[disclaimer: literally any of my followers who send this person hate get blocked and go fuck yourself challenge]
I’m gunna be honest here this is the most annoying circular argument because it’s been explained over and over and over and yet? No one appears to want to listen or to care.
When I was a young baby gay and learning trans theory from a trans woman directly mentoring me in person, the correct term was transmisogyny. It was widely understood that both trans women and trans men are affected by transmisogyny but in different ways, and that these differences were largely based on how well we passed and whether people perceived us as our assigned sex.
At some point we stopped being allowed to use “transmisogyny” because it became a trans women only thing. Which is fine, since a trans woman is who coined and popularized the term, but we as trans men still were able to talk about what happens to us using the terms “transphobia” and “misogyny” because of the reality of how many of us live being perceived and treated as women whether we liked it or not, with the exception of the most stealth and masculine passing 100% of the time trans men out there. This was further expanded when nonbinary discourse became more common and we started discussing femme trans men, she/they afab nonbinary people, and non-medical and non-dysphoric trans mascs and how literally all of them tend to get lumped in with women But Doing It Wrong all the time.
But then we were told that we weren’t allowed to use misogyny anymore, because we’re men, and men aren’t affected by misogyny because only women experience misogyny, and thus we shouldn’t call it misogyny. Even though some of us are in fact treated identically to women by misogynistic society, since misogyny is a “woman’s thing”, it wasn’t something we could use to describe what was happening to us.
But then we were told that we couldn’t use misandry since it is, technically, gender-based oppression happening to men, because that term has been so poisoned by MRAs and incels whining that they can’t find a date.
But then we were told we can’t use transmisandry to clarify that this is a gender-based oppression happening to trans men because it “implies misandry is real”.
But then we were told we shouldn’t use transandrophobia to clarify that this is a gender-based oppression happening to trans mascs on the basis of both transphobia and misogyny due to our male identities and how we are both Failed Women and Incorrect Men at the same time, because the coiner has a massive callout post against him filled to the brim with deliberate misunderstandings and flat-out lies.
But then we were told we needed to stop using transmascphobia to again clarify that this is a gender-based oppression happening to transmasculine people that is a clear intersection of transphobia and misogyny, because the coiner of that got into a shitty argument with the folks spreading the other guy’s callout so now he’s problematic too.
But then we were told we needed to stop using antimasculism to be more inclusive of intersex people of all assignments as well as nonbinary amab people who identify as both transgender and masculine and thus would also be defined as “trans masc” because it implies that men aren’t allowed to be masculine by wider society.
And at this point it really seems to me that it doesn’t matter what we call it because there’s always going to be someone making this type of shitty comment of “why can’t you just call it [word]” when this conversation has been going in circles for years and the only thing that seems to be happening is that people keep being mad we’re still talking about it. What is more important: nit-picking a word to death and saying an oppressed people cannot talk about their oppression until the label they choose has been co-signed by you specifically, or working together to solve the problems they’re actually talking about?
