#(because why would you target cis white women

[ballsbalb]

this blog/community is like. literally my only escape from reality. so i’d prefer to keep it that way, because if i post all my political opinions, this shit will be karl marx’s manifesto by march//

The privilege is astounding…

ah yes, privilege is when tumblr blog

let’s be real, the actual privilege here is you being able to spam me with the most utterly ignorant asks, hide behind anonymity, and ignore people doing actual, real work. i go to protests and marches and sit-ins and meetings, and you sit in your ass whinging on tumblr. we are not the same

my entire existence is, constantly and eternally, political. my entire life, who i am, who i love, is all inherently political in our modern political system. so don’t fucking tell me that me being allowed one space where i can just talk about footy with my friends is somehow an indicator of privilege— yes, i absolutely have privilege as a white guy, but it really ends there for me.

but, sure. go around spouting nonsense you know nothing about on the internet to make your virtue signaling, posturing ass feel better.

get a fucking job bro

[katrafiy]

I think about this image a lot. This is an image from the Aurat March (Women's March) in Karachi, Pakistan, on International Women's Day 2018. The women in the picture are Pakistani trans women, aka khwaja siras or hijras; one is a friend of a close friend of mine.

In the eyes of the Pakistani government and anthropologists, they're a "third gender." They're denied access to many resources that are available to cis women. Trans women in Pakistan didn't decide to be third-gendered; cis people force it on them whether they like it or not.

Western anthropologists are keen on seeing non-Western trans women as culturally constructed third genders, "neither male nor female," and often contrast them (a "legitimate" third gender accepted in its culture) with Western trans women (horrific parodies of female stereotypes).

There's a lot of smoke and mirrors and jargon used to obscure the fact that while each culture's trans women are treated as a single culturally constructed identity separate from all other trans women, cis women are treated as a universal category that can just be called "women."

Even though Pakistani aurat and German Frauen and Guatemalan mujer will generally lead extraordinarily different lives due to the differences in culture, they are universally recognized as women.

The transmisogynist will say, "Yes, but we can't ignore the way gender is culturally constructed, and hijras aren't trans women, they're a third gender. Now let's worry less about trans people and more about the rights of women in Burkina Faso."

In other words, to the transmisogynist, all cis women are women, and all trans women are something else.

"But Kat, you're not Indian or Pakistani. You're not a hijra or khwaja sira, why is this so important to you?"

Have you ever heard of the Neapolitan third gender "femminiello"? It's the term my moniker "The Femme in Yellow" is derived from, and yes, I'm Neapolitan. Shut up.

I'm going to tell you a little bit about the femminielli, and I want you to see if any of this sounds familiar. Femminielli are a third gender in Neapolitan culture of people assigned male at birth who have a feminine gender expression.

They are lauded and respected in the local culture, considered to be good omens and bringers of good luck. At festivals you'd bring a femminiello with you to go gambling, and often they would be brought in to give blessings to newborns. Noticing anything familiar yet?

Oh and also they were largely relegated to begging and sex work and were not allowed to be educated and many were homeless and lived in the back alleys of Naples, but you know we don't really like to mention that part because it sounds a lot less romantic and mystical.

And if you're sitting there, asking yourself why a an accurate description of femminiello sounds almost note for note like the same way hijras get described and talked about, then you can start to understand why that picture at the start of this post has so much meaning for me.

And you can also start to understand why I get so frustrated when I see other queer people buy into this fool notion that for some reason the transes from different cultures must never mix.

That friend I mentioned earlier is a white American trans woman. She spent years living in India, and as I recal the story the family she was staying with saw her as a white, foreign hijra and she was asked to use her magic hijra powers to bless the house she was staying in.

So when it comes to various cultural trans identities there are two ways we can look at this. We can look at things from a standpoint of expressed identity, in which case we have to preferentially choose to translate one word for the local word, or to leave it untranslated.

If we translate it, people will say we're artificially imposing an outside category (so long as it's not cis people, that's fine). If we don't, what we're implying, is that this concept doesn't exist in the target language, which suggests that it's fundamentally a different thing

A concrete example is that Serena Nanda in her 1990 and 2000 books, bent over backwards to say that Hijras are categorically NOT trans women. Lots of them are!

And Don Kulick bent over backwards in his 1998 book to say that travesti are categorically NOT trans women, even though some of the ones he cited were then and are now trans women.

The other option, is to look at practice, and talk about a community of practice of people who are AMAB, who wear women's clothing, take women's names, fulfill women's social roles, use women's language and mannerisms, etc WITHIN THEIR OWN CULTURAL CONTEXT.

This community of practice, whatever we want to call it - trans woman, hijra, transfeminine, femminiello, fairy, queen, to name just a few - can then be seen to CLEARLY be trans-national and trans-cultural in a way that is not clearly evident in the other way of looking at things.

And this is important, in my mind, because it is this axis of similarity that is serving as the basis for a growing transnational transgender rights movement, particularly in South Asia. It's why you see pictures like this one taken at the 2018 Aurat March in Karachi, Pakistan.

And it also groups rather than splits, pointing out not only points of continuity in the practices of western trans women and fa'afafines, but also between trans women in South Asia outside the hijra community, and members of the hijra community both trans women and not.

To be blunt, I'm not all that interested in the word trans woman, or the word hijra. I'm not interested in the word femminiello or the word fa'afafine.

I'm interested in the fact that when I visit India, and I meet hijras (or trans women, self-expressed) and I say I'm a trans woman, we suddenly sit together, talk about life, they ask to see American hormones and compare them to Indian hormones.

There is a shared community of practice that creates a bond between us that cis people don't have. That's not to say that we all have the exact same internal sense of self, but for the most part, we belong to the same community of practice based on life histories and behavior.

I think that's something cis people have absolutely missed - largely in an effort to artificially isolate trans women. This practice of arguing about whether a particular "third gender" label = trans women or not, also tends to artificially homogenize trans women as a group.

You see this in Kulick and Nanda, where if you read them, you could be forgiven for thinking all American trans women are white, middle class, middle-aged, and college-educated, who all follow rigid codes of behavior and surgical schedules prescribed by male physicians.

There are trans women who think of themselves as separate from cis women, as literally another kind of thing, there are trans women who think of themselves as coterminous with cis women, there are trans women who think of themselves as anything under the sun you want to imagine.

The problem is that historically, cis people have gone to tremendous lengths to destroy points of continuity in the transgender community (see everything I've cited and more), and particularly this has been an exercise in transmisogyny of grotesque levels.

The question is do you want to talk about culturally different ways of being trans, or do you want to try to create as many neatly-boxed third genders as you can to prop up transphobic theoretical frameworks? To date, people have done the latter. I'm interested in the former.

I guess what I'm really trying to say with all of this is that we're all family y'all.

[giritina]

Lately I've been dipping my toe into the mess that is transandrophobia discourse, and in the process I've been presented with one question in many forms:

"Do trans men experience misogyny?"

My initial answer was "these terms are all theoretical frameworks for a vast range of human experiences, why would you choose to frame your pre-transition experiences as that of a woman?" This makes sense to me, but clearly isn't satisfactory to many of the people sending me anons. As much as I might want to use my own life as a case study, I can't very well tell these people in my asks box "no, you've never experienced something that could be categorized as misogyny." Still, the question bothers me.

I think that's because the question obfuscates the actual debate. It's clear to me the question we are debating is not one of "experience" but "authority." That is:

"Do (binary) trans men understand what it's like to be a woman?"

My answer? No.

How can I justify that when we have, since birth, been raised as women? Well, because we also have, since birth, been trans men. If we cast aside the idea of transness as a modern social construct or anything other than an innate and biological reality, this has to be true. Even before you ever came out to yourself, you were transgender. Transphobia has dictated every moment of your life. Your idea of what "womanhood" is is not at all the same as a woman's, be it cis or trans. Why? Because a woman does not react to "being a woman" with the dysphoria, dissociation, and profound sense of wrongness that you do. [If you do not experience these things, a cis or trans woman, at the very least, does not identify as a binary trans man.] A woman sincerely identifies as a woman, and identity plays a pivotal role in how we absorb societal messaging.

Let's take homophobia as an example. While any queer person has probably experienced targeted episodes of bigotry, the majority of bigotry we experience must necessarily be broad and social. Boys learn to fear becoming a faggot as a group, but the boy who is a faggot will internalize those messages in a completely different way to the boys who only need learn to assert the heterosexual identity already inherent in them through violence. All of them are suffering to some extent, but their experiences are not at all equivalent. This is despite the fact that they've all absorbed the same message, maybe even at the same moment, through the same events. Still, we don't say that a straight boy knows what it is like to be a gay boy. Similarly, cis women do not know what it is like to be a trans man despite being fed the same transphobic messaging in a superficially identical context. It isn't a stretch to say the same can apply to misogyny.

Because I can't speak for you, I'll use myself as an example for a moment. I'll give my bonafides: I am a gender-nonconforming, T4T queer, white, binary trans man. I am on T, and I have recently come out to my family. I do not pass. My career as a comic writer is tied to my identity as a trans man. I can confidently say I have never been impacted by misogyny the same way as my friends who actually identify as women. This manifested early on as finding it easy to shrug off the messaging that I needed to be X or Y way to be a woman. In fact, most gender roles slid off my back expressly because breaking them gave me euphoria. I was punished in many ways for this, but being this sort of cis woman did help me somewhat. It's easy to be "one of the guys" in a social climbing sense if you really do feel more comfortable as a man. It also helped me disregard misogyny aimed at me or others because it seemed like an shallow form of bigotry. It was something you could shrug off, but it was important for building "unity" among women. I thought this must be the case for all women, that we all viewed misogyny as a sort of "surface level" bigotry. However, for whatever conditional status I gained in this role, there was a clear message that if I did "become" a man, every non-conformist trait about me would just become a grotesque and parodic masculinity.

That was the threat that was crushing me, destroying my identity and self esteem. That was what I knew intimately through systemic, verbal, physical, and sexual abuse. I could express my nonconformity as a cis woman, but if I took it so far as to transition to male? I would be a pathetic traitor, a social outcast. I truly believe that throughout my life people were able to see that I was not just a failed woman, but an emasculated man.

I do partly feel that the sticking point for many is the idea that the sexual abuse suffered by trans men is inherent to womanhood, and therefore inexplicable if trans men are men from birth. While this disregards the long history of sexual abuse of young boys, especially minority boys, I do see the emotional core. I'll offer that the sexual abuse I suffered was intrinsically linked to my emmasculation, my boyishness, despite the fact that I was not out to myself or anyone else. I believe many trans men have suffered being the proxy for cis women's desire for retribution against cis men, or for cis men and women's desire for an eternally nubile young boy. I also believe they have suffered corrective assault that attempts to push them back into womanhood, which in itself is an experience unique to transness rather than actual womanhood.

I'll note quickly that many, many trans men cannot relate to the idea of feeling confident and above it all when it comes to womanhood. Many of you probably tried desperately to conform, working every moment to convince yourself you were a woman and to perfectly inhabit that identity. I definitely experienced this as well (though for me it was specifically attempting to conform to butchness) but I can concede many of you experienced it more than I did. I still believe that this desperate play-acting is also not equivalent to true womanhood. It is a uniquely transgender experience, one that shares much more in common with trans women desperately attempting to conform to manhood than with true womanhood.

One key theme running through the above paragraphs is the idea that "womanhood" is synonymous with "suffering." A trans man must know what it is like to be a woman because he suffers like one. It should be noted that actual womanhood is not a long stretch of suffering. It often involves joy, euphoria, sisterhood, a general love and happiness at being a woman. It wasn't until I admitted to myself I had never been a woman that I was able to see how the women in my life were not women out of obligation, but because they simply were. The idea that you are a woman because you suffer is more alligned with radfem theory than any reality of womanhood.

When I admitted my identity to myself I was truly faced with the ways that my ability to stand up to misogyny did not equate to being anti-misogynist. I was giddy to finally be able to admit to being a man, and suddenly all that messaging that "slid off my back" was a useful tool in my arsenal. Much like cis gay men feel compelled to assert their disgust for vaginas and women after a life of being compelled towards heterosexuality, I felt disgust and aversion to discussions of womanhood as an identity. I didn't even want to engage with female fictional characters. I viewed other people's sincere expressions of their own womanhood as a coded dismissal of my identity. Like many people before and after, I made women into the rhetorical device that had oppressed me. Not patriarchy, not transphobia, but womanhood and women broadly. It wasn't explicit bigotry, but the effects were the same. I had to unlearn this with the help of my bigender partner, who felt unsettled and hurt by the way I could so easily turn "woman" into nothing but a theoretical category which represented my personal suffering.

This brings me to another point: I sometimes receive messages from nonbinary trans mascs telling me that it's absurd to think they don't understand womanhood and identify with misogyny in a deeper way. I would agree that, if you sincerely identify in some capacity as a woman, you are surely impacted by misogyny in a way I am not. However, why are you coming to the defense of binary trans men like me? Less charitably, why are you projecting a female identity on us? Perhaps my experience frustrates you so deeply because we simply do not have the same experience at all. Perhaps we are not all that united by our agab, by our supposed female socialization.

So, no. I do not believe that binary trans men know what it's like to be women. I don't believe we are authorities on womanhood. I do not believe that when a trans woman endeavors to talk about transmisogyny, your counterargument about your own experiences of misogyny is useful. I ESPECIALLY do not believe that it is in any way valid to say that you are less misogynist, less prone to being misogynist, or-- god forbid-- INCAPABLE of misogyny because you were raised as a girl. I also don't believe your misogyny is equivalent to that of a woman's internalized misogyny in form or impact.

For as much as many in this movement downplay privilege as merely "conditional," those conditions do exist. They do place you firmly in the context of the rest of the world. Zoom out and look at the history of oppressed men, and you'll find the same reactionary movement repeated over and over. Attacking the women in your community for not being soft enough, nice enough, patient enough, rather than fighting the powers that be. Why do I believe your identity is more alligned with cis manhood than any form of womanhood? Because this song and dance has been done a hundred times before by men of every stripe. Transphobia is real, and your life experience has been uniquely defined by it since birth. This is a thing to rally around, to fight against, but you all have fallen for a (trans)misogynistic phantasm in your efforts at self-actualization. You are not the first, and you will not be the last. Get out of this pipeline before it's too late.

[doberbutts]

you don't actually get to cry "ally yourself with trans women" while actively talking over trans women whose traumatic experiences with transmisogyny are wildly ignored in favor of how hard transmisogyny is on the cis women. like why don't trans women get to say privilege plays into how much transmisogyny affects people?

do we not characterize white privilege as being what protects white americans from the systematic racism that permeates the US?

again, what is the preferred way you would have us refer to that privilege? because I am right here telling you that privilege is a part of the construct of tme/tma but you don't really care that trans women are more affected.

like it's crazy that you seem to think my problem is with the transvestigation playing out against a cis woman and not the way everyone pays attention when it happens to cis women but ignores the rampant transmisogyny when it happens to a trans woman. like you don't even pause to look at why there were no trans women at the olympics to transvestigate in the first place so they turned to the next marginalized option, intersex and women of color, when discussing how trans women deserve better.

Hi I'm the trans woman I deserve better from you specifically

To be completely honest this is looking less and less like a good faith discussion and more and more like you simply accusing me of stuff I didn't say.

You say I am actively talking over trans women. How so? How is "we need to address transmisogyny at its root if we want things to be better" ignoring the plight of trans women?

How is it that I have *repeatedly* acknowledged that there is privilege there, and yet apparently I am ignoring it?

if you want to use the race example: white privilege exists. Racism also affects white people. If white people want to stop being affected by racism (welfare regulations, the war on drugs, low income housing, social programs for community aid, to name a few) then maybe they should ally themselves with people of color because the root of what's causing issues with these things is racism. That doesn't mean white privilege doesn't exist just because a system of oppression affects everyone under said system. It doesn't even mean that the primary target has changed. It's just what makes this a system rather than an individual occurrence.

Never once have I said that cis women are more affected and, in fact, in followup posts I have stated that it *is* quite annoying that people have only been talking about this because this year's Olympics included approximately 0 out trans women. I have been saying that this was the clear end result, once they were rid of the trans women they'd go for whatever cis women they could feasibly get away with, and this time it seems they overplayed their hand.

Castor Semenya is a cis woman who only found out that she is intersex due to being transvestigated. She is, by definition, TME. Except she's not, is she, considering the same rules that apply to trans women apply to her. That's why I brought her up! And- correct me if I'm wrong- but out trans women still competed after she was forced to leave the Olympic running. That is why I'm saying that things maybe are not quite so clear cut as "have" and "have not", because I can point to an example of someone that the definition labels as "has privilege" that according to Olympic ruling bodies no longer counts as a woman either despite being afab TME cis.

If you want to continue to put words in my mouth, then we're out of things to say to each other, and it becomes clear that this was never intended to be a good faith discussion in the first place.

[communistkenobi]

this might make me sound ignorant but is the radfem part of term not about hating men? they hate trans people, they hate men and they view both as predatory, obviously men are not their primary targets but I feel like it would be incorrect to say that they don't hate men, especially since many of them believe in gender separatism (which is bs for numerous reasons). it's wrong to bring up men every time someone talks about the transmisogyny terfs spew bc that would be derailing the conversation but can men (trans/cis/whatever) not express how they've been hurt by terfs in their own posts or conversations? apologies if ive completely misinterpreted what you were saying I just want to understand the topic better

I’m not disputing that terfs hate men. However, I think it’s an error to highlight their hatred of men as ideologically significant. Sure they talk about hating men, but their political alliances reveal that dismantling patriarchy, or a desire to oppress men, is not a concern for them, given that they support the criminalisation of sex work, the state enforcement of sex as biologically determined, and are allied with the same right wing groups (such as the Heritage Foundation in the US) that want to criminalise abortion and reinstate “traditional” white western gender norms. If you view terf political goals through the lens of hating men, then their political efforts have overwhelmingly been a massive failure. Which I don’t think is very useful analysis!

A hatred of men is also not politically useful in general, because there is no money to be made or political battles to be won hating men. Hatred of men is not a systemic issue because men are not oppressed as a social group on the basis of their manhood. There is no political or financial infrastructure built on the foundation of hating men, nor is there infrastructure dedicated to maintaining a systemic hatred of men. Hating trans people, however, is extremely financially and politically lucrative, particularly hatred of trans women/transfems, because of how transphobia and misogyny intersect with and reinforce one another. There are ample political, financial, medical, and social institutions that operate on the maintenance of patriarchy, many of which terfs share a political platform with. So terf hatred of men is clearly not that big a deal given how willing they are to ally with right wing groups and fascists, who are the last people on earth to tolerate the oppression of men as a political goal.

This is why people (myself included) take umbrage with the continued insistence that terfs hate men as a central foundation of their beliefs. It’s not incorrect to say that they hate men, but hating men is not the problem with terfs. Hatred of men is not an inherently reactionary position anymore than hating cis people is. The problem is the way terfs conceptualise gender, and the political goals that flow from that conceptualisation, which affects all trans people but primarily affect trans women/transfems. The spectre they raise about bathrooms, about sports, is always the age-old transmisogynistic conspiracy of “a man in a dress” “invading women’s spaces” because the historical legacy of transmisogyny looms large in public consciousness, and reinforced by medical/psychiatric institutions in particular, in a way that hatred and fear of trans men does not (autogynephilia exists as a mental illness but autophallophilia does not, for example. Julia Serrano talks about this in Whipping Girl if you want to read more on the subject). Terfs don’t care about trans men in men’s sports, they don’t raise the counter-spectre of trans men being mass assaulted in bathrooms by cis men who discover that they’re “really women” - these are not rhetorical moves that are interesting or useful to them, because it does not position them as victims. Trans men are hurt by their transphobic rhetoric, suffer under transphobic laws that are passed, and face transphobic discrimination from people in their lives as a result of how mainstream transphobia is (and I am speaking from significant and traumatic personal experience on this front). We are not, however, the face of the transgender boogeyman, and we are not the primary target of terfs. We are targets because we are trans, not because we are men. To be dismissive of the claim that terfs hate men is not a dismissal of the pain and violence transmascs go through, because our oppression is not founded on our manhood.

So when you see terf political efforts and terf rhetoric, their obsessive focus on trans women as arch villains who need to be destroyed, and you come to the conclusion that a hatred of men is the animating force behind terf political activity - that is a transmisogynistic conclusion, both because you are framing their transmisogyny as something that is primarily informed by a hatred of men, and because “terfs hate men” is a non-sequitur in discussions about the political and social damage that their beliefs cause. If terfs hate men, they do so as a hobby, and I don’t really give a fuck about their hobbies

[demonslayerunhinged]

Unhinged rant >:(

Demon Slayer fandom discourse

I want to start this by saying, I know that Demon Slayer isn't an explicitly queer manga/anime because Shōnen Jump, but I believe that Demon Slayer is for the queers and has lots of themes that we can identify with like love, acceptance, loss, guilt and strength.

Despite what these stupid, smelly, ignorant, power-scaling, non-ass-washing, Cheetos-dust-snorting, once-a-month-showering, dude-bros would have you believe, Demon Slayer isn't just another battle Shōnen anime/manga, it's a love story and about the perseverance of the human spirit and if that doesn't speak to the queer experience then I don't know what does.

Plus, I don't know how Gotogue-sensei is as a person, but I think the fact that she managed to make one of the kindest mcs in shōnen speaks volumes about her disposition. I don't think she would be one to reject queer fans identifying with her story so well.

In these recent times, it seems like everything is going to shit, the world is slowly regressing into the dark ages destroying decades of progress and trying to distract ourselves from all this by engaging with the fandoms we love is hard because everything seems to cater to cis, straight, white men.

To be honest, I created this blog mostly out of spite, but I also wanted to carve out a tiny space for myself where I can talk out of my ass and not have some decrepit reddit dude bro go all 'well, ackshually ☝🤓' on me, and I'm happy to have met so many like-minded people.

So, I've compiled a list of answers to the common types of nonsense drivel these fuckers post in response to shipping and queer discussions and theories about Demon Slayer. You can copy and paste whenever and wherever you encounter these black holes of ignorance and stupidity if you want.

In the Taisho era, there were no gay/queer people: This is one of the dumbest statements I've ever heard, and the fact that it's a really common response really shows how we've failed as a society. Queer people have existed for ages all over the world, Japan has an extensive queer history. Demon Slayer is based on samurai culture and samurai culture was really, really, really, really, really, really, really gay. Sure, it had rigid roles, but that doesn't make it any less queer. A quick Google search would go a long way to nourish that dried-out, shrivelled husk you call a brain. Go read a book you walking condom ad, your parents and education system have obviously failed you.

It's forcing sexuality into the story: We literally had a whole season dedicated to the mcs going to the 'entertainment district', we have a sexy man with three wives who talks about 'loving' them all equally, we have the abundant male fanservice, one of the mcs talks about women on the daily, we have a boy who eats demons and is horny shy around girls all the time, we have his brother who exposes his tits because he's proud of them, we have a demon who was essentially a sexual predator that targeted 16-year-old girls and ate them, the main villain shape-shifts into a woman to 'get' information as a Geisha, we have a girl who literally lusts after almost everyone she meets but yea no lets not force sexuality into it 🙄.

I don't care: Okay cool, but I value your opinion as much as I value the shit I took this morning.

It's who they are as a character that matters: Sexuality is a part of a person's character. Your sexuality defines your experiences, decisions, options and outlook on life. That's why you as a straight man can be so ignorant.

It's forced*(I really hate this one): Honestly, fuck you. Why is it that you only think something is forced when it doesn't revolve around you and your experiences? You guys are fine with tons of anime/manga that sexualize women and girls to an insane degree even when it doesn't make sense, but that doesn't stop you from consuming and glazing the hell out of the authors, but when we talk about including queer characters suddenly it's forced? Your existence is forced, and you can just eat shit.

I don't like it: Who the fuck do you think you are dictating how other people consume and interpret the media they consume? How about you go hump your smelly, cum-encrusted anime body pillow.

Men can be touchy/emotional with each other without it being gay, it's just our western standards: No it isn't the majority of shipping activities and works come from Japan, which wouldn't happen if it was just part of their culture. We're not stupid, we know men and boys can be friends without it being sexual, and we know when a friendship is just that, and then we know when two guys are straight up pining for one another.

It's not canon/the mangaka didn't explicitly state it: They can't because of Shōnen Jump, so a lot of them pass off information about a character through subtext, metaphors and allegories. They also don't have to, things don't have to outright stated or 'canon' for them to make sense and if you need them to be so for you to understand or enjoy the story then a moment of silence for your head since it's without a brain.

It's not common: Despite Shōnen Jump, there are lots of mainstream anime/manga that have queer characters: One Punch Man, Hunter x Hunter, Dr. Stone, Windbreaker, Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, Naruto, Gintama, Dragon Ball Z, My Hero Academia, Fairy Tail, One Piece, Attack on Titan, Tokyo Ghoul, Jujutsu Kaisen, Chainsaw Man, Blue Period and that's not to talk of the ones with queer subtext like I dunno ALL Sports anime/manga to ever exist!

Why do you look for LGBTQ in everything?: It might be hard for straights to understand but growing up queer and looking for a connection causes us to develop what we call a gaydar that helps us identify characteristics, mannerisms, features and vibes from a person that screams 'ONE OF US! ONE OF US!'. It's only natural, and our gaydar doesn't suddenly turn off when we're consuming media, especially when it's media that we love and hold dear to our hearts. It doesn't matter if the mangaka inserted these characteristics intentionally or not, that doesn't stop us from picking up on them, and why should it?

Shipping is stupid: So is power-scaling, but that doesn't stop you assholes from making thousands of posts, creating YouTube channels and sharing content about it and cramming it down our throats. It's even worse because it's from grown-ass men.

The characters have no chemistry/they hate each other: A lot of queer ships have more chemistry, history, interactions, personality and development than a lot of 'canon' straight couples. It's literally a trope in media that all a man and a woman need to be in a relationship is to be in close proximity to each other, then their relationship goes on to be drier than salted crackers in silicone packets scattered in the Sahara desert. Well, I guess you can't blame the creators, you write what you know after all.

I know this is a lot and I know how angry I sound right now, but I'm so sick and so tired of all these guys who are as useful to the human race as pieces of freshly shat out dog turds that have been thrown in the grass by the sidewalk in a hot summer afternoon, who can't see past their lice-infested neck beards trying to make something as colorful, interesting, joyful and queer as anime and the fandoms fit their own boring, stupid and misogynistic worldview.

In Conclusion, Demon Slayer is amazing, horny* and unbelievably queer.

*I'm talking about the male fanservice btw :)

[machine-saint]

i don't think I've ever really faced much discrimination for being a trans woman in my job; I've got promotions at a decent clip, always had good salary raises, and so on. I've gotten fucked by The System for changing my name, but that's not really a thing targeted at trans people per se I would say. the most it's fucked with me medically is when a psych refused to write me a bridge prescription for Vyvanse because he was worried about interactions with estrogen (it doesn't have any).

of course it would be absurd of me to extrapolate from this to the wider population of trans women! some of this is due to my privilege in other areas, some of it is luck, some of it is living in a fairly trans-friendly area. but this is still my "lived experience". and this is part of why I've always placed (somewhat!) less emphasis on the idea of listening to individual lived experience than I see elsewhere; people are experts on their own lives, but if you want to talk about populations, you need to do surveys or whatever.

of course, conversely, the problem is that if you ask "have you been discriminated against for being X characteristic", there's a subset of (say) white people, cis people, men, etc., that will answer yes even if they haven't because of culture war nonsense. and you can't know whether that's legitimate or not without knowing a priori how social relations around race/gender/etc work. so you take a step back and go, okay, let's look at salaries and median wealth and employment numbers, but those can have noise for their own set of reasons, etc, etc

there's no punchline here, no one weird old trick. I think this is just hard.

[chronicsyd]

Yk… I feel like people have become So used to like TikTok doom-scrolling feeding their limited attention span and having most sapphic rep be TV-Y7 shows (She-ra, TOH, TLOK, etc.) that when they’re faced with a TV-14 show where they actually have to Pay Attention to little things like facial expressions over words instead of having constant exposition shoved in their face they don’t like it.

And this is not me saying you can’t be an adult and watch a TV-Y7 show, but you Do have to keep in mind that the shows target demographic Is younger viewers so they have to utilize stuff like exposition so younger viewers can easily understand it. And those shows have pretty black and white morals “Horde = Bad” “Princess Alliance = Good” all that fun stuff.

But Arcane isn’t like that, it makes you think deeper about what’s actually being told to you and I’ve had to do a couple rewatches myself to pick up on stuff I hadn’t noticed the first time. And putting those same black and white morals to the characters like these really does the show a disservice.

(I also think the "oh I don't like oppressor x oppressed" complaint to be Incredibly stupid because you could slap that onto practically Anything. Heterosexual relationships/Hetero-passing relationships? that's oppressor x oppressed because of men over women. Mixed relationships involving any white person? that's Definity oppressor x oppressed. Relationships involving a cis and trans person? yup oppressor x oppressed again. Reducing characters down purely to their socioeconomic status and occupation and ignoring all the nuance, complexity and logic of them and their actions frustrate the hell out of me because they refuse to think deeper than that.)

And I'd RATHER Caitlyn Show she's remorseful and changing through her Actions rather than a sob session of "I'm sorrys'" (Also, LAST time Caitlyn merely said words to Vi ("I won't"), her actions didn't reflect those words, so why would Vi trust a simple "I'm sorry" now? Not to mention we already got that "I'm sorry" plot beat when it came to Jayce and Viktor back in S1 with Jayce doing stuff like setting the Bridge Blockade (and No one wants to bring up the "oppressor x oppressed" thing when talking about Jayvik despite it being the same dynamic...))

(Let's also address that Vi never said "I'm sorry" to Jinx for joining the Enforcers. No, the "I'm sorry" in Ep 3 wasn't for That it was an "I'm sorry for what's about to happen" because they Both know that there's a high possibility that Jinx might be dead at the end of this fight, and I know this because Vi becomes defensive in Ep 5 when Jinx brings it up. Vi doesn't say "I'm sorry" for hitting Isha either (btw if you say Vi saw Jinx care for Isha as a "I'm a bad sister" then you just lack basic media literacy all together). Jinx never says "I'm sorry" for all the fucked up shit she does like kidnapping Caitlyn and forcing Vi to kill her. Also, Vi AND Caitlyn come up with the plan to take out Silco loyalists, Shimmer and Jinx so why the hell does Caitlyn have to apologize for that? Caitlyn admits that forcing Vi to take the badge was the wrong thing to do and gives an explanation as to why she wanted Vi to join her as an Enforcer, because Caitlyn's worry of "one of us comes back in a box" IS justified)

(I also think the time jumps have fooled the audience, because they feel that Caitlyn's scene with Ambessa in ep 4 is "a complete 180" when you have to keep in mind that Caitlyn's been watching how her actions have affected those in these 6 months that we haven't really been seeing her on screen; we see bits of her during the "Paint the Town Blue" montage and Even Then you see her damn near crying in one of those still shots and looking so exhausted and over it in another. Once again part of that "Arcane wanting you to use your brain to connect those dots instead of the show doing For you but the audience refuses to do so" kinda stuff.)

Also, do people need to go through their Own trauma, grief and anger in order to understand Caitlyn's actions/motivations? because it's kinda starting to look that way. Caitlyn wasn't maliciously manipulating Vi with the kiss and the "I won't" statement because when going through emotions like this, Caitlyn doesn't have the time to reflect on those actions and see how she is changing, it's more of a hope that she isn't changing in the way that Vi doesn't want her to (you have to remember that S1 Ep4-S2 Ep3 happens within the span of like a week, maybe two at the most; Caitlyn's not being given time to stop or think about what's she's doing or what's going on, she's merely going through the motions in a sense. So by the time we pick up Ep 4 and there's been months of shit happening under her watch, she's had Time to be like "I don't want to be this, I hate this and the person I've become in all this".)

(I mean we can have Another discussion of how a lot of hate is just performative activism. One of the reasons I Like Caitlyn so much is because she shows that even with good morals, someone from privilege can easily fall down that rabbit hole. Because that's happened to myself before. Despite being lesbian and mentally disabled I still come from certain privilege, while I don't come from aristocratic wealth, I still lived a life better than most and just being a white woman that also gives me privilege and I've had to do my own reflecting on how my thoughts and actions can affect others simply from that privilege; which is what Caitlyn's able to do herself over the course of the season, which it seems that none of these haters are able to grasp)

[velvetvexations]

honestly those posts about needing to steal trans women from tme partners for their own good just feel condescending. very "if your views don't align with mine, it's a sign that you can't make decisions for yourself." if you're genuinely concerned someone is being taken advantage of by a partner, there's better ways to offer support and help them out of that relationship than "convince them to be with you instead"

it's the radical feminism!

i was genuinely asking myself if I was high while reading that meat-headed, "come to the Denny's parking lot if you want an ass-whupping"-plagiarising post, like great work defending trans women by — oh, dear, threatening to beat up people (including, by that purposefully vague definition, other trans women)? And doxxing yourself while doing so? Instead of — oh, I don't know — dismantling the idea of waifish women & fems in need of protection by strong men & mascs, and doing the legwork to break down other such binary ideals? I thought the whole argument was that trans mascs are inherently emulating the worst of cis masculinity by BEING trans masc, and are thus dangerous to be around/include in the community; does it help or hurt that rhetoric to specifically act like that? And also; why are you going to doxx yourself about it?? With the political climate as it is??? It is infuriating that I still care about this jabroni's safety but there it is!

wild right

Terminally online transradfems will say they're the most oppressed demographic but I don't think many of them are poor sex workers of color

there is no good hierarchy ordering but the new TRF thing is that they (affluent White women) HAVE to do this for the less privileged trans women who can't do it themselves and lol

I love black trans women and believe they need all the support they can get. I also believe it's crazy to portray tWoC as the #1 most targeted group of people when intersex people's right to life is under question since birth in more than a few countries. Around the world and throughout history, intersex people have been euthanized like animals before even getting the opportunity to live our lives. This practice is still not outlawed worldwide. Did you know that even in the US and European countries, the medical establishment attempts to coerce expecting parents into terminating an intersex fetus because it would be "better for the child not to live such a horrible life", and if the visibly into child is born, 95% of the time they are mutilated at birth or otherwise before puberty. Is that not a hate crime? Oh wait. It's not illegal, so it can't be a crime. Is maiming an intersex person's body because you believe how they look is disgusting and disordered not hate? The violence of intersexism is baked so throughly into laws and medical protocol that hate crimes against us aren't even documented because they're fully fucking legal. Millions of us. Our blood soaks the earth and nobody cares to hear our pleas.

ultimately no oppression caste system will ever help anyone but the way intersexism is ignored is disgusting and desperately needs to stop

Often I wish I could like your response to a post without liking the rancid original post

lol my friend says that a lot

At this point I've started to take someone being transandrophobic as a FULL THROATED confession that they were aphobic during the ace discourse days and only stopped because it started being "cringe" (read, they only stopped because it was unpopular, not because their views actually changed) to be aphobic. And like, this is what, the fourth identity or so that's being completly fucking harassed like this? By the same fucking people? I'm done giving these people the benefit of a doubt.

the first thing I heard about fite-club was what a huge aphobe he was so that was my introduction to TRFs

the enemy is at once all-powerful and in control of everything, and incredibly weak and few and far between, right? lol. everyone agrees with you and loves you but actually nobody believes in the things you claim. somehow.

it's wild like yo dawg I just passed a thousand followers!!!!!

i am so baffled by the insinuation that youre a Very Popular Transfem and all other transfems on here are fighting for scraps???? because not two months ago, the posts being passed around were about how all the best most popular posts on tumblr are made by the same circle of transfems

maybe they were talking about apricot-aligator being a sycophant for transmisogynistic TMEs

re that fox girls post, i dont think thw critique itself is unfair but ime transandrophobia blogs sharing black feminism is not necessarily bc it has relevance to white transmasculine experience directly (ofc entirely ignoring the black transmascs active in this theory) but bc transandrophobia itself is built off of black feminism and most of these people are interested in black feminist theory outside of transandrophobia theory or rather, that they came To transandrophobia theory From black feminist theory < or at least thats been my experience with my favorite transandrophobia theorists (the more i think abt it the angrier i get that it just sidesteps talking abt its relevance to black transmasculinity by . just tacking on "white" and leaving it at that. like yeah thats abt what id expect from someone that finds hooks' own intersectional work "mid" lol) (but maybe im being uncharitable idk.)

it was really weird because it's like

marginalized misandry for my category but not for thine ig

[mariacallous]

I think the real crypto-terf behavior is telling people that they can't talk about things they've personally experienced themselves (like most women have with gendered socialization, whether because they got it, or they didn't/resisted it and were socially punished for it) in order to be a "good ally." If you don't let people talk about that, they're going to find someone who will. If you tell people who are on the fence on something that your side is the one that refuses to believe something they experienced is real, that's telling them that you're not a person you should listen to, and by extension, discrediting your whole side. This whole stupid shit on tumblr where feminism 101 concepts like gendered socialization, male privilege, and so on are now considered "crypto terf" is itself the most crypto terf ass behavior. Terfs have for years tried to act like they are the only true feminists, that feminism is inextricable with transphobia, and here are all these supposedly progressive pro trans people on tumblr handing it to them on a silver platter! I'm also just amazed at like who ARE these trans women on tumblr who have never noticed the way in which certain behaviors they took for granted before are treated worse now that they're perceivved as women. Do these people not leave the house? Are they just completely oblivious to how others perceive them? Because it's one of those things that is almost universal in trans women and is talked about regularly in trans women spaces. But I also think what a lot of people don't understand with this attitude of "I shouldn't have to make the right arguments, because you should recognize the hate group is bad anyway" is - first, this is stupid and self-defeating with anything, you should want to win period and not lose but keep the moral high ground. Second, they underestimate how much hate groups appropriate the language of social justice and oppression to make their arguments. They just frame themselves as the True Oppressed. For TERFs, this is even easier than it is with other groups because they're speaking to a group that is genuinely oppressed and giving voice to those real experiences of oppression, and then redirecting it at the wrong target. The only comparable hate group would be like, Islamist groups when they recruit in Muslim-minority countries, in terms of drawing on people's real experiences of oppression to radicalize them. Obviously other groups like MRAs and alt-right THINK they're oppressed for being men or white or gentiles but they aren't actually so they have to work on that a bit to convince normies. But you can kinda see why for a feminist woman who doesn't know trans people and is "new" to this question in general, some of them might be genuinely confused as to which one is actually the "real" anti-oppression group. Since terfs frame themselves as fighting an insidious misogynistic movement cloaked in the language of social justice - which is also what describes terfs. So both "sides" are saying 'I'm the real oppressed one and they're lying." Like, we know from experience which one is telling the truth, but you can see how that might be confusing to an older cis het woman feminist or like, a baby 18-year-old from a conservative background who's never met any out LGBTQ people in her life, let alone trans people

Yeah

[gatheringbones]

[“Rather than conceptualizing of everyone as having their own innate preferences, participants who engaged in a Critical Cis-ness viewed desire as socialized and connected to power. At the end of each interview, I asked participants “How, if at all, should our understandings of who is beautiful, attractive, and desirable?” Janelle responded:

I think—they should change. They should change. You know that store Aries, you know American Eagle and like they have this, they have like a little mini story for like lingerie. Yeah, and if you go onto their advertisement or you go onto Aries, their models are Black, White, skinny, fat, disabled, like it’s honestly amazing. It needs to be like that, like I feel like all places should cater to all types of individuals and like also the range of sizes and things like that. If I go to Victoria’s Secret and I can only be a small, medium, or large or XL but I’m a 2x or a 3x, Ima be like I’m less desirable, but if I go to Aries and they got a range up to like 4XL, I’m going to feel really good about myself. I’m going to feel like whoa, I can buy things from here, it’s beautiful, it makes me feel sexy. I’m gonna feel desirable. So we just have to, us as a society has, we have to stop like neglecting other [pause] types of people . . . Things like that and like the media like I said . . . The media, capitalism, needs to change, like if you really wanna make money, even though I hate capitalism, but if you’re really tryna make money, you need to stop looking for, to make one demographic happy and try to make all demographics happy. Period.

Janelle connected who is seen as desirable to what is sold as being desirable within a hyper-capitalist society. This contrasts with those in previous categories who saw desire as an individual preference, potentially something innate, but inherently disconnected from social forces. Further, Janelle highlights that being desirable is not merely about being desirable to others but also a inner feeling of self-attraction. When one cannot find clothing in their size at any store or see themselves reflected in the advertisements, branding, and ownership of a business, it becomes that much more difficult to feel as though there is something beautiful and of value about oneself.

Continuing to discuss this within our interview, Janelle discussed Eurocentric standards of beauty and issues of colorism. Janelle elaborated on the connection between white supremacy, colorism, capitalism, and desire:

It’s like the more White you seem, that equals the better opportunities you can have. So, like that’s why people are usually more attracted to like European features, because not only are people in general attracted to it, but jobs are attracted to it and things like that, work opportunities.

Such a connection to beauty and job opportunities is even more exaggerated for women and feminine individuals who are held to White standards of hair styling, scrutinized for how they do their nails according to White and classist standards, and policed for wearing “women’s” items if they are not women or are not perceived to be women. This is even more evident among trans women, for whom expectations to “pass” according to cisnormative, Eurocentric, middle-class standards of what a woman should look like drastically affects not only one’s workplace opportunities but whether one will be more likely to be targeted for violence and harassment.

Alyx, too, felt that social conceptualizations of desire, beauty, and attraction should change. In explaining her answer, she noted:

Um I mean there’s always like, with, with any social issue, I feel like there’s um some group in a position of power that would like to stay in a position of power, and [pause] beauty standards might sort of play into that a lot. Um and that people who are deemed pretty would like to continue to be deemed pretty.

Alyx, Janelle, and other participants in this category conceptualized beauty and power as interconnected rather than separate phenomena. Race, class, and gender shape how others perceive individuals and what they have to offer at home and the workplace. For TERFs and Conditionally Accepting Cis-ters, trans women were conceptualized as offering dishonesty, deception, and difficulty. For those engaging in Critical Cis-ness, trans women were conceptualized as potential partners with cis people conceptualized as the ones offering difficulty, harm, and violence.

Participants who engaged in Critical Cis-ness worked to actively challenge the necropolitics of cis-ness. They constructed trans women as vulnerable to the harms of trans people and cis-ness as an assault. Black trans women, thus, need protection (including self-defense) from the harms of cis-ness. Cis-ness is marked as pathological, problematic, and violent. Finally, participants’ discussion of desire and power as interconnected challenges those in prior categories who argued preferences were apolitical and biologically innate. Instead, participants in this category argued that power shapes who is seen as desirable and that those marked as desirable have greater access to power.”]

alithia zamantakis, from thinking cis: cisgender heterosexual men, and queer women’s roles in anti-trans violence, 2023

[gauntletqueen]

the italian boxer isn't a cop, isn't 100% white, and was crying because of her dead dad. she's come out in support of the other boxer people are using her as a weapon against to be racist. the way the olympics and the media is treating both boxers is really fucked up, i do not think the italian woman did anything wrong, she's just a useful tool of oppression people are utilizing against her will

Okay you're part right, part wrong. I've done some more looking into it and I'm glad I did cause it's Nuanced~ Not here to prove you wrong, just gonna list it all out clearly so we can all understand the situation better.

I haven't personally seen any racism coming into the controversy so I don't understand why you're bringing that up, or that Angela Carini isn't fully white. The most I can see is a few mentions of Italian politicians using the situation to try and earn some brownie points by standing behind Angela Carini, but even then they're also latching onto the narrative that Imane Khelif had an unfair advantage, due to her being transgender. She isn't, btw. She's a cis woman,another case of transphobes jumping at any opportunity to try to push their bullshit, even when the target isn't trans, and nobody had even accused them of being trans before that point.

While I can't find definitive proof that Angela herself is a cop, she was raised by cops and is a member of the boxing division of one of Italy's police forces. I can't figure out if that means that she is also an actual cop but that's probably where the assumption comes from.

"she was crying because of her dead dad" is true, but oversimplifying it. Specifically, she's said that her brother and late father were boxers before her, and taught her the sport. She wanted to honor them in the olympics, but the tension, stress and expectations got too much for her in the match against Imane, who it seems fought much harder than Angela was used to. This caused her to have an emotional breakdown. That's all extremely reasonable honestly I can't imagine having to handle to pressure of representing your country At The Olympics, especially not when there are also such big personal stakes. Supposedly she was cited as shouting "it's not fair!" as she left the ring. This is what got transphobes like JK Rowling and Musk to co-opt the story into their bigotted narrative that Imane must be transgender, as transphobic women in the past have blamed their losses on the fact that a transgender woman Was Involved.

It's likely that they might also have used Imane's disqualification from participating in the 2023 IBA Women's World Boxing championship. The organization had declared her testosterone levels to be too high, which supposedly "proved they had XY chromosomes". Since then, the International Olympic Committee has removed the IBA as the organizers of boxing at the olympics due to "continuing irregularity issues in the areas of finance, governance, ethics, refereeing, and judging" So. Perhaps they are a bad judge of chromosomes. Because again, Imane is a cis woman.

Anyway. Angela has stated (translation taken from Wikipedia, the original italian article is behind a paywall) "I want to apologize to her and everyone else. I was angry because my Olympics had gone up in smoke. I don't have anything against Khelif. If I were to meet her again, I would embrace her"

So yeah, she's done nothing wrong, she just cracked under immense pressure, and might be a cop or cop-sympathetic, but that doesn't seem to really have anything to do with the situation. The important thing is that rightwing bigots jumped at the chance to make her a martyr against her will, as you said.

[masteroffearshusband49020]

Anya deep dive time!!!

She's very quiet and meek, what Jimmy did to her doesn't help one bit. I think she was always quiet and meek. That's why Jimmy raped her. He knew she'd be too scared to tell anyone. And she kinda was at first until Jimmy got her fucking pregnant and she couldn't stay quiet about it anymore. I have a feeling Anya has been put down her whole life. I had a period where I was quiet and meek like her because people had broken my spirit, and I have a feeling that that's very much what happened to her. Also another reason she's so quiet and meek is because she's the only woman in a crew full of cis men. She has nobody to talk to or relate to in terms of being a woman. Yeah, Curly and Daisuke are nice, but Daisuke is a kid and Curly is sweet, but a clueless white, cis, probably straight man who hasn't the slightest idea of women's struggles. And no offense to Swansea, but he's not who most people would go to first with their struggles. This isolates Anya and makes her an easier target for Jimmy. I'd love to dig deeper into her psych, but I have a feeling that the writers kept her character development to a minimum because you play as Jimmy and Jimmy doesn't see her as a person.

[agaricgarlic]

Trans people are not holding back the LGBT+ community

LGB or LGB ✂️ T (sometimes LG) individuals are convinced that Trans individuals are the reason cishets aren't welcoming queer people with open arms, so I'm just going to go over a few points.

1) "Trans people shouldn't even be apart of the LGB community. Its not a sexuality."

Trans people and gay people have always been grouped together because cishets have a track record of grouping non conforming people together into groups. Not to mention the rights you appreciate and are claiming Trans people are ripping away from you are LARGELY due to the role Trans and GNC played in fighting for LGBT+ rights. People use any excuse to support their hate. When gay marriage was first being legalized hets were claiming that it would lead to animal and child marriage. That's what they equated gay marriage to, something vile and abusive. Obviously it didn't but people will use the excuse of "weird trans people" as an excuse to be bigoted towards other parts of the LGBT+.

2) "Trans people are holding us back. Just be normal."

Trans people are lacking in rights because of homophobia (and literal feminine/masculine black/white thinking amongst other things ofc). A quick look into Transvestigator territory will explain what I mean. Something these people will constantly claim is that "every celebrity is trans and is thereby being used to make everyone gay." The reason why this is a problem is because being gay = bad.

For a straight man to be attracted to Megan Fox (a victim of Transvestigators) that man would suddenly be gay. When these people realize that sexuality is not just genitals (because we aren't just floating privates) they tend to get uncomfortable with the possibility of their orientation getting called into question. Cishet men that are violent towards trans women are a great example of this. Their fear? That they'd be called or would actually be considered gay for being with or attracted to a trans woman, sometimes tragically ending in violence so that this Cishet man is no longer under the "weak" and "emasculating" term 'gay.'

3) "They just don't want it pushed down their throats!"

Oh, like how having a lesbian in toy story was pushing it down their throats and indoctrinating their children to be gay? Like how having a gay couple in a commercial is pushing it down their throats? Like how PRIDE is pushing it down their throats? To these homophobes not being closeted is "pushing it down their throats."

The same arguments that these people are using have been or constantly are being used against them. The term "I don't care what you do in your bedroom" is Hets telling queer people that showing a gay couple showing affection outside of their bedroom is inappropriate and sexual, not just a form of endearment. Basically, being gay is a kink. In fact, since these people view being gay as a kink and not just a same gendered couple doing practically everything a straight couple does (spoiler alert they're almost identical) they find the term 'gay child" to be grooming and inappropriate. Same as "trans child" is grooming and inappropriate because they view being trans or talking about trans issues as a way to yap about genitals all day long.

4) "No one should be forced to be attracted to trans people!"

You're right, and no one (except a few chronically online individuals) believe that anyone should be forced to be something they're not. Whether that's forcing someone to be cis, straight, or attracted to a trans person.

Trans people are hyper aware of what they look like and a lot of trans people are uncomfortable being in binary spaces Pre-HRT or even Mid HRT/transitioning because they know they may not visually match the target demographic and may cause confusion. Trans people constantly put their own comfort aside for cis people. Not many "non passing" trans people are rushing onto gay dating apps to force gay ppl to be attracted to them. However plenty of trans people have gay partners that love and are attracted to them or interested in hooking up with them even if you aren't.

Also trans people arent unloveable and unwelcome in binary spaces. In fact it will always make more sense for a trans person to be placed in the spaces their gender aligns with to avoid confusion. A gay trans man that goes to a "straight blind dating party" and places himself in women's section would cause confusion and discomfort for his Cishet straight guy partner sitting across from him. The truth is that a person that's attracted to a man will be much more likely to be attracted to a trans man. A straight man probably won't be into someone that isn't feminine, has a bunch of secondary male characteristics, has a lot of facial hair, and reads as male regardless of what assumed genitals the trans man has(if that trans man even WANTS to use those parts sexually). And no not every trans person is a gay persons type but plenty of gay men are attracted to trans men and plenty of lesbians are attracted to women. And attraction isn't the standard to be RESPECTED.

Okay I'm all done.

I only did minimum proof reading and this is kinda a rant post so it's not perfect but I think I got my point across. Also the LGB(LG) community it a small but loud minority. You're more likely to be accepted by a gay person than a Cishet person if you're trans and vice versa. The LGBT community is the ones that will have your back in the end and fight for your rights.

[prettycottonmouthlamia]

I'm going to be honest here it is a little bit hard to really buy the arguments of individuals who seem to think that transmisogyny is like. A tumblr fad. You do realize the term is quite old? Like it's 17 years old. It actually has a strong base in feminism and, you know, works within an intersectional framework. Transmisogyny as the exploration of the intersection of transphobia and misogyny is important!

You can't alter the term though and have it retain its intersectional meaning. Cismisogyny is inherently extremely silly. It sounds like something a TERF would make up. There is no systematic oppression of cis people. You also can't change misogyny in the same way because...well men aren't oppressed for being men. You would have to redefine the entire word into meaning something it doesn't, which is a problem when the term itself comes as a reaction to discussions of transmisogyny.

I say "reaction" neutrally here. I think we make assumptions sometimes about terms and assume their strongest meanings. Seeing "transmisogyny" and understanding that your own experiences differ in a unique way is an important part of discussions. This is almost certainly how the concept of biphobia and transmisogyny were born.

The lack of mirroring in any other conversation is also a bit of a red flag to me. When we talk about homophobia, we don't tend to mention homomisogyny, but that is primarily what lesbophobia is (although I would also argue it covers bisexual women too). Lesbians and bisexual women experience both homophobia, for being interested in the same sex/gender and misogyny, from being women. Gay men, then, don't get to claim that homoandrophobia exists. While there are specific experiences unique to gay men, they are not being discriminated against due to being men. Rather, it is from the framework in which men are judged for not meeting the idealized masculine framework: the white supremacist, sexist framework.

And yet. This isn't necessarily a disqualifier from male privilege. History has born this one out for the queer community, and it has taken multiple decades of trying to make things right in order to change it. Let's look at a really quick and easy example to prove this point.

Take a look at the list of queer Congressmen and women and see how many of them are men. It's a bit overwhelming! Now keep in mind this doesn't necessarily mean any of them are bad people, and I imagine a lot of them aren't. You do not need to be a bad person to benefit from male privilege.

Now you can point out that there are far, far fewer queer members of Congress than there are straight ones, and I entirely agree. We're still dealing with institutions, and people, that are homophobic. But the pattern is still there.

(And, also, an overwhelming number of these people are white. This is kind of obvious and I haven't really seen queer people who actually care about social justice ever state this was a phenomenon that didn't happen.)

It takes real effort to prevent this, btw. A lot of people are subconsciously sexist and misogynist even if they would insist otherwise. It's taken decades of advocacy to have more queer women in higher level positions in organizations and media. This is why saying there is androphobia in the queer community is deeply silly. There's no proof! Everything points rather directly to the opposite being true. There's a very strong bias towards, rather than against, masculinity.

Now, moving back to transmisogyny for a moment, it is worth noting here that transmisogyny does have to have people it doesn't cover. Misogynoir, for example, doesn't really cover white people. Why would it? Likewise, while men can experience misogyny, it is usually very silly to say they are the targets of misogyny. Misogyny is many cases for men is more of a deterrent than a form of oppression. It's to keep men in the fold, to keep men and women as distinct, separate categories.

If the targets for transmisogyny are all trans people...this creates some issues. What then separates it from transphobia? This isn't even particularly radical. But where I think the problem lies (outside of clumsy wording of TMA and TME) is in this.

The world is not split up between oppressed people, and oppressors, on an individual level.

What do I mean by that? Oppression isn't a passive thing. It's a result of systematic incentives and forces. In a very simple way of looking at it, oppression is the harmful implementation of power against those who do not have it. Ultimately, no one is immune to this. You can get power, and willingly use it to hurt others and keep them down. But you can also do this unwittingly. But this also means that not everyone is an oppressor. Not everyone has this power to wield over others. I want to look at this article briefly (Fair Warning: I cannot get 12ft to actually work here so I am not sure how exactly to bypass the pay wall, my apologies.)

This article isn't necessarily super substantial (it is meant to be a very cursory look after all) so the example given here is very basic. But I want to point out the obvious here. In the example, this is not a trans man in the oppressor role. Rather, it is to highlight how transphobia can and often is experienced differently, and let's be entirely honest with ourselves here, often much more intensely for trans women.

I've seen people claim this isn't actually true, which is kind of fucking wild because being someone who is around and doesn't have the memory of a goldfish, I remember when the bathroom panic started. It started, pretty much in its entirety, as a response against the idea of trans women being in women's bathroom. This was so strongly the point of the reactionary drivel that a lot of trans men rightly pointed out that the argument being as one-sided as it was actually meant there would be more masculine people in the women's bathrooms.

It was so overwhelmingly only about trans women that trans men pointed out the implications were very funny in a very stupid way. This wasn't that long ago!

Ultimately, and I want to point out this was pretty much what Serrano was talking about in that article that got spread around, not being the target of transmisogyny doesn't in turn make you an oppressor. Oppressors need power, and that power is not always given to trans men, which brings up a final question.

Can trans men benefit from male privilege?

Uh.

Yeah.

Obviously. To insist otherwise would be to insist they aren't men.

Privilege, when wielded, can in fact be a form of power. It's very easy to do this unwittingly.

Let's talk a trans man and a trans woman for a moment, and put their lives next to each other. Let's assume all factors are equal here: they're both white, they're both from middle class families, they're both straight, neither of them are disabled. Both of them also pass (I'm not going to go into the concept of "passing privilege" here, which is a silly term for a different concept entirely), so while moving through their lives, they exist as both a man and a woman.

All things are equal here. Who, ultimately, do you think has the better access to jobs? Who gets paid more? Whose opinion gets treated more seriously? The man. Obviously.

Now, of course, the real world is WAY more complicated by this. That's the point of intersectionality, the way in which different axises of oppression and privilege interact with each other. The fact that a wealthy woman might have more privilege than a homeless man does not make misogyny fake or unreal. Intersectionality does not contradict the core premise of the oppression.

Now, for the sake of fairness, let's reintroduce transphobia back into the picture. This makes the waters murky, but there are trends to look at. The issue here is, obviously, that a trans man's access to male privilege is extremely conditional, I would say more conditional than basically any other group of oppressed man, and even when those conditions are met, like other groups of oppressed men, they often benefit from male privilege less than cis men. This is because the ideal man is not a trans person, it's a cis person. Much as it is not a black person, it's a white person.

Trans women do not get this. At all. This is a really important point to make. Transphobes do not see trans women as misguided men. Once you make the choice of becoming a trans woman, it's very rare to get brought back into the group. Detransitioning does not solve the issue. Transphobes view trans women, even while they are calling us men, as inferior to men. We are less then men. The act itself is so transgressive that there is no penance. The solution is to get rid of us. This is why so many TERFs are blatantly genocidal. This is why teaming up with men to kill us doesn't bother them.

Now, this isn't to say that trans men are given much of a chance at penance. Violence is also a tool used against trans men, as it is still against gay men. For many people, although thankfully a lot less than there used to be, sleeping with a man is also an act so transgressive the only solution was violence. The point is to show that trans women are in a double bind. Becoming women disqualifies us from male privilege, makes us acutely vulnerable to misogyny, and we are almost never able to escape that.

This is all ultimately why transandrophobia bothers me as much as it does. As a term, it stands in blatant disregard of a lot of feminist thought, including intersectional feminist thought, and here's the thing.

I, like Serrano, believe that trans men do experience transphobia in a way that is different to trans women, and not necessarily in a strictly easier way. There is a need for language here. But the idea that trans women cannot ultimately criticize the choices made here is a bad faith argument. It's very bad faith. There are trans women who ultimately wash away this need in its entirety, and I strongly disagree with them, but to act as if good faith criticisms of the feminist framework of your choice is an attack is bad as well.

Transemasculation is one of the options I've seen that I actually quite like. I think it gets down to the core root of the issue very well. There can be others, obviously.

What I worry about is that the rhetoric I've seen is...really quite bad a lot of the time. I have my own criticisms of TMA and TME, but they come down to the terminology used. I don't have criticisms of the structure. For transmisogyny to exist, there must also exist those who are and are not the targets of it, just like anything else. I've seen a lot of criticisms of the structure, which has its own implication: that transmisogyny doesn't really exist.

If you believe that, but then also talk about transandrophobia, then I don't have nice words to say about you. You can stand, ultimately, in direct opposite to history and to like the majority of established feminist thought if you want, but I don't know if I want to be around you.

History never repeats, but it often does rhyme, and my prediction here is that ultimately, trans men, if nothing is done, will ultimately end up favored and privileged. The thing is that a lot of work has been done to prevent that. Serrano did not destroy the trans movement by coining transmisogyny; again she did that back in 2007. It is ultimately the responsibility of us all to make sure not to repeat the mistakes of the past. Trans men need to work to make spaces inclusive of trans women. White trans people need to work to make spaces inclusive for black trans people.

(BTW: White trans men who are making a big row about white trans women. I see you. You ain't slick.)

This can be hard work, sometimes, but we have literal decades of work to fall back on. Wealthy trans men helped to push for greater access to transition healthcare for everyone.

None of us are immune when given access to privilege and power from becoming an oppressor, but likewise, nothing disqualifies us from choosing to instead do the right thing.

[mermaidsirennikita]

As always, I'm hesitant to discuss Bton, but I find this Variety article on toxic fandoms influencing creative decision-making so concerning on a creative level... And the fact that Michaela/Bton is name-dropped and included in the image collage attached is so...

Because it's easy to blame racist, homophobic white fanboys for most of the backlash to the inclusion of people of color and the LGBTQ+ community in conventionally cishet white-centric fiction. I think that probably, the biggest and loudest voices often are cishet white guys, right? The Acolyte comes to mind.

And I do think there's something to be said about media that targets women being treated as something you MUST alter significantly during adaptation to "appeal to a wider audience" (men), whereas there's more of a demand to be faithful to media directed towards men, or to at least incorporate highly anticipated arcs, scenes, into the final product. I grew up with the constant litany of "your girly thing that's being adapted must be changed to appeal to a wider audience". However, again... that audience... was primarily male. And we are accommodating men when we say "Maybe Galadriel shouldn't pick up a sword after all".

BUT. We aren't only accommodating men, and the Michaela storyline is a prime example.

Bton is a show that has a male audience, sure. But we've seen so many thinkpieces, which aren't incorrect, about the power of the female audience for that show. And on a related note, the power of a romance audience that is primarily driven by women.

Except... it seems that the women most often listened in both spaces are white cis women who want to watch a man and a woman OR PERHAPS TWO MEN fall in love. Because I don't think this article just pulled Michaela as an example out of thin air and angry redditors (many of whom, I must say, have been truly disgusting). The article has anonymous insiders giving information. I would not be surprised at all if at least one of those insiders was from the Bton team.

I've said before that while I don't like the show at this point, I think there's a lot of positive things this show could do with Michaela and Fran, both on a social level and a creative level. And I TRULY don't get why people are up in arms about this either way—I don't think the intro was done in a way that forecasts like... great sensitivity, but I'm also at this point so done with the show's choices that I could just be counting my critiques before they hatch. (And truly, how critical can I get if I'm too checked out, etc., I'm aware of some hypocrisy there.)

But at the end of the day, the show has never been a very faithful adaptation, and I'm not talking about the diverse casting. If Michaela had been Michael, you would have had a lot of changes to the plot anyway.

The thing is... if the show listens to a bunch of fans who hate that "Michael" is a Black woman, they're going to downplay the Fran and Michaela story. The series has one CONFIRMED season left. I would be kind of surprised if they didn't get a renewal for more? But maybe not. That season will not be out until 2026. It won't be about Michaela and Fran, at least not at the forefront. And like... what would it say if the show made this big shift to provide LGBT+ rep, in the form of a sapphic interracial relationship at that, and then... gave them a subplot romance.

And again, maybe I'm counting my critiques before they hatch. I can say that some things I saw online circulating about Michaela's casting made me think that she would have a more significant role than "supporting B-plot love interest". And when I see articles like this, I would hope that the response to fan backlash would be "fuck them" and not "oh, let's give the people some rep, but not TOO much rep".

Look—for all my misgivings about how that plot was introduced, I hope Fran and Michaela get a center stage season, and I hope it blows all the rest of them out of the water, and I hope they get to be on posters as a romantic couple and merch, and I hope they get someone to rewrite WHWW so that people who see themselves in that story onscreen can read something that ACTUALLY reflects it.

(And if the show doesn't, I hope they refer people to some of the actual sapphic historical romance novels on the market right now. I know that's pie in the sky, but I'm just putting it out there.)

Most of all, I hope the show's team protects Masali in a way they didn't protect Ruby Barker, or even Rege-Jean Page.

(Ya haven't seen much of an effort to combat the issue yet, a la the way Amazon addressed the ROP issue, and it's been LOUD already.)

I guess it's just articles like these COMBINED with what I'm seeing not only in Bton but in shows across the board that concern me. It would be horrible to think that something was or is in the works, and gets downplayed because of backlash from people who just neeeeeeded to see a fictional character.

Especially when we're in the age of Another White Heathcliff in 2024 and "Dorian and Basil are brothers, actually". It feels like we're going backwards, and it feels like that storyline is going to be a statement from Netflix whether they like it or not. What are they going to do on their Big Romance Show?