#I would consider this transmisogyny

[edwardallenpoe]

man I sure do hope people who say that trans people don't have to present hyper-binary or be passable are normal about masc/butch trans people, including trans women who don't want surgeries or hrt or use she/her pronouns. Man I sure do hope they don't just mean femme trans men and exclude trans women and nonbinary masculine people. Man I sure do hope that they aren't super fucking weird about masculinity, especially when performed by trans women.

[bunnyboy-juice]

spent the first hour and change at work deleting some old files and am having a grand ol time laughing at myself for not realizing i was a lesbian sooner

[jade-curtiss]

It's quite a red flag when I see people on here consider tme and afab as interchangeable terms, especially if the person is tme, because not only it take away the biggest ratio of people to whom it applies which also turn out to be (arguably almost) every men, but also...what is the point to make it all about yourselves as if it was an oppression competition? To what extend do these people have to go to make sure everything in life must be about themselves and their own personal identity crisis?

[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.

[unlimitedbutchworks]

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

[euniexenoblade]

The Rocky Horror discourse is so annoying, upsetting, and transmisogynistic cuz it often starts off as trans women just honestly discussing how they have trauma related to it or how the film has all the classic transmisogynistic tropes of killer/rapist man crossdressing or how the creator has said some bigoted stuff, and the tme response to personal stories of trauma and actual media analysis is always the same cycle of responses.

"MY trans women friends love it!" Ok that doesn't matter to the point "It's important queer history!" That's why this discussion matters, we need people to understand that queer history can also be transmisogynistic "it's from 50 years ago society is DIFFERENT!" The world is not so different that transmisogyny doesn't exist "the creator is trans!" The creator has said transmisogynistic things and just because he himself might be tma doesn't mean he can't be transmisogynistic or that his transmisogyny doesn't actually influence his identity. "Rocky Horror is ONLY popular cuz transfems love it!" Spacelazar said this one in response to a post I made about actual trauma I have related to the movie, completely discarding my actual real trauma that's not saying you're not allowed to like or watch the movie, to claim that Rocky Horror is only popular cuz of transfems - that cis society isn't more why it's considered a cult classic.

And, tme people just refuse to empathize and often resort to name calling, memes, often times not just falling into misogynistic standards (hysterical women/trannies amiright guys) but also racist remarks (I saw a white tme person make a "woke" joke to mock a black person).

It's just completely dishonest and transmisogynistic. The discussion isn't "you're not allowed to watch Rocky Horror" or "you're a bad person for enjoying it" it's that it's a piece of problematic media that exhibits transmisogynistic bigotry and instead of using their big kid brains and acknowledging that and moving on, tme people really need Rocky Horror to be exonerated as this piece of perfection. (Tbf I think it's largely just cuz it's trans women having an issue, if cis men said Rocky Horror was offensive and misandric I'm sure people would be like oh yeah it is!).

[lttleghost]

also I just have to say as a transmasculine person myself - I feel like other guys not being able to relate to their favs if they are interpreted as transfem instead of transmasc, espec in regards to characters who have that coercive and harmful relationship with manhood, are suffering from a skill issue

it's not like you're being asked to sacrifice every connection with a character you have to interpret her as transfem... unless the only thing you clung to was your transmasc headcanon, in which case do you actually even like the character? like it's really hard for me to see how ppl who bring up "relating" doesn't have a connection to fandom misogyny and transmisogyny, like it's a similar reason ppl bring up not having female favs in general as well

"Most popular transmasc headcanons would be more character accurate as transfem headcanons" ok but I think part of this is just what is personally relatable to you! I do agree on Dave though because davepeta rlly makes a lot more sense if not being obligated to masculinity is freeing to Dave. I feel like if Dave was transmasc being fused with a cat girl wouldn't be so gender for him

i mean yeah part of it is based on what is personally relatable to each person, but if you think that fandom doesn’t prefer men & masculinity over women & femininity in a misogynistic (and this case transmisogynistic) manner then your brain is cooked i’m afraid. like there is a massive massive trend of transmascs on this website taking a character whose whole thing is rejecting the masculine identity they were forced into and rejecting maleness, and then saying “he is transmasc and the most liberating thing for this character is for him to be a man”. Jesse Pinkman, Shinji, Peter Parker, Dean Winchester - these are all characters who would be objectively happier if they didn’t have to live up to the masculine archetypes they’re forcing themselves into. this isn’t a matter of “different strokes” so much as it is “i choose not to see what the story is about bc i want to be the cool male figure, he could be me, a trans guy could be this too!”

[cyprozombiegirl]

Help a trans girl recover from tumblr’s institutional and systematic transmisogyny

hey folks, so tumblr nuked my account (cypro-girl) and deleted most of the posts I had depicting me dilating (aka doing a medical treatment to myself) or talking about the joys of bottom surgery. They left up the photos of me pre bottom surgery hard as a rock though 🤔. Anyways I’ve tracked down and saved as many of my former posts as I could but there are a bunch that might still be circulating, if you find any or have any already on your blog can you please please send them to me?

I suspect, given tumblr under Matt (I miss David) has been infamous for destroying any attempt by trans femmes to think/talk about our own bodies or oppression, and the fact that it had been primarily my posts about bottom surgery that have been removed from the site, that it was this positivity that got my blog (and backup blog) deleted. This is the second time I got nuked, my old blog cyproterone-girl has 23k followers when it got destroyed. I’d just built back up to 10k and thought I was safe cause I was being a lot more cautious. I had zero flagged posts and my blog wasn’t labeled as explicit, so this was tumblr escalating its epistemic violence against me from 0 to 100.

If you could please share this post so new people and past followers can find my new blog I would deeply appreciate it. I’ve appealed the deletion but I highly doubt tumblr will act in good faith and restore it. So for now this is my blog. I’m also sorta considering launching a class action lawsuit against tumblr but we’ll see if I want to devote the time and energy to doing so. I guess that depends on how much more tumblr pissed me off. They even deleted my gf’s main blog (steadfastcr0w) their damn poetry blog. So I’m pretty livid. I lost a passion project of mine, and feel like tumblr is forcing my exhibitionist self into sex work, cause they won’t let me post about my body for free like I want to (and I’ll be damned to hell if I start using reddit or X).

Anyways yeah, please share this!

[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)

[gamer-goo]

The whole thing with considering theyfab like a slur when it is literally punching up reminds me that transmisogyny is like not a serious social pressure to most people.

I’ve seen this in many cases in my life, most notable was a former roommate who would routinely get upset with me for taking issue with her implicit transmisogynist behavior(I distinctly recall her saying I don’t get to decide what is and isn’t transmisogynist but that was part of an entire falling out that I regret my handling of to a certain extent), but you see it in other ways too!!!! People not knowing what the word even means is an example of this, they distort it’s meaning to be something that affects them because then it’s serious, but when it just hurts dolls it’s on a lower level.

I forget who said it, but the example I first saw was that transmisogyny is stored on the same tier of “levels of discrimination that matter” as people thinking furries are weird. And that’s literally true! Transgender women on this website will talk about how deeply transmisogyny affects us in all aspects of life, only to be met with people saying shit like “just log off” “please touch grass” or one of my least favorites “normal people: hey man what’s up” because to them it is just Not Real.

[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

[soup-mother]

Wish ppl would fucking shut up with the "if a place doesn't accept trans women/amab nonbinary ppl then it means they just see trans men/nb's as women!" like yea sometimes but also consider maybe some people actually just fucking hate trans women and will accept other trans ppl but not trans women? transmisogyny exists in trans spaces like fucking cmon. like the ppl saying that shit on the post I just reblogged when it's explicitly about how even other trans and queer ppl, who accept other trans and queer ppl, will still be transmisogynistic. stop fucking trying to make this about you holy fucking shit just shut uuuup. care about the people actually being fucking mistreated and not about how actually transmisogyny is bad because it disrespects you when you really think about it. just fucking shut uuuuup please for the love of fucking god.

"yea i know they called you a male socialised rapist but like can we talk about how that means they see me as a girl???? 😢"

Like i just really fuckin need people to understand that some places just genuinely do respect trans ppl other than trans women. like it's not actually some secret misgendering of you it's actually just transmisogyny!

[katrafiy]

Hiya tumblr! Let's have a talk about bioessentialist enbyphobia, transmisogyny, and how to make sure transfeminine people, enby or not, feel completely unsafe and unwelcome at your events. First take a look at this group description, and then lets get into it.

First some context. Those of you who know me know about the kinds of clubs I go to. This screenshot was taken from a local event page, and I've blocked out their name because in the months since this event was hosted the group has updated their description to be more inclusive.

Seeing that description, I avoided going to events hosted by that group.

"But Kat, why? You're a woman and it says women are allowed!"

It also implicitly lumps all nonbinary people who were assigned male at birth with men and calls them males.

So why is this a problem for me? Well, if this group sees all AMAB nonbinary people as "male" then it says a lot of things about the ways the see trans women.

Many, and I would venture to assume most, trans women know well the feeling of our womanhood treated as conditional, subject to immediate revocation without warning.

Spaces that are "Women and AFAB exclusive" are often rife with this, and often lead to a lot of really gross and abusive power dynamics where transfems get treated as second class to anyone who was assigned female at birth.

(Side note: Gretchen Felker-Martin did, I believe, a masterful job of portraying this sort of dynamic in her book Manhunt)

If you are a trans woman in one of these spaces, you quickly learn that you are on the thinnest of ice.

Laugh a little too loud? You're male.

Sit or stand a little too close? You're threatening.

Smile at the wrong person? You're making other people uncomfortable.

Transfems, in these spaces, quickly learn that standing up for ourselves in the face of flagrant abuse is verboten, and will be met with swift and decisive punishment and exile.

I personally don't like the word "theyfab" and don't use it. I'm writing this thread to hopefully help people better understand the social dynamics that were being addressed when that term was coined.

It was coined because transfems are forced to navigate a community of things like "afab only" apartment rentals.

It was coined because transfems constantly have to listen to other trans people implicitly describe us as disgusting, hideous freaks.

In short and in closing: consider that the reason why the term "theyfab" exists and "theymab" really doesn't probably lies somewhere in the fact that the sort of person who would call someone a "theymab" doesn't need to, because they *already* just call AMAB trans people "male".

[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”.

[taliabhattwrites]

Is "hijra" a slur? Contextualizing South Asian (trans)misogyny

A note on the sheer cultural diversity of the subcontinent

There is no realistic way for me to exhaustively examine the context of every South Asian transfeminized population (though believe me, I’d like to). As such, I’m going to limit my scope to India, but make a quick initial note about Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Pakistani transfeminized communities, according to my partner’s sisters who are in the community, do consider ‘hijra’ more derogatory than their Indian counterparts necessarily do and refer to themselves as part of the ‘khwaja sira’ community.

I have sadly not been able to speak to any transfeminine people from Bangladesh, but I have spoken to cis queers who have told me that they use ‘hijra’ in a manner similar to India.

If there are desi queers from those communities who would like to add their perspectives, please feel free to reblog. And for the South Asian communities I haven't mentioned (such as Sri Lanka), please feel free to add your perspectives too! I'm curious to hear from you all.

Etymology and Usage

‘Hijra’ in its meaning and usage amongst the cis is most similar to the word ‘naamard’ (NAH-murd). The ‘naa’ is prefixal, a negation akin to ‘non’, while ‘mard’ is the word for ‘man’. It is a way of unmanning a man, of calling him lacking in the essential quality of manhood, of labelling him, in spirit if not in body, impotent.

As such, you can see how it’s an implicitly third-sexing construction (even before you account for how these communities are explicitly third-sexed, denied the epistemic autonomy to be recognized as women and now third-sexed by law). When Nanda called them emasculated homosexuals, it was not far off from how Indian culture forcibly categorizes and marginalizes them.

Members of the community have told me about their frustration and anger at being referred to as such, even though the word has now become a term through which they organize the community and sometimes advocate for themselves, a political reality that does not inherently contradict their campaigns to be recognized as women, and allowed to self-ID as such. (Recall, the Indian government currently mandates legal third-sexing of the hijra: they must first obtain a “Trans Certificate” and be documented as a third sex before they initiate the process of being recognized as women—a process that is contingent on subjecting themselves to transmedicalist scrutiny and gatekeeping!)

Others, however, have pointed out to me that the term is undergoing a process of reclamation. The term ‘hijra’ has a certain degree of legibility in Indian society even as it is a pejorative with degendering and dehumanizing connotations. It is being reclaimed intracommunally, but also by allies who speak of them without the usual stigmatizing connotations that cis society has saddled the term with.

Even still, I have also been told that the manner in which cis and especially Western academics use the term in scholarship—and I’m quoting here—"makes me want to tear my skin out". The fictions of “recognized gender role in Indian society” and “oppressed only after colonialism” are further simplifications and fabrications that obfuscate the role South Asian ruling-class collaborators eagerly played in petitioning for those colonial-era laws, and ignore such easily available empirical evidence as the Manusmriti mandating punishments for anyone who sleeps with—ugh—“eunuchs”.

Conclusion

In sum, I’d liken the use of the word “hijra” as analogous to the usage of “queer” in the 90s, as a slur in the contentious, contextual process of being reclaimed. As Aruvi put it to me on Bluesky:

We cannot allow cis people to dictate the discursive and epistemic terms of transfeminine culture. At the same time, the term “hijra” still carries with it heavy baggage due to South Asian transmisogyny as well as the academic misrepresentations and epistemic extractivism that Western scholarship has subjected South Asian transfeminized demographics to.

If you want to know how best to use the term, try to do so without third-sexing, and without promulgating fictive ideas of South Asian cultures being “gender-expansive” and “recognizing more than two genders”. Erasing the marginalization of the hijra is endemic to the way the term is used in the West, and that must absolutely be combatted.

On a final, personal note, I also wish to clearly state that I do not reject the label ‘hijra’ because I consider myself essentially different from them. Many Indian (usually upper-caste) trans women wish to distance themselves from the hijra, as though reproducing our society’s disgust for them will spare them from the same fate. That is not an attitude I share, or wish to normalize. The hijra—both those who affirmatively identify with the term, and those who wish to distance themselves from it—are my sisters.

I have simply not been granted the honor of being part of the communities and kin structures, and I do not wish to appropriate their struggles out of respect. Even still, their struggles are and will always be mine.