Obligatory opening line about walking into the bats-swinging-at-hornets-nest room.
Anyway, I keep seeing transandrophobia discourse that uses the argument, "transmisogyny is real but transandrophobia is not real, for the same reason misogynoir is real but misogyn-(white)-y isn't. Because being male or white isn't an oppressed identity."
And I think the analogy is the wrong analogy. For misogynoir, gender and race are DIFFERENT axes, and as such something like misogynoir is the combined experience of two SEPARATE axes of oppression. "Being trans" and "what your gender is" are NOT different axes. Which gender you have transitioned into is a detail OF the trans experience! Comparing this to intersecting two separate axes (race and sex) is fundamentally the wrong analogy!
Gay men and lesbian women both experience homophobia. They also have different experiences OF homophobia depending whether they're MLM or WLW. I think this is a significantly better analogy because, like with being trans, "same gender attraction" and "what gender you are" are NOT independent axes.
I would never fault a gay man for talking about the kinds of homophobia gay/bi men face, or a lesbian woman for talking about the kinds of homophobia targeted at lesbian/bi woman. Because there are some different societal reasons that people direct hate at men-loving-men and women-loving-women, which are, inextricably, tied to how society demands different genders act.
Like you cannot say "men shouldn't separately identify and talk about the kind of homophobia experienced by men, because men aren't oppressed" because being male is inextricably linked to how that homophobia is experienced
And in that vein, there are different societal reasons that people direct hate at FTM and MTF people, which are all within transphobia. But the kind of transphobia someone experiences is inextricably linked to what the person's transitioned gender is, and what society wants them to be. This is not introducing a second, uncorrelated privileged axis! This is a detail of the transphobia! Details are allowed to have names! This is different kinds of real people's lived transphobia and acting like someone is throwing in an unrelated axis of privilege (like being white, or being upper-class) is disingenuous!
Also, you may notice, I'm strongly advocating for people's voices to be heard and the details to matter! I want trans women to talk, LOUDLY, about transmisogyny. And its specifics and why it matters! This is not shouting down any of that! Talk about your experiences and the parts that are specifically transmisogynistic! I just think it's bonkers that somewhere along the way, people who think every single identity class is a perfectly independent, perpendicular stat bar that shows up on a character customization screen came around and decided half of the experience of transphobia needs to be un-named and un-personed because someone heard "men" and looked that word up in their privilege stat book and got real scared.
Like in conclusion, "Trans men can't talk about transandrophobia because men aren't oppressed" reads exactly the same to me as "gay men aren't allowed to talk about the way gay men are specifically hated (hatred of emasculated men, etc etc) because men aren't oppressed." If someone started calling the second thing "homoandrophobia" would you like, start claiming sodomy laws were never real?
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