katrafiy - Tumblr blog

katrafiy · 7 days

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Serena Nanda is an Orientalist lunatic who hates trans women.

The intro to the first edition of her book was written by John Money.

She repeatedly talks about hijras describing themselves as women, and ignoring them to call them castrated males and crossdressers.

Third-Sexing is anthropological transmisogynistic violence on a discipline level.

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katrafiy · 2 months

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While I'm still focusing on finishing my book and my essay series on understanding TERFs, I wrote a quick, bite-sized post on one of the most common gender-conservative temper-tantrums expressed as a pithy three-word shibboleth. We take a harsh look at the motivations and assumptions underlying this mindset, and what people really mean when they assert "sex is real" as an antagonistic principle to transsexual existence.

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katrafiy · 2 months

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I really hate the "nobody is trans unless explicitly stated"/ "femininity and womanhood aren't tied to queerness and nonbinary-ness" idea that's been running around some of the queer community (and non queer people that are slightly in the know) for years. Like I've been with groups of (mostly white) queer people and I automatically get "they" or "he" way before I get "she" even if I'm dressed up with makeup, jewlery, a blouse, skirt, hair done and nails polished. I could be trying my damndest to convey femininity and people will still ignore that and assume that it's not related to my identity. Like. How often and explicitly do I have to come out? It feels like I'm getting called clocky because I'm not conforming to what a woman or transfem should look like.

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katrafiy · 2 months

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I think about this girl I met one time, years ago all the time. She was trans, I was in the closet or in denial or just plain stupid. But it was a night out with my usual group, my friend had brought her along and she was having a great time. She danced and drank and was unashamed to tell us that she thought a girl we all knew was very hot, like so so hot (she was right). But that made us uncomfortable. Very uncomfortable, like so much so that we brought it up with our friend who brought her, they apologised. We all talked about it and we all agreed.

I will probably never see her again but I wish I could beg for her forgiveness.

I didn't think she knew that we had all conspired behind her back. After a little while and some reflection I decided that we'd over reacted and wished we'd been nicer, she was out with a cliquey group of mostly strangers and we didn't do a very good job of being welcoming even before we started conspiring.

I will probably never see her again but I wish I could beg for her forgiveness.

Then later still I transitioned and I had friends become cruel and uncaring. I saw that same look on my friends faces again that we had all worn that night when discussing her transgressions. I had to make my own fun in groups. I had to be fearless in my desire. I had to really reckon with more than just that we'd been cruel but why. I had to accept that as subtle as we thought we were being she knew what we thought of her.

I will probably never see her again but I wish I could beg for her forgiveness.

I think about her all the time.

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katrafiy · 2 months

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Hey tumblr did yall know that I'm actually very pretty

#girlslikeus #transisbeautiful

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katrafiy · 2 months

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I think about this image a lot. This is an image from the Aurat March (Women's March) in Karachi, Pakistan, on International Women's Day 2018. The women in the picture are Pakistani trans women, aka khwaja siras or hijras; one is a friend of a close friend of mine.

In the eyes of the Pakistani government and anthropologists, they're a "third gender." They're denied access to many resources that are available to cis women. Trans women in Pakistan didn't decide to be third-gendered; cis people force it on them whether they like it or not.

Western anthropologists are keen on seeing non-Western trans women as culturally constructed third genders, "neither male nor female," and often contrast them (a "legitimate" third gender accepted in its culture) with Western trans women (horrific parodies of female stereotypes).

There's a lot of smoke and mirrors and jargon used to obscure the fact that while each culture's trans women are treated as a single culturally constructed identity separate from all other trans women, cis women are treated as a universal category that can just be called "women."

Even though Pakistani aurat and German Frauen and Guatemalan mujer will generally lead extraordinarily different lives due to the differences in culture, they are universally recognized as women.

The transmisogynist will say, "Yes, but we can't ignore the way gender is culturally constructed, and hijras aren't trans women, they're a third gender. Now let's worry less about trans people and more about the rights of women in Burkina Faso."

In other words, to the transmisogynist, all cis women are women, and all trans women are something else.

"But Kat, you're not Indian or Pakistani. You're not a hijra or khwaja sira, why is this so important to you?"

Have you ever heard of the Neapolitan third gender "femminiello"? It's the term my moniker "The Femme in Yellow" is derived from, and yes, I'm Neapolitan. Shut up.

I'm going to tell you a little bit about the femminielli, and I want you to see if any of this sounds familiar. Femminielli are a third gender in Neapolitan culture of people assigned male at birth who have a feminine gender expression.

They are lauded and respected in the local culture, considered to be good omens and bringers of good luck. At festivals you'd bring a femminiello with you to go gambling, and often they would be brought in to give blessings to newborns. Noticing anything familiar yet?

Oh and also they were largely relegated to begging and sex work and were not allowed to be educated and many were homeless and lived in the back alleys of Naples, but you know we don't really like to mention that part because it sounds a lot less romantic and mystical.

And if you're sitting there, asking yourself why a an accurate description of femminiello sounds almost note for note like the same way hijras get described and talked about, then you can start to understand why that picture at the start of this post has so much meaning for me.

And you can also start to understand why I get so frustrated when I see other queer people buy into this fool notion that for some reason the transes from different cultures must never mix.

That friend I mentioned earlier is a white American trans woman. She spent years living in India, and as I recal the story the family she was staying with saw her as a white, foreign hijra and she was asked to use her magic hijra powers to bless the house she was staying in.

So when it comes to various cultural trans identities there are two ways we can look at this. We can look at things from a standpoint of expressed identity, in which case we have to preferentially choose to translate one word for the local word, or to leave it untranslated.

If we translate it, people will say we're artificially imposing an outside category (so long as it's not cis people, that's fine). If we don't, what we're implying, is that this concept doesn't exist in the target language, which suggests that it's fundamentally a different thing

A concrete example is that Serena Nanda in her 1990 and 2000 books, bent over backwards to say that Hijras are categorically NOT trans women. Lots of them are!

And Don Kulick bent over backwards in his 1998 book to say that travesti are categorically NOT trans women, even though some of the ones he cited were then and are now trans women.

The other option, is to look at practice, and talk about a community of practice of people who are AMAB, who wear women's clothing, take women's names, fulfill women's social roles, use women's language and mannerisms, etc WITHIN THEIR OWN CULTURAL CONTEXT.

This community of practice, whatever we want to call it - trans woman, hijra, transfeminine, femminiello, fairy, queen, to name just a few - can then be seen to CLEARLY be trans-national and trans-cultural in a way that is not clearly evident in the other way of looking at things.

And this is important, in my mind, because it is this axis of similarity that is serving as the basis for a growing transnational transgender rights movement, particularly in South Asia. It's why you see pictures like this one taken at the 2018 Aurat March in Karachi, Pakistan.

And it also groups rather than splits, pointing out not only points of continuity in the practices of western trans women and fa'afafines, but also between trans women in South Asia outside the hijra community, and members of the hijra community both trans women and not.

To be blunt, I'm not all that interested in the word trans woman, or the word hijra. I'm not interested in the word femminiello or the word fa'afafine.

I'm interested in the fact that when I visit India, and I meet hijras (or trans women, self-expressed) and I say I'm a trans woman, we suddenly sit together, talk about life, they ask to see American hormones and compare them to Indian hormones.

There is a shared community of practice that creates a bond between us that cis people don't have. That's not to say that we all have the exact same internal sense of self, but for the most part, we belong to the same community of practice based on life histories and behavior.

I think that's something cis people have absolutely missed - largely in an effort to artificially isolate trans women. This practice of arguing about whether a particular "third gender" label = trans women or not, also tends to artificially homogenize trans women as a group.

You see this in Kulick and Nanda, where if you read them, you could be forgiven for thinking all American trans women are white, middle class, middle-aged, and college-educated, who all follow rigid codes of behavior and surgical schedules prescribed by male physicians.

There are trans women who think of themselves as separate from cis women, as literally another kind of thing, there are trans women who think of themselves as coterminous with cis women, there are trans women who think of themselves as anything under the sun you want to imagine.

The problem is that historically, cis people have gone to tremendous lengths to destroy points of continuity in the transgender community (see everything I've cited and more), and particularly this has been an exercise in transmisogyny of grotesque levels.

The question is do you want to talk about culturally different ways of being trans, or do you want to try to create as many neatly-boxed third genders as you can to prop up transphobic theoretical frameworks? To date, people have done the latter. I'm interested in the former.

I guess what I'm really trying to say with all of this is that we're all family y'all.

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katrafiy · 2 months

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I wish I didn't know that Fallon Fox actually had a middling career in women's MMA and lost to the only fighter she went up against that had a positive win/loss record.

I wish I didn't know that orbital rim fractures are one of the most common injuries in MMA.

I wish I didn't know that Veronica Ivy's world record was specifically set in the 35-39 age bracket.

I wish I didn't know that her record was beaten three months later by a cis woman.

I wish I didn't know that those two trans girls in Connecticut bombed at regionals, and that the only reason they broke so many records at their school is because the school was severely lagging behind the rest of the state.

I wish I didn't know Lia Thomas' name.

I wish I lived in a world where when my supposed "allies" saw headlines that say "trans woman crushes a woman's skull in mma" that they didn't respond with "okay well maybe the bigots have a point this time".

Maybe, if they didn't always respond that way, I wouldn't have to know half of the things I know about other trans women athletes.

Maybe they would stop seeing women like me as a problem to be solved.

Damn that would be nice.

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katrafiy · 2 months

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'Dulhaniyaa', my F/F contemporary romance, is out for pre-order now!

In this Bollywood-inspired story, a woman consigns herself to the arranged marriage her family has set up, only to realize that she's falling for her dance instructor.

It has:

Desi Lesbians!

Bollywood-inspired camp and surreality

Meditations on queerness and Indian culture

Arranged marriage and forbidden romance

Cis/Trans and ButchFemme main couple

Lighthearted tone with HEA, but with serious moments

Preorder Link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CH8ZP3TY/

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katrafiy · 2 months

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Hey Ive seen Baeddel used in a lot of your posts but like,, other than a definition of the word I cant really find much on what it means like discourse-wise.

I know its something relating to transfems but other than that im lost x.x sorry for the bother

Basically it started out as an old timey slur for trans women. The word "bad" is rooted from it. In the early 2010s a group of trans women adopted the term and had a community for a very short time before it collapsed and not much information is left over.

Some say that had abusive dynamics. Some say they were just talking about transfeminism like they do now. My sibling swears up and down from their personal experiences with the initial group that they were a group of grifters using queer politics to fundraise for tumblers first big scam, The ARK(C?) Project.

A bunch of anti-transfeminists in their efforts to create the magical word that will allow them to terf-jacket trans women without having it called out as such happened upon the term and used the lack of concrete history/the fact that most of the subjective history isn't too charitable to this original group to fabricate a conspiracy theory that these original Beaddels were an evil cabal of bigoted trans women who never really went away and now operate and sow intracommunity discourse from the shadows for the explicit purpose of weakening the holy divinity of TransUnity.

And while some of them moved on to other terms like "TIRF" and "Neo Radfem" a good portion of TransUnity/Transandro anti-transfeminists have latched onto the term and have doubled down on their intent to use it to create a category of trans women that it's ok to exclude. Out of all of the anti-transfeminists that have come out of this new wave, the ones who build their politics around "Anti-Beaddelism" are some of the most mask-off exclusionists of the bunch. Like look at how they talk about Beadels

They will list how these groups have a bunch of ties to nearly every anti-queer group they could think of. And then they warn White™(Because everytime they attack trans women they have to pretend like it's a race thing to distract from the transmisogyny) that they mean to need to maintain a sense of hypervigilance around their transfem sisters and read into every laugh, every joke, and every word for the possibility of finding Beaddel rhetoric. This is a manipulative abusive tactic to keep the transfems within their sphere of influence to reach other to other transfems and rely on TME people to tell them what's right and provide community.

I remember on sailorportia's "Anti-Egg discoursers sound just like my conversation therapist" post I saw one of these people referring to the notes section as "full of beaddel dogwhistles" and inviting people to "take a look and educate themselves". Not specifying what the dogwhistles are or how they are dogwhistles. Just vaguely gesturing at the notes section and inviting you to regard anything a vocal trans woman as a crypto-beaddel and anything they say as "beaddel dogwhistles"

These communities cultivate a sense of paranoia. They encourage constant scrutiny regarding anything a trans woman says. Their leaders sell themselves as protectors of the community whose exclusion is a necessary evil to keep online trans communities safe. They are incentivized to keep the term Beaddel definition murky but representative of all the evils they attribute to trans women.

The term in the modern day is largely prescriptive and moreso defined by the reactionary "Anti-Beadelism" movement than it is defined by its history. Only a few trans women have reclaimed the term. When anti-transfeminists talk about Beaddelism they aren't talking about an organized group or community, they are referring to a bunch of individual trans women they have branded with the beaddel slur.

Currently I don't think reclaiming the word is a good move. Not that I disagree with it or think trans women shouldn't reclaim it. It's just that it will do more harm than good for as long as exclusionists control the narrative on its definition. I've seen mutuals have their posts on general transfeminism get completely discarded out of hand because they had Beaddel in their profile name or bio.

Because like it or not the current definition of Beaddels that gets passed around was written by current ex-terfs/transandro nothorses bro and cites TERF resources in their definition. This is the same dude who's responsible for the foundation or the current TransUnity echo chamber and used the influence from creating that community to try and redefine TERF to include trans women for the purpose of TERF-jacketing.

It's why me and some other trans women have been picking up the words trasfeminism to refer to discussions of transfem issues and anti-transfeminist to refer to these new wave of transfem exclusionist. It denies the exclusionists the ability to define our politics for us to outsiders. Also note: If the term trasfeminism picks up in use your going to see a lot of these people switch from "Beaddel" to "Radical Transfeminist" as their go-to anti-transfeminist TERF-jacketing slur

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katrafiy · 3 months

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i desperately need fanart of meryapi and achilles getting wasted and talking about linguistics

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katrafiy · 3 months

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transphobic men will see the hottest trans woman alive and act confused and disgusted like it’s a complicated dilemma for them to find her attractive. there’s nothing complicated about it my guy. you’re a man, and you find women attractive. no one’s gonna think you’re gay for looking at a picture of a beautiful, stunning, gorgeous woman and going “wow she’s beautiful” like come on man

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katrafiy · 3 months

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If you ever find yourself mad about "trans lesbian separatism" or "baeddelism" or whatever word you've found to paint trans women having solidarity/community with each other as exclusionary, have you considered not burning every bridge you have with transfems while expecting us to be the ones to put all the effort into rebuilding them while you hold the burning torch, and maybe JUST MAYBE considered listening to us when we talk about transmisogyny and worked to making this a safer space for us.

Like I dunno I think if I had a problem where transfems deal with such scrutiny and vitriol in the queer community that trans women have their whole community ripped out from them so they seek out like-minded trans women who aren't going to abandon them the instant that associating with them would negatively affect their social credibility and I was someone invested in TransUnity™ that the solution would be to work on the transmisogyny problem to make my community a safer space so they wouldn't feel the need to do that instead what y'all are doing which is which hunting for trans women you can brand as exclusionists for the purpose of excluding them. Which you know, only makes the "trans women don't feel safe in the queer community" problem worse. This is literally yall rn

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katrafiy · 3 months

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My general litmus test for when ppl recommend riotggrl or queer punk music is what i call the "mitchfest test", which asks "have this band or any members of it performed at mitchfest?", this goes especially for when people are praising the band as "trans", by which they mean white nonbinary who still performed at mitchfest.

the followup test for when people are talking about a "trans" band is to ask "could this band perform at mitchfest?, would any members of this trans band be banned from mitchfest due to their transfem exclusionary policy? would members of this band even care that trans women are excluded and would they be affected by it even slighty?", which again weeds out the "trans" bands that are three cis women and a nonbinary person or trans man, who could all perform at mitchfest with zero problem. and in fact would benefit from the exclusion of trans women from said event.

this is a useful test, it helps you shut down ppl who act like bikini kill were going to start a revolution, and reminds people that riotgrrl music is and was not exactly the most welcoming or inclusive space for trans women, and that transmisogyny is a real social force that is present even in music you like, and ignoring it doesn't make it go away.

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katrafiy · 4 months

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various corners of twitter were having freakouts over trans puppygirls "fetishizing" themselves, and f1nnster just posted a screenshot of himself wearing a leash in front of a dog cage and is getting thousands of retweets and likes, and theres probably some way to connect this to the way people act like there is real pressure placed on gnc cis men to transition as if trans women are more accepted despite all evidence to the contrary, but theres not much point since people will probably keep acting like trans women just hate gnc men and have power over them anyway

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katrafiy · 4 months

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the worst thing about the moral panics over egg jokes is the transmascs who get in on it. i dont know how you go from "the idea that we are transing butches is a transphobic narrative" to spinning that same narrative about transfems and "femboys."

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katrafiy · 4 months

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I wanna rant a little bit about that last post coz like I have feelings about it.

Reproductive rights are a huge part of feminism, but it's really important that it ISNT "sex-based oppression" bc tying birthing ability to the universal experience of womanhood is actually REALLY FUCKING MISOGYNIST. Like you're rly gonna say that women incapable of having children experience less oppression than those who can?

The bioessentialist idea of "sex-based" oppression is heavily weighed on the idea of a cis woman capable of giving birth to children as the definition of woman as a sex & gender. It is a damaging social construct that harms all who are socially classed as women in some way, regardless of actual gender or actual sex.

Like you realise already that definition of womanhood excludes a huge amount of women? And that it is so untrue to these women's actual experiences of misogyny?

It misses how misogyny treats infertile women regardless of sex as being "broken" because they are unable to fit the social role of womanhood.

It's also just like incorrect to the wider experience of misogyny of women who can have children at certain points in their lives, bc girls & women aren't capable throughout their entire life of having children. But young girls still experience misogyny up until puberty & past that, & misogyny doesn't go away after menopause, in fact menopausal women are treated as undesirable or used goods because they aren't typically capable of having children anymore.

The bottom line to all this is that, there is no one single universal experience of womanhood as a social role beyond just being a woman & you cannot exclude trans women from the experience of misogyny. Misogyny isn't "sex-based", bc sex is socially constructed in a way that does exclude a lot of women.

I rly beg fellow transmasc's & trans men to go out & spend time with trans women, talk to them about misogyny & their experiences with misogyny.

You wouldn't have these weird ass ideas about misogyny if you branched out more & tried to relate to trans women & their experiences with misogyny. It would fix a lot of the misconceptions folks have about radfems, TERFs & transmisogyny. Ppl get too caught up on this idea that TERFs hate trans women for their supposed relation to men & maleness, which is actually deeply untrue because really the crux of TERF ideology & most transmisogyny IS misogyny. It's rooted deeply in trans women not neatly fitting into the box of cis perisex white abled womanhood, it's about trans women being the wrong kind of woman, which IS the universal experience of misogyny & womanhood that all women & those socially classed as women face.

The sooner you stop treating transmisogyny & TERFism as a symptom of hating men & actually about hating women, the better your understanding of these ideologies & the better your understanding of where trans women fit in social roles of womanhood AND of your own place as a trans man.

You should rly be open to relating to & talking with ppl about any experience of misogyny that is outside your own, be that from trans women, women of colour, disabled women, intersex women, ect, because there are facets of misogyny you haven't experienced that are important to talk about & recognize.

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katrafiy · 5 months

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Found a blog by a callout culture person searching for people to block, and this just illustrates the the underlying transmisogyny. Like this person names four persons they thinks are problematic, and literally all of them are trans women. This is why i think callout culture "anti-pedoshit" crusades are transmisogynist. It is suspiciously focused on trans women, all the supposed "pedos" they find are trans women. They never find the powerful men who actually commit most child sex abuse, instead in this discourse the demographic responsible is trans women.

And notice how vague the language is, the women are accused of being "shitheads, ramming through people's boundaries", of being too sexual and unable to take no for an answer. Like it's all vague accusations that suggest the predatory rapey trans woman trope with no actual concrete descriptions of the supposedly harmful actions they've done. It suggests these women are all rapists, without actually saying so, which you would write if it was actually established they were. There are no links either to establish the claims of wrongdoing. It just presumes their guilt is obvious and well-established.

As Porpentine, one of the trans women accused in this post, wrote: "Be extremely critical about what people say about trans people, especially things said in vagueness."

This person mentions being accused of wanting to kill trans women, and based on this post it's well-deserved

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