#I would consider this transmisogyny

[psychoticallytrans]

I do wish that "oppositional sexism" was a more commonly known term. It was coined as part of transmisogyny theory, and is defined as the belief that men and women, are distinct, non-overlapping categories that do not share any traits. If gender was a venn diagram, people who believe in oppositional sexism think that "men" and "women" are separate circles that never touch.

The reason I think that it's a useful term is that it helps a lot with articulating exactly why a lot of transphobic people will call a cis man a girl for wearing nail polish, then turn around and call a trans woman a man. Both of those are enforcement of man and woman as non-overlapping social categories. It's also a huge part of homophobia, with many homophobes considering gay people to no longer really belong to their gender because they aren't performing it to their satisfaction.

It's a large part of the reason behind arguments that men and women can't understand each other or be friends, and/or that either men or women are monoliths. If men and women have nothing in common at all, it would be difficult for them to understand each other, and if all men are alike or all women are alike, then it makes sense to treat them all the same. Enforcing this rift is particularly miserable for women and men in close relationships with each other, but is often continued on the basis that "If I'm not a real man/woman, they won't love me anymore."

One common "progressive" form of oppositional sexism is an idea often put as the "divine feminine", that women are special in a way that men will never understand. It's meant to uplift women, but does so in ways that reinforce the idea that men and women are fundamentally different in ways that can never be reconciled or transcended. There's a reason this rhetoric is hugely popular among both tradwifes and radical feminists. It argues that there is something about women that men will never have or know, which is appealing when you are trying to define womanhood in a way that means no man is or ever has been a part of it.

You'll notice that nonbinary people are sharply excluded from the definition. This doesn't mean it doesn't apply to them, it means that oppositional sexism doesn't believe nonbinary people of any kind exist. It's especially rough on multigender people who are both men and women, because the whole idea of it is that men and women are two circles that don't overlap. The idea of them overlapping in one person is fundamentally rejected.

I think it's a very useful term for talking about a lot of the problems that a lot of queer people face when it comes to trying to carve out a place for ourselves in a society that views any deviation from rigid, binary categories as a failure to perform them correctly.

[punishedgwyndolin]

honestly I think that the core of a lot of issues of transmisogyny and bioessentialism that you see with tme trans people exists solely because they do not want to see transfems as equally valid victims of gendered oppressions whom they have gendered power over, because doing so would require them to unlearn ideas of sex-based oppression rather than talk around them and be quiet. a lot of trans guys and nonbinary people just never grew past this, still happily talking about how they still experience misogyny due to “being a female” and never bothered trying to consider transfems in their analysis and it’s a problem. people act like they have to believe in this bullshit or pretend that they never faced misogyny or oppression growing up, and it’s a bullshit false dichotomy that only serves transmisogyny. seriously, open almost any post talking about transmasc issues and you’ll see a guy talking about himself and others as female or otherwise utilizing the language of sex based oppression, unaware or uncaring of how it implicitly erases the misogyny transfems are subject to.

a large majority of transmisogyny from tme trans people is either stemming from this frustration that they have to respect trans women’s experiences with misogyny despite lacking the female birth assignment they view as critical, or a post-hoc justification of these views, they don’t really believe trans women are men or access male power, but instead “just find it important to talk about uniquely female issues and misogyny”, which, yknow, always include things trans women also experience, but try telling that to the implications they make

[canideformed]

This is a false equivalency.

The term for somebody who is transfem and who is oppressed for being transfem—is transfem. Intersex people are intersex. Transfem people are transfem. Perisex people are not intersex. Non-transfem people are not transfem.

TMA/TME is more closely equivalent to if I said IA/IE (intersexism applicable/intersexism exempt).

The reason TMA/TME is problematic is because it fails to acknowledge that non-transfem people can be impacted my transmisogyny—the same way perisex transfems can be impacted by intersexism. And also because it completely ignores the existence of the oppression transmascs experience, categorising them in with their oppressors. The TMA/TME binary is problematic because it collapses complex interplays of oppression into one binary system.

If you want a word for somebody who is transfem and impacted by transfem oppression in the way somebody who is transfem would be? The term is transfem.

“Transfems really are the only people who can’t have terms for their own oppression” I have a question. How do you feel about the term “transandrophobia?” How would you feel about the terms “TAA” and “TAE” (transandrophobia applicable and transandrophobia exempt)? If you’re okay with those terms, I’ll eat my words (somehwhat, it’s still weird, but at least you’re okay with it across the board). If you’re not—why? Do you think trans men don’t experience specific oppression? Is your issue just with who coined it? How do you feel about the term transemasculinisation? Anti-transmasculinity? Please consider why you think it’s okay to restrict the language transmascs use to describe their oppression.

Further, why not make it TMNA/TMNE (transmisogynoir applicable and transmisogynoir exempt)? Black trans women absolutely face the highest rates of assault (assuming black trans men aren’t being erased in the statistics, which is a big assumption). If you’re talking about systems of oppression… why not consider the most impactful axes? Why only consider the axis of man/woman? Consider what this says about the proximity of your theory to radical feminism.

[xenosagaepisodeone]

this is just my perspective as a tme person observing the ongoing discourse on the dashboard but when I read someone attempt to conflate transmisogyny as something that "technically" does not just effect trans women, therefore permitting other groups to lay claim to being victims of it and weaving their experiences into our conceptualization of it, I find myself remembering how trans women were conceived of by wider culture prior to maybe 2011. "dead trans sex worker" was a punchline to a joke. you could tune in to the comedy network during daytime hours and hear a standup comedian rattle off a bit about it. you would see it all over tv and in movies, and not a single actor bleating about it registered that they were talking about a human being. and its not like the bit had come out of nowhere, the regimented ostracization inflicted upon these women, relegating them to survival sex workers whose assault, abuse and deaths were horrifically common, baked them into a cohesive underclass that polite society was both aware of and amused by. systematized unpersoning in its most literal form. is it not cruel to then dilute a term used to describe (and therefore understand and protest) a form of mistreatment that others consider either self-justified or nonexistent (assuming that they ever cared to wonder about the experiences these women have to endure at all)? who are you helping by decentering the intended victims of this abuse? (<- rhetorical question)

[veryvocallyadmired]

a common, rather mind-numbing take i see among trans women who hold nominally transfeminist positions, but in practice disavow any real transfeminist beliefs, action, or comminity, is that the women complaining about transmisogyny in the trans community are somehow arguing that TME trans people broadly pose a greater danger to trans women than cis TME people

it is such an incredibly insidious strawman, preying on the militant separatist narrative

the reason TME trans people are such a predominant topic among transfeminists is because theyre the only group for whom the existence of a community-wide issue of transmisogyny is overwhelmingly denied

it is understood by all except the most bare-faced bigoted reactionaries that cis people stand to gain from the oppression of trans women, their interests in perpetuating transmisogyny are unquestioned

but it is with TME trans people we are told we must have community, that trans liberation is always a rising tide, and it must surely be impossible for them to further their own interests at the expense of ours

and that does make them a distinct threat to trans women

not more dangerous, the workings of patriarchy still grant cis men the greatest ability to leverage violence on a structural level

but the very fact that those we have been lumped into community with have material interest in furthering our oppression needs to be distinctly considered

i dont think ive ever met a trans woman who Hasn't had a TME trans person leverage the idea of community and equivalent oppression as a weapon to abuse and exploit them

i can only speak to my experience, but i have gone through years of heartbreak over the fact that so much of the trans community benefits from making itself unsafe to me and other girls like me, i would love to share community with TME trans people

the few i have met that recognize the privilege they have over trans women have been wonderful and deeply fulfilling relationships, and it does far more to sow division to claim this danger and privilege doesnt exist than to call attention to it

[lumsel]

When I say the transmisogyny affected/transmisogyny exempt thing is binaristic, I really do mean that literally: there are two options, so it's necessarily a binary. You could say that's a pointless observation, trivially obvious with no value beyond semantics, but there is a reason I bring it up.

Consider the following set of characters:

Cis woman with a beard

Drag queen

Butch transfem who doesn't shave her face

Genderfluid person whose gender presentation and conception of gender varies from day to day

NB who isn't really fem but isn't really masc either

Cis guy who always wears a skirt

Intersex NB

Transfem who goes by he/him

Someone who refuses to give pronouns entirely and exclusively identifies as a "faggot"

Which of these people are TMA, and which are TME? You could invent an arbitrary grouping that would sort them into one box or the other, but it would be just that-- arbitrary. Each of these characters will have such a different experience of gender and their gender will be percieved so differently that to try and sort them into a mere two categories is just plainly absurd. Even two people who are both in the same dot point here will have wildly divergent experiences with transmisogyny!! No matter how you arrange it, the terms TME and TMA will miss so many nuances of each person's experience that they fail to have any explanatory power at all. Zero utility in actually telling you anything about these people and their lives.

And this is why I use "binaristic" specifically as a criticism. The world is not binary! Nothing on this Earth is so simple as to have only two possible designations that can adequately describe them. Trying to cram human beings into neat categories always ends up flattening down people's lived experiences into easily digestible narratives instead of actually working to describe the world accurately. To quote that one post, "nice dichotomy idiot, what lies outside it?"

[tinkerbitch69]

You know, looking back it’s absolutely fucking bizarre that my old nominally queer friend group full of rampant transmisogynists who claimed to be ‘progressive’ and ‘accepting’ would continue to hang out with and put on a show of being ‘friends’ with a right wing cis guy who regularly ran rhetorical defense for literal fascism, biological gender essentialism and openly professed how much he loved ayn rand and objectivism despite every single one of them privately admitting they fucking hated the guy, yet regularly went out of their way to avoid spending time with me, a trans woman, as much as possible, regularly dismissed my concerns and opinions (particularly when I said something along the lines of “hey guys why don’t we just tell him to fuck off”) and the second I got angry at being shown zero support or consideration in this friend group, I was kicked out and socially shunned almost immediately with no grace shown, all the while they continued to placate and play nice around said reactionary cis guy and not a single one of them considered “hey maybe our actions and choices of association aren’t really holding up to our professed values”

Or it would be but this is generally just your average self awareness, reflection and general baseline cognizance of transmisogyny in most queer circles. End result of ‘cis guys are indicators of a healthy queer space’ in action.

[thefantastickatinator]

Dropout should hire more trans women.

That said, a couple things about the data set floating around showing disproportionality in casting:

1. 7 of the top 9 (those cast members who appear in over 100 episodes, everyone else has under 70 appearances) are members of the core dimension 20 cast, aka “the intrepid heroes”. This cast has been in 7 of the 22 seasons, with those seasons usually being 20-ish episodes long (the other seasons are between 4-10 episodes long typically). That’s approximately 140 episodes for each of the main intrepid heroes cast members just for these seasons (not including bonus content like live shows). Brian Murphy has appeared 154 times, which means almost all of his appearances were on D20 intrepid heroes campaigns.

2. The other 2 in the top 9 are Sam Reich and Mike Trapp, who are both hosts of long running shows (Game Changer and Um, Actually)

3. 198 of the 317 episodes that noncis “TME” people have appeared in can be attributed to ally Beardsley alone (there is some crossover where for example alex and ally have both appeared in the same episodes). Erika ishii has been in 67 of the 317 noncis “TME” episode appearances i don’t know how much crossover there is between them but i don’t think they’ve been on d20 together so i doubt it’s more than 20. It could be as many as 250 of the 317 episodes that have either erica or ally. Both Erika and ally are majorly skewing the results for the data

4. Over 3/4 of people have no listed gender identity in the spreadsheet - most of them have 1-2 appearances, but a few have 3-4 appearances. I’m pretty sure these people aren’t included in the data at all (some of them i’m p sure are not cis like jiavani and bob the drag queen)

5. The data collector has assigned “tme” and “tma” to various cast members.

TME: transmisogyny exempt

TMA: transmisogyny affected

Now, tranmisogyny can affect trans women, trans femmes, and nonbinary people, and occasionally masculine appearing cis women.

I personally do not believe that an outside person can assign you a label deciding whether or not you experience certain types of oppression- and yet that is what the data collector has done.

I think a more accurate label would be amab/afab, or more honestly- “people i think are amab or have said they are amab and then everyone else”

6. The data does not include many of their newer shows such as Very Important People, Gastronauts, Play it By Ear, and Monet’s Slumber Party, all of which feature trans people (MSP, Gastronauts, and VIP are all hosted by noncis people)

What I think the data more accurately shows:

- Dimension 20 has a “main cast” who have appeared in the majority of episodes

- Dropout has some “regulars” who appear on the majority of their content/shows (sam has referenced multiple times that brennan is one of the first people he calls whenever someone can’t show up for something since he’s nearly always down for anything) - none of these people are trans women

Final thoughts:

I think eliminating “hosts” and the “intrepid heroes” from THIS TYPE of data set would be more appropriate because they massively skew the data when crunching the numbers for dropout shows. Especially since I can tell from the excel sheet that there are shows missing. Examining d20 sidequests and the guests on the other shows will give a more accurate representation of casting. Hosts should be analyzed separately as that’s a different casting process.

Also imagine if we referred to men and women as “misogyny exempt” and “misogyny affected” when doing demographics. Or if someone did a data collection of the number of POC appearances in dropout episodes and sorted it by “racism affected” and “racism exempt” - so weiiiiird

TLDR: the data set has massive issues with its methodology and that should be considered. That doesn’t make what trans women are saying less valid.

In other words: spiders brennan is an outlier and should not have been counted

[plaidos]

have you considered that attending a wide scale public queer event (*even if it largely hosts people you wouldn't normally agree or hang out with*) doesn't necessarily mean you agree with or condone everything done there? or even knew getting into it? accusing a large portion of your peers of holding beliefs just because they came into contact with them doesn't help anyone. sometimes people go places. sometimes people read books. that doesn't mean it is a representation of their belief. just another perspective- my auntie went to a lot of those types of events because they were available to her and her wife is a trans woman. they attended together for the majority of them. and yes, there was mistreatment, but they also found some of their best friends there by outspokenly criticizing those beliefs and standing up for themselves.

(sorry if this is a lot to read!!)

i mean, do you know the history of the word terf? do me a favour, look it up. look up what event it was coined to describe. i hope your auntie got over her transmisogyny before marrying that trans woman, and i hope she doesn’t allow her terfs friends to mistreat her either.

some people just “go places” and “read books” but i’ve found it astoundingly easy to not attend hate movement gatherings or shill books that call for the genocide of minorities. if your white auntie “went to KKK meetings” and “read david icke” i would want better proof than “she married a person of color” that she wasn’t a racist. as it turns out, actually, the institution of marriage historically exists to violate gender minorities. like whoever heard of mistreating your wife eh?

it’s fucking crazy how the highest allyship TME can imagine towards trans women is fucking us. how do you not see how despicable what you’re saying is lol.

[catboybiologist]

thanks for your explanation about the roots of transmisogyny and ergo why transandrophia doesnt make sense as a counterpart - found that explanation enlightening.

as a trans man, there’s another piece to the misogyny ive faced that maybe you have thoughts on? since i was raised and treated as a woman for the first two decades of my life, i was often considered less capable or less worthy of awards/promotions/etc just for being a “woman”. now that i pass, i experience male privilege, but underneath that, i still have all the setbacks of 21 years of misogyny (setbacks that my trans sister, for example, never faced. not trying to play oppression olympics here to be clear!). so i have male privilege in the present moment but not the snowball effect that cis men have.

anyway, i appreciate your clear and thoughtful breakdown of how these structures of oppression operate, and am interested in any thoughts you might have on this angle

So yeah, these are thoughts I've grappled with a lot, and honestly get really personal. They're also thoughts that I talk to a lot of cis women about, and is a reason why I think it's important for trans women to have more solidarity with cis women.

Misogyny does affect trans women pre-transition, let's be clear. Vilification of feminity and being branded as "faggotgender" are manifestations of misogyny as well, and trans women will often have this experience. I was, and the series of incidents that I consider my worst interactions with transmisogyny were actually technically pretransiton, when I was questioning and tepidly telling people that.

With that out of the way, that experience is MUCH different than what most transmascs and cis women go through. One compare and contrast I've made with some cis friends is their first experiences with sexualization. I was first nonconsensually approached and followed by a man in public when I was 26 years old. For my cis friends, it was as early as 11.

That does shit to you. That's trauma inducing. I'm not going to deny that it is, because that would be horrifying.

Cis women have also had to deal with exactly what you said: not being taken seriously as a professional for years. Trans women don't necessarily have that until they transition.

The flip side of this, however, is that trans women face misogyny in ways that are far more silent and isolated than cis women.

Alongside their horror stories, my cis friends have also told me of the support: mothers, sisters, friends, community members, older women who protected them, pulled them aside, gave them love and sympathy, attacked the men who targeted them, and gave them advice on how to keep their head up in the face of sexual danger and professional sexism.

Trans women, more often than not, get none of that.

There was no one to defend me or sympathize with me the first time I got sexually assaulted. No one believed me when I noticed people rapidly taking me less seriously after I socially transitioned. No one believed that I was "enough of a woman" to get catcalled.

Slowly, over time, that changed. But it changed because I had open and honest conversations about it with people- and I would say I have a strong network of friends and supporters now, precisely because I've engaged with the different ways this has affected us.

It's all a balance. I'm not doing anything oppression Olympics here, and neither are you! These are important experiences to compare and contrast. In fact, let's take that lack of support I mentioned: the first people I started getting support from, were the same cis women telling me those sorties. Breaking down the barriers, talking openly about how to navigate a misogynist world, and restating that yes, the force we're feeling is misogyny is a super important thing to bring into your day to day life.

Bit of a personal pontification and guilt under the cut.

This cuts at a bit of guilt I've been feeling recently.

I graduated high school as a man.

I got admitted to my undergrad as a man, and started research there as a man.

I got my Bachelor's of Science as a man.

I got my first Masters of Science as a man.

I was admitted to a PhD program as a man.

I transitioned.

I dropped out as a woman.

I've felt a lot of complicated feelings of failure and guilt around this. They're deeply rooted to other parts of my life too personal to talk about on tumblr. But... Yeah. This is all part of it. And yeah, I do see how I was propped up in the past, and how much of that I've lost.

Along the way, I had a lot of silent oppression as well. But I still don't talk about those, and to the world, it still looks like I became a woman and immediately crumpled. What kind of message does that send?

Idk. I know this is dumb. But yeah. Shit sucks.

[velvetvexations]

One thing that's personally very isolating about the way a lot of things have been sectioned off as exclusive transfem experiences is that I've always very much related to the trauma of being presumed a sexual threat by just existing but I cant express my solidarity with that pain without being accused of valor stealing transmisogyny.

I'm a ~boring~ binary trans man who's predominantly attracted to women. When I was a quite young teenager, younger than 15 I got outed as a "lesbian" in a deeply Christian and homophobic environment and I was immediately reclassified from "tomboyish young girl" to "dangerous masculine sexual deviant". I was considered a threat to the girls in my class I had to be "supervised" in the changing rooms because my teachers assumed I would assault my classmates I avoided using the bathroom at school because girls would accuse me of being in there to leer at or grope them. I was physically assaulted by other students repeatedly because they assumed I was a rapist in waiting. I was a child.

And that was just the stuff *in school*. I'm in my 20s now and still fucked up by this. I'm terrified to express attraction to women, I don't pass at all and likely never will but I use the men's bathroom even when it's unsafe because I'm terrified of being "caught" in the vicinity of a slightly undressed woman. I am constantly trying to make myself smaller. Appear safer. Lest I be an aggressive scary dyke. And it doesn't even work half the time.

So when I see big popular transfems talking about how the tmes can't possibly understand what it's really like to be assumed a predatory deviant because we're safely invisible, when they're backed up by transmascs who've never considered that our experiences aren't a monoith. When cis and trans lesbians talk like there's a hard, thick line between how society sees them Vs me. I feel very alone and empty. And I don't want to speak up, because I'm used to being treated as an aggressor.

Speaking up is important, anon, and I'm proud of you for sending in.

[lilyveselka]

Genuinely what does that part in your latest post "misgender themselves and claim to be oppressed for their birth sex" mean? Like yes only transfems experience transmisogyny but all trans people are victims of misogyny are they not? This doesn't excuse disgusting behavior from trans men but trans men are oppressed for their birth sex, especially if they're a person of color or too impoverished to afford testosterone or many other factors. I'm trying to disregard my own hurt feelings by that statement and understand here.

Ok, let me clarify this a bit: the claim that transgender men are oppressed on the basis of their assigned sex is incorrect, because for that to be true, sex-based oppression would need to exist. Sex-based oppression is a radfem concept, and not one that really is grounded in material reality. Misogyny operates on the basis of real or perceived gender, not sex. “Woman” is a functional societal class that faces oppression, and all people who fall into that societal class face misogyny (regardless of their assigned sex).

The issue is that society by and large considers "gender" and "sex" to be congruent. Therefore, when someone is assigned female at birth and raised as a girl, they will be automatically considered a "woman" and treated accordingly as a member of that class. When a transmasculine person is out of the closet, they may still be incorrectly or maliciously categorized as a "woman" by the people around them, and once again treated accordingly.

I completely agree that, because of this, transgender men can and do face misogyny, and can speak with more authority on the subject than the average cisgender man. However, they do not have more authority on the subject than transgender women - because trans women are women, belong to the societal class of "woman," and are perfectly well equipped to discuss the subject.

The issue that I'm referencing here arises when certain transmascs believe that their misogynistic oppression is in some way "more legitimate" than the misogyny faced by transfems, because of their assigned sex at birth. Not all trans men believe this, or uphold this - but it's a claim that I've seen come up multiple times, particularly in circles that are already hotbeds for transmisogyny.

Most frequently, it gets peddled out when a trans woman accuses a trans man of directing misogyny towards her, and he claims that he can't be misogynistic because he was "raised as a girl." The double implication is, first, that he is an authority on misogyny and in fact a greater authority than the transgender woman, and, second, that the woman herself is lacking in authority specifically because she was "raised male." In this way, he actually manages to uphold TERF-adjacent bioessentialist "feminism," and weaponizes it against the transfem in an effort to get her to stop criticizing him.

[plaidos]

when TME people dismiss transmisogyny theory & transfeminism as “petty infighting in the trans community” they are framing it this way because our points are true! if they disagreed with our analysis of data (that transfems are more likely to be homeless, less likely to get job opportunities, paid less, experience greater levels of violence than transmascs, experience greater housing insecurity etc) then they would say as much, or seek data to prove the reverse is actually true — but they don’t do that, they dismiss the relative privilege gap within the trans community & transmisogynistic discrimination as auxiliary to the “main problem” which is trans people being treated as different to cis people.

so the argument being made here is “we can care about misogynistic attitudes in the trans community when transmascs have full access to male privilege” which i think is pretty obviously bunk, antifeminist, transmisogynistic nonsense when you consider it for a second; this is a desire for the relationship between transmascs and transfems to mirror the relationship between cis men and cis women in society (ignoring the fact that this is already the unbalanced relationship between our two groups).

“that’s just petty infighting” is basically a way of saying “i know the data says that trans women are treated worse, but i don’t care, you have to deal with that, and if you complain, you’re the one tearing the trans community apart, not me”.