bricksotherblog

[bricksotherblog]

hate people wanting to shut down conversations about transandrophobia say that trans men and mascs "measurably" experience less violence than trans women and fems

one of the core aspects of transandrophobia is erasure. the rates of violence we face cannot be "measurably" different than anything, because the rates of violence we face are deliberately not measured and erased whenever posssible

[bricksotherblog]

Responded to this post agreeing and talking about how it’s ridiculous and bigoted to exclude anybody based on a trait they can’t control, and OP (on her profile states she’s cis) decided to delete my comment and say she wasn’t gonna “read all that.” When I made another comment pointing out how ironic it was to delete a transfem’s comment under THIS post, she deleted that, too.

Transmisogyny is insane. All this because I believe in transandrophobia. I never even mentioned it in my reply and explicitly included things like sexuality as well but she STILL deleted my reply. Like this is just transmisogyny. If you’re targeting a transfem and removing her comments… maybe you shouldn’t be posting about transfem exclusion.

[bricksotherblog]

Trfs: "transandrobros keep making everything about trans women, even when it has nothing to do with trans women!"

Also trfs:

[bricksotherblog]

#yet whenever a TRF gets caught red-handed jorkin it to loli it's pEdOjAcKiNg!!!11111#funny that#rules for me but not for thee indeed

that's it?

that's the "lesbophobic fetish" of the person who coined the term transandrophobia?

THAT WAS JUST A MILD CONSENSUAL ROLEPLAY SMUT SESSION LEAKED FROM A PRIVATE SERVER!!!

[bricksotherblog]

"we're a community" until men describe their experiences in a way that parallels womens experiences, then its "cultural appropriation"

(this is about the term 'achillean', the vincian flag, and also about the term 'transandrophobia')

[bricksotherblog]

saw someone in the tags talking about being a "transmasc isolationist" in response to transandrophobia-

no! not that! the response to exclusionary ideologies shouldn't be more exclusion! that's how we got here in the first place!

[bricksotherblog]

It's so nice being on tumblr because you don't even have to make your own post but people would still follow you anyways if you're good at rebloging posts they like

[bricksotherblog]

COTL designs myap

one of my favorite games..

[bricksotherblog]

Fat Liberation Mini Zine

You've always wanted to spread the word about Fat Liberation, but didn't know how? Well, you and me both. And then a few months ago I had the idea to use the results of my research to create a mini zine, intended to inform people about some of the basics of Fat Liberation. And now it's finally done!

While I did my research on Fat Liberation in the US, I don't actually live there and wanted to make a zine that fits more accurately for Germany. Most parts are still identical, but especially when it comes to literature or modern day organisations, there are some differences.

(It comes in an English and a German version.)

Guessing that the picture quality might not be very sufficiant for printing these out, you can get a PDF version here. The folder also includes a Word document version, in case anyone wants to translate it or use it as a basis to create a version specific to their own country.

Here you can see how to properly fold it into a mini zine:

You can print as many of them as you want and spread them whenever you want - hand them out at events, ask your local businesses to display them, sneak them into books in your local library or bookshop, ...

A big thank you to @fatliberation for offering advise and a ton of research of their own to help me out in creating this. (The flag on the front page is also their design 💙🐋)

[bricksotherblog]

hi I cant find what's wrong with urls like born to baeddel anywhere, would you be okay explaining?

It's the baeddel part.

"Baeddel" is a word that was adopted by an abusive group of trans lesbian separatist radfems a few years ago. They claimed the word "baeddel," which was originally used as a slur against feminine men, intersex people, and trans women, is the linguistic root of the word "bad." While this is one proposed possibility, it's actually not very likely and there are a lot of much more likely roots for "bad;" there are a number of place names that seem to come from the word, and it's from Old English and fell into obscurity long before "bad" became a term people used; for centuries after "baeddel" stopped being used, people said "evil" instead of bad. I'm not a linguist myself, but a linguist has deconstructed this idea and explained in better detail than I can why it's unlikely (his name is Luke, but I can't remember his url off the top of my head).

The reason they started calling themselves baeddels, under the assumption that it was the root of "bad," was because they though that the only real oppression, from which all other oppressions stem, was transmisogyny, and that trans women were the most oppressed people worldwide. It goes without saying that their group was predominantly white and never gained popularity among non-white trans women.

One of their key actions, and the reason people started disliking them (aside from, you know, the gender essentialism and radfem ideas that are only a hair away from TERF beliefs), was that they were especially hostile towards trans men, transmascs, and afab trans people in general. They just decided on their own that we don't face oppression and refused to listen when we tried to explain otherwise. They replaced the "male-bodied people are inherently oppressors and female-bodied people are inherently the victims" ideology that TERFs are famous for with their slightly tweaked "men are inherently oppressors and women, especially us, are inherently victims" ideology, so they struck out particularly aggressively against trans men because they had the power to hurt us in ways they can't hurt cis men. They would do things like intentionally try to trigger our dysphoria and try to push us out of trans spaces; I actually experienced that. After I was sexually assaulted, I went to a trans Facebook group to talk through it since I couldn't talk to my irl friends about it, and because I used the word "misogyny" to describe one of the most dysphoria-inducing parts of what I went through, a baeddel and her following got me banned from every trans Facebook group I was in except an afab-only one over the course of half an hour, because I "didn't experience misogyny since you're not a woman."

Ultimately, people had to stop calling themselves baeddels when it became guache to do so after the accusations started coming in. The core group who'd started it tried to make a "safe house" for other baeddels, and one of the founding members raped someone there. There were also allegations of abuse directed at other prominent members. When the group fell apart, several others who'd been sucked in began to speak out; apparently, there were a lot of cult-like elements and grooming practices in place, and vulnerable, newly-out trans women who didn't get have much connection to the wider trans community were their primary targets. They told these girls that no one else, not even other trans people, could be trusted; only baeddels were safe, and only baeddels didn't want to hurt them. These victims started speaking out a ton about the cult-like elements and grooming experiences once the abuse and rape allegations came out.

But baeddelism didn't go away just because people stopped using that word. They kept the ideology and just divorced it from the word; that's why so many people think trans men just don't face specific oppression. The ideology has been spreading and getting worse lately, and trans men in particular are being targeted to the point where a lot of us don't feel safe in trans spaces and have been driven out of spaces with other trans people in them, even if those spaces aren't specifically trans spaces. It's happened to me. But now that the allegations are in the past, people have started reclaiming the term and ideology again openly.

If someone is calling themself a baeddel, there are a few things that guarantees that they believe, even if they'll deny it if directly confronted (although I've also seen them say all of these things openly at least once):

Trans women are The Most Oppressed People, always, regardless of any other intersecting identities and privileges

Trans men are the worst kind of men because they've actively chosen to identify as The Oppressor (because being trans is a choice but only if you're a trans man/transmasc)

Trans men are therefore not to be trusted, inherently abusive and violent, become monsters when they start T (sound familiar?), etc.

Trans women should have trans women-only spaces, but trans men shouldn't, and trans women's voices should always be prioritized even if the conversation is about another group

If trans men try to talk about their own oppression, they're actively harming trans women and being transmisogynistic by pulling attention away from transmisogyny, which is a real issue

Men are always evil and women are always victims (hence the abusers being drawn to the movement since it absolves them of suspicion)

Trans women who don't agree with baeddelism are brainwashed and must hate themselves

All transphobia is rooted in transmisogyny and trans men who are hurt by it are just collateral damage and can't be targeted by misogyny or transphobia in unique ways

Etc.

So, while baeddels are very much a minority (and I want to make it clear that they DO NOT speak for all trans women, and most trans women disagree with their beliefs; it's individual people who are the issue here and trans women as a whole are not to blame, nor do they deserve to be lumped in with baeddels just because they speak about transmisogyny or call out trans men who are saying harmful things; trans women are victims of baeddels, too), they're still dangerous. They've hurt a lot of people, both trans men/transmascs they targeted and trans women who were manipulated into being a part of their club and then abused there. Their ideology is very similar to terf ideology in a lot of ways, and while the original intention was positive (it was supposed to be about addressing transmisogyny), it became something else very quickly. Anyone who's reclaiming the label now likely knows by now how bad they were (because both trans men and former baeddels who were harmed as a part of their group have been speaking out about them a ton lately), and should therefore be regarded with suspicion because by claiming that term, they're openly saying that the abuse directed at trans people of all genders isn't a dealbreaker for them; in fact, it's something to be defended. Baeddelism is no better than transmedicalism or the transmisogyny that trans men like Buck Angel spout. Their victims deserve to be respected, and a part of that means not proudly adopting their moniker.

[bricksotherblog]

transmascs did not "invent" transandrophobia because they were, what, jealous(???) of the mistreatment of transfems and it is insane that people are genuinely positing that as some sort of good faith argument. its not good faith to claim that half of all trans people don't face significant bigotry due to their identity

[bricksotherblog]

my experience of this situation, as a nonpassing transfemme who, cannot, in fact, avoid transmisogyny no matter how much anyone malds over it:

[bricksotherblog]

There is a conversation doing the rounds on twitter about racialized violence against men (i.e lynchings and castration of black men during Jim Crow, the targeted murder of Palestinian men happening right now) and the primary contention seems to be men of color using the word "racialized misandry" to describe this. It's almost eerie, but not surprising, how much this conversation echoes the dismissals of transandrophobia here. There's this same insistence on rejecting a framework that posits men as the primary targets of gendered violence or oppression, despite how convoluted it is to describe the real harm that we as men face purely on the basis on gender/race. They act like it would be the end of the world if some men were (yes, actually!) oppressed! And so then there's this urge to describe the violence that white and/or cis men commit against outgroup men as misogyny, further diluting that term beyond usefulness. It makes even less sense to describe violence against black and brown cisgender men this way; apparently the way these so called feminists square this circle is by claiming that they do this to "protect their women" hence misogyny, but this makes even less sense given the tendency for ingroup men to see pre-pubescent boys as violent aggressors. Which women are racist cops protecting when they gun down 12 year old black boys?

These kinds of discussions really highlight the kind analytical failures that pervade old school feminism. I saw a post that said something to the order of "You can't have a gender based movement that ignored the experiences of one gender"; these conversations definitely show why.

[bricksotherblog]

I know people have come up with other words for transandrophobia, but i’m digging in my heels on that term. Yall won’t ever be happy with whatever other word we try to use, because the point is you want us to shut up and not talk about our oppression. I’m not going to waste my time hopping from term to term in an attempt to please yall and get you to take me seriously.

[bricksotherblog]

“Why do you have to call it transandrophobia?? androphobia doesn’t exist, you guys just experience misogyny but in a trans way” well we can’t call it transmisogyny because you’ll tell us to kill ourselves so what else are we supposed to call it.

[bricksotherblog]

„Yeah transandrophobia is an ideology that believes misandry is real and trans women oppress trans men“ where. Please. I have been following this tag for months and I have not once seen this. I have only seen posts where people explicitly say that this is NOT what they believe. Like do y‘all just make this up? Or are you seriously this misinformed. I genuinely don’t know.

[bricksotherblog]

Ok, so not even getting into everything insane about the whole 'forcemasc is a mockery of forcefem 'thing, I just want to address something, using this post, which i think is an interesting example.

So, clearly, this creator is speaking largely about the trans community when referring to the 'queer community', (mentioning t4t, forcemasc/forcefem, and gender affirmation).

Now, this idea that everything in the trans community came from transfems and trans women is pretty popular, and based in the fact that the majority of openly trans people, trans communities, trans people in activism, for much of recorded history were/made up of transfems.

What i struggle with, is the fact that someone can argue 'most openly trans people were transfeminine people', and also not acknowledge that this was... not transmascs choice?

I mean typically speaking, you can't argue 'majority of [community] was defined by, spearheaded by and revolved around [half of community]' and that theres a problem with the less represented, more history wiped, less common [half of the community] building stuff for themselves.

Its... not transmascs fault that they haven't been able to popularise any terms, make their own communities, be present in campaigning, explore their kinks, and set their boundaries until pretty recently*.

You do know thats not their fault right?

I mean transmascs have only recently been able to be openly out at the same 1:1 ratio as transfems*, is it really a surprise that their language developed later, and may be seen to be 'copied' off transfems?

We should be studying the reasons why transmasculine people appear to be one of the most stunted groups in the queer community at having their own spaces, terms, even medical care and representation in the public.

Not blaming them for it.

**Worth noting that this is Western focused. In the rest of the world transmascs still have not reached even close to a 1:1 ratio and still the majority of trans communities outside of the west do not include transmascs/are extremely heavily transfem