#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

[kohakuhibiki]

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.

[azuremist]

TME and TMA as intersexist terms: as written by an intersex transfem

I’ve had a few different people in my inbox asking me why I view these terms the way I do. In particular, why I claim it’s intersexist. So, I thought I’d lay out a few examples, so everyone can understand where I’m coming from.

Imagine an intersex woman. She was assigned female at birth by her doctors, and was able to go about her childhood as a woman with no inclination that anything was amiss. Sure, she didn’t experience certain parts of puberty, but puberty was different for everyone, right?

But, later in life, she learns she has Turner syndrome. This is an intersex condition where a woman has only one X chromosome, rather than the usual two.

Soon after she learns this, she finds that laws are being made to attempt to keep trans women out of women’s spaces (often specifically sports) which use chromosomes as a defining factor of womanhood.

Would this intersex person be considered “transmisogyny affected”? She has been raised as a cisgender woman with no problems regarding being ‘clocked’, but she is also a direct target of transmisogynistic laws. She lies in a gray area.

Now, let’s go to another intersex person. Imagine an intersex man with PAIS. AIS is an intersex condition where babies are born with testes and XY chromosomes, but their body is immune to or can’t respond to androgens (which includes testosterone). Intersex people with partial AIS (PAIS) often develop a vulva and clitoris during puberty.

This intersex person identifies as a man, and he was assigned male at birth. However, his body does not produce testosterone, and he went through a feminizing puberty. To the average eye, he appears to be a woman now because of this.

Would this intersex person be considered “transmisogyny affected?” He was assigned male at birth, and now appears to be a woman, much like many transfems. However, if many saw how he looks now, stating that he is a male, they would probably clock him as transmasc. He was raised as a boy until puberty, and then faced astrozcization from his peers when he began a puberty that feminized him. What he was facing was a form of intersexism where transmisogyny was playing a huge part. Does his childhood matter? Can one become TME over time, when they were TMA as a child? Again, he lies in a gray area, where the answer is not quite so simple.

What about the “opposite”, per se — an intersex woman who had a masculinizing puberty? She has aromatase deficiency, which means that many ‘male’ hormones (which would usually be converted to ‘female’ hormones) would remain unconverted. She identifies as a woman, and was identified as a female at birth and was raised, until puberty, as a female. But now, she would be clocked as a trans woman upon looking at her. What does that make her? Is it different from the previous example? How and why? This intersex person also lies in a gray area. How she should be described with these terms is not clear.

And keep in mind, these are all relatively simple examples. All of the examples I listed self-identify as cisgender. But there are intersex people who are trans in any direction you can imagine.

If that last example identified as a trans woman, because she is now clocked as one, would you be able to say she’s wrong for that? What about if she identified as transmasculine, because of her experience with puberty? What if she’s multigender, bigender or genderfluid, and says she’s both transmasc and transfem because of her complicated experiences? Would that make her a TMA transmasculine person? But I thought that transmascs were all TME? That’s how it’s so often framed, anyway.

The reason why these questions are so difficult to answer is because these terms were not made with intersex people in mind. Very real intersex transfems were pushed to the wayside in favor of centering the perisex view of transgenderism. Intersex people are nothing but an inconvenient little afterthought, annoying perisex people with their demand for “inclusion” and “consideration”. (As per usual.)

You cannot simply make a new gender binary and say, “No, really, this time everyone fits into these two categories! Forcing people to confine themselves to these two rigid labels which are shown as opposites, and as never interacting, will definitely include everyone this time!!” No matter what the contents of the new binary is, it’s not going to work, because sex and gender alike are too complicated for that. There will always be people in the gray area.

This isn’t even getting into the fact that these terms, for all intents and purposes, seem to have been popularized by and associated with the Baeddelism movement around 2017, which was essentially “Radical Feminism 2: We’re Trans Women, So It’s Fine!” This movement is known for chronic villainization of trans men and non-binary people who aren’t transfem. (They act like this with cis people too, but noticeably less so than they do with non-transfem trans people. How curious.) Think along the lines of how regular radfems treat all men (and who they deem to be men) as inherently morally disgusting scum who deserve to be attacked.

Methinks that maybe these terms aren’t the neutral, fact-based descriptors of oppression that many people nowadays tout them to be, considering that.

So, yeah. “Transmisogyny exempt” and “transmisogyny affected” as terms: not even once. Listen to intersex people, stop trying to make sex and gender into binaries, and for the love of God, stop drinking the queer seperationist koolaid!

[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!).

[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!

[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.

[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".

[fishing-lesbian-catgirl]

I don’t know why so many people in the tags of me reblogging the ‘is it okay to suggest to a man who seems kind of eggy that he might be a trans woman’ poll are so quick to jump to “it’s never okay to tell someone they are a trans woman!” No sorry that’s a lie. I know exactly why they keep doing this.

The poll asked if it’s okay to suggest to a man that he might be transgender. It didn’t say “tell” it didn’t say “force” it didn’t say “coerce” or “harass,” it said SUGGEST.

You were perfectly capable of understanding the difference between suggesting and telling for all the other polls, so why did your mind change for this one?

What we’ve all been pointing out is that they did a poll of this exact question but with every other major queer identity and for every single one of them the “I’m not a [gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans man, nonbinary] but I think [yes/no]” options, the “yes” option was way higher than the no. Whereas for trans women the poll was sitting at “no” as the majority for a while and now “yes” is only a slight bit higher.

Think about why that is for a second.

You, person who feels the need to write an essay in the tags about how it’s only okay with specific circumstances or how it’s not okay unless some theoretical condition is fulfilled, think for a second, and don’t lie to yourself, if you would’ve wrote tags about that on any of the other polls.

If you are one of the many people whose immediate reaction to the poll was to think of all the ways that trans woman would be in the wrong for a suggestion, seriously think about why that is.

The mere suggestion that a man might be a trans woman is so offensive to you, but none of the other ones were. I know you people don’t bother listening anything we say about transmisogyny but could you, just for a moment, consider that maybe, just maybe, we might not just be hysterical trannies making things up for some sort of oppression Olympics

[trans-androgyne]

I think the weirdest accusation of transmisogyny I saw was years back, when I reblogged a cute anecdote from a trans guy who would meow back and forth with his cat, and his cat lowered the pitch of their meow to match the guy's new voice and the guy thought it was really cute

Apparently this anecdote was transmisogynistic? Not sure how and I can't check because unfortunately I was much younger and had accidentally fallen into a tirf group whilst trying to avoid NB-phobic and aphobic trans people, so I deleted the reblog

Wild. One of the ones I’ve seen lately is that transmascs making jokes about how their parents misgender them no matter how far into their transition they are is transmisogynistic. As in “mothers will tell you about their beautiful daughter but then he looks like this <insert picture of House M.D. or something>” jokes. Because apparently it implies that people with those traits should Always be gendered as men (it doesn’t). But apparently it’s fine when transfems do it like in this beloved post:

I think some transfems get dysphoric whenever they’re reminded that people perceive certain traits they may have as masculine. So transmascs celebrating things like deep voices and facial hair as masculine makes them uncomfortable, and they have to come up with a reason why it’s wrong. That’s not just a transfem issue, transmascs can get dysphoric about others celebrating feminine traits too, but you can see it a lot in the way transmascs can’t talk about enjoying masculinity without being called toxic or transmisogynistic, while enjoying femininity is considered just good feminism. No traits are inherently masculine or feminine, but their perceived masculinity or femininity can be extremely important to trans people, and it isn’t transphobic to experience gender euphoria.

[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.

[0w0tsuki]

If you ever find yourself mad about "trans lesbian separatism" or "baeddelism" or whatever word you've found to paint trans women having solidarity/community with each other as exclusionary, have you considered not burning every bridge you have with transfems while expecting us to be the ones to put all the effort into rebuilding them while you hold the burning torch, and maybe JUST MAYBE considered listening to us when we talk about transmisogyny and worked to making this a safer space for us.

Like I dunno I think if I had a problem where transfems deal with such scrutiny and vitriol in the queer community that trans women have their whole community ripped out from them so they seek out like-minded trans women who aren't going to abandon them the instant that associating with them would negatively affect their social credibility and I was someone invested in TransUnity™ that the solution would be to work on the transmisogyny problem to make my community a safer space so they wouldn't feel the need to do that instead what y'all are doing which is witch hunting for trans women you can brand as exclusionists for the purpose of excluding them. Which you know, only makes the "trans women don't feel safe in the queer community" problem worse. This is literally yall rn

[purple-th0t]

Still thinking about the person who said being rightfully called on their transmisogyny was a dogwhistle. This is where we are at.

How have we got to the place where people can suggest transfems weaponize accusations of transmisogyny to silence others with no hesitation???

TMEs* will hand wave away all but the most vile and violent transmisogyny and then complain about accusations of transmisogyny being wielded against them.

if it were any other marginalized identity- keeping it generic because transfems using well established dynamics that the general public respects in analogy to describe our own dynamics is terrible obvs- if it were any other marginalized identity, would you not see that accusing said person of weaponizing their identity to deflect criticism as blatantly bigoted?

The idea that accusations of transmisogyny are so powerful that being accused of that means you have no recourse to ever criticize the transfem that accused you? Laughable on it's face and actively hateful.

When accusations of transmisogyny are actually being taken seriously instead of framed as privileged queers avoiding critiques I'll consider thinking "weaponizing accusations of transmisogyny" is something that is actually happening.

*I do mean transmisogyny exempt- as in nontransfems including cis people of both genders and transmascs, just to clarify before I'm accused of using it just to mean transmascs.