Love this bitch for having multiple gender filters on. He’s transmasc, he’s a woman who’s a man, she’s nothing at all

Hey @ trans inclusive radical feminists, how do y’all beat the terf accusations while also talking about sex based oppression as a form of misogyny? I literally highlight my support of trans people in my bio and my pinned post and just got hit with a terf accusation :/

I really, REALLY hope that CAPCOM never reveals who Nero's mother is. I don't think I can take losing all the steamy Dante/Vergil Mpreg fanfiction and fanart!😥

Oh anon, I highly doubt the art and fanfic would disappear just because capcom gave a face to nero's mom! Even if they were to actually make her a character, I think me and everyone else who's deep in the hc would just keep going as if nothing had happened - after all, I highly doubt Vergil being Nero's actual mother would ever be made canon, so why care about what canon says on the matter? It fits incredibly well with his character and with the general vibe all of the spardas have that make them so close, at least in my experience, to the (specifically transmasc) non-cis experience, but it's one of those things that was likely just a happy accident and as such will probably never be recognized by the creators, even. Though while I think it's clear that the official intent of purely canonverse is to imply Vergil had a ONS with a random woman who got pregnant with Nero, I personally don't think it would serve the narrative to make her a full fledged character - something like that would muddle the story a bit too much. I think it works perfectly as a "yeah this thing happened but how or the details don't matter, what matters is that now Nero exists" thing rather than having its own detailed branching off plot. I just don't think DMC is the franchise to explore that - and besides, I think capcom, so far, hasn't seemed too interested in exploring that, which honestly I appreciate not just as a shipper (because again, like I said, at the end of the day what canon says matters relatively little) but from a narrative perspective.

Vent abt smth that gets on my Nerves

also a special shoutout for real like wendy epic ableism moments when she stops talking directly to winston and expresses this is b/c he communicates too incorrectly (here too literally or whatever, once again whether he misinterpreted her or she misinterpreted him, it's put on him) and thus he doesn't deserve that

when you're talking to a trans person about their identity & the way they view themselves, there comes a point when you really just need to take a step back and say . i will not, and probably never will be able to understand exactly what this person is feeling. i need to accept that, as much as i want to interrogate and question and throw hypotheticals into the air like they're rice at a wedding, i won't understand what they're going through. i just need to trust that they understand themselves enough to make decisions that are good for them.

If you have a materialistic feminism point of view it's really strange to not be able to see how plastic surgery is not a personal choice but one which is pushed by social constructs and history.

I'm watching a video essay about a game ive been interested in playing. The creator of the video, who has crossdressed multiple times, makes a "women arent funny" joke, and i suddenly realize ive never witnessed him acknowledge a woman in an uplifting way before.

I'm on a dating app for lgbt+ people. I've stated multiple times on my profile that i would rather lose an arm than recieve nudes without consent. I will be sent five dick pics for every 2 people i talk to that night.

I'm talking with my dad, who informs me he's been trying his best to learn about trans issues. He says the same things steven crowder brings up when trying to ridicule trans people. I gently but firmly correct my father and get told that ive been fed propaganda.

I'm on instagram, under the comments of a post ridiculing someone for being a misogynyst. Someone's left a comment saying "it must be hard being a woman on the internet" and i respond "it is." I will have every aspect of my appearance scrutinized as a reminder that no matter how well i pass, it will never be enough for someone with bad intentions.

I'm back on that dating app for lgbt+ people. I'm messaged by an attractive looking person, but i can see their partner prominently displayed in all but their main photo, oftentimes striking what im sure they thought was a very intimidating pose. Their bio says "looking for a third for our anniversary." I know that even if I did feel up to it, the gruff partner wouldnt approve of me because i don't pass.

I'm at a job interview for a clothing store. I tell the gracefully-dressed woman interviewing me that ever since i began my transition, i've discovered an interest in fashion, and that this job would allow me to dip my toes into the industry in a safe way. I'm told that i've reduced womanhood to a stereotype, and i can tell by her tone that i lost any chance at the job the minute she realized i was trans.

I'm at the same hospital i got facial feminization surgery in, trying to figure out what's wrong with my bowels. When the person behind the desk gives me a wristband with my patient info on it, i notice a single, lonely, letter M. I ask a nurse in private why it would say that despite me having changed it nearly a year prior. They say they have no clue, and bring in paperwork for me to fill out and have it re-changed again.

I'm living with my mom at the time. I'm new to transitioning, and decide to try my hand at voice training. It feels a bit off, but otherwise im feeling neutral toward the whole thing. I try speaking in this new voice to my mom and she laughs. Now, when people ask if i intend to voice train, i find speaking at all difficult for minutes after.

I didnt have some sort of grand message to convey by this. I just had a thought and then that thought spiralled into whatever the hell this became. Some, okay most, might call it complaining; they are right to do so.

God, Matt Mullenweg is a dumbass. He could just have let his staff ban predstrogen, ignore her harassment and kept quiet, and he would have gotten away with it. She is a trans woman and people literally get away with murdering us, and the majority of the people who care are fellow trans women. Don't get me wrong, he will likely still get away with it, but he made this a bigger problem for him than it would have been otherwise.

Like this is more evidence that rich people are not smarter, they are often quite dumb. They don't work harder, and have quite easy jobs. Matt at this point has one of the easiest jobs in history, just let the money from wordpress being 40% of the internet roll into his bank account and relax. And he still managed to fuck that up.

That's because he took the quite minor controversy over Predstrogen being repeatedly banned personally for some reason. I'm not sure why, probably he thought his site being accused of transmisogynic moderation practices was a blow to his self-image as a cool tolerant dude.

And then he proved the critics point by repeatedly misgendering her, and singling her out by him, the ceo of tumblr, personally justifying her being banned. And then arguing about it with randos in replies and even dms. Like he points out himself that "We generally do not comment on individual cases." That's generally a good policy for a ceo of a social media site to have, Matt, don't ever make an exception to it, no matter how upset you are about "misinformation" that you are a transmisogynist.

Like his company's PR team must have been literally asleep or off the clock, or he didn't consult with them beforehand, because if they were in any way competent they would have told him what a bad idea this was.

Stumbled across a high school friends blog and Twitter recently and she looks like she's doing well for herself and man it made me weirdly... nostalgic, but not for high school. Rather i felt this weird nostalgia for that feeling i had in high school of wanted to get to know her and a couple other people better. And like, i wish back then I'd taken more social risks and spent time with those folks in high school i thought were so cool and wanted to get to know better, but i cant make that bond now. We've both moved on, neither of us are those high schoolers who were friends but wanted to get to know each other better. Idk, it's a weird feeling i don't know how to elaborate on. But anyway I'm glad she's doing well (at least as far as an online presence can show how well someone is doing, obvs people do usually try and put their best foot forward on social media)

I was just beaten, stabbed, and shot all in just the matter of a few days, each day a different incident or attack by an individual in my family and outside of my family by ppl around me, I had to get several stitches in my legs, arms, hands and even some in my face after being jumped and beaten and stabbed, I had a bullet pulled out my leg and my side, I was shot 8 times, 4 times in the legs and 2 times in my right lower abdomen and another 2 times in my left lower abdomen, I been in and out of the hospital including the mental hospital for suicide attempts as well as being harmed by transphobic ppl, I've been struggling paying for costs of a vet visit after my kitten was killed by my moms dog after she had her dog kill her, I've been raped, molested and abused by my family and ppl in my schools and neighborhood and I just get tired of being in this same situation surrounded by poverty, I live in a neighborhood where I'm constantly threatened for being a black trans woman and I have NO ONE TO TURN TO, I've tried getting help finding a new job but it's harder after constantly being fired for molestation at work and sexual harassment and constant work abuse I've been thru whether it was employees or managers targeting me with harassment and bullying within the workplace and it's been hard in general trying to get help with financial situations, paying for medical bills and get med assistance from the government and the city as well as mental health help for therapists, psychiatric help, and safe space havens or shelters, I've also been from mental health facility shelter to homeless shelters and been harassed, abused, raped and molested in EVERY SINGLE ONE, i am currently living in a rundown home surrounded by poverty and bad conditions, rusted bursted pipes, i have no plumbing, no water, no way to get anything to drink, to clean stuff with, i dont have water for dishes to be cleaned, laundry to be washed, or to bathe or shower in or to take a piss or shit in either and there are several dead cats in my basement as well as raccoons from all the holes in the walls, I had to freeze in the winter and was trying to get help from the city with some government assistance and I'VE YET TO GET ANY HELP, ANY THERAPISTS FOR MY MENTAL HEALTH I'M STILL ON A QUEUE, I HAVE NO HELP FOR MENTAL HEALTH MEDS, OR PSYCHIATRIC HELP, I can't seem to afford to get help with much even after succeeding my Gofundme goal because I had to use most of that money for food for me and my cats and keep cleaning products to get my home clean WHICH IS STILL A MESS. so what i need anyone to do for me if yall POSSIBLY CAN, is reblog this as much as you can and please share my links to donation help with pet food, water, meds, med help, mental health help, finding an apartment, getting a bed or mattress, and any daily needs and necessities IF YALL CAN.

My goal is to get at least $2500 to $3000, I know it's alot but rn I need as much as I can possibly get, yall can send anything, nothing is too small it's ALL APPRECIATED. IF PPL CAN SEND AT LEAST 25 OR 30$ EACH IT WOULD HELP OUT SO MUCH, BUT AGAIN ANY AMOUNT IS APPRECIATED. THIS is REALLY IMPORTANT!!....I'M TRYING MY BEST TO SURVIVE RIGHT NOW!

Cashapp: $Slasherstan91

Venmo: Negrophiliac (I know the name's wild 😭)

Chime: $MarsRayL

Paypal: paypal.me/MarsRayL

Finally getting help (pt 2)

This one actually is edited thanks to @basementqueercock! Thank you friend!

part 1 | Masterpost

-------

Vlad had been making a stink at the Gala about the Wayne brats taking his godson from him without his permission when the music suddenly cut out. Bruce Wayne himself stalked towards Vlad with an expression that was honestly a little intimidating, even if Vlad obviously wasn’t scared of such an empty headed pretty boy even if he was one of the richest and most influential people on the planet. He was Plasmius! He could take a rich pretty boy is he had to!

“Ah! Mr. Wayne, thank goodness! Your children have taken my Godson off somewhere! I’m sure it’s just a harmless prank but he’s a bit fragile and unpredictable so I really think that it would be best if-“

“Is he fragile and unpredictable because he’s pregnant and you knew?” Bruce asked low and dangerous. Silence spread out around them, even though there’s no way they could have heard they saw the look on Brucie’s face. He rarely got angry but when he did it was serious, when he did it usually meant someone had hurt a kid.

Vlad blanched for a moment, Danny had been so tight lipped about it, so unwilling to tell even those he trusted how did These people know?! “What? What on earth are you talking about? Of course he’s not pregnant, I mean he’s a boy!” Vlad huffed and Bruce’s jaw tightened even more somehow.

“He’s not leaving with you. Get out.” He said low and menacing, then raised his voice. “Sorry to cut the party short everyone but something has come up, a situation that really needs my attention so I’m going to have to put an end to the party early.”

“What do you mean!? He’s MY God son! MY heir! You can’t just keep him from me!” Vlad said, he knew that his eyes were starting to glow a little red but he couldn’t help it. “He’s MINE! Return him to me or you will regret it I swear!”

“See him out.” Bruce said dismissively to a handful of guards who had approached at the start of the commotion A lot of the socialites were already starting to see themselves out, now was not the time to argue, or even stick around when it looked like this might get physical.

“I will be back! I will be back with lawyers and police and the brat’s parents,” Vlad vowed but couldn’t risk fighting the guards any more than a usual old man would on the way out with so many eyes on him. Well he just needed to find a place alone. Then he could transform and come back, possess Bruce Wayne and make him do something heinous in public to ruin him for this.. this- this INDIGNITY!

-------

Bruce was having a hard time keeping his Batman expressions off his face as he saw that everyone was out of his house and he knew his children were having the same trouble. Dick looked like he was ready to bash someone’s head in and Steph wasn’t that much better. Damian was standing by the door, seeing everyone out with frosty politeness that no one would mistake as genuine. Bruce felt just a little bad, it wasn’t anyone’s fault what they had found tonight. No one else knew about the clearly abused teen they were currently harbouring, but none of the family could help it either. Bruce would send all the guests gift baskets once they could announce what was going on.

Alfred was on the phone with Bruce’s lawyers, sending them the mildly distorted audio from Danny’s earlier conversation with Cas and Dick, and the footage from Vlad Master’s outburst. That had the same sort of distortion over it too which was odd, he’d have to look into it. Cas had already informed him she thought Danny was a meta of some sort, maybe it was connected to that? Or maybe they were aliens? Though Danny being trans was currently the most plausible explanation for his pregnancy. They’d find out more later. What mattered was the footage of both of those would be enough for Bruce to get emergency custody while the family was investigated. 

Tim was with Danny in the room Alfred had fixed for him, helping him settle in and lending him some clothes. Tim was the closest to Danny’s age and also one of the calmer ones right now so he was in charge of trying to make Danny feel safe and comfortable while the family took up battle stations to deal with the legal and logistical elements of this.

Bruce made sure everyone was out, the perimeter was secure, and Oracle was at her computer watching the security feed for anything suspicious including the pattern of distortion Vlad and Danny seemed to emit. He wasn’t sure how paranoid he should be about all this, but he’d seen the way Vlad’s eyes sparked red when he was angry and Batman was sure he was a lot more dangerous then he first seemed. And not just in the way that he was apparently willing to impregnate a boy young enough to be his son.

Finally he couldn’t avoid going to check on Danny anymore. Not that he was Really avoiding it, just that he knew this was going to be an exhausting and difficult conversation and he needed to brace himself for it. With every step towards Danny’s new room he felt the weight gather on his shoulders of what this child must have been through.

He knocked, and let himself in. Immediately clocking the way Danny tensed at the sight of him. Of course a rich older man would set off his alarm bells. Bruce gave the softest smile he could and went to pull out the desk chair across from the bed Danny was sitting on, well out of arms reach so he wouldn’t seem like a threat as he sat down. He glanced at Tim who nodded and went and sat on the bed next to Danny. Solidarity, willing to stand up against Bruce if Danny needed it, safety.

“Hello Danny, it’s nice to meet you. My children told me a bit about.. your situation,” Bruce said with a small grimace. “Would you mind if I ask you some questions? I promise I won’t judge you whatever you say, and I promise I am on your side. No matter what I will try to keep you safe okay? Just tell me the truth, it’ll help me do what needs to be done.”

“Alright Mr. Wayne,” Danny said, though he was still wary.

“Thank you, please call me Bruce. So first, what’s your full name?” he asked deciding to start super easy.

“Daniel James Fenton,” Danny replied softly.

“Your parents names?”

“Doctors Madeline and Jack Fenton,” Huh the fact that he called his parents doctor like it was part of their name seemed to be significant though Bruce wasn’t sure exactly what it meant.

“How old are you?”

“I’m 16,” He said. A little older than he looked but still no where near old enough to have the weight of the world on his shoulders like he did.

“And you’re pregnant?” Bruce asked as gently as he could, Danny nodded. “And you’re sure?”

“Yes,” Danny said softly and Bruce nodded, licking his lips a little.

“Did you take a test then?” He asked and Danny grimaced making a so so motion.

“It’s not… that simple,” He said softly.

“Can you explain it to me please?” Bruce asked softly.

Danny took a deep breath and licked his lips, hesitating, opening his mouth to stat, hesitating again and biting his lip. Bruce stayed quiet as he watched the conflict on Danny’s face. “You work with the justice league right?” Danny asked suddenly which seemed like a bit of a non sequitur to Bruce but he needed. “A bunch of the members aren’t human right?” Ah, Bruce nodded again. “And you’re okay with that?”

“Of course I am Danny,” Bruce promised, soft and reassuring. “People don’t have to be human or from earth to be people. Whatever is going on with you you’re still a person, and a kid, and deserve to be protected.”

“Okay,” Danny said as he scrutinized Bruce’s body language for any sign that he was lying. “Okay. I’ve never been able to trust any adults with this shit but I can’t keep doing this on my own so okay. I’m not human, not fully anyway, not anymore. These are..” He touched his stomach. “Like if you did an ultrasound you wouldn’t see embryos more like… Hang on Here.”

Bruce blinked as Danny suddenly, reached Inside himself, and before he could panic Danny had pulled out a perfectly round object that filled his palm. It shimmered with light from within, cold and sparkling with stars. “Our kind is more energy and light then anything else. This is Us, the mind, heart, everything we are is stored in our core the rest is formed around that. I mean for most of my kind, I’m still half human.” Danny said before replacing the orb inside him. “I have two other little cores inside me right now, feeding on my energy to develop properly, you could see them on an Xray. I don’t know how long they’ll take honestly.” He sighed caressing his stomach again.

 “But I can feel them inside me, I can feel their worry when I’m scared, and their joy when I’m happy, and their love. They’re my babies.” He said with the softest most paternal smile on his lips. The bags under his eyes were awful, he was clearly exhausted and stressed, but his expression told Bruce Danny thought it was all going to be worth it for his children. It brought a lump to his throat he had to clear before he could speak again.

“Okay, do you have access to healthcare appropriate for your.. species?” He asked and Danny nodded. Though he was tight lipped still.

“There are protections for non-human species in America you know,” Tim said.

Bruce and Tim exchanged a confused look as Danny barked a laugh. “Not for MY kind, we were specifically excluded,” He said with a wry curl to his lips. “The shadow or echo left behind when a proper human dies, not sentient or sapient they say. Malicious and dangerous they say. To be captured or exterminated on sight. They would take me, experiment on me, probably put my babies in jars or something.”

Oh, oh fuck, he was shaking, eyes blank and glassy like he was heading towards a panic attack. “Danny! Danny look at me,” Bruce said as he leaned forward and Danny’s gaze flicked up to his face. “I don’t know who ‘they’ are but I promise I will do everything in my power to make sure they don’t get you. You’re clearly not what they say, and anyone who would hurt a child is not the good guy in this story.”

“Who are they?” Tim asked with an expression that promised swift and vicious retribution.

Danny took another deep breath. “The GIW, the Ghost Investigation Ward. They’re a government agency, they’ve been hunting in my hometown for a while. Early on we tried to call the Justice Legue, but I think they were jamming the lines or something,” Danny said looking down and biting his lip.

Fuck this poor kid really couldn’t catch a break! Bruce was sure that the ‘ghosts’ these idiots were hunting weren’t really anything of the sort, but he would look into this and see what he could find. Tim was clearly itching to as well bad he wasn’t willing to leave Danny alone with Bruce, good lad.

“And what about your parents? Do you think you could be safely returned to their home?” Bruce asked, as much as he wanted to keep Danny reunification was supposed to be the goal of fostering.

“No!” Danny nearly yelped sitting up straight. “No! They work for the GIW! They design most of their weapons. If they ever found I’d been contaminated- I don’t want to think the worst of them but even if they still recognized me as their son the babies-“ He cut off, wrapping both his arms around his stomach and curling in on himself.

“Okay, we’ll call child protective services, my lawyer, and the Justice League. We’ll get to the bottom of this,” Bruce promised Danny. “And you can stay here as long as you need to. Is there any other family you would want to go to?” Bruce asked, just to be sure, but he wasn’t surprised when Danny shook his head and grabbed a pillow to hug.

“And I know Oracle and Red Robin will be itching to find out more about this ‘government agency’,” Tim said. “I want to go tell them Danny, if Bruce and I go will you be okay on your own or do you want me to ask Cas to come stay with you?”

“Cas please? If she’s not busy?” Danny asked uncertainly and Tim nodded. Bruce was getting up before Danny spoke up again. “I have a sister, Jazz. She knows about me not being fully human, but not about the babies. She’s a good person, and she’s almost an adult. I don’t know, I just need you to know she’s good, and I don’t want to mess things up for her,” Danny said worriedly.

“Of course Danny, thanks for letting me know,” Bruce said with a smile already making plans to get her out as well. “We’ll let you know as soon as there are developments.” He promised before both he and Tim ducked out. They split up, Tim going to find Cas and ask her to go back to Danny before they reconvened in the bat cave, they had a lot of research to do.

next>

Releasing Nimona on the last day of pride month 2023 was such a great move because it’s a really needed piece of media right now. Lots of countries that legalised gay marriage years ago have been grappling with this rising TERF narrative of “if you’re gay it’s whatever but if you’re trans, non-binary or gender non-conforming in some way you’re a PERVERT! A MONSTER trying to GROOM CHILDREN!” The outrage against simple things like pronouns and drag events, and the movement against gender affirming healthcare have reached a terrifying peaks for contemporary times.

So a kid’s movie set in a fictional country with controlling government officials with personal agendas, with an openly gay couple but also a shape-shifting kid who cannot even be afford to be out is our reality in the US today. Nimona’s feelings about her vibe, body and form, her insistence that she is only “Nimona” no matter what she looks like and her aversion to “small-minded questions” together forms such a beautiful allegory about trans, genderfluid individuals.

Ballister asks her to be a girl, but for whose sake? It’s only for the comfort of people who refuse to understand her, and would rather see her die than let her be herself. And it’s this widespread rejection and loneliness that has eventually made Nimona indifferent to pain, that makes her feel suicidal.

In the end, it is another member of the LGBTQ+ community that truly sees and accepts Nimona for who she is. And that should be a reminder that we cannot let them divide us. Trans people stood up for the rest of us and made historical change happen, and we need to do the same for them. Besides, cis queer people are only the “good ones” until they’re done with trans people and then will turn on us.

The first time I saw a trans woman was in porn. I was pretty young then, in early middle school I think. My first thoughts about trans women only existed in a sexual context, since that was the only place I saw us mentioned

The next time I saw trans people mentioned was a TV show presumably about trans people and transitioning. I didn't watch it, only saw the description because even as a kid I had already internalized the idea that it was taboo and I would get in trouble if my parents walked in and I was watching it

Eventually I saw enough TV and cop shows to see an episode with the dead trans hooker trope. It further reinforced the building idea that trans women were something else, separate from "normal" people and always on the outskirts of society

And then Caitlyn Jenner came out. At my Catholic middle school there were few kind things said about her and plenty of nasty comments, but this was the first time I saw trans people being publicly talked about

In high school my views on trans people started to fracture. On one hand, I was being pushed the idea that gender was about what's in your pants, that if you've got a dick your a man and there's nothing that can be done about it. On the other hand, early high school me had stumbled across some gender change erotica and quickly became obsessed with it. While it wasn't great representation, it was still pretty positive about transitioning. The people in those stories were always happier afterwards

I struggled to reconcile what parts of society were saying about trans people with my daydreaming about what I'd do if I woke up the next morning as a girl. Eventually I decided that it was just a fetish. I just thought it was hot, there was no way I could be trans because I was just a normal person. I wasn't weird or a spectacle for others to gawk at, I was just a person

Around that time I also met a trans person in passing for the first time. One of the trans guys at my high school was in one of the musicals that I went to because some of my friends were also in them. When I was talking to my friends about it after someone mentioned the trans guy and that he was trans. I wasn't really sure what to think so I kinda just didn't think about it. Thinking back, there were a few trans guys at my high school but I don't think there was a single out trans woman

Eventually in college I actually met some trans and nonbinary people. In some classes we introduced ourselves on the first day with names and pronouns which was my first exposure to people using pronouns other than just he/him and she/her. I had a few classes with trans and nonbinary people, including a survey of transgender studies class I took in my last semester. I had plenty of excuses for why I was taking it (I needed a few more credits to graduate. It still had room open. It fit with my other classes. It seemed interesting. I'm trying to be a good ally.)

Around this time as well I found some trans creators online like ContraPoints and Philosophy Tube (whom I had watched before she came out as trans). I was weirdly excited and interested when Odyssey Eurobeat came out as trans and I went to go listen to some of her music right after I heard. I was starting to have examples of trans people just being people. Not just porn stars or public spectacles, but people

Later I met and befriended a few trans women, one of whom was extremely open about her transness and happened to share a video which started the initial steps of my egg cracking and figuring out who I am now

If I had actually known any trans women, if the world had been kinder to trans people, if representation of trans women as people existed and was well known, I might have been able to realize who I was sooner. I would have been able to exist as myself for more than a tiny fragment of my life so far

Representation matters, both in media and in daily life. Trans people being out and open about who they are made it possible for me to realize that about myself. Please never stop being who you are

so I'm on this app, Marco Polo, where you stay in touch with people by means of sending video messages. (there are probably other features, but I'm a free user, so I remain blissfully ignorant of them.) mostly I use it to annoy my sister. ("BITCH WHAT IF I GOT A PHALLOPLASTY AND HAD A BABY SHOWER FOR MY DICK. WE COULD HAVE ZUCCHINI FRITTERS. DICK-SHAPED PASTA. BANANAS FOSTER. DO U SEE MY VISION")

anyway, during the Hell Year of 2020, I saw my childhood best friend (let's call her Lee) was on this app. and like.

when I say "my childhood best friend", I mean the Weird Girl next door, who saw the Weird Girl that I was. I mean the girl I played with from age five until just shy of eleven, when my family moved away. I mean the girl I played with every day, for hours and hours, making up all kinds of elaborate scenarios involving our menagerie of stuffed animals. there were multiple overlapping, soap opera-style plotlines that lasted for years. there was drama. heartbreak. glory. she was the first friend I remember having. she was the first girl I ever loved, in my five-year-old way.

well, I hadn't seen Lee in at least 20 years and I was like, "holy shit! Lee!!!" so I sent her a "hey, nice to see you here, how you been" message.

again, this was late 2020.

now, I had been on T for a scant three months when I sent the first message, so I was a mere baby child, relative to the gruff manly man I am now. no beard, my voice had only started to wobble, still had tits... you get it. keep this in mind, it'll be important later.

I never heard back from her, but we're both Old, so I was like "eh, she probably forgot she installed the app" and forgot about it. we'd exchanged text messages at some point during the Hell Year, but like many people my age she doesn't really text, and I'm not calling anyone if I don't have to, so our communication had been sporadic, at best.

well. today I got a notification that she sent me a reply on Marco Polo.

I figured, well, she's replying to me 3.5 years late, but better late than never. I have ADHD and no friendship degradation mechanic, so I'm excited! yay! friend! :D

and then I remember. "...oh shit. she doesn't know I'm trans."

so. the thing is. I'm from Mississippi, which is. very very fucking conservative. I know Lee grew up Southern Baptist. I also know she's still living in the same town where we grew up and where she eventually graduated from high school and college. last I checked she was still attending the same Southern Baptist church where she grew up and her remaining living parent is still living in Lee's childhood home.

so this is either going to be Fine or it's going to be a disaster. lol.

in thinking it through, I figure either she's seen my updated profile pic, where I have the beard etc., or she hasn't. so either she's going to acknowledge this change or she isn't. okay. these are the possibilities. so I watch the message.

...the secret third option is... she seems to not realize when I sent the message? "sorry, I missed this when I was at work!" girl. what? I mean, you probably did miss it while you were at work... three and a half years ago. possibly she meant to reply to someone else and got me instead?

whatever. who knows. doesn't matter.

because I have the opportunity to do the funniest fucking thing in the world now

Tranny Tango

There's a man on the sidewalk, looking over, then up to see me walking past. He stops in his tracks and stutters back and forth, his read || reaction to me flickering between upstart woman // taller man || hold ground // make space, glitching him in place. When I step off the sidewalk and into the grass, he sheepishly passes me by without a word.

I'm interested in the everyday glitches, the double-takes, the way "everybody is just a little bit disgusted by you," what Susan Stryker calls 'monstrosity' and more than that, the casual experience of being a gaping hole in the gendered world. Stryker attributes this monstrosity to the idea that medical transsexuality, more than any other form of transgenderism, "represents the prospect of destabilizing the foundational presupposition of fixed genders." She takes anti-trans feminists at their word, assuming that their hate stems from some abstract gender trouble that transsexuals pose to female spaces, and her solution is a near-complete identification with that trouble. We can do better. This monstrosity, this glitching, is not just a downstream consequence of spectacular interruptions to some abstract 'fixed genders.' It is certainly not dependent on some unique threat posed by medicalization. It exists through instinctive disgust and constant little glitches in the social infrastructure that is gender, an uneasy response to an uncanny bricolage of the building blocks of gendered life.

Escaping the Cisgender Gaze

The classic trans encounter is to see a visibly transfeminine person out on the street, or as an escort, or in some carefully-curated performance piece, and to realize that gender is a lie. This is part of the utility of transmisogyny, which renders people both constantly accessible and utterly exemplary, and in turn this casts transmisogyny itself as spectacular exclusion instead of a slow social and economic death that sometimes spikes, particularly with multiply marginalized subjects, into horrific violence.

This singularization of transfeminine life and oppression (particularly with trans women of color) through suicide and murder statistics renders both trans life and pain spectacular and implicitly places one as a 'natural' consequence of the other. We need to seriously inspect the many interactions between non-passing transfem people and cis people which do not end with one of them dead. One way to start is Sandra Lee Bartky's understanding of hegemonic femininity as a disciplinary practice.

Femininity as Disciplinary Practice

As the lesbian separatists of the 1970s and 80s intensified the work of rooting out patriarchy from their spaces, they began to discover that nothing was sacred: nearly all everyday social activities were shaped by gender. As Bartky argues, the 'imposition of such discipline on female identity' influences every second of every day:

Iris Young observes that a space seems to surround women in imagination that they are hesitant to move beyond: this manifests itself both in a reluctance to reach, stretch, and extend the body to meet resistances of matter in motion—as in sport or in the performance of physical tasks—and in a typically constricted posture and general style of movement. In an extraordinary series of over two thousand photographs, many candid shots taken in the street, the German photographer Marianne Wex has documented differences in typical masculine and feminine body posture. Women sit waiting for trains with arms close to the body, hands folded together in their laps, toes pointing straight ahead or turned inward, and legs pressed together. The women in these photographs make themselves small and narrow, harmless; they seem tense; they take up little space. Men, on the other hand, expand into the available space; they sit with legs far apart and arms flung out at some distance from the body. Most common in these sitting male figures is what Wex calls the “proffering position”: the men sit with legs thrown wide apart, crotch visible, feet pointing outward, often with an arm and a casually dangling hand resting comfortably on an open, spread thigh. …in a way that normally goes unnoticed, males in couples may literally steer a woman everywhere she goes: down the street, around corners, into elevators, through doorways, into her chair at the dinner table, around the dance floor. The man’s movement “is not necessarily heavy and pushy or physical in an ugly way; it is light and gentle but firm in the way of the most confident equestrians with the best trained horses.”

Bartky concludes that, between behavior and makeup and skin-care, these disciplinary practices "produce a 'practiced and subjected' body, that is, a body on which an inferior status has been inscribed,” and that "the practices that construct this body have an overt aim and character far removed, indeed, radically distinct, from their covert function;" that is, she claims that gender is everywhere, that it is power, and that cisgender women are structurally made unaware of this connection.

What does this mean for transfeminine experience? First, as seen in the sidewalk example we started with (so chosen precisely because of how fucking boring it is), the abstract 'genderfuck' of transfeminine existence congeals into actual examples in the context of gender-as-infrastructure. Gender is a crossing-guard, a gatekeeper, a reviewer -- it performs social functions, all the time, which glitch and shake in our presence. Transmisogyny is not necessarily vitriolic rage at 'boundary-breakers,' it can also just be the passive exclusion of a person whose existence causes a few too many little frictions.

As we've noted, the singularization of transfeminine life makes non-spectacular trans life impossible for cis people to understand, leading to a constant current of disgust/disdain that accompanies their more exciting bouts of transmisogyny. One major inlet to this current is social friction, the way that non-passing transfems are structurally prevented from using social/visual gender infrastructures to do everyday things. The second inlet, which I will discuss in the next section, is the unease provoked by the negotiations transfems take to navigate gendered systems despite this breakage, making small corrections which are ignored, must be ignored, leaving only the horrible lingering fear that they're better at this gender thing than you.

Gender work

Because transfemininity makes no sense from a vulgar gender-power perspective, cis people generally view transfeminine people as either unwitting 'dupes' of gender or as spectacular hyper-aware gender predators, as seen across the HSTS/AGP split, the dead tranny/serial killer media split, the 'scheming eunuch' archetype, and the binarization of transfem identity in queer spaces. But because cis people also generally want to assume that they're talking to someone that isn't an evil serial manipulator, personal interactions encourage and enforce the good tranny archetype, which demands absolute suppression of any sort of informed gender negotiation. This archetype is impossible to fulfill because of the systematic failure of social gender-power infrastructure to account for transfeminine people, which demands some degree of semi-intentional gender work to fill in the gaps.

Fortunately, this work will basically never be understood as such by well-meaning cis people because of transmisogyny, so you don't have to be /super/ subtle about it. Unfortunately, ignoring this transfeminine gender work takes a lot of effort on the part of cis people, particularly if they also have had to perform reparative gender work because of trans-adjacent conditions (divorce, infertility, lesbianism, PCOS). The invisible work cis people must make to keep themselves separate from transfeminine people is then associated with our presence, most clearly articulated in Janice Raymond's lament that transsexual lesbians are feeding "off woman’s true energy source, i.e., her woman-identified self" -- our proximity alone demands intense effort to keep cis gender negotiations distinct from trans ones, growing frustrations that feed the slow current of transmisogyny.

Even if a cis person successfully suppresses their understanding of transfeminine gender work, for folks within queer & women's spaces, this itself leads to a horrible looming anxiety because people in these spaces usually pride themselves on having a full consciousness of gender, and we're a pretty notable exception to that. These anxieties are then channeled into a constant fear of the bad tranny, manifested in the horrible trans woman that your cis queer initiators will tell you to stay far away from. But there is really not much of a difference between the shadowy machinations of the bad tranny and the gender work transfeminine people have to constantly perform to even exist within queer spaces, so transfeminine people are rendered constantly precarious.

What's so deliciously ironic about all this is that this is just a shallow repetition of the cis man // cis woman dyad! Archetypes like 'the poisoner witch' or 'the gossip' or 'the slut' have always been used as a reaction to negotiating power gained via the kitchen, or cloistered social activity, or sex, all routes that men could never understand as a direct consequence of their own gendered power -- so in response to this fear, these roles pilloried exemplary women to structurally terrify the population, but just as importantly to exonerate the rest of the female population, to let men pretend that these weren't tools that everyone was using, to pretend that heterosexual relationships were pure! Just as transfems serve the role of gay best friend^2 in gay mens' films, they serve the role of women^2 in queer spaces, constantly performing gender work which is simultaneously unknowable and terrifying to the cis majority, forcing periodic purges to pick out 'the bad ones' which temporarily exonerate the rest, letting the majority believe that the 'good tranny' actually exists: that mythical trans woman who is not semi-intentionally managing their gender presentation around you, the one you can fuck without worrying if she's just faking it, the one who is good and pure and radical and really, really boring. I have never met a non-passing trans woman like this, but I'm sure plenty of queer people have.

Conclusion

So there are two main forms of everyday experience that express and constitute transmisogyny. The first is the social friction inherent in being freak-gendered in a world that relies on gender to make people move and talk and shit correctly. The second is the friction between the gender awareness demanded of transfeminine people (none) and the practical result of transgendered living in the world. If you want to take some of this back to cis womanhood, I've been trying to reframe the marginalized position of womanhood in terms of articulation work -- that while women have always worked, that work has generally been rendered unreal, always carried out with a dream of not existing, turned into stage-setting for the real boys to grow up and come in and be breadwinners. In this context, our components look like 1) do gender work and 2) don't let it show, and the framing of transfeminine people as socially useless outcasts despite their constitutive role in social life via flexible labor starts to sound a lot like the making of a super-woman, like the mujerísima sometimes invoked in Latin American travesti activism. That sounds just about right. I will become a witch of witches, the lurking terror that eats astrologers, always and ever a little bit too real.