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Lured in and placated by putting emphasis on where we are similar in struggle and that we are totally the same in that regard, such as the right for bodily autonomy and self-determination (but as the political climate gets more dire and push comes to shove, then the mask slips and it's — perhaps always has been — "autonomy for me, not for thee" as our purpose as nothing more than tools comes to fruition once more and we're thrown under the bus), but where similarities end and diverge to issues specific to the transmasculine, then…

Well, you're making a mountain out of an anthill. These issues aren't really a problem, and even if they are they're not that bad and are only secondary concerns (if any concern at all), and also if you truly did care about these problems you'd shut up, listen, and do as we say because by licking our boots forever they will be resolved. We know better than you and you need us.

Something that has become quite evident the longer I navigate the world as a transmasc: As much as they claim otherwise, non-transmascs do not actually care about transmascs outside of our usefulness for their own causes and how their own narratives around our existence can serve their agendas. We are only pawns that double as a sexual resource. Our worth — and non-transmascs 'care' about us — is tied to how we can be used and how useful (obedient and subservient) any individual transmasc remains.

Or whole groups, as for a while now we've been watching the 'trans community' vilify and cast out whole groups of transmascs for challenging the trans communities narrative of transmasculinity and retaliating by leaning hard into antitransmasculinity and malgendering to reinforce it, making sure it stays intact, so it stays useful for their own purposes.

We're not members, we are tools. Everywhere we go, just community property.

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Something that has become quite evident the longer I navigate the world as a transmasc: As much as they claim otherwise, non-transmascs do not actually care about transmascs outside of our usefulness for their own causes and how their own narratives around our existence can serve their agendas. We are only pawns that double as a sexual resource. Our worth — and non-transmascs 'care' about us — is tied to how we can be used and how useful (obedient and subservient) any individual transmasc remains.

Or whole groups, as for a while now we've been watching the 'trans community' vilify and cast out whole groups of transmascs for challenging the trans communities narrative of transmasculinity and retaliating by leaning hard into antitransmasculinity and malgendering to reinforce it, making sure it stays intact, so it stays useful for their own purposes.

We're not members, we are tools. Everywhere we go, just community property.

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Fellas is it fash-esque to talk about and acknowledge the unique ways misogyny and gender is weaponized against the transmasculine.

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I don't believe in "transmisandry".

Unless, as usual, the use of "transmisandry" here is in reference to antitransmasculinity (no matter what it's called) in general and any discussion of it, because it is a lot easier to demonize and disregard these discussions when referred to that way as it likens any and all discourse of antitransmasculinity to MRAs (even though antitransmasculinity at it's core is misogyny) then, sure. In that context I guess I do.

As "malgendering" is my own abomination, I should probably touch on it again, seeing how it's festered.

Regarding it's coining: the initial post was impulsive, plucked out of my drafts and far from finished, because I'd seen the topic of transmascs only being seen as men or "affirmed" in their masculinity when it can be used as an excuse to abuse them come up frequently within the preceding week. One was an account of a recent assault in a private channel.

There is a lot of pain and confusion around, and I wanted to help and offer a salve, however rudimentary it may be, by giving transmascs more language to better articulate their experiences and another means of understanding what has been/is done to them and why, so that their pain may be alleviated just a little bit. It's a lot easier to combat something and heal from it when you can name and define it.

I thought it'd only help 10 people at most, which was enough to try.

"Malgendering" was also conjured up in my mind in response to transmascs who pointed to being malgendered as evidence of "misandry", and to give language to the phenomenon without giving credence to "misandry", as the type of corrective sexism that malgendering is is ultimately rooted in misogyny and better understood that way. It is one method of many to punish those who've stepped out of femininity and their assigned role of "woman" (and coerce them back into it if possible).

Though the sexism and gender stereotypes malgendering uses can look to be what could be considered "misandry" on it's face, underneath it is not a genuine hatred of men, but a hatred of transmasculinity specifically. Invoking "misandry" is just a means to an end and a lot of what I see evidenced as "misandry", especially when explained in it's relation to "transandrophobia", is really just misogynandry.

That aspect of it was not established well (because, as previously said, it was wholly unfinished when posted) and did not take hold in it's spread but malgendering as a concept seems to have achieved it's main goal which was to help. And that matters more than my feud with the use of "misandry" in these discussions, so in the end I don't care how transmascs use the word and don't think there are any 'wrong' interpretations of it.*

Words have lives of their own, they take on different meanings and contexts depending on the speaker. Language is subjective, and trying to control it is a futile endeavor that has only ever driven people miserable and insane. I threw "malgendering" out into the wind knowing it'd be carried off and become something else to someone somewhere else. As long as it's still understood what it means when I use it as I originally conceived it, again, I do not care how transmascs use it elsewhere.

*Non-transmascs butting in to police language and decide for transmascs what actually is and is not malgendering, however, are annoying as fuck and wrong on principle. Non-transmascs in general need to stop dictating the narratives around transmasculinity if transmasculine advocacy that actually serves us is to get anywhere - but they won't because too much is at stake for them to not have control over transmasculinity, so they must be resisted and refused any ground whatsoever.

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transmasculine/ftm spectrum separatism ironically but unironically

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"You transitioned in order to run away from misogyny." Damn I wish it worked. This shit is inescapable

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The push against transmasculine and trans man lesbians and the call for their exclusion from lesbianism completely is about further erasing and isolating us from our own history (and in many cases then claiming our history as theirs), rendering our lives and experiences even more unspeakable and unthinkable (and unreclaimable).

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"Read [insert title] 🤓" I will not read your bible but I will get a copy to beat you to death with.

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woke up, mxster freethem... woke up and... smell the pronouns

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I'm gonna need to non-transmascs to stop putting in their two cents and commenting on anything related to transmasculinity and the transmasculine experience because it has become abundantly clear they do not (and seemingly never will because they are committed to their own narratives that require misunderstanding) understand what they're trying to speak on at all. Stop trying to speculate. Just leave us alone.

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"Affirmation" & Malgendering

"Fine, I'll 'respect' your gender, but I'll make it absolutely miserable for you. What? You don't like the way I'm 'affirming' your gender? Guess you'll have to stop being a (trans) man then."

I want to put something out there about what I call "malgendering". I see trans men talk about the phenomenon and acknowledge it as a part of antitransmasculinity but not the concept of "malgendering" itself and what it's purpose is, and as trans men and transmasculine people are especially caught in the lose-lose situation between misgendering and malgendering I think it is an important concept to establish. The erasure of transmasculinity, particularly as a unique gender and gendered experience, also serves to keep the transmasculine trapped within this double-bind, positioned between the gender binary of cis patriarchal ideas of womanhood and manhood, where for us there is only misgendering (being abused with the Woman gender) or malgendering (being abused with the Man gender).

I define malgendering as the practice of "validating" someone's gender identity only when it can be used against them and to hurt them, and malgendering almost always involves the enforcement of only the most negative sexist stereotypes available onto the victim with none of the "positives". If misgendering is forcefully pushing you back into your 'proper place' such as by calling you a "girl" or a "her" and showing you that you're really a woman through sexual assault -malgendering is scaring and traumatizing you into it by using your own gender against you. Malgendering is the realization that you don't need to misgender someone to hurt them or to punish them for the way they identity and push them towards the gender they're 'supposed' to be - you can do all that through 'validation'. It's psychological warfare on the sense of self.

This violence and abuse under the guise of "respect" and "identity affirmation" creates plausible deniability of intent and places the blame on the victim for "identifying that way", so much so that even other trans people will defend it and believe it's not maligned (especially because "but being seen as and treated as your gender is what trans rights is all about!" and "errm but its transphobic to not treat u this way?/ur misgendering urself by wanting to not be treated this way :/" with the hidden message being "don't like it? stop being trans"), even when faced with evidence of the (very much intended) effects it has on stalling and outright eliminating transmasculinity (ie. repression, detransition, suicide).

Some examples I can pull off the top of my head:

A transphobe is talking about a pregnant trans man. The whole energy of the Facebook video is 'comedic', and while calling birth the most “feminine” thing someone can do and alluding to how the trans man is really a woman, they still use he/him and call him a “guy” (in air-quotes). Not out of any respect but because the idea of a man being pregnant, calling a pregnant person a "he", and the very existence of the trans man in question, is the whole joke. In doing so, the transphobe has turned the act of using the proper pronouns and gendering him into a source of humiliation and made the experience of being properly gendered a demeaning one. -

The Ukraine military situation where all males aged between 18 and 60 were banned from leaving the country and obliged to serve in the military. Trans women were denied passage out of the country "because they were men", and trans men were similarly denied passage out of the country "because they were men". With the discrepancy between invalidating the gender of trans women and "validating" the gender of trans men, you'd think the motivation behind this would be obvious - that trans people are expendable meat and it's better they die than cis people. It shouldn't of needed to be said that "I'm only affirming your gender because it allows me to put you in a position where you will likely suffer and die and put the blame for it on you" is not 'respect' or 'affirming' at all but somehow this was taken as evidence for the idea of that trans men are more 'respected' and seen as their genders than others (and are thus 'privileged'). -

A common one almost every trans guy deals with at some point is cis people threatening to beat trans men up (and often following through), because "If you're a man and not a woman (anymore) that means I can punch you," using the proximity to masculinity that transmasculine people claim as a justification for violence. Every other week there's a new story in online transmasculine spaces about someone having their ribs broken with "Since/if you want to be a man so bad-" preceding the attack. -

The above is in a similar vein to when accounts of violence done to transmasculine people by cisgender men are brushed off and they're told something along the lines of "welcome to being a man", "that's just what men do to each other", "that's just the way things are with men", etc. along with the insistence that their attack had nothing to do with antitransmasculinity, making it an immutable problem with (cis)men as a whole - creating a sense hopelessness and that this is all they have to look forward to. -

Transmasculine individuals being refused treatment, tests, or insurance for gynecological issues, especially cancer, despite the knowledge that they are transmasculine, because "men don't deal with these problems" and they don't want "men in women's spaces", and if you don't want to be 'treated like a man' and get the care you need (and not die), you're going to have to go ahead and detransition, change that M marker back to an F.

All of this functions to create contention, and eventually a rift, between the individual and their sense of gender identity. Creating an association between being gendered 'correctly' and 'respected' as your gender (and ultimately existing as a transmasculine person) with abuse, violence, helplessness, trauma, fear, isolation... and by making transmasculinity and transmanhood uninhabitable and driving a wedge between the individual and their sense of gender identity you can more easily drag them back to their 'proper' place. Plant seeds of doubt by making being transmasculine an exceedingly unhappy experience. Make them think that everything that's happened is their own fault for choosing to be transmasculine or trying to be a man. That maybe since they're so unhappy this isn't for them. That living as a transmasculine person is just too difficult and they're not cut out for it, that if they "gave up" and were to be women again things would be easier and they would be safer and happier.

This also all serves to maintain cis patriarchal ideas of gender and the gender binary and police the boundaries of manhood, in a way I can't articulate right now.

Through all this, despite being called "men" during malgendering, we are not actually perceived as such. We are always an "other". Acknowledging us as "men" is just another weapon, and why some transmascs flinch at the phrase "trans men are men". Our own genders are used to beat us.

Using a scrap from my .txt journals:

"[...] on the subject of having a core aspect of yourself taken from you and turned into a weapon to beat you with, with the result being that aspect of yourself now becoming a source of trauma and pain so you abandon it and lock it away like an awful secret, that’s exactly what happened with my gender. Being genderless and a(nti)binary is what I’m most comfortable as, a(nti)gender is my ~real gender~, but I have to admit a lot of this is because I have been traumatized out of any gender with binary associations and have consequently come to know gender itself, and the act of gendering, as violence. Gender is but a designation for what exploitation, abuse, and violence can be enacted upon you and the justification there of. When someone asks whether you are "masc" or "femme", behind their back as they face you is a hammer in one hand, and a knife in the other, and what they are actually asking is if they can pummel you or lacerate you. When it comes to the “direction” I’m transitioning in though, it is obviously “masculine” (as much as a negation of "femininity" is always taken as stepping towards "masculinity") and you wouldn’t be entirely wrong to call me “transmasculine”, though I have been scared to death of being acknowledged as such."

My first encounter with malgendering was when I was 13 and had just started to realize I was "ftm" and looking for community online. My first exposure to any affirmation of transmasculinity was someone I came to respect reblogging a post about how Kill All Men includes trans men. This would set the precedent of the next decade of my life of existing while transmasculine. A decade of only hearing the words "trans men" and "transmasc" used negatively and as the butt of jokes that served to reinforce patriarchal ideas of gender. The consistent and relentless denial of transmasculinity as a unique gender and gendered experience, the denial of transmasculine reality especially in regards to misogyny, and continuous abuse and threats of violence, all under the guise of affirming trans men's genders as men (and affirming the gender binary in the process). A decade of having antitransmasculine sentiment fed to me in every way possible.

For me, the experiences of antitransmasculinity and malgendering from non-transmascs has effectively "chased" me out of my transmasculinity and any acknowledgement of it. For years I have hidden my transmasculinity and presumed "AGAB" out of fear, even in queer and supposedly trans-friendly spaces. I have not been able to associate with any “masculine” language in reference to myself without feeling that I am in imminent danger, have made a grave mistake, and suffocating in anticipation of punishment. I have always been scared of posting any of my art that eludes to my transmasculinity. I have always been terrified of being referred to or perceived as “transmasc”, a “trans man”, of being called a "guy" or “dude” or “bro”, of using "he/him" anywhere. All of it. Deep down on some level I do desire it, but it’s been forbidden and only aggravates existing wounds.

And this, in turn, pushed me out of associating with other transmasculine folks out of fear and internalized antitransmasculinity towards other transmasculine people, isolating me from any community or connection with anyone similar to me, exacerbating my loneliness and alienation as a youth to the point where now as an adult my ‘normal’ human social needs – connection, community, relationships, empathy – are completely broken. I don’t feel loneliness anymore, or the desire to connect to anyone, despite in ways being even more alone now than I was then. In a way I believe antitransmasculinity shaped the path of my schizoidism. Isolating and divorcing me from my transmasculinity and the world at large is what I understand to be yet another point of this type of antitransmasculine rhetoric - because when you've destabilized and isolated someone from their whole sense of self and community, they are much easier to control.

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The fear of transmascs being amongst each other without being monitored by non-transmascs lives in the heart of all non-transmascs. The mere prospect or even idea of transmasculine exclusivity is able to send non-transmascs into a tizzy every time.

A somewhat recent example was a non-transmasc making a post about an ad put out by a trans man about an all transmasculine band he's forming to - in his words - empower other transmasculine people. Even that was enough to awaken that fear of the transmasculine not being under the gaze and control of others and existing as it's own because to the poster this was apparently a nefarious thing.

Their first argument was that this was "discrimination", but when one transmasculine person pushed about how this wasn't discrimination and various minority and marginalized groups organize amongst themselves for projects like this all the time, they struggled to come up with any actual argument as to why this was a problem, but still they insisted: there was just something wrong about it, it just wasn't right. They knew so in their heart.

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It's been real funny watching the non-transmasc ATM detractors shift from "[ATM] is not real" and trying to minimize and detract from an assortment of misogyny and transphobic violence, hate crimes, corrective rape, forced detransition and pregnancy, anti-trans laws focus on saving young girls from themselves, etc. to "Okay, maybe it does exist, but through some roundabout theorizing I've decided we're [non-transmascs] the real victims of it" and some then claiming authority on the conversation and speaking as the "real" experts on ATM (which, of course, misses everything antitransmasculinity and misogynandry actually is because otherwise their worldview and how the world is 'supposed' to work would start breaking at the seams).

And by "funny" I mean: Holy shit we truly can never do anything without someone trying to control us and claim authority over us. And that feels like one of the defining features of transmasculinity. Everyone — from cisiety and terves, to the trans 'community' — feuding and fighting for control over transmasculinity to try and rein in the threat it presents to the status quo.

Everything the transmasculine and it's subjects does independently and on it's own accord — especially theorizing and organizing as a class — without any guidance or approval from non-transmascs, is always so threatening to them. It's always framed as some chaos sewing evil, complete with it's campaigns to convince as many transmascs as possible to not participate in this evil plot and have any consciousness with/of their own.

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A(nti)moralism is a key part of transmasculine liberation and moral abolition is a transmasculine project.

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A type of post that used to be making the rounds that irked me were the assertions that "XYZ is morally neutral" (particularly "(trans)masculinity is morally neutral"), which is not entirely wrong — "XYZ is morally neutral" is true in the sense that morality is a crock of shit, and morals and their qualities aren't real — but my issue is that the phrase "morally neutral" and framing of moral neutrality validates the idea of moral qualitative states. For something to be "neutral" there must be different states it exists between or outside of, and "morally neutral" infers the existence of "morally good" and "morally bad".

I'd been seeing this in response to misogynandry/antitransmasculinity, specifically the idea that transmasculine people are uniquely evil and immoral for 'choosing' to abandon womanhood, because misogynandrists/anti-transmascs have gotten really bold about saying that bluntly, but the response to that shouldn't be to validate morality — leaving it intact for the next poor sod enduring abuse as an immoral subject — by trying to negotiate the moral position of your existence to someone who clearly thinks you're filth (and will never think otherwise because ultimately you are affixed to your position now matter how "good" you prove yourself to be). It's pointless. The correct response is viciously attacking morality itself.

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The erasure of trans men is not a privilege. Erasure murders. Using euphemisms like "invisibility" only serves to further erase us.

inthedirt via twitter