korrasera

[korrasera]

I know I keep posting stuff about transmisogyny and trans discourse, but it's really uncomfortable to see just how many people are comfortable treating trans women and trans fems like garbage.

If we don't work to educate people to oppose bigotry, bigots will educate them to support it.

[korrasera]

[korrasera]

This post contains several misconceptions that I'd like to debunk.

Trans woman and trans fem are not just labels

Trans woman and trans fem are terms that have a meaning that can't be divorced from assigned gender and the history they represent. They're centered on the fact that we're amab or camab. Someone who's afab or cafab doesn't have the same life experience we do.

When these terms are invoked, they're weapons pointed squarely at amab and camab people, not afab people. It's not segregationist to point out that this is how oppression works and that trans women and trans fems being assigned male is relevant to our community and our history.

The term 'trans woman' is not a gender unto itself

The label is an adjective (trans) paired with a gender (woman) that arrives at the final label describing someone's gender identity. To have a label that's just a gender, you'd want to use something like nonbinary woman, another gender label, or coin a new one all together.

If someone claims that the term trans woman (such as when people write transwoman) is a gender unto itself as a way to avoid disagreement, they're taking advantage of people's desire to be inclusive to avoid being challenged. They're also othering trans women in doing so, as it inherently separates us from the concept of womanhood by claiming we're a part of a different gender.

Appropriation is not inclusion

The terms trans woman and trans fem don't describe afab people. One group taking a term that does not apply to them and using it for themselves is appropriation. Insisting that it's inclusion or that critics are being segregationist is just a dodge people use to avoid being criticized for engaging in appropriation.

You can see this kind of appropriation elsewhere, like when Rachel Dolezal claimed to be transracial and black despite being white. She was attempting to appropriate terms that did not apply to her, not because she was a part of the black community or the transracial adoptee community, but because she desired those terms for herself.

Doing so required Dolezal to redefine those terms, despite their existing meaning and history, ignoring and in a few cases directly silencing black people and transracial adoptees.

Transmisogyny does not target afab people

The word transmisogyny describes an intersection that affects trans women and trans fems in which we aren't recognized as women because we're amab/camab and we aren't seen as equal and valid because we're women/fem.

That's an experience that afab people can understand as observers, but do not experience themselves. While afab people experience misogyny, they don't have the experiencing of being amab/camab while experiencing misogyny.

Oppression isn't a single, momentary thing based on appearances and the superficial. It's a system of control based on identity. A white person who gets mistaken for being black and is called a racist slur is not being oppressed. They can understand racism as observers, but they don't experience it themselves because they don't live life as a black person.

This kind of appropriation is transphobic TERF logic

Specifically, it's transmisogyny. Taking terms that belong to a specific part of the trans community, erasing us from the history of those terms, while simultaneously claiming that we're being bigots if we disagree.

That's why you'll hear people that support afab people appropriating these terms call trans women and trans fems TERFs and radfems to deflect criticism. In reality, the people that support this appropriation are the ones acting like TERFs. They try to control our language, redefine our terms, and suppress any opposition to their bigotry.

What they're doing is similar to a rhetorical tactic often used by bigots and abusers. It's called DARVO. Deny Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. They steal our terms and when we disagree they act like their side are the victims, even though we're the ones that are being appropriated from and attacked.

TMA/TME proves the appropriation and bigotry

The terms TMA (transmisogyny affected) and TME (transmisogyny exempt) exist is because trans women and trans fems tried to avoid engaging in discourse about this appropriation.

This proves that the appropriation of the terms trans woman and trans fem are rooted in bigotry. We coined new terms to discuss our issues without discussing the appropriation and the people engaging in that appropriation started using those terms to attack us all the same.

That's why you'll see people who talk about TMA/TME issues getting called bigoted, gender essentialists, or some other strain of insult. It's why you'll see people bend over backwards to claim that these words mean something different than what they mean, like trying to claim that afab people are affected by transmisogyny.

Conclusion

You've got to be careful about this because people endorsing the appropriation of the terms trans woman and trans fem are engaging in bigotry and transmisogyny with a well developed set of rhetorical tools that helps them disguise what they're doing.

It all comes back to that simple DARVO principle. They're attacking people, claiming the people they're attacking are the real offenders, and then using everyone's desire to be inclusive and kind to help them rally violence against trans women and trans fems.

"Can afab people be trans women?"

Yes because a trans woman is anyone who identifies as such, just like a woman is someone who identifies as a woman.

"No, you need to be amab to be a trans woman"

You are perpetuating a form of transphobic violence that reinforces rigid, bioessentalist ideas of trans womanhood, you are the mirror of terfs who, like you limit a gendered category to an assigned sex at birth since they believe that you need to be afab to be a woman. No one should be prevented from identifying with a particular gendered category on the basis of the sex assigned to them at birth. If the concept trans woman is what personally describes you the best, then should you be allowed to use it no matter your natal genitals.

"You are erasing what a trans woman is"

Inclusion is not erasure, just like including amab women in the woman category doesn't erase women, it only inclusively expands its meaning by overcoming bioessentalist, genital-reductionist conceptions of what a woman is. Only for genital-obsessed people, inclusion is erasure.

"it's appropriation"

It's not appropriation because afab trans women are trans women, just like amab women aren't appropriating the term woman since they are already women. Only for asab segregationists one or both of these groups are ''appropriating'' these concepts.

"Ok...But afab trans women are still TME"

That's not how it works. Since afab trans women are trans women they are also targeted by transmisogyny in addition to regular misogyny. Just like amab trans women, because they are also women, they are targeted by traditional misogyny. Therefore afab trans women are TMA, not TME.

"Trans woman is not a gender, only woman is one''

Not everyone share the same point of view as you. For some ''trans woman'' is a gender identity because they feel connected to trans womanhood and you have to accept it.

[korrasera]

It's not hard to notice how many transmisogynists there are on the AFAB trans woman/trans fem tags.

They're comfortable ignoring and erasing trans women and trans fems because they don't see violence against us as a problem.

That's why they refuse to recognize that it's appropriation and transmisogyny.

[korrasera]

As a quick FYI, a lot of those ideas aren't actually humanocentric, it's just that some of them are based in simple physics and some are because we can't figure out how life would exist without those things.

Life needs sunlight (heat) because physics.

Life requires energy (heat) to do anything. Using energy increases entropy. Entropy means energy changes from a form that's useful into a form that's not useful. Sunlight gives us raw, low entropy energy to refill life's batteries, while the Earth radiates away the high entropy, useless energy into space. The life at the bottom of the ocean still requires sunlight, it's just one layer down. The sunlight grows the animals at the surface, the animals at the surface die, and the whale fall that results brings all of that low-entropy energy down to the sunless depths to recharge the life batteries.

Ergo, life requires sunlight (heat).

Life needs water because we can't figure out how life would exist without water.

Everything seems to be based on cells and all cells need to be able to exchange stuff into and out of a cell. The way you do that is with salt water, which makes osmotic exchange possible at the cellular level. We've never found a form of life that doesn't require this basic building function. As a result, all life is packing around customized saltwater at all times. That's what blood is, that's what the water flowing through trees is, that's what intercellular fluid is. It's just saltwater with additives. And it's necessary for the cell to take in food and excrete waste.

Ergo, life requires water.

It's possible that we might find life some day that will violate these basic principles, but for now this is How We Think The Laws Of Physics Require Life To Work. Plenty of these rules have nothing to do with human evolution.

i hate when scientists are like ‘this planet cant have aliens on it because there’s no water! the atmosphere is wrong! theres not enough heat to sustain life!’ because dude theyre aliens, nobodys saying they need any of those things to exist

[korrasera]

Just highlighting that your response to hearing someone you follow got something wrong about discourse and was teaching people how to reduce others to stereotyped positions is to a) act like a child and b) misunderstand what respectability politics are. Or what policing is.

Kids like you are one of the reasons why discourse is in such a bad state. You may not be the bad actors that are all over the place, but your inability to actually contend with half of the things you say means that you don't have the fortitude to actually defend your own positions. Or understand them.

That's why it's predictable that any kind of disagreement elicits an emotional response like this one.

After all, if we can't defend what we're doing, we can sure as shit attack people who ask us to do a better job and maybe...idk, grow up a little?

You can do a lot better than this.

So much queer discourse is just "i like pancakes" "so you hate waffles?" Type shit

"I believe mspec lesbians are valid" "so you think lesbians just need good dick?"

"I believe trans men can identify as lesbians if they want" "so you think trans men are women?"

"I believe transandrophobia exists" "so you think transfems oppress transmascs?"

No bitch that's a whole new sentence wtf are you talking about

[korrasera]

It's not your job, but you chose to talk about something that people need education about and you educated them about it. Poorly.

I'm sorry you didn't realize you were contributing to the same poor state of discourse that you were complaining about, but thems the facts.

So much queer discourse is just "i like pancakes" "so you hate waffles?" Type shit

"I believe mspec lesbians are valid" "so you think lesbians just need good dick?"

"I believe trans men can identify as lesbians if they want" "so you think trans men are women?"

"I believe transandrophobia exists" "so you think transfems oppress transmascs?"

No bitch that's a whole new sentence wtf are you talking about

[korrasera]

other trans women can put it better than me but there's this, tension, between "radical genderpunk you can be whatever you want forever-ness" and "trans woman as politicised identity"

one views any engagement with your assigned gender at birth as like, being trapped in a prison of your own making,? as using the tools of the enemy or whatever. and the other is "yes my assigned gender is a prison, it is a prison the outside world is constantly enforcing on me and i would like to be able to talk about that a little thanks"

so you get this tension, where one side (made up of predominantly people who aren't trans women) says "the ideal world is one in which you can be whatever the fuck you want forever! so call yourself anything you want as long as it makes you happy, you can be an afab trans woman if you want it's all made up :)" and the other side says "hey hi yes i broadly agree with you on the whole ultimate gender liberation front, but we do not live in an ideal world and transfemininity is uniquely demonized even as far as trans identities in general go, so i would appreciate it if maybe you didn't act like our identity and oppression was something made up that you could just put on and take off whenever you like? we sure as fuck can't do that."

and then the other side goes "hey all these trans women are invalidating us! why are they gatekeeping and being so exclusive! assigned gender at birth shouldn't matter so why are you acting like it does!?"

and they say this while we live in a society where your assigned gender at birth very much does matter, and if you're a trans woman it is borderline impossible to escape that.

it's like an is-ought problem where since we're not acting like we already live in a gender utopia where one's relationship with assigned sex and gender is completely arbitrary, we're treated like the enforcers of the gender binary.

this is where you get stupid bullshit like people calling trans women radfems

[korrasera]

Yep, that's a thing that happens.

Everything you say educates someone else and I get that this was just a vent post for you but it's also the kind of thing that teaches people to just go for the dunk instead of actually looking at what's going on.

I'm just asking you to give people better material to learn from.

So much queer discourse is just "i like pancakes" "so you hate waffles?" Type shit

"I believe mspec lesbians are valid" "so you think lesbians just need good dick?"

"I believe trans men can identify as lesbians if they want" "so you think trans men are women?"

"I believe transandrophobia exists" "so you think transfems oppress transmascs?"

No bitch that's a whole new sentence wtf are you talking about

[korrasera]

Again I didn't actually say that transandrophobia wasn't real, you seem to be arguing with someone that isn't me, that wrote something I didn't write.

I'm not pinning a problem on you, I'm saying that you wanted to talk about a problem you saw in discourse but aren't characterizing that problem accurately nor are you giving people good advice for how to deal with it.

You don't want to see the problems that exist, I understand that. But they do exist. And teaching people to use stereotypes doesn't make them go away. It just makes discourse worse.

So much queer discourse is just "i like pancakes" "so you hate waffles?" Type shit

"I believe mspec lesbians are valid" "so you think lesbians just need good dick?"

"I believe trans men can identify as lesbians if they want" "so you think trans men are women?"

"I believe transandrophobia exists" "so you think transfems oppress transmascs?"

No bitch that's a whole new sentence wtf are you talking about

[korrasera]

There are some misconceptions in this thread:

anarchotolkienist is right. It's easy to find online "leftists" that don't actually practicing leftism. Still indoctrinated to authoritarianism, they just cheer for team red now. If you've seen people talk about tankies that venerate the Soviet Union and ignore things like the Holodomor, then understand that there are people who talk about the CCP like it's a successful socialist project instead of an authoritarian state capitalist government while ignoring the government's crimes against minority ethnicities in China.

Characterizing someone as worshiping Tolkien because they named their blog anarchotolkienist isn't a real criticism, it's just a personal attack meant to encourage you to dismiss what they're saying. Looking at their blog, they're just a Tolkien fan.

Tolkien didn't look down on Asian people and seek ways to portray them as evil. His attitudes towards were notably anti-racist for the time and the Lord of the Rings in particular take time to specifically speak against the idea of characterizing any people as evil. That's why the source of evil in the series is a non-human entity that seeks only to dominate and enslave. People who spread the idea that Tolkien was some sort of cryptoracist aren't actually familiar with his works.

Part of being an anarchist is being skeptical of the idea of a state. As in, you should ask whether the state needs to exist at all.

Communists that idolize the state of the Soviet Union and the CCP likely don't get why anarchists are like that, and also probably don't get why Marx and Lenin both talked about how a communist state was merely a transition to a fully classless and stateless society.

I think the comparison of loving the CCP being cope for leftists is an apt one. It just teaches you to ignore the real and valid criticisms of the Chinese state and keep cheering for team red.

nooooo don't reblog the "liking the ccp is cope" from the fucking "anarchist tolkienist"

[korrasera]

Also, that's not actually a corollary.

A corollary is another, smaller point (probably a theorem or a proposition) that follows from and supports the previous point.

If I wanted to raise a corollary to fandomsandfeminism's point, I'd have to say something like...

You can see this point demonstrated in the behavior of right-wing authoritarians. When they claim to be dedicated to human rights they always have a list of people to whom those rights do not apply. And when pressed, they will restrict rights further as they need to push more and more people into the out-group.

kemregik's idea to argue that human rights can be logically denied to a person is an attempt to counter or rebut the original point.

Unfortunately, it doesn't work, and I want to elaborate somewhat on what fandomsandfeminism already said.

To act in concert, we need a social structure. The social structure we use to manage things like rights and laws is a government. Regardless of what kind of government you have, that's what the purpose of a government is.

Ergo, if we created a point score system to assess someone's humanity, government would be the tool we use to manage that system. Since we're talking about rights, and rights are managed by a government, we'd manage this humanity score through the government.

Governments do an exceedingly poor job of handling human rights already. There's no evidence that this idea would improve that behavior, it would just systematize it. That would likely make things much worse than they are today, as instead of requiring legal proceedings to limit an individual's rights, you could just look up their humanity score and then deprive them of rights without any kind of due process.

Like, the entire concept of due process alone counters that entire idea. Before you ever get to talking about the philosophy of universal human rights.

I think you can tell a lot about how rigorous and committed someone's belief in a human right is by how quickly they are able to name people who they think could or should have that right taken away.

[korrasera]

Are you replying to what I wrote? Because it doesn't sound like you are.

I pointed out that you were judging a whole group of people based on the actions of a few shitty people. You're building stereotypes, saying that if you hear these kinds of points come up in discourse you can safely dismiss them. None of these points are valid, they're just people saying "so you hate waffles?" even when that's not what's going on.

(EDIT: It also relies on oversimplifying the positions people take, turning them into soundbite positions that are easy to judge and dismiss. Again, this is part of what makes discourse so toxic.)

That's the problem with building stereotypes and straw man arguments. It might feel good and it might be true in a few cases (broken clock and all that), but it's not actually helping anyone navigate discourse. It just teaches them to be dismissive and ignorant.

Also, your response sounds like exactly the sort of thing you're campaigning against. I didn't say anything about transandrophobia not existing, or that trans men can't be lesbians. That's a whole new sentence you've added there. Did you mean to do that?

So much queer discourse is just "i like pancakes" "so you hate waffles?" Type shit

"I believe mspec lesbians are valid" "so you think lesbians just need good dick?"

"I believe trans men can identify as lesbians if they want" "so you think trans men are women?"

"I believe transandrophobia exists" "so you think transfems oppress transmascs?"

No bitch that's a whole new sentence wtf are you talking about

[korrasera]

That's not actually true.

Prominent feminists who have failed in that specific way is a thing that happens. That's a real, extant problem, no doubt. It's just not the main reason that people don't understand feminism.

Feminism isn't taken seriously in the US because right-wing voices in the US have worked for a very long time to mislead and miseducate people about what feminism is.

They've been indoctrinating people in this way going back to the 70s at least, and that's just the modern form of this misinformation. If you go back to 1st wave feminism you'll find people trying to attack feminism all the same, just in different ways. The only difference is that by the 70s, feminism was a real cultural force that right-wing conservative voices had to contend with directly.

Rush Limbaugh spent most of his career calling feminists feminazis. I've listened to people say that the family court system was taken over by radical feminist infiltrators that rewrote the court attitude towards divorce and custody. Anyone with highly conservative relatives could spend hours listening to them talk about how pointless and selfish they think feminism is.

You will eventually hear someone talk about how feminism is just a desire for female supremacy.

Yes, prominent feminists failing the movement happens, but they aren't the primary reason people are still uneducated about feminism. They don't have the cultural cachet to influence public consciousness to that degree.

But Fox News? Rush Limbaugh? The Moral Majority? They absolutely did.

[korrasera]

in 2004 george w bush won the presidential election and promised in his acceptance speech to codify a federal ban on gay marriage. 30 states passed bans on gay marriage in the wake of his re-election. and then they fell. one by one by one. it has to get worse before it gets better.

queers. trans people especially. our attitude for the next decade has to be “we’re not fucking scared of you”. do you understand? this has always been at the core of who we are and what we do. we fucking move. we take up space or carve out our own with our bare hands. we take care of us.

do you know the other queers in your neighborhood? do you know who you can call at a bad time? do you know whose house you can crash at? do you know where you can go for a free meal? do you know where you can bring meals to the hungry? do you know the LGBT resources available in your area? do you know the informed consent clinics in your area?

do you know how DIY HRT works? do you know and have friends who don’t? do you know our history? have you read the works of james baldwin and leslie feinberg? are you equipped with knowledge about the forces that work against us? do you understand dialectical materialism? do you know what to say if stopped by the police? do you know what good opsec is? are your legal documents in order? do you know how to get them in order?

scream, cry, rot in your bed, do whatever you need to do to process this, then find something to do. do not fall into despair. in the face of extermination say “fuck you.”

[korrasera]

[korrasera]

As well meaning as this might be, this kind of sentiment only contributes to the broken nature of discourse.

The responses highlighted above are presented as nonsensical, in line with the pancakes/waffles example provided above. Problem is, are they?

If you present someone's position as a straw man when it's a real concern, one that you're not familiar with, you're just mocking people because you're ignorant. That's not just rude, it makes discourse worse.

Examples:

Yes, there are people who believe that trans men can identify as lesbians because they are fundamentally women on some level. Just find someone that makes the biological sex argument and says something like, "I respect all trans men, but they're also females," and you've found an example.

Yes, there are people who believe transandrophobia exists...and that a part of it is that trans fem people oppress trans masc people. Find someone who claims that trans fems take up all the air in the room or that trans fems are socialized male and strongly endorses transandrophobia and you've found an example.

I'm not saying that everyone has to be well acquainted with all queer discourse, but before you start mocking people you should probably understand what you're talking about.

Sure, people do the whole new sentence thing, that does happen.

But if you use that as your guidepost instead of trying to understand what's actually going on you're only going to spread more ignorance around.

So much queer discourse is just "i like pancakes" "so you hate waffles?" Type shit

"I believe mspec lesbians are valid" "so you think lesbians just need good dick?"

"I believe trans men can identify as lesbians if they want" "so you think trans men are women?"

"I believe transandrophobia exists" "so you think transfems oppress transmascs?"

No bitch that's a whole new sentence wtf are you talking about