#just decides to pull an actual transmisogyny
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https://www.tumblr.com/familyabolisher/729804795639152640/do-you-not-believe-in-gendered-socialization-not?source=share
what do you think of this post?
Insane how this person writes. Boggles the mind.
"in discourse terms, it gets pulled out to denote an ineluctable state of "womanhood"-subjectivity in those coercively assigned femaleness and ineluctable "manhood"-subjectivity to those coercively assigned maleness; in other words, it gets used as a cudgel for gender essentialism coming from "progressive" types by which the claim that trans women/otherwise TMA people have "male privilege" ("male socialisation") can be smuggled into the discourse; the experiences of cis women and trans men/otherwise transmasc people are privileged as a standardised form of 'female socialisation' that pits them not as agentive within social forms of gender (and as beneficiaries of transmisogyny) but as unilaterally 'oppressed' to the unilaterally 'oppressive' male-socialised."
That's one sentence. Good lord.
You only write like this if you want to obscure your own bullshit, hoping it'll be too exhausting for someone to pick apart and thereby goes unattested. Because...what other explanation could there be.
But by god, this is so fascinating so I will try, for you anon.
>no. "gendered socialisation" is about a stone's throw away from "sex-based oppression" if we're being real about it.
So the assumption here for the author is that oooobviously the idea of "sex-based oppression" is ludicrous. This does not bode well for those of us who understand that "sex-based oppression" is not secret code language but is exactly what is described by the words being used. But let's discover what this person thinks.
>in discourse terms, it gets pulled out to denote an ineluctable [ie: can't be avoided] state of "womanhood"-subjectivity in those [people] coercively assigned femaleness and ineluctable "manhood"-subjectivity to those [people] coercively assigned maleness;
I added some editor's notes to make it more readable, hopefully. Essentially, op is positing that people only use the phrase "gendered socialization" to suggest there is an unavoidable (and, I assume, innate) womanhood and manhood based on sex. This is not true, socialization is a topic of great interest to many disciplines, and although it's never referring solely to sex/gender socialization, gender socialization is not just made up tumblr language. It's academic. If op believes that gender is a social construct, then I don't see how they can't believe in gender socialization. But op is clearly someone who believes that observing sex is coercive assignment.
>in other words, it gets used as a cudgel for gender essentialism coming from "progressive" types by which the claim that trans women/otherwise TMA people have "male privilege" ("male socialisation") can be smuggled into the discourse;
Observing gender socialization is neither progressive or conservative, depends on the context. The feminist context is progressive. The view from a feminist is that gender is entirely socialized, and is not innate to the sex, which is the opposite of "essentialism". To understand this you have to actually understand what socialization is, and I have a feeling that op does not. More on that in a second.
Obviously op isn't interested in discussing whether male privilege exists, they've already decided there is no sex hierarchy, that sex is not an axis of oppression, as they disregarded that idea in the first sentence. If I was to bet, it's because they already decided or believe that this idea belongs to "bad people" thatare in opposition to them, so they can't try to understand it.
>the experiences of cis women and trans men/otherwise transmasc people are privileged [???] as a standardised form of 'female socialisation' that pits them not as agentive [ie. taking an active role] within social forms of gender (and as beneficiaries of transmisogyny) but as unilaterally 'oppressed' to the unilaterally 'oppressive' male-socialised.
Op is just reiterating again they don't subscribe to the idea that sex-based oppression exists. Sex-oppression doesn't exist, therefore female people can't be unilaterally oppressed by men, etc. This person also posits that "cis women and trans men" are the beneficiaries of transmisogyny...unclear if cis men are the beneficiaries as well?? Firefox doesn't recognize transmisogyny as a word btw lol.
By the way, in case this isn't clear, op has used essentially 4 sentences just to say over and over again "I don't believe in sex-base oppression" and has not furthered a point beyond that. So....so so so boring.
>there is no one coherent form of "gendered socialisation";
This isn't seriously argued in feminist theory or scholarly. I'm not talking about random women on tumblr. When someone alludes to gender or sex socialization, they aren't saying that all women or all men are equally socialized the same and all women are the same and all men are the same. They are saying women are socialized as women and men are socialized as men. This is more clear when we actually understand socialization.
Okay, so what is socialization? Socialization is a complex topic, but divorce it from scholarly mumbo-jumbo what we're ultimately talking about is how the human brain absorbs information. How does the human brain absorb information? Socializing. Yeah, like the thing you do at parties. Yeah, like when you call you friend up. Yep, like when you chat up the cashier at the gas station. You know that meme, we live in a society? Okay that but for real. You live in a society, you can't say society doesn't affect you.
So what do we mean by "society"? Well, that's a prety complex topic, but! if you want to divorce it from scholarly mumbo-jumbo we're ultimately talking about how humans live with humans. Oh, you live alone? Yeah sure, but who designed your bed? Who manufactured your door? Who wrote your tv shows? Who decided that green means go, red means stop? Who made my bagel sandwhich $7? Wait wait wait, why does "manufacturer your door" matter? Well imagine if we lived in a world where "normal" doors were assumed to be ten feet tall and 8 feet wide, that would change a lot of things, right? Okay, expand that thought into the infinitesimal: think about how every dimension of every single manufactured physical thing you interact with had to be decided by at least one other human, if not thousands of humans.
You literally cannot avoid socialization. You are socialized by walking outside your house. You are socialized by never leaving your house. If you don't want to be socialized you have to be abandoned in the woods as an infant. People who survive that don't turn out so good. They weren't ever socialized into even understanding what a "door" is. Yep, the fact that I can type d-o-o-r and you know what I'm talking about is proof that you are socialized. Doors don't have to exist. We made those up.
So, when we talk about "female socialization" we aren't arguing there is a finite and concrete list of traits all women have, we're talking about how society has ideas, roles, myths, images, stories, explanations, expectations, etc. about and for women, and you just can't avoid them and they will affect you. That PLUS even if you buck every trend imaginable, people around you will still act according to those ideas they've been socialized into. If you're a woman who gets interrupted a lot at work, that doesn't go away just because you shave your head.
>how gender is coercively socially imposed varies along countless axes that cannot be accounted for under one sole framework.
much like doors
>if you want to say that experiences and subjectivities are shaped by misogyny or patriarchy then simply name misogyny and patriarchy as deciding factors.
annoying false equivalency. people can use as much clarifying language as they need to make their point. This is a person who believes in hidden evil secret subtext in words women use.
>it suffers from the same fundamental issue as many contemporary feminisms ie. that even in its most charitable form, it attempts to present a complete account of "womanhood" and account for transfemininity only after the fact via hamfisted exceptionalism, rather than beginning with transmisogyny as the lynchpin of gendering and developing itself from there.
wrong
>+ in general i try not to overrely on the language of "socialisation" and "conditioning" to describe behaviours and relationships
can't imagine what blowhard reason that would be because frankly I don't think this person really understands socialization
>unlike "coercion," which i think identifies the discourses of power + antagonism present in these modes of subject-creation, the language of socialisation and conditioning conjures up this idea of a non-agentive, immutable relationship to gender
Why? They don't explain why socialization (and conditioning?) is "non-agentive"...and then they don't explain why that matters. I mean, I agree, you don't have a lot of agency in socialization, but you also get to decide how you live your life. Plus why does gender have to be agentive? We're entering into ideas of transness that the audience is assumed to know and agree with that I would be called a feminazi for asking for clarity on so w/e
>(one in which gender is not something we do but something that is done to us) which stands fundamentally at odds with what transness should articulate. i guess another way of putting it is that i don't really believe in appeals to what people do or do not "experience" [x does or does not "experience" misogyny etc] as a cogent way of developing an actual theory of oppression + liberation.
idk what they're saying here sorry
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ive spoken about transandrophobia before on here and while i don’t disagree more or less with what ive said i think perhaps there is an issue with the word itself. transmisogyny, much like misogynoir, is less about one + one and more about a blended kind of discrimination that happens alongside others. transandrophobia isn’t exactly that, imo, and i think there’s a decent semantic problem at the heart of a lot of denial / conflict about it. i’ve constructed a kind of numbered list of thoughts:
one. “there is no systemic androphobia / misandry, so there can’t be a unique intersection of transphobia and misandry that constitutes something like a transmisogyny”.
i have mixed feelings about this. there are many ways that men are discriminated against in society. to me, understanding the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy as a pyramid scheme of sorts helps; inherently, those benefitting the most will be the smallest group, and it’s best to keep everyone one tier below you infighting to make them easier to control.
looking at the works of bell hooks and emi koyama, i think that men can act and behave in patriarchal ways, in ways that benefit systemic oppression and violence against women, but i think that thinking of them each individually as agents of the patriarchy gives them, frankly, too much power in a system. your average sexist dude catcalling you on the street is acting out a learned, shitty, behavior, but he’s not an ‘agent’ of anything; he’s another pawn in the same fucked system. think of the poor racist who decries immigrants ‘taking our jobs’; he’s likely to have more in common with the immigrants he’s mad at than the politicians who’ve told him to be mad at the immigrants.
male privilege is another thing; i don’t know that thinking of people as having or holding male privilege is helpful. i think privilege is more of a lack of a thing than a thing itself. do trans men who pass significantly well gain some status? yes. do trans women who are boymoders / not out already have some status? yes. but i don’t think that’s something they are doing so much as it is something that others are assuming about them.
and, as i said above: it’s a pyramid scheme. in a white supremacist society, men of colour are not advantaged over white men, and often not even over white women. we’ve seen this historically, with lynchings, and recently, with ‘karen’s calling the police over seeing a black man in their neighbourhood. white women can and do pose a significant threat to black men through their use of state violence, and their existence as a resource the state wants to protect (sometimes, at least).
so is it all predestined? no, obviously not. you can and should fight against the culture if it is harmful. and for men, the thing is, they are not told or easily shown that the system is harming them as much or more than it benefits them. there are less obvious threads to pull at to start the unravelling of an internalised worldview for people closer to the top of that pyramid. but it’s work many of them don’t do, to their own detriment as much as to the detriment of everyone else around them, especially women and gender minorities.
two. “what you’re experiencing is just transphobia”
i think we can acknowledge that transphobia towards (for simplification’s sake) trans men and trans women. cultural transphobia, as it exists right now, is fairly gendered. when we talk about trans women, we talk about adults, we talk about predation, we talk about perversion. when we talk about trans men, we actually talk about trans boys, we talk about girls, we talk about a ‘trans cult’ or ‘trans ideology’, we talk about hysterectomies at twelve, top surgery at six, hormone blockers at three.
the goal of current cultural transphobia is protecting trans men from trans women, essentially. in their genocide handbook of “enemy must be weak and also strong” they’ve decided trans men are weak, and trans women are strong. note that this itself falls in with the sexist tropes the transphobia crowd often say they’re against.
transphobia, historically, has been about trans women, in the same way that homophobia, historically, was about gay men. not in terms of everything, but in terms of the big cultural boogeymen. sure there were and have been scare campaigns about lesbians and trans men, but generally, the desires of “girls” (counting trans men here for now, sorry guys) were seen as frivolous, unreal. i mean as of what, 2019? we had noted freak ray blanchard theorising about if women even have a sexuality. what society saw as dangerous, though, were men and trans women (who they also saw as men, when it suited them to).
so really, trans men had some catching up to do, in terms of public fear-mongering. and we did! abigail shrier and j.k. rowling both targeted trans men far more squarely than they targeted trans women.
irreversible damage contains a few anecdotes about trans women (iirc, one about a bra store assistant being trans and how ‘dangerous’ it would have been to let her fit a bra on a child, and another about a stealth trans woman who was mad that more visibility was making people start to clock her in the street).
terf wars mentions the ‘lesbians are being called transphobic for not dating trans women with penises’ talking point, and the fear of ‘men entering women’s dressing rooms’. but the part that jk focuses on for a good chunk, the part she claims is ‘intensely personal’, is the idea that if she had come about, she might have been transed! to be fair and balanced, jk rowling also spends some time on her fears about sexual assault from trans women, though not phrased exactly like that. so perhaps she’s more broadly transphobic.
but the latest rounds of libs of tiktok / fox news / matt walsh / etc etc etc fueled transphobia have been aggressively targeting trans men, even if they won’t say that. it’s always ‘children’, or ‘girls’. at the same time that people are reacting with anger and violence towards trans women (and drag queens, though tbf cis transphobes either don’t know the difference or don’t care), people are calling in bomb threats to children’s hospitals and passing anti-trans healthcare bills with the explicit target of stopping young trans boys from accessing trans affirming healthcare. they mention castration briefly, occasionally, but the real target is stopping “girls” from mutilating their bodies.
my point in all of this is: there should be a way to talk about this, about this specific thing, without getting shouted down because of the ‘bad word’ you’re using. bills targeting drag or crossdressing in public are about trans women. bills targeting healthcare are about trans men.
the tl;dr here is that transphobia against trans men and trans women are different. they manifest differently, they are acted out differently, they exist for different reasons. they have different outcomes. but transphobia is a general term, and it would be nice, sometimes, to be able to talk about transphobia against trans men specifically. because there are things that happen or are targeted at them that don’t happen / aren’t targeted at trans women. is that word transandrophobia? idk.
three: “the guy who coined transandrophobia was A Bad One”
this i’ll cover extremely briefly. we’ve had a wave of posts recently saying ‘wow you bullied a random trans woman off the internet for having kinks you don’t like, did you do it? did you save us all?’. these are good posts. however, i think the ‘you can’t use transandrophobia because the guy who coined it has a kink i don’t like’ is uh. perhaps the worst argument among all possible arguments, for the same reason.
i’m old enough to be of the ‘don’t like don’t read’ generation, so uh. that’s what i do. if i follow someone who has a kink i don’t like, i just block those posts / tags. simple. or maybe i even unfollow. but doing a callout because ‘this person has problematic kinks’ is, i think, a bit cringe.
four: “but if we don’t call it x, what do we call it?”
i don’t know. i don’t have a good answer here. generally, i’m someone against using ‘assigned at birth’ or ‘tme’ language because typically i feel those things just serve as another way to misgender people. not that it’s always this way, but i’ve been on tumblr long enough to see people typically just use AFAB and TME to mean FEMALE, in bold bright pink sparkly font.
in some ways, maybe it’s the same issue with “women and femmes / women and nonbinary people” type language. for those things i think being able to self-select into those spaces and conversations is the best, so “people who menstruate” or “people who experience misogyny”, and you get to decide if that counts. but. idk, it’s not very snappy.
“transphobia against trans men” also doesn’t apply evenly, though maybe it never will. there are trans people who are stealth, who are out, who are closeted, girl/boymoders, and on and on. trans people who are ‘fully’ medically transitioned to a binary gender can and do have very different experiences, internally and in the world, to trans people who are nonbinary or don’t / can’t medically transition, or go stealth.
so. idk. i think we can and should have these conversations and others, under the umbrellas that transphobia and cissexism represent. but i also think that generally people talking about transandrophobia or exorsexism are doing so from a genuine place of “i have an issue and i want to talk about it”, and unfortunately i have seen far more people turn off their empathy after seeing A Word about it, in a way they maybe wouldn’t have if the conversation was phrased differently.
transphobia hurts us all. bills targeting healthcare hurt trans women and girls, just as much as they hurt trans men and boys. hell, the bathroom panic around trans women regularly targets cis women. working together is in all of our best interests, esp now.
#*m#transandrophobia#extremely long post written and not edited so#consume at your own risk#just some thoughts i guess
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One Discourse to Rule Them All: Blood Libel, Pedophilia Accusations, and Abortion, or How To Take Advantage of People’s Hot Buttons For Fun and Profit.
Buckle up. Mostly the title functions as a trigger warning, but we’re also gonna get into transmisogyny (and homophobia, I just realized it’s not going to be obvious to everyone that the second list item up there is about homophobia.) Here goes!
Once upon a time, Europe was synonymous with Christendom, and antisemitic as fuck.
Jews were separated off into their own villages and neighborhoods (often ghettos) and didn’t necessarily interact with Christians that much, and Christians lied through their teeth about what Jews were like, even blatantly false things like what they looked like, in order to justify wholesale slaughtering them.
I say Christians did this, but what I mean is: there were Christians who told the lies and other Christians who believed them, and probably some who didn’t actually believe them but were willing to play along, but the point is it wouldn’t have worked unless there were some innocent dupes being pulled along for the ride, who wouldn’t have committed mob violence if they hadn’t been blatantly lied to.
The lie was “Jews murder your children and drink their blood.” This was based on nothing.
But it was very effective. Because one of people’s strongest, most fundamental drives is to protect their children. So saying “those people, they intend to harm your children, they have harmed children just like yours”, well, it’s very effective. Even when it’s based on absolutely nothing.
(I don’t want to oversell my case and that wasn’t the only lie, “the Jews are responsible for the death of the Savior”, which is I guess an interpretation you could have of the gospels but it’s a pretty odd one, was another, apparently highly motivating, justification for antisemitic violence.)
Once upon a time, a different time, parents didn’t trust the gays around their kids.
You couldn’t legally adopt if you were in a same-sex relationship. If you wanted to be a teacher, better keep in the closet. You want to be invited to family events? Should have thought of that before you became a fag.
This was based on the lie that the queers were more likely to be pedophiles. And of course it worked. What kind of parent would you be if you exposed your precious child to a known sexual deviant?
Once upon a time, someone decided to frame abortion as baby murder.
I don’t want to get into arguments for or against seeing abortion as intentional child death, so I’m just going to make an assertion and if you want to stick an “I’m not sure I agree with this pin in it, go ahead, it’s not like there’s a shortage of arguments about this right now. Let’s just assume, like we’re in a math class and this is an axiom, that abortion is not actually child murder, and see where that takes us.
Where that takes us is this pattern I’ve been pointing out: someone’s got an ulterior motive like “if we kick all the Jews out of the country, we can take their stuff” or “it’s easier to control people if there’s some designated outsiders that we can make them all hate”, or specifically "hey, what will get the Republican voting base to the polls? What enemy can we create this time that will generate maximum rage and disgust (and keep them from seeing how we're screwing our own voters over in terms of money and public services)?" and…they just lie through their teeth. But they don’t lie arbitrarily. They lie about a thing that will get the strongest possible emotional reaction out of people, a thing that packs such a powerful gut punch that they won’t stop and think “wait, do I actually trust this source of information?” and instead will just react.
I’m calling this the one discourse to rule them all because oh my goodness do you see this all over tumblr. Can’t come up with an actual reason why fic that squicks you out is bad? Wildly allege that it supports pedophilia. Can’t come up with an actual reason why you don’t like trans women (and of course this one is emphatically not a tumblr exclusive)? Maybe they’re predators who are trying to get into (“real”) women’s spaces to rape (“real”) women. You don’t need evidence if you can hit people’s stress response button hard enough.
And: “people who identify as bi lesbians contribute to corrective rape” (here let me trauma dump in your inbox) and “but you can’t have kink at Pride think of the children” and “hey here’s this specific person I don’t like, you should not interact with them and maybe harass them because, wait for it, they’re a pedophile.”
And as far as I can tell there’s an inverse correlation to how much someone’s likely to get caught up in BS (never mind how likely someone is to advance the lies knowingly) and how much they do about actual child abuse. The most common motifs I’ve heard in people talking about their actual experiences with child abuse are "I never told anyone" and "I told someone and wasn’t believed". Somehow for all the hate society is capable of leveling against alleged child abusers, society's ability to literally just believe children who say they're being abused, well, they're not actually connected. Outrage at child abusers does not protect children. Child abusers are always, perpetually, the feared and hated other. They're never the friendly neighbor, the coach who get the team to win, the respectable pillars of the community.
And the moral panics about child abuse never come attached to anything useful for fighting real child abuse — never coherent policies for screening for potential abusers, never lists of signs that a child may be experiencing abuse, never discussion about what to do if you suspect abuse but aren’t sure, never discussion about how to support a child who’s been harmed. The focus is 100% on identifying people you can safely hate, 0% on genuinely protecting anyone or helping them recover.
What I'm trying to say here is, there is a pattern, a pattern of people with ulterior motives saying whatever they think will get people reacting with their gut rather than thinking with their brains. This pattern can be disrupted by questioning the validity of the source. Is there really any connection between an identity and rape? Is there really any correlation between disturbing fiction and child molestation? Does framing the story of Jesus as one where the Jews killed him (and therfore it's good to hurt Jews now?) make any sense whatsoever?
Does framing abortion as child murder make any sense whatsoever? Or is it just really effective at punching people in the gut?
And is there a group of people getting away with something unsavory while people are doubled over and preparing to punch back?
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transmisandry is just as real as transmisogyny and it's a goddamn travesty that it's talked about SO LITTLE that I don't even see the term transmisandry applied. it's IMPORTANT and you deserve to have your own trans masc language for it. it's transmisandry and it is REAL and it is TERRIBLE and it HURTS you and you do not have to hide that it is rooted in hatred of trans men to make cis and trans women feel more comfortable that shit is absurd
anon bc i do not enjoy being perceived sorry but also have a lovely day
I sometimes get asks like this and I hesitate to publish them. Especially if they’re angry sounding because I’m afraid of what people will say if I talk about transmisandry. But today I got to thinking. Why am I so scared of the term transmisandry? Why am I afraid for people to think that I think that it exists?
I think it’s because good old fashioned misandry is one of those things that only exists at a personal level and not a systemic one but so many bad or ignorant people pretend that it exists at a systemic level that the word itself has been poisoned. So even though transmisandry does exist at a systemic level in my opinion, you can’t use that word.
Also the general conversation about trans people in the mainstream if it exists at all I feel like is mostly dominated by binary trans women. I’m by no means saying there should be less coverage of that group. It’s super important to talk about trans women’s issues. It’s just that if you point out that most cis people outside of very progressive circles don’t even know that trans men let alone non binary people exist, there’s this fear that you’re gonna get yelled at for trying to talk over trans women even if you’re not saying it in a context where we’re talking about transfeminine issues.
I feel like a lot of people who aren’t transmasculine assume that we have some sort of weird privilege and should just keep our mouths shut but like, we face discrimination on a daily basis. We just do, and just because you personally can’t see it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist.
Transmisogyny is a huge issue in our society but I also feel like there are people who exist who use talking about transmisogyny as a device to push tme trans people out of the conversation. We should definitely make space for conversations about transmisogyny. We should talk about it a lot more, actually. But we also can’t use those conversations as an excuse to ignore other issues. And I don’t think this is unique to trans issues. A lot of people will decide that we’re focusing on this group now and we’ll get to you later. We’ll put off thinking about you, if we ever do that. They feel like that other group also looking to talk about their issues is taking air time away from their issues, which just isn’t true. We can chew gum and walk at the same time.
But still I feel like if I straight-up agree with anon I’m gonna get backlash for it. But I dunno. Maybe all those moms that’ve quickly pulled their children away from me since I started transitioning are just afraid of short hair or something. Maybe all the barriers in place that make it complicated for me to get reproductive healthcare are just a part of my imagination. Maybe the people who cut me off after I came out did it because I’m annoying. Maybe I get harassment and suicide bait and death threats full of slurs from r*dfems and other transphobes where they tell me it’s because I’m claiming to be a trans man that they’re doing this are actually because they don’t like my fandoms. We’ll never know.
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hi, i’m really sorry for asking such a weird and potentially hard to answer question, but. how do you know when you’re a lesbian? i identified strongly as bisexual for multiple years, but i realized my attraction to men was tenuous at best and even now i have no idea if it’s genuine? i kinda feel like im going insane
There's many reasons why a woman could feel tension regarding their (potential) attraction to men, even cishet ones, but TO ME these things boil down to what makes you happy and to what/who you desire.
(I acknowledge that for all women who like men, but especially bi and trans ones, being able to accept an active desire for men can be complicated because of trauma, slut shaming type of sentiments, biphobia and transmisogyny, so do take that into account when exploring your feelings.)
What I would have to ask myself is, do I actively desire men? Because I feel that I actively desire women, that's unquestionable to me (that being unquestionable while being uncertain about men doesn't necessarily make someone not bi but it happens to a lot of unrealized lesbians). I have always felt that natural pull towards women/girls even when I was a little girl and it wasn't sexual at all. Even when I'm in the mood to be alone or when my sex drive is dead I feel that active desire. When I think of A Sexy Human, I think of a woman, always, in the diversity that encompasses women. As a little kid, when I thought of a pretty human, I also thought of girls only.
But men? Nope. Even when I find one attractive, I still don't want him. At my "happiest" being with men I felt like "this is tolerable and if I pretend we're just friends I actually like being with him", and at worst it felt like overwhelming death. It took me a long time to realize that even as a kid I never considered boys as belonging to the category of "pretty" or "cute" or even interesting tbh like I decidedly did with girls. At most I saw them as a girly status object like the Disney princesses I was obsessed with had their princes as an accessory in my eyes.
Maybe this isn't at all like your experience, and in that case that doesn't mean anything in either direction, both bi and lesbian experiences are tremendously diverse, but MY exeprience when I was still identifying as bi is that I would find myself always performing. Always checking in silently with my female peers to see what was it that they found attractive in guys so I could mirror them. I was always a sensible but hopeless romantic, so as a kid whenever I felt lonely and wanted to fall in love I would scan around coldly to see if there was any boy I could "decide" to have a crush on.
Back in the days before the Tumblr porn ban I had a nsfw sideblog that was just reblogs. When I wasn't policing myself I would end up only reblogging women and sapphic sex, or shots of cishet sex in which the man was cropped out. Then I'd catch myself doing that, I'd panic out of my ass, and forced myself to find stuff with men to reblog so I could keep desperately telling myself that I was not a lesbian. This happened as I was dating a man long term. I would have to train myself to find men attractive, including them. Which is not how it's supposed to work. Sex with them felt a little like sleeping with a dildo attached to a mannequin. I was in it either out of pressure or for the physical sensations, that's it. A toy could've done the same and better.
Attraction is an active desire and when you're attracted to someone it's not supposed to feel like you're tolerating being with them, you're supposed to feel joy and comfort even if it's not always perfect.
It can happen that with some men it has felt like a chore you're tolerating without that necessarily meaning you're not bi because comp het is a bitch and it affects ALL women, but if being with Men like, As A Whole, feels that way... You're probably not bi.
Try to think; if you were free of all expectations, both yours and other people's, who would you want? If there weren't labels for any of this, if there were no consequences for either option, if you could have the life that'd make you happiest and feel the most authentic, who could you see yourself with? Not necessarily like, married, but just enjoying romance and/or (if you're old enough) sex with, be it serious or uncommitted.
Whatever turns out to be, don't rush yourself, love. No community or label owns you. Labels are descriptors and we exist before them. We're not meant to make ourselves fit labels, the labels are supposed to fit or not fit us. If you have to spend a while without a label more specific than "gay", "queer", "sapphic", "wlw" or what have you, that's fine. If you spend the rest of your life like that, that's okay too as long as you're okay with it. There's no time limit. Feel free to explore however you feel safest and most comfortable, and don't be afraid of your feelings. They're not wrong, they just are, whichever they are.
I hope this was helpful, feel free to keep sending me messages if you want to.
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Some Stuff(tm) about the MOGAI Wiki but not what you're expecting
(I was not involved in... whatever the fuck Kris did and left before that happened, I am bewildered.)
Hi! I’m not sharing my name, though you might be able to guess. Refer to me as "butch" or "dyke" and use it/its pronouns.
I used to be a MOGAI coiner, centering on pagan, lesbian, and Latin identity. I also used to be an extremely prolific editor for what is now the Mogai Wiki (the Ezgender Wiki, when I was an editor), writing 40+ full pages and editing possibly 200+. And I left because of transmisogyny. Fun.
At the time, the wiki & Discord didn’t have a single active transfem mod. The only mod who is maybe transfem was extremely inactive to the point I’d never seen them post anything in the server. This remains the case, apparently. (Can't say I'm shocked the owner left due to being overly defensive given the incident this post is about.)
The server was also very, very absent of transfems. I think there were maybe three of us total that I saw.
So, the incident that caused me to leave:
One of the (at the time) admins messaged in a chat asking if it was okay to identify as [transmisogynistic slur]. Said admin was transmasculine. A member (who is prominent in the MOGAI community) linked a Wiki page I wrote on the term, that explained extremely clearly with sources why [slur] should not be used by non-transfems. And was seemingly used to say “yes, it’s cool.”
I entered the conversation and politely asked if they actually read the article. They had.
I then said that, since they knew better—and since their first time fully deciding to use the term was after knowing better—using it would be extremely transmisogynistic.
They did not like that.
I was accused of erasing gay male history. They tried to convince me that I was wrong about the term’s origins. They refused to even at least censor the word on request if they were going to continue saying it. When I said I was the only transfem present and was being ignored which, bad look, [prominent community member] said I wasn’t. I… definitely was. I knew all the people involved were transmasc or transneutral, because I knew them personally. I was told I was doing “discourse” and ordered to stop speaking on the issue by (again, transmasc) mods.
So I muted the server for a few days, because that experience was fucking degrading.
When I finally looked back on it, i found [different transmasc admin] had pulled me in a ticket, and warned me for “biased articles” and “hateful language.”
The biased articles? [Slur]. Obviously. And one article on the black triangle that was at worst biased towards not erasing Roma experiences regarding the Holocaust, which had been up for months (and read by mods) with no prior issue. That article was from November. This issue was in January.
The hateful language? A message from the week before reading “cis people are cancelled, men are cancelled, transmascs are cancelled, this is so transmisogynistic” when explicitly speaking about transmisogny regarding [slur] a week prior. Which, I’m so sorry that I hurt your feelings by generalizing when calling out bigotry that you immediately turned around and perpetuated. Point proven for me, though. (If you “not all men me” on this I swear I will bite your legs off.)
I then found that [transmasc owner] had rewritten the entire page to almost entirely be about gay and trans men. They removed my transfem primary sources. They removed the definition’s source and didn’t bother sourcing a new one. They watered down every place I mentioned it was a transmisogynistic slur to downplay or fully erase the term’s history as one. The majority of historical context I provided was deleted without replacement. To be clear: [slur] is an equivalent slur to tr-p. Like. 100%. Which is part of what my sources discussed.
The only transfem sources they included? Naturally, transfems saying it was totally okay because “we all experience transphobia” and “the gay and transfem community are really close,” which is just… extremely ignorant of history and also definitely a minority opinion in the transfeminine community. The slur is transmisogynistic. Not transphobic, not homophobic, not femmephobic. It is a slur against specifically AMAB transfems & trans women.
So, naturally, I was fucking pissed.
I may have written a very long, very angry reply, as one does when implicitly accused of ‘tranmisandry’ for calling out transmisogyny by a transmasc. Essentially, it was pointing out the issues I said above. Then I left.
For a few days I did not unfriend the moderators. I never blocked them, and they can easily find my Discord and Tumblr. It’s been four months with no message or apology, and last I checked the page is still what the former owner "corrected" it to, so I don’t see how I could be expected to believe the wiki or people involved changed.
Currently, only two mods for the wiki were there when I was a member. Only one of said mods was involved in the issue. So I’ll give the new mods benefit of the doubt.
But yeah, you guys wonder why you don’t see a lot of transfems active in the MOGAI community? Why every wiki seems so devoid of us? This shit is why.
You all are only against your idea of transmisogyny, not committed to protecting transfems. You hate TERFs more than you love trans women.
You can’t stop talking about how TERF ideology is just as bad for transmascs when they literally want all transfems murdered—yeah, they hurt transmascs a lot, but they’re killing us. You can't stop trying to make transmisogyny about you. You refuse to analyze transmasc-specific bigotry through any lense other than comparison to transmisogyny.
If you get told to stop using one slur, get a little uncomfortable, feel like we’re being too mean? That “allyship” goes straight out of the window.
You’re more averse to speciesism than transmisogyny. You’re more upset by “kinnie” than by [slur].
Maybe treat us like you give a shit, and fucking listen. Then you might realize that, hey, this community isn’t just transmascs and enbies, and it never has been.
(on the slur censored in this post:)
[Slur], which some might have guessed, is femboy. While transmascs and gay men use it… a lot, now, it originated in the 90s as a sibling term for trap, but even more sexualized. As in, it literally came from the same discussion boards.
The main difference, and why the f-mboy is even more sexualized, is that since they’re not “deceiving” men, they can have very visible bulges. This is also why the term is extremely pornographic, reclaimed or not, and minors really need to stop throwing around.
Frankly, the whole queer men "reclaiming" it has made it way fucking worse. Conflating a slur calling trans women men with queer men is extremely fucking gross. "Reclaiming" other communities' trauma and erasing them from the discussion is gross. (And, no, "I wan't a term with history" isn't an excuse when that history is the sexualization, trafficking, and murder of trans women. Want historical terms? Scroll down.)
The movements formed around it are cool. Yay feminine men. But the use of the slur is still violently transphobic even if the culture is nice.
It feels a bit too late to stop completely at this point, but the least you (and the MOGAI Wiki) could do is not actively spread transmisogynistic misinformation on the word.
If you're looking for alternatives that don't fuck over transfems, consider:
Lavender boy - Much more history within the gay community, and more of a connection to queer men than f-mboy will ever had. Referring to a feminine queer man/masc. 1920s
Rosboy - A modern equivalent to the exact definition of f-mboy used by queer men/mascs, but this time the definition used is accurate to the term itself.
Tomgirl - Opposite of tomboy
Femme - Literally just femme. We've had femme the whole time. Just use it
Femme man, masc, guy, etc. - See femme
Make something up, or do your own research! Both are definitely options for anyone
Also, yes I have sources on all of this, I'm just not posting them publicly because I would be immediately outed if I did. If anyone involved/in the Discord wants to back me up without saying who I am or showing my user/nickname, feel free.
#mogai#mogai community#mogai safe#transmisogyny#mogai wiki#genderheaven#ezgender#ezgender wiki#lgbta wiki#terf mention#t slur#fem slur#transfem#transfem mogai#lgbtq community#queer
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ok i genuinely think a lot of other people have this problem but stop inserting yourself when xyz issue is mentioned. when someone is telling you that a person, a celebrity, some franchise is harming their identity or anyone’s identity as a minority, or part of a certain race or religion or anything shut the fuck up and accept it.
they do not need to know your emotional attachment to said thing, your disbelief, your horror, your personal experience - we didn’t ask for all that. we know just how bad it is, cus yk it harms us maybe? we’ve already gone through the cycle of being angry and indignant and now we’re here trying to get you to understand in the hopes that as a friend you do what you’re meant to do when you became friends with us. we are not your constant ball of anger to use whenever you find something that’s “crazy, unbelievably, shockingly” once again, a hate crime, when you decide you want to feel angry and care about it.
more under the cut bc i talk too much
by doing that, you’re making an issue that you didn’t even know about suddenly yours. ask yourself, what is the purpose for telling anyone all that? to get them to sympathize with you personally so you can get a pass because you didn’t know? of course you don’t know, of course you’re unaware, that’s the whole reason why you’re being told in the first place. do not water down the issue or even try to play the ‘everything has some issue like this so there’s no point in going this far’ card. especially as a white person. the reason why you don’t know primarily is because it doesn’t affect you and it doesn’t cross your mind.
when you watch a show with a black character, you don’t care about how off the character design is or how stereotypical and borderline racist the comedy gag surrounding said character is. when you listen to your favorite white music artists or watch your favorite movie with a majority white cast, white staff, white team, and white theme, you don’t care to analyze just how outdated and stereotypical the way that token asian character is portrayed. some of y’all don’t understand and will never understand the mental struggle and awareness forever plugged into the brain of lgbt and/or poc, especially black people when we consume anything, when we go anywhere, when we meet new people, to constantly catch those micro aggressions and know what to avoid.
so when someone tells you insert classic hot mess is racist and you should stop supporting it, one of the worst things you can do beside outright rejecting it is to defend it and insinuate that we don’t know what we’re talking about, that we need 30 different sources to prove it all, that you don’t think (for example taylor swifts dream colonized africa mv) is bad. you try to say the thing or person that is actively promoting all this homophobia, racism, transmisogyny etc needs to be kindly educated, is trying their best, will learn soon enough, just wasn’t educated, will do better in the future (esp looking at u kpop stans). does their apparent regret but refusal to properly apologize actually matter? the damage has already been done.
that in itself is a privilege i could never have. i don’t even try being a fan of any major white celebrity or any kpop group because i guarantee if i search up their name with ‘racist’, ‘sexist’, ‘homophobic’, ‘transphobic’, ‘cultural appropriation’ behind it something or some image is bound to show up. you will all say “oh they haven’t done anything yet” but when it comes out that they did, they have, and they do not care about who it affects, suddenly it’s a bombshell dropped on you out of nowhere.
it’s not that hard to spot these things actually. if your fav is constantly putting themselves against people of color, saying shady shit about non cishets while being a cishet themself, saying one thing and doing another, or has been silent when their voice was expected to speak up, shouldn’t you notice? y’all will reblog all these posts but in reality only 10% are actually reading and listening and actually digesting this information for future use.
and i think the thing that pisses me off is this is all from personal experience where i’m speaking from. over the past 2 days the amount of times if i’ve heard about the “tea that dropped w meghan markle” is ridiculous and annoying. a girl texted me and i sat there and i realized that she does this on a daily basis to fuel my anger and get me to validate her own useless anger. of course i knew about it and i wasn’t surprised at all - she’s still a black woman.
almost every black blog on here, when they get big enough, deals with some sort of weird shit surrounding their blackness. if you get big on speaking about issues you are now this emotionless token ‘smart black person i can actually trust’ to use as your replacement for google. this is not to say asking questions is bad, but it is so easy to pull up some of the shit you guys ask for. some people get called slurs directly, targeted for being too black or not black enough, attacked for their features and etc and someone mentioned this before but the only people that care in those situations are other black people themselves. white people will have blm in their bio but turn the other way the minute some anon starts acting up in their mutuals’ inbox, calling them a dark1e because they felt confident enough to post some selfies. and then you get sad when we dont go to you for any kind of support?
i’ve stated sometimes that asking me questions on issues and things is okay, but one of the main reasons i say that is because whether i say it or not, i’ll be asked questions and expected to know everything and i am your personal walking encyclopedia and ofc it’s natural for me to have all this information in my head, as if i didn’t research it myself. but then i think about the numerous amounts of people that specifically say not to ask them this shit because it really does tire you out, that they don’t want to have to deal with this in any space but they still get them.
and then the ones that don’t even know themself so people will use them as an example and say “well this person didn’t know and they’re ‘marginalized identity’ so it should be fine for me too”. good god just apologize, show that you really care, change your behavior and move on. do you think it was fun being asked the statistics for george floyd’s and other black peoples death in class? that you were being inclusive and giving me a chance to show off my intelligence, to prove to others that i really had something up here and you were my greatest star eyes white friend that gave me that chance? i cant close my posts like this properly but i want you to think about that shit and actually ask yourself if you’d do that. a lot of you will read this and think “i’m not that type of racist” “i don’t have those deep seated prejudices in me” yes you do. you just haven’t been called out on it.
for all the shit ive dealt with above, if i’ve ever talked to you about this before dont come to me to apologize i do not need it and you are not the only person i’ve received this from. i guarantee you that there’s about 20 other people i’ve thought about while writing this post considering i’m a black person in the real world, so keep your guilt to yourself an deal with it
white people don’t add on to this
#important#antiblackness#george floyd#death mention#ok to rb#more than ok but#here it is 😇#ill rb this everyday if i have to
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the transmisandry “debate” and the attitude towards trans men is so transparently a retreading of literally every exclusionary movement of the last few decades and Yet it’s being perpetrated and tolerated by what otherwise should be inclusionist spaces because it’s once again being pointed at a more “acceptable” target
like, on some level I understand the gut reaction, the term itself is associated with a lot of negativity and “mens rights activists” and the like have made the idea of men specifically facing oppression for being men at best laughable and at worst a red flag for violent misogyny.
it’s one of those things that a lot of people in left leaning spaces take for granted as being true across the board, something they don’t need to think about or examine. and to be clear “they” included me for quite some time, I do understand where the feeling comes from
but it’s not about oppression for being men, it’s oppression for being trans men, it’s transmisandry for the same reason that transmisogyny is transmisogyny. it’s a term specifically meant to cast a net over the broad array of experiences that people have specifically as trans men to give them an outlet to both examine their experiences in relation to the wider community of trans men and to specifically seek and give reassurance and solidarity to each other.
the bigger problem with this argument is that many people will resort to denying what I’ve just said in order to reject the proposed term, whether it’s something they’d actually believe once they examined the situation in earnest or not. because people act as though acknowledging that trans men face oppression for being trans men will open up the floodgates leading to cis straight white men convincing people that they’re oppressed for being men. so trans men Can’t be oppressed for being trans men because trans men are men and men aren’t oppressed.
so leading from this line of thought what you’ll generally see is the argument that what trans men experience is “just” transphobia, and if you press the issue or bring up a personal example you’ll almost as commonly get that anything else is “just” “misdirected” misogyny. and just, there’s so So much to unpack there that I’m almost tempted to just leave it where it is, but ignoring the issue won’t make it go away and I wouldn’t be writing this post if I didn’t want the issue to change.
the point with, I think, the least baggage is one that I’ve already touched upon, that being that the experiences of trans men and trans women are just naturally going to be different from each other and it’s useful for both parties to have language to talk specifically about their experiences, in the same way that it’s useful to examine the differences between the experiences of binary and nonbinary trans people. it doesn’t matter who you think has it “worse” because this isn’t a competition to see who’s oppressed enough to Deserve having their experiences heard. the urge for trans men to make a term to describe their experiences isn’t some way to try to argue that they’re more oppressed, it’s born from the inherent need to be understood and to see that other people exist in the way that you have. it’s the solidarity that brought the trans community together in the first place
a point leading off of that with probably significantly more baggage is the idea that queer and lgbt+ spaces are a contest to measure your oppression in the first place. don’t get me wrong, it Is useful to recognize different axis’ of oppression, to recognize larger patterns of violence faced by specific groups of people at a disproportionate rate. it helps us, as an entire community, identify the most vulnerable groups of people so we can lean into helping them on both a systemic and individual level, so we can see whose voices need to be boosted so they can be heard both in and out of the community. and moreover having these numbers and experiences together can help people outside of the community see that it’s is a problem as well.
however, the issue comes in when perceived theoretical oppression is used as a social capital to decide who is and is not allowed to be heard. I’m sure I’ve already lost the ace exclusionists ages ago by now, so that’s a perfect example.
at it’s most extreme ace exclusionism is blatant bigotry and hatred justified with the excuse that they’re protecting the queer and lgbt+ community from privileged invaders, and even when in it’s milder form ace exclusionism is powered by the idea that asexual people don’t face oppression. marginalized people are denied resources, solidarity, safe spaces, and voices because they’re painted as not being oppressed or not being oppressed Enough.
this wouldn’t be able to happen if your worth as a member of the lgbt+ community wasn’t measured by how oppressed your particular minority group is, if it didn’t have the sway that it has. creating a power structure in any way at all leaves people with the ability to exploit that structure, and the specific one that’s emerged within the queer community and leftist spaces in general allows people to exploit it while hiding it as moral, while hiding that they’re causing any pain at all. it’s the same frame of mind that’s made bullying cool in activist spaces
another reason why this hierarchy tends to fail on an individual level is, of course, that the level of oppression that an entire group faces does not dictate someone’s lived experiences, which is an idea that goes both ways.
the argument over whether or not asexuals are oppressed is ultimately a meaningless distraction from the lived experiences of asexual people. it is a Fact that asexuals face higher levels of rape and sexual assault than straight people, you can deny that what they’re facing counts as oppression specifically but what does that matter? there are people who are suffering and that suffering can be lessened by allowing those people into our community, shouldn’t that be enough?
likewise, comparing the suffering of individual people as if they were the same as the suffering of their respective groups combined is absolutely absurd. someone who is murdered for being a trans man isn’t less dead than someone who was murdered for being a trans woman. a trans woman isn’t Guaranteed to have lived a harder life than any and every other trans man just because of a difference in statistics, and the same can be said for literally every other member of the lgbt+ and queer communities. other community members aren’t concepts, they aren’t numbers, they’re people with unique lives and sorrows and joy. neither you or I or anyone else is the culmination of our respective or joint communities and some people need to learn how to act like it.
again, there is Meaning in seeing how our oppression is different, it’s not inherently wrong, but creating a framework where it can be used to paint a group of people as both lesser within the community and less deserving of help is creating a framework that can more than readily be abused. and because it positions the abused as privileged it creates a situation where the abuser can justify it to themselves. you use another minority as an outlet for the pain you feel under the weight of the same system that hurts them while denying their pain.
but to pull the conversation back to trans men specifically, lets examine lived experiences for a while longer.
“misdirected misogyny” and “just misogyny” are both employed commonly in exclusionist spaces to deny that either someone’s oppression happened to them for the reason they say it did or to deny that their oppression is their own, and often times it’s both. for instance, the claim that ‘asexual people may face higher rates of sexual assault but That’s just because of misogyny (and/or misdirected homophobia)’ is used to deny that what asexual people face is oppression for being asexual. if you can’t deny that an assault victim was assaulted without either violating your own moral code or the moral code of the community you’ve surrounded yourself with then denying the cause of their assault is a more socially acceptable way of depriving them of the resources they need to address that assault. their pain wasn’t their own, it belongs to someone else, someone who’s Really oppressed.
in the context of trans men the argument is, of course, that they’re men. if they just so happen to face misogyny then it’s because they were mistakenly perceived as women. this works a convenient socially acceptable way to deny the lived experiences of a group you want to silence both in the ways that I’ve already illustrated And with the added bonus woke points of doing so while affirming someone’s gender identity in the process.
again, I want to reiterate, even if it were objectively true that all trans men face transphobia and misogyny totally separately, like a picky toddler that doesn’t want their peas anywhere near their mashed potatoes, that is ultimately an insufficient framework when talking about individual lives. there’s literally nothing wrong with trans men wanting to talk about their lived experiences with other trans men in the context of them Being trans men. being black isn’t inherently a part of the trans experience but being black Does ultimately affect your experiences as a trans person and how they impact you and it’s meaningful to discuss the intersection of those two experiences on an individual level.
but it just, Isn’t true.
this shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone, but trans men were born in bodies that are perceived as being women, misogyny is a Feature to the experiences of trans men inherently. even trans men who are fully transitioned, have full surgery, have all their papers worked out, completely pass, move to a new state and changed their name, and have zero contact with anyone who ever knew them before or during their transition still lived a significant portion of their lives under a system that was misogynistic against them. of course there’s still a spectrum of personal experiences with it, just like there are with cis women and trans women, but to present the misogyny that trans men face as “accidental” is just absurd.
and moreover, most trans men Aren’t the hypothetical Perfect Passing Pete. I’ve identified as trans for seven years now and I frankly don’t have the resources to even begin thinking about transitioning and won’t for what’s looking to be indefinitely, I don’t even begin to come within the ballpark of passing and it Sure Does Show. misogyny is just as present in my life as it would be for a cis woman but the difference is that I’m not supposed to talk about it.
and even barring That there are transitioned trans men who face misogyny specifically because they are trans men, before during and after transition. you could argue that that’s “just” transphobia but you could do the same for transmisogyny. if we can acknowledge that trans women have experiences that specifically come from their status as women who can be wrongly perceived as men then we should all be able to acknowledge that trans men have experiences that specifically come from their status as men who can be wrongly perceived as women and that both the similarities and differences between these experiences are worth talking about.
another issue with painting it as “just” misogyny that ties pretty heavily into what I was just talking about is the fact that men don’t have the same access to spaces meant to talk about misogyny that women do.
again, this is something that makes sense on a gut level, it’s not like cis men are being catcalled while walking to 7/11. but like, a lot of trans men are.
misogyny is a normal facet in the lives of trans men but male voices are perceived as being invaders in spaces meant to talk about misogyny, both in and out of trans specific spaces and conversations
trans men lose a solidarity with women that they do not gain with men. there’s a certain pain and othering that comes with intimately identifying with the experiences of a group of people while being denied that those experiences are yours, of being treated the same way for the same reason but at once being aware that the comfort and understanding being extended isn’t For you and feeling like you’re cheating some part of your sense of self by identifying with it.
part of that is just the growing pains of getting used to existing as a trans person, but that in and of itself doesn’t mean that we aren’t allowed to find a solution. if trans men can’t, aren’t allowed, or don’t want to speak about their experiences in women’s spaces then why not allow them to talk about their experiences together?
the fact that we even have to argue over whether or not trans men Deserve to talk about their experiences is sad enough in it’s own right, but even sadder is inclusionists, people who should frankly know better at this point, refusing to stand up for trans men because someone managed to word blatant bigotry in an acceptable way Once Again.
#discourse#transphobia#trans men#transmisandry#inclusionism#long post#hi yes hello everything I say is exactly two ideas in a trench coat
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something that’s become a meme in terf circles is “pattern recognition” and how we should all recognize “patterns” a trans women as male abusers. i can write this off personally as pseudo-intellectual posturing with no basis in any coherently articulated theory about anything, because it is, but that doesn’t make me feel any less anxious about how potentially effective that type of rhetoric is so i will.. try to explain what i think is effective about it, and hopefully undermine it to whatever extent i can.
the way that the point is generally put is basically, you are all pretending that trans women aren’t really male predators and abusers, and hiding behind phony theories about how to think so would be transmisogynist or to buy into stereotypes of trans women as perverts, but if you just look around you’ll see that actually, no, trans women are dangerous sexual predators. not all of them, but enough of them that they shouldn’t be trusted not to be any more than men. “how many trans women have to be outed before we all collectively recognize a pattern at play?” is the big rhetorical question.
aaand, it’s not meant to be answered. the answer is, there have already been so many that you’d have to be fucking naive to think that the pattern isn’t evident! the answer to the rhetorical question is a monolithic rhetorical plenitude of trans women who have used bogus libfem queer theory to “break through the cotton ceiling” and it doesn’t matter how many exactly.. just a fucking lot of them!
so what if we uh, actually fucking try and answer that question. how about twenty? thirty? a hundred? i mean if we go back and look at the past few years of lgbt/trans/feminist/whatever social media there have been probably about a couple dozen cases of relatively prominent trans women being outed as being sexual predators of one sort or another, that is true, it would be pointless to deny that and it can basically be empirically checked so whatever. and so like, that’s a high number right. so many! clearly enough to establish a pattern. well.. is it?
the thing about talking about pattern recognition is that, well, like anything to do with cognition or epistemology or whatever, it requires a lot of thinking. like a lot a lot. more than people regularly do on fucking tumblr. i’m not going to pretend i’m an expert in the field, but rather say i “know enough to know i don’t know very much at all.” i know that the way we detect patterns is pretty fucking context-dependent and subject to all sorts of things related to the way that general cognition is structured, like affective biases and prejudices, assumptions about the boundaries of reality and about what kinds of meaningful entities exist. in other words.. no you certainly cannot just “recognize a pattern” without a lot of critical evaluation lol.
so like, back to the semi-regular social media shitstorm wherein some trans woman who is somewhat prominent gets outed as a sexual predator. we can all acknowledge that this happens a few times a year, i think. or maybe not idk, but it’s something i personally cross paths with on about a monthly basis. i’m not talking about the “prisoner gets sex change and gets moved to womens prison” type stories, specifically trans women in “activist” circles who write or post a lot about transmisogyny, and end up outed for some serious sexual impropriety. more often than not there is to some degree of a defense of her behaviour, or rather a denial that accusations are true because they seem to resemble transmisogynistic stereotypes and therefore simply cannot be true. more often than not she loses credibility as the accusations gain it, occasionally the accusations turn out to be actually kind of horseshit, sometimes to a greater or lesser degree she continues to leverage a “following” who believe her to be some sort of martyr to transmisogyny, but most of the time she just ends up getting pushed out of the community in disagrace because she’s a fucking sexual predator, it’s pretty ritualized at this point.
so, pattern right? this happens way too often to be a coincidence, we have to stop pretending the theory of “““transmisogyny”““ is real or that trans women are anything other than testosterone crazed males and a very real threat to females. lol. the problem with all of this, is that there are a lot more patterns than just, trans woman abuses innocent cis women/trans men/whatever afabs happen to be available to her in her position. [as a side note in my experience most trans woman abusers most commonly abuse.. other trans women, not directly relevant but yeah].
as huge as the number of instances seems on a gut level (hence, “how can you possibly denny it?”), it’s not as statistically significant as it “seems” affectively. there are a lot of trans women out there. not as many as there are stars in the sky, but still a lot. there are a lot of trans women with blogs, trans women who do activism, trans women who talk about misogyny/transmisogyny/whatever, trans women who write theory and have followings. seriously enough that a dozen a year [that number’s arbitrary but i’m going with it so yeah] being outed as sexual abusers is not the most statistically significant thing in the world. my own little mental test for these sorts of things is, how does this compare to the statistics for traffic fatalities. like the sheer number of people who die gruesomely in car accidents is high as fuck, but as a statistic it doesn’t move us to get rid of cars or fear for our lives every time we pull on to the highway. it’s just not actionable in that way. and uh, i’m not going to claim anything super empirically valid here, but based on my own observations of trans women being outed as abusers in different contexts, and how this seems to play out statistically, i wouldn’t say it is either.
so. why’s the argument effective then? well, none of this shit is about statistical anlysis lol. it’s totally gut level. and when it feels like “it keeps happening” then it feels like a crisis. a crisis that needs to be fixed. by getting trans women the hell out of women’s spaces, communities, discussions, etc. same way that whole websites list every conceivable criminal offence by a trans women (or a man who may or may not wear women’s clothes, or whatever), where it’s not about any kind of analysis of what’s actually happening, it’s about how many mug shots you can load on a web page, it’s about what i described before as the monolithic rhetorical plenitude. what it’s about, it the sense of a lot. and i’m sorry but if you truly believe that’s sufficient to actually ground decisions about anything let alone about the nature of lgbt politics, you are fucking dumb.
as a kind of personal aside i will just say - i know a lot of trans women. i’m not going to say anything categorical about people or about myself or my experiences, but i will say that of the relatively large number of trans women i know, no one is a sexual predator as far as i know. i know a lot of people who have been vicitimized in one way or another sexually who are trans women, however. and like, i can honestly say i’ve witnessed a lot of emotional abusive, maladaptive coping, manipualtive behaviour, etc. from trans women, towards each other and towards non-trans women but like.. that is very fundamentally different at every level from being “men” or existing in the kind of dynamic that men exist in towards women in terms of sexual violence. like if you’re a cis woman who follows a few trans women on tumblr, i can pretty confidently say that i know more about the dynamics that exist for trans women than you do, because i am one and i exist in this space in one way or another, and i get a picture that’s more “authentic” (i hate that word but yeah) than you whether you’ve decided that trans women are perfect angels uwu or evil predators based on shit you’ve half-encountered in lgbt “discourse”.
anyway, i mentioned earlier “more patterns” so i uh should probably elaborate on that. i am not going to name any names, but suffice it to say this is about a thing that’s happened in the last few days as of this post being written where a trans woman got media attention for calling out a celebrity for saying dumb transmisogynist shit, was seen briefly as some shining light for activism, was called out for sexual abuse, and then the whole thing turned into a social media Thing. this is of course a unique case as anything is, but it does seem to have a discernible resemblance to some others, so yeah.
what i will say most disturbed me about the whole ordeal is how easy it was for the person in question to just completely dismiss accusations by essentially stating “i am a trans woman, these accusations are false because they sound vaguely like transmisogynistic stereotypes and terfs are saying them.” like it’s such a fucking unhealthy dynamic when that can actually work to some degree. and for the record, i am constantly tempted to post petty shit about like Trans Woman Social Media and just the level of intellectual dishonesty and theoretical indiscipline that’s totally pervasive, not because i think it’s horrible in and of itself but because, seriously, it’s fucking derealizing and it leads to a bizarre fucking situation where instead of just discussing things as though they are real and people have any kind of autonomy or responsibility or place in any sort of meaningful social system, they are just part of some narrative mythology.
and like that happens with the “discourse” around transmisogyny. but it’s not because the concept of transmisogyny is bad, or because the idea that trans women are unfairly stereotyped as sexual deviants is bad, or because the idea that trans women deserve to be “included” or treated in good faith in whatever sense is bad. it’s because the standard of application for all these ideas isn’t very rigorous, and people within this community (by which i mean pretty much everyone lgbt) have a lot of emotional issues that make their judgment fucking poor. it’s because there are trans women who see a theoretical concept that they can manipulate to make themselves absolute victims and incapable of abusing other people, and hide behind it because they’re charismatic or whatever. that, more than anything, is the pattern that i see. and if there’s one thing that will not fix that pattern it is sewing more paranoia and hatred than is absolutely necessary.
all of which leads me to, what exactly is the point of all this “pattern recognition” shit? well as i said the intention seems to be to inspire people to reframe the way they think about trans women from a paradigm of theorizing about transmisogyny to seeing trans women as inherently male in some sense and, per the pattern, inherently threatening to byologycal fembales. that is why, when terfs write callouts about the aformentioned trans woman, they don’t just say, this person, bad, no good, they specifically make a point to say “it’s not just this person, it’s all of these people.” hence “pattern recognition”.
what i will say about most callout posts i’ve seen is there’s a certain sense of.. grief? about them. people don’t want to marginalize someone they thought of as a friend or someone worthy of synmpathy or they admire or whatever, but they know that some kind of harm reduction has to happen if that person’s behaviour compromises others in some way. i flat-out don’t get that sense from terf calliuts of trans women. it’s schadenfreude, nothing more nothing less. i mean, doing a bit of a thought experiment, we know (and terfs certainly know) that a trans woman can easily leverage the sense that accusations against her are a “terf conspiracy” into some kind of support, so wouldn’t a harm reduction approach sort of discourage interspersing callout posts with boilerplate terf rhetoric that would in all likelihood make it easier for a person to deny the accusations as terf hate?
but in the case of all the terf posts i’ve seen about the particular trans woman in question (and about any given trans woman) they’re blatantly not “really” about bringing down that particular trans woman, they’re about the pattern. what’s important isn’t that the lgbt community be made aware of an individual predator’s behaviour, or even that the broader and more nuanced issues that promote dysfunctional and even predatory or abusive behaviour within the community be addressed, but rather that the “pattern” be fed into. what is ultimately most important is that cis women be made more and more paranoid about trans women, so that any meaningful community that does form and does have meaningful practices and discussions around abuse exclude trans women from the get-go, insofar as trans women are of course inherently not capable of participating without threatening real women’s safety.
i don’t really know how to finish this other than to say, trans women are trans women, we exist and will continue to exist in one sense or another, and i think we deserve to be a part of communities and be treated with good faith and have our experiences and needs and desires taken seriously. there is going to be some awkwardness in that but it’s workable. if you really don’t think it is, you are a terf, and you are a coward whose praxis is centered around giving hollow intellectual legitimacy to ignorant prejudices and keeping trans women cordoned off in the most abjected and dysfunctional zone of existence because you don’t have the empathy or imagination to see us as a part of your community, and you’re too fucking weak to actually hate men so you fucking take it out on us. stop it. jesus.
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Man, body dysmorphia as a butch got me relating to a lot of trans issues ngl. I even thought about transitioning for a while but ended up deciding that being cis and non binary was what suited. That op already makes me feel better
I'm gonna be honest, when you're a cis lesbian and you feel down, even when you start going towards the ftm route, GCs/T3RFs are gonna try to prey on you hard as fuck. Don't let them do that. Arguably a while ago i "talked" to them (just trying to pull info about what they thought to better understand and debunk it a sister starts feeling too attracted to this ideology) and guess what it's bullshit. It doesn't add up. They only believe it because they have faith in it it's almost cult-like. Yikes.
Of course they also try to take advantage of women of color and take advantage of racist white women. They have no remorse being side by side with actual fascists as long as it helps their core beliefs, which is hatred of trans women. Transmasc and "afab NB" (hate this term but that's the only why i can describe it) are seen as just victims of trans women. GC/T3RF ideology is just about transmisogyny before anything else.
#i mean i can understand that people would think that i'm trans or even some kind of weird chaser because of some stuff on my dash#but no i'm just one of those allies#again personnal#i will ask you not to rb
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you know what really get's me- when fic writers who previously wrote offending/hurtful material (namely g!p) add a little note like this I just pulled "I wrote this before I knew it was problematic, I'm sorry if I offended anyone." The phraseology and the fact that the fic is still up prove they don't actually care
yeah, like, essentially my thought process is
“your story’s still reproducing harm against trans women, especially if it’s a popular one in the top dozen pages for their ship, casting doubt on the notion that you understand how and why g!p is problematic (and the word choice there only adds to that doubt, otherwise more appropriate words would be chosen), but go off I guess...”
Like, no ones’ telling anyone to delete the stories from all existence (I keep private copies of all my stories, and I know plenty of authors who have handed out copies of their deleted fics on request). But keeping them on a public archive continues the harm. There’s no getting around that. The idea that there IS any way of getting around that kind of makes it clear folks are missing the point about the actual harm caused, or they just straight up don’t believe it, and have only stopped creating it out of peer pressure...which, while technically better than nothing, it’s a far cry from my goal of folks understanding the harm and deciding not to write it because they don’t want people to experience that harm.
I really hope it’s not another scenario akin to where trans women go on in detailed, patient essays about the harms of TERFs, how they utilize cissexism and transmisogyny against us, etc., and cis folks walk away from that only with “TERFs are bad (for reasons , ones I would not be able to clarify if asked to)”
Like, I’ve even made short posts, moderate length posts, and long posts all detailing the harm g!p works reproduce. Yet, I wouldn’t be surprised if some folks walked away with a simple “Huh, g!p is apparently bad for some reason or other. Better stay away from that.”
#g!p#creative responsibility#transmisogyny#cissexism#transphobia#trans representation#trans fetishization#Anons
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http://cardozzza.tumblr.com/post/162364426138/caseydickdanger-kindergraph-kindergraph-hey
this post is hilarious considering cardozzza was one of the diehard defenders of discourseprincessa, who was a cis woman pretending to be an intersex trans woman to get away with attacking people
this shitwipe was constantly telling inclusionist trans women to die and making other violent remarks lol which many trans women were calling out lol
and on top of that also claimed to be a “messianic” jewish person which many jewish people have said time and time again is not a thing and is antisemitic as fuck
and don’t come at me with that “but we were manipulated! stop hanging this over our heads!” because even if she wasn’t lying about who she was she was still claiming to be a “messianic” jewish person and threatening trans women!!
and that shit’s not suddenly unacceptable only because she turned out to be fucking cis, it was unacceptable to fucking start with!
I’m not gonna sit here and pretend this doesn’t have anything to do with the discourse and is “actually about helping people” because aphobes, cardozza included, have shown time and time again they don’t care about or will even defend when their own pull these kinds of stunts
Here’s some facts about this callout
1. aerf was not coined by them, in fact it was supposedly coined by trans women, and here’s a tweet from June 9th using it before this person did
2. this isn’t "bragging” about blocking trans women; they just remarked that they can block whoever they want after making a post about how nobody’s entitled to their creations
and 3. it is absolutely correct that many trans women have expressed about how aphobes borrow TERF tactics and that it makes them feel afraid and unsafe, especially considering how often aphobes agree with TERFs and think that’s fucking fine
let alone the amount of cis people using “cishet” and saying shit like “saying cis people don’t have a say in transphobia is homophobic”, let alone the amount of people who are super willing to misgender nonbinary people and call us “basically (wo)men” to prove that sga is the main and most important aspect of being LGBT+, let alone their fucking constant intersexism
(this reblog explains it more eloquently)
and there’s a damned lot of people on this post that are completely ignoring all the ableist and misogynistic slurs which btw is an incredibly fucking common thing aphobes have been doing lol
so again this all smells very strongly of being exactly about ace discourse
honestly, y'all need to stop listening to only the trans women and trans people that you personally like lol
a good reply:
tatterdemalionamberite said: I’m so fucking exhausted and enraged that this is going to be (is already being) used as a bludgeon against the trans women whose perspective Nora was boosting in the first place. Oh, and OP isn’t a trans woman either as far as I can tell, they just decided they’re an arbiter of what counts as transmisogyny, now that they can use that against a group of people including trans women that they don’t agree with.
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kate mckinnon is a transmisogynist why are u so obsessed with her
Hey there, anon. There are two sentiments here, so I’m going to address both, since they are, indeed, separate.
Kate McKinnon is important to me for a number of reasons. There’s the shallow baseline of I think she’s very talented ( not just in comedy, but in singing and performance art in general ) and wildly creative, seeing the world in ways no one else does. She can make me laugh when I need it the most and at things I never thought possible ( see: this entire election ). I love her for all the reasons people normally love their faves. But there’s something more, too.
Kate has been an open and proud lesbian for most of her life. She’s said in interviews that she wasn’t always comfortable with it, that it was something confusing for her as it was for many of us, but that it’s the banner she flies and she’s proud to be who she is. That’s not something we get a lot in our community; someone to look up to and find inspiration from. There’s that expression, if you can see it, you can be it. Well, you know what? There are no openly lesbian women in my field to look up to. There’s no one that I can look at and say, “hey, they made it, and now it’s my turn.” Of all the people I’ve ever known in this area, it’s just me. Hell, even in my life, I’m the definition of the token gay friend. I know three other queer women offline – one of my best friends, my hair stylist, and a girl I just started dating. No one else. I’m in a big freaking city and people here still aren’t out and proud because I live in one of the most conservative areas of the country. Hell, for almost the entirety of my teenage years, I didn’t even think being a gay woman was an option. So to look at someone succeeding in Hollywood and be unashamedly, unapologetically gay as hell, that actually means a lot to me and it inspires me.
As for the accusations of transmisogyny, I’ve seen two main points for where that comes from: the Celesbian interview she did and the Fitzwilliam skits. I’ve seen the interview a dozen times by now and I’ve even giffed parts of it, and I’m just straight out going to say that I think the quotes pulled are taken entirely out of context; not just in what she was saying but also in how the world spoke at the time. It was almost ten years ago that she did that interview. Ten years. The discourse has changed so much over the last ten years with regards to everything LGBTQ+, but especially being trans* or the idea of ‘gold star lesbianism’ or anything like that. Besides that, people just pick and choose parts of what she said and ascribe meaning to it that otherwise has no real basis, in my opinion.
Now onto the Fitzwilliam sketch. I’m not excusing it. I’m not going to pretend it wasn’t problematic or say anyone shouldn’t be offended. That’s not my place to decide. I do think it’s fair to take offense to it.
I would just point, however, out how much the world has changed in the last ten years. Ten years ago, the only knowledge a lot of us had about transgender people was from Chaz Bono. There was so little talked about with regards to it that a lot of us were woefully ignorant and misunderstanding of the community.
I suggest people consider that at the same time the fact that she was only 22 when she came up with the sketch. I can’t speak to her current views, as this is not something she’s discussed to my knowledge, but I can say that I don’t know anyone who hasn’t evolved in their attitudes or beliefs of what is or is not acceptable over the course of nearly a decade. Change is an ongoing process of education. Clearly no one at the network or the show saw fit to call her out on it, so she probably thought it was fine. I mean, her greatest crime is ignorance, rather than malice. The whole reason it came up wasn’t malicious intent, but rather that she thought it was fun to say ‘vagina’ in a British accent. Again, not an excuse for doing it and not saying that it’s okay, but her motives were hardly to make fun of anyone or harm anyone. She’s said repeatedly that the last thing she ever wants to do is hurt people with her sketches and that she would be very upset if she did. She also has no social media presence at all and it’s never been brought into interviews, so there’s a good chance she doesn’t even realize it’s upset anybody or that there would be a need to address it.
One thing Kate always said about working on the Big Gay Sketch Show is that it felt like comedy with a purpose – like she was doing something for her people and giving a voice to the community. Was it her place to speak for trans women? No. Was it a problematic sketch? Yes. Should she apologize for it? Yes – but she has to be given the information and the opportunity first. But is it really fair to assume she’s a transmisogynist for a comedy sketch she last performed eight years ago?
I’m not trying to be dismissive of the community by any means. I love and support my trans* sisters. And if Kate comes out tomorrow and says something transmisogynistic or addresses Fitzwilliam without apology, I’ll reconsider my opinion in a heartbeat. Until then, I’ll continue to love her. I’ve got all my posts tagged, so if you follow me, you can blacklist. If you don’t ( which I suspect, since I’ve been blogging about her for awhile without any comment ), then peace out. All the best. xx
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