. TERFs also ignore how trans men are worse off than cis women, and how trans women are worse off than cis men, and insist that all trans experiences are reducible to "men are privileged women are oppressed." its literally just a matter of which trans people you cram into which side of the cis binary. this is not good transfeminism and it never ever will be.
people will tell you that people seen as men are gender-policed much more harshly than people seen as women and every little deviation towards femininity is noticed and punished, and that's why trans guys have it easier. but you'll also hear people tell you that people seen as men have so much more wiggle room, men can be all kinds of sizes and shapes meanwhile people seen as women have to fit into this tiny little box, and that's why trans guys have it easier.
these are two entirely contradictory lines of logic, but they lead to the same conclusion. because the conclusion is the point. its a backformed theory of gender. people believe, for whatever reason, that "trans guys have it easier" is an objective fact, and then storytell an explanation for why that is that sounds right to them. [...]. its about people just feeling, on a gut level, that trans guys must have it easier, by which they really mean, transmasculine suffering isn't socially visible, and it isn't natural for me to imagine it, therefore it must not exist; yet, trans suffering in general clearly exists, so there must be some reason that transmasculine suffering feels so abstract and immaterial to me and others.
once you start to see this you can't unsee it. people will just say insane bullshit that could easily be used to make the opposite point they are making
here's an example of this in action:
"if someone masculine happens to have something feminine about them, it is dissuaded"
oh so you mean cis men can be feminine and no one cares and that's why trans men have male privilege? but i thought it was the reverse, that cis women can be masculine and no one cares and that's why trans men have male privilege? which is it? which is it? which is it? which is it? which is it? which is it? which is it? which is it? which is it?
"Society values being male over being female because trans men make $0.10 more than trans women" also is just............. ignoring the rest of that data, where TRANS MEN make less than CIS WOMEN. If "maleness" was valued over all, wouldn't trans men make more money than even cis women, instead of being the second lowest paid gender* when it comes to salary rates?
*Second lowest according to the screenshot above; that nonbinary people are missing does not escape notice
When it comes to specific historical figures whom we have good reason to believe were what we’d consider to be ‘transmasculine’, I believe it is appropriate and necessary to protest revisionism casting them as cis women who did what they did to rebel from patriarchy. Reclaiming them restores us our history and honors their memory both.
However, when it comes to the broader issue of whether certain tendencies, more or less historically documented, should be considered ‘women’s rebellion’ or ‘transmasculinity’, I propose that we should do away with this limited framing entirely. This dualism was not created by transmasculine people but by others wishing to define us (often, define us out of existence). I propose that what today we call ‘transmasculinity’ is and always has been a part of (so-called) ‘women’s’ history, not just because there have always been transmasculine people who were seen and recorded (if they were recorded) as women, but also and especially because the impulses that lead towards transmasculinity are historically, and thus epistemologically, indistinguishable from the impulses leading towards rebellion to patriarchal standards and impositions.
To phrase it another way, there is no way under patriarchy for any woman to enter the historical record while following patriarchal precepts for women’s behavior perfectly and entirely. Any woman whose name we know, any woman who has made it into the patriarchy’s well-guarded archives of history, was a woman that flaunted the oppressive prescriptions for women’s behavior strongly enough to swim against the current and achieve this seemingly impossible victory. Thus, as all ‘women’s history’ is at least to some extent a record of rebellion to patriarchy, transmasculine people have a claim to all of ‘women’s’ history, because a woman being in history in and of itself is an aberration from gendered roles - a gender non conformity, if you will.
This is not to say that every ‘rebellious’ woman in history was or would today be transmasculine. What I am saying is that ‘transmasculine history’ is not a separate category that is currently erroneously ‘nested’ inside women’s history - as I sometimes see people on here imply (a good faith and understandable mistake, to be sure). Rather, the two categories are fundamentally inseparable and indistinguishable, definitely for the so-far recorded human history (the overwhelming majority of which was recorded under patriarchal societies), but also to a large extent for the present and future, as long as transmasculinity continues to occupy its position as a rhetorical impossibility in many people’s minds.
miscellaneous & disorganized thoughts on the "why should feminists care so much about men's issues? why don't men organize themselves?"
feminist is not equivalent to woman. this is for one, because anyone can be a feminist, and two, because "being a feminist" (or rather, doing feminism) is not just being a woman or caring about women. it is a dedicated to a movement that seeks gender liberation and the end of patriarchal oppression; to call yourself a feminist, in my opinion, means holding yourself as a feminist to a higher standard in the pursuit of liberation. while we should of course be vigilant about reproducing patriarchal dynamics, we must not conflate the role of feminist with simply being a woman.
feminism has historically been deeply cissexist in a way which prevents full analysis of men and trans people's position under patriarchy. trans men have been involved with women's liberation forever, yet trans men have also been constantly excluded from feminism because of their manhood, despite being no less materially affected by misogyny.
men's liberation cannot be achieved without women's and trans liberation, and ultimately all gender liberation cannot be achieved while we maintain gender segregation. we must be unafraid to be heterosocial, affiliate with one another, and disregard the boundaries of gender in order to demand true freedom. if gender is a tool of patriarchal control which divides us socially and economically, we must turn gender into a tool of liberation by emphasizing inter-gender solidarity and our intertwined, overlapping experiences. we cannot achieve gender liberation by continuing to maintain the illusion that "men's issues" and "women's issues" are separate, especially when for trans and intersex people, this illusion is itself extremely violent and excludes us from feminism ideologically
going off that; women must take the first step and claim men's issues as a feminist concern, in order to take a sledgehammer to that gender segregation. by insisting that men's issues are women's issues, we can also then demand that men recognize women's issues are men's issues, and trans issues are men and women's issues, and men and women's issues are trans issues. many men have tried to do this themselves, but it is very hard for men who recognize women's issues are men's issues to be given enough recognition and validity amongst cis men. this stance means that feminists are not sitting around and waiting for cis men to collectively realize their position; they are demanding men realize it, and they are doing that through very pointed compassion. "you are with us whether you realize it or not; our doors are open, we are concerned for you, and to turn away from us is to reject yourselves."
to take inspiration from the Black Panthers, we need to heighten the contradictions of gender. we need to make cis men at large realize that it is only through organizing with women and trans people that they can be truly freed from their own gendered struggles - and to realize that their struggles are gendered in such a way. like it or not, feminism is THE anti-patriarchal force in our society; it seems a waste to refuse to use that force, simply because "we shouldn't have to."
When I say the recent major waves of transandrophobia, transmisogyny and exorsexism on this site feel like a psyop, I am not saying "bigotry in the community isn't real and everyone ever posting it is a government agent", I'm saying that a lot of us are becoming so susceptible to hating one another that we arent even recognizing when blatantly obvious bad faith actors are inserting themselves into our community spaces anymore.
I am watching people get anons that are self evidently written by TERFs, 4channers and a number of people who likely do not engage with our spaces outside of discourse, and blindly blaming other trans people/communities as a whole. Watching them insist that that's just how our brothers and sisters treat each other, so they've earned slurs and harassment in return. Eye for an eye, but you earn it by even having eyes to see that a blade was swung at all.
I'm begging all of you to learn to recognize this and stop participating in it. It's feeding exactly what the nasty underbelly of this site wants of our community - for it to self cannibalize and fizzle out until there's no one to have your back while they try to drive each and every one of us to detransition or suicide.
various tv, film, and theater producers for the last 50 years smacking themselves in the forehead like fuuuuck how can we make it easy to understand why carrie is alienated from her peers and callously bullied at school WITHOUT making her a hideous fatass like in the book
Oh wow so me saying "no government documentation should ever include a gender marker for any reason" has been right all along. For exactly the reason I stated when people were giving me shit for not supporting x markers on documents.
“People should pass a test before being allowed to have kids.” “Isn’t it scary how white people have this inborn capacity for evil?” “I’ll never pass because males and females have different skull shapes.” “Autistic people have a stronger sense of justice than anyone else.” “I don’t want AMABs in my space because they’re dangerous.” “You shouldn’t have access to hormones if you dress like THAT.” “Anyone who does something that awful isn’t human.” “Some people really shouldn’t be allowed to vote.”
This is eugenics. This is phrenology. THIS IS NAZI SHIT, YOU ARE A LEFTIST BUYING INTO NAZI SHIT. YOU ARE NOT IMMUNE TO NAZI SHIT.
