#Julia Serano homophobia

[drdemonprince]

to the anon asking why trans women don't have male privilege.

well. a lot of you are gonna be shocked to hear this one, but it's incredibly clear why not if you listen to trans women's experiences.

trans women have written at length about being sexually victimized, othered, subjected to violence for gender non-conformity, internalizing transmisogynistic cultural norms, being socially excluded and penalized for their failure to be adequate "cis men" and much more. if you are a person who has experienced misogyny but are not a trans woman you really have got to spend a lot of time reading transfeminist writing about this stuff, because your understanding of gender based oppression will always be woefully incomplete if you don't know what a lot of trans women go through and trust them as a reputable source.

here are some texts that i recommend just off the dome

Here's a thread from Grace Lavery about how even before she came out as a trans woman, men perceived her as an acceptable target for sexual assault in much the same way they do women of all kinds.

Here's a book from Laura Kate Dale about how her Autism was never recognized when she was a child because she met all the hallmarks of "female Autism" as a young closet trans girl.

Here's Jules Gill-Peterson on what transmisogyny is, how it functions, and how it affects the entire course of trans women's lives.

Here's Julia Serano's foundational text that introduced the concept of transmisogyny which explains at length how transmisogyny is so baked into our culture that it influences everyone and harms trans women long before they come out.

There's also just, you know, the base logic that queer people still suffer from homophobia and transphobia as kids before they even *know* they are queer. That's not exactly controversial. In fact the very fact that presumed straightness and cisness is forced upon everyone to the extent that a person must "come out" as anything else is a clear demonstration that trans women suffer from transmisogyny at every point in their lives. Being told you are not permitted to be yourself, that people like you do not even exist, is a pretty core experience of oppression and mimics what a lot of other groups of oppressed women (for example, lesbians) go through.

I will also clarify that trans men often experience privileges related to transmasculinity before they even come out! People never quite treated me the way they treated cis women, I've written about that before, and while structurally trans men do experience misogyny, their positionality is different in all kinds of subtle ways.

[da-mous]

More terminology from Whipping Girl that needs to make a comeback:

Oppositional Sexism

"The belief that female and male are rigid, mutually exclusive categories, each possessing a unique and nonoverlapping set of attributes, aptitudes, and desires"

This is defined separately from "traditional sexism," aka plain old misogyny

The author, Julia Serano, argues that oppositional sexism is the root of both transphobia and homophobia--which both essentially function to prevent people from blurring the lines between the categories

From my perspective, this "policing of the borders" is necessary for a patriarchal society to exist in the first place. If everyone believes that men are fundamentally logical while women are emotional (and thus apparently irrational), then it becomes easy to argue that men should hold power and women should be subordinated

Deviant expressions of gender and sexuality, then, present a challenge to the argument that justifies the patriarchal project, and so they have to be punished and pathologized. Unfounded claims of "autogynephilia" and "bathroom predators" serve to explain trans women away in terms of "male" sexuality, positing that we couldn't possibly be dressing or acting femininely as an expression of an intrinsic sense of self, so then it must be some kind of fetish or elaborate ploy to predate on "real" women, who of course require no explanation for dressing or acting feminine. This preserves the idea that (cis) women act femininely because of some fundamental, core essence that's exclusive to them, and which justifies their subordination

Finally, I'd like to zoom out a little further and suggest that this is a fundamental aspect of how all oppression works, not just sexism. Power must always justify itself, and so CEOs are at the top because apparently they're just the smartest and hardest-working, and the poor are at the bottom because they're just simply stupid and lazy. The logical endpoint is always that the powerful hold power because they possess intrinsic qualities that others don't, which make them uniquely deserving of it

[plaidos]

Femboys anon again

I think I had misunderstood what the original thing was saying, because it read to me like it was saying it was transmisogyny if cis men were oppressed for "acting feminine" not crossdressing, so I guess I interpreted that as meaning like, flamboyant? But I think I just didn't read it right.

Thank you

these things are all interlinked and interlocking systems anon; homophobia and transmisogyny often have a lot of crossover. you might’ve seen people talking about oppositional sexism (talked about in Julia Serano’s Whipping Girl) which is the idea that there are exactly two genders with zero crossover or overlap. this is indeed a big part of what forms transmisogyny

[goosemixtapes]

max's favorite short stories & articles!

to be updated as i read new things! "articles" could be anything from political points to philosophical musings to fascinating stories. obligatory statement that i don't necessarily agree with everything in every one of these stories/articles, but i think about them a lot and want to share :)

short stories

Avi Cantor Has Six Months To Live by Sacha Lamb (@kuttithevangu) (novella) (so says the writing on the bathroom mirror. of gender & judaism & magic and t4t trans guys. cw for suicidal ideation and bullying)

Epistolary by Sascha Lamb ("The [stuffed] frog you are selling on your blog is MINE and he is NOT HAUNTED and his name is MOSHE not BILLY HOPPER.")

Chokechain by Andrew Joseph White (a trans man discovers his parents have replaced him with a robot version of his pretransition self. cw for transphobia and violence)

Sandrine by Alexandra Munck (the tagline for this one is "I dated a sun god in college" but that doesn't do justice to the sheer concept here please read this)

You Wouldn't Have Known About Me by Calvin Gimpelevich (set in a hospital ward where patients are recovering from gender-confirming surgery)

No Flight Without the Shatter by Brooke Bolander (novella) ("After the world’s end, the last young human learns a final lesson from Earth’s remaining animals." cw for climate change/extinction)

And You Shall Know Her By The Trail Of Dead by Brooke Bolander (what if you had to death-match-fight a virtual version of yourself at your meanest made by your boyfriend whose life you're trying to save would that be fucked up or what. cws for guns and violence)

Hell is the Absence of God by Ted Chiang (stories that clock you in the fucking teeth in the religious trauma.)

A Serpent for Each Year by Tamara Jerée (microfiction) ("Our relationship is almost a year old when I ask Nal why she is covered in snakes." cw for animal death)

The Front Line by W.C. Dunlap (microfiction) (cited as one of the world's finest attention-grabber openings. cws for police brutality, racism, and SA)

Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience by Rebecca Roanhorse (step into the simulation and gain an authentic experience! cws for anti-Native racism and alcohol)

The Husband Stitch by Carmen Maria Machado (one of the best stories ever written. once there was a girl with a green ribbon around her neck...)

City of Red Midnight by Usman T. Malik (a chronicle of nested stories-within-stories, set in old fantasy pakistan, inverting a myth from the one hundred and one nights)

We Work In Miraculous Cages by Brenda Peynado (following a college grad drowning in loans through the nightmare of neverending work)

Other Worlds and This One by Cadwell Turnbull (a brotherly relationship collides with a theory about atomic particles, space, and time)

And Then There Were (N-One) by Sarah Pinsker (a convention of alternate-universe selves--all Sarah Pinskers--becomes a murder mystery)

Fandom For Witches by Ruoxi Chen (fuck every other thing ever written about fandom)

Haunted Home by Conrad Loyer ("The ship features a recreation of a slave ship’s hold. The cruise prides itself on it. It is not a good recreation, if the metric is realism.")

articles & essays

Freedom of Sex (far and above the best essay on trans kids and transition)

Lockhart's Lament (on how math is taught in schools. that is, badly. one of the most cathartic essays i've ever read on education)

Against Cop Shit by Jeffrey Moro (on adversarial education)

Debunking "Trans Women Are Not Women" Arguments by Julia Serano (comprehensive, well-written, good to have as a reference point)

On Liking Women by Andrea Long Chu (and on the politics of desire)

Turning a Unicorn Into a Bat by Josh and Lolly Weed (on Mormonism, love, and whether a gay man and a straight woman can marry happily. cw for homophobia)

Laziness Does Not Exist by Devon Price (musings on motivation from a social psychologist and professor)

How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation by Anne Helen Peterson (how come everything happens so much?)

White Women Drive Me Crazy by Aisha Mirza (on the harm caused by white women. cw for racism)

Everything You Know About Obesity Is Wrong by Michael Hobbes (should be required reading for everyone at this point. cw for fatphobia and eating disorders)

Becoming Anne Frank by Dara Horn (on the cultural fascination with Anne Frank. cw for antisemitism)

The Ecstasy of Influence by Jonathan Lethem ([on/a] plagiarism)

On the Ethics of Boinking Animal People by Patricia Taxxon (video essay) (ostensibly what the title says, but actually a detailed musing on the essential properties of furry media and the freedom of dehumanization; changed my life a bit)

[communistkenobi]

sure thing! It’s a fairly mainstream “trans-inclusive” opinion that while sex is still biological (which is to say, binary, “real,” outside of social opinion, it exists in nature), gender is socially constructed. This frames being transgender as having a socially constructed gender that ‘conflicts with’ biological sex. This conforms to mainstream psychiatric models of transgenderism, which frames trans people as having an identity disorder or something psychologically wrong with us that makes us ‘want to have a gender that is different from our biological sex.’ It is a handy way of conceding that gender is social while still maintaining the belief that sex is a real biological thing. It is very common among doctors, cis allies, policy documents about trans inclusivity (the ones I’ve read, anyway), and is also a common opinion among trans people in my experience.

I really dislike this framing for several reasons - one is that it is in fact arguing that gender is biologically based by tying it to our ‘natural sex’ (if our gender ‘conflicts with’ our sex, then gender is still biologically based, and if the reason you want to change your gender is because of mental illness, then a desire to change one’s gender can only be gained through psychological abnormality). It also maintains sex as something that is real, unchanging, natural, and universal across space, time, and culture. It is none of those things -

sex can change (HRT, surgery, and so on changes our sex, in fact it’s called ‘sex reassignment surgery’ and HRT is comminly understood as initiating a ‘second puberty’),

sex is not binary - a belief that it is binary is what constructs the category of ‘intersex,’ ie people who don’t fit this supposed universal sex binary, and this construction produces medical violence against intersex people by positioning them as medically defective/abnormal,

sex is not ‘real’ in the sense that the category of ‘sex’ is a social construction that bundles a complex series of properties of the body (external genitals, reproductive organs, hormones, chromosomes, gametes, etc) together by claiming they always 100% coincide with each other and form a coherent whole (this is not true, ‘sex’ is a spectrum because sex refers to many, many things). You can read the work of Julia Serano, a trans biologist who has published many open access essays on this subject. I believe she recently published a piece critiquing the idea that gametes are binary

The process of assigning sex at birth does not even follow this supposed scientific fact properly, because we don’t run chromosome checks on infants, we don’t do ultrasounds on them to see what their internal organs look like, we don’t measure their hormone levels, and so on. Sex assignment at birth is a social process of doing a quick genital inspection of infants and then writing down their sex on birth records based on that inspection, and if those external genitals don’t conform to binary understandings of sex (eg the infant is intersex), these genitals are surgically altered to fit this binary model. I believe Adamson describes this in Beyond the Coloniality of Gender as preparing children for a life of ‘good heterosexual sex’ (this is a paraphrase, I don’t remember the exact quote)

Because sex is a socially constructed category, it is not universal, because social constructs are dependent on the social context they arise in. I’ve read a number of papers from postcolonial/decolonial scholars in particular critiquing this supposed universalism as a form of colonial domination (María Lugones’ Coloniality of Gender, Sally Engle Merry’s Colonial and Postcolonial Law, Boris Bertolt’s The Invention of Homophobia in Africa, Jenny Evang’s Is Gender Ideology Western Colonialism?, B Binaohan’s Decolonising Trans/Gender 101. These last two aren’t postcolonial works but they’re very instructive for understanding sex assignment as a deeply oppressive and non-scientific practice: Heath Fogg Davis’ Sex Classification Policies as Transgender Discrimination: An Intersectional Critique and Toby Beauchamp’s Going Stealth: Transgender Politics and US Surveillance Practices)

essentially, “sex is biological, gender is social” is a massive cop-out that still accepts the framing of binary sexual biological legitimacy, which is the foundational belief that produces transphobic violence and discrimination in society. I really like Judith Butler’s framing of it Bodies That Matter: if sex is this supposedly biological reality that can’t change, but our understanding of sex is only always in reference to our social interpretation and application of it in the world (eg gender), then sex is also socially constructed

we never should have let cis people get away with “sex is biological, gender is social”

[vaspider]

youve got a lot of really great thoughts on a transphobia and homophobia, tbh more critical thinking than most people on here, and i was wondering how much you knew about the theory of rapid onset gender dysphoria/if youd be comfortable sharing your thoughts on the ridiculous idea

It was explicitly invented by transphobes as a means of delegitimizing trans identity, and that invention was backed up by a "study" in which the person running the study never spoke to any trans people or to any professionals providing care for trans people, only spoke to the parents of trans minors, and those parents were specifically recruited from forums for anti-trans parents.

The paper which supposedly coined ROGD was taken down for a while and corrected. Further studies have found no basis for ROGD.

What's really interesting is in the cache of emails which became public earlier this year from a former detransitioner there's a paper trail which pretty clearly indicates that the term was actually created on a very heinous website called 4th/wave/now (forgive my anti-search slashes, these people are awful) well prior to the study.

Hey, you want to guess where the parents for this study were recruited from? If you guessed "the one where the term was invented," you're right!

But wait, there's more!

It appears from the journalistic work done by Mother Jones, Jude Doyle, and Julia Serano, that this term was created by an anti-trans activist who works extensively with right-wing think tanks and who went to great lengths to hide that she invented the term.

Jude Doyle:

Finding anti-trans narratives that would “sell” to the general public was a constant concern for this crowd, and Shupe says it didn’t much matter if the narratives were based in fact or not. Marchiano, for instance, eagerly watched the spread of the ROGD theory — “[transfeminist writer and researcher Julia] Serano has already written a takedown,” she exulted in one August 2018 email. Shupe suspects Marchiano’s role is larger than the public knows: “Marchiano never explicitly said she is the inventor of ROGD, but the evidence points to her, and she’s listed as a contributor to the [Lisa Littman] study on PLOS One,” she writes to me. “My ‘opinion’ is that Marchiano and the 4thWaveNow folks are behind the ROGD study, and Littman merely fronted it for them to make it appear unbiased.”

Jude Doyle again:

On July 2, Shupe sent Marchiano a link to Jones’ blog post telling her “you’ve upset Zinnia again.” (Shupe had a tendency to send Marchiano news of ROGD, and to attribute the theory to “you” — that is, to Marchiano — whether Marchiano was explicitly named or not. In the communications I’ve reviewed, Marchiano does not reject the attribution.) Marchiano responded by saying that Jones had done something to “make her nervous” — namely, she’d dug up a blog post about ROGD that Marchiano had written under her own name.

Julia Serano:

If all of this is true — that Marchiano ran YCTP and invented ROGD — then it would follow that Marchiano was also likely skepticaltherapist, the supposed parent of a trans child who invented the idea of “transgender social contagion” in the first place.

Julia Serano again:

Also on March 15, 2016, at 6:07am (so very early in the day, likely before the aforementioned YTCP piece is published), skepticaltherapist posts her final comment on 4thwavenow before mysteriously disappearing. In a reply to someone named Starrymessenger, skepticaltherapist says: 'I wanted to mention that this month’s Psychotherapy Networker is focusing on trans youth issues, and the tone of each article is uncritically celebratory — lots of mentions of “courage,” and “bravery.” You may need a subscription or at least an account to comment, but I have so far.'

At the time of this comment, "Lisa" is the *only* person to have posted a comment on this particular Psychotherapy Networker article, as the 2nd comment doesn't appear until later that evening (7:30:15 PM on March 15th; both 4thwavenow & Psychotherapy Networker appear to be based in the U.S., so the should be only a few hours apart, if at all). Therefore, "Lisa" and skepticaltherapist must be the same person.

Did you catch all of that?

This is a fraudulent "diagnosis" explicitly invented by an anti-trans psychologist who at times has used sockpuppets to manipulate online conversations, claimed at times to be the mother of a trans child, or maybe it was her friend who had the trans child, or maybe she just knew somebody who just randomly decided he was a trans boy after going on tumblr. (Boy, does Lisa Marchiano hate Tumblr, lol.)

After inventing this diagnosis and pushing it on a forum for parents who don't like that they have trans kids, Marchiano then approaches a different researcher and uses this other researcher to launder this term, launching it into the verbal stratosphere, while explicitly working with right-wing groups who used this "evidence" to manufacture anti-trans bills. This list of right-wing groups and individuals includes the Alliance Defending Freedom, the "American College of Pediatricians," -- not to be confused with the American Academy of Pediatrics, the legitimate organization, ACPeds is a fringe right-wing group.

They literally made all of this up, this idea that transmasculine people specifically are being "infected" by online sources, and then they laundered it through a shitty study and tried to hide the laundering they did, so that shit like this can happen:

The president of the American Principles Project, a member of the coalition, recently told the New York Times that his group’s goal is to eliminate all transition care, starting with children because that’s “where the consensus is.”

This isn't about protecting children or any bullshit like that, and it's not about this fallacious "disorder" because it doesn't exist -- and they know it doesn't exist. They know it doesn't exist because they were the ones who made it up.

Like... what else is there to say? It's like if I made up Purple Big Toe Disease and claimed that all people taller than 5'10" and born on a Tuesday have Purple Big Toe Disease and should not be able to buy aspirin, because it's G-d's plan that people who have Purple Big Toe Disease should not prevent themselves from feeling the pain that G-d has planned for them, and then I asked someone to write a paper about PBTD and pretend I wasn't the one who made it up so I could point at the paper and be like le gasp, PBTD is the number one problem! We need to stop everyone over 5'10" and born on a Tuesday from being able to buy aspirin! And then some dude in South Dakota starts writing up bills in consultation with a bunch of Evangelical lawyers to deny basic health care to people over 5'10" and born on Tuesdays.

If it sounds fucking ridiculous, it's because it is.

[roadkillnroses]

But homophobia against gay men is also ultimately based in misogyny and arguably transmisogyny... Look, life's too short to explain what's wrong with all this when Julia Serano already did it. Just read Whipping Girl.

we can recognize that "man in a dress" is a transmisogynistic trope, yes?

well we also need to address how the trope of forcing tomboys to be feminine is a transandrophobic trope

[gatheringbones]

[“If there is one thing that all of us femmes have in common, it is that we all have had to learn to embrace our own feminine expression while simultaneously rejecting other people��s expectations of us. What makes femininity “femme” is not the fact that it is queer, or transgressive, or ironic, or performative, or the complement of butch. No. What makes our femininity “femme” is the fact that we do it for ourselves. It is for that reason that it is so empowering. And that is what makes us so powerful.

As femmes, we can do one of two things with our power: We can celebrate it in secret within our own insular queer communities, pat ourselves on the back for being so much smarter and more subversive than our straight feminine sisters. Or we can share that power with them. We can teach them that there is more than one way to be feminine, and that no style or expression of femininity is necessarily any better than anyone else’s. We can teach them that the only thing fucked up about femininity is the dismissive connotations that other people project onto it. But in order to that, we have to give up the self-comfort of believing that our rendition of femme is more righteous, or more cool, or more subversive than anyone else’s.

I don’t think that my femme expression, or anyone else’s femme expressions, are in and of themselves subversive. But I do believe that the ideas that femmes have been forwarding for decades—about reclaiming femininity, about each person taking the parts of femininity that resonate with them and leaving behind the rest, about being femme for ourselves rather than for other people, about the ways in which feminine expression can be tough and active and bad-ass and so on—these ideas are powerful and transformative.

I think that it’s great to celebrate femme within our own queer communities, but we shouldn’t merely stop there. We need to share with the rest of the world the idea of self-determined and self-empowered feminine expression, and the idea that feminine expression is just as legitimate and powerful as masculine expression. The idea that femininity is inferior and subservient to masculinity intersects with all forms of oppression, and is (I feel) the single most overlooked issue in feminism. We need to change that, not only for those of us who are queer femmes, but for our straight cis sisters who have been disempowered by society’s unrealistic feminine ideals, for our gender-variant and gender-non-conforming siblings who face disdain for defying feminine expectations and/or who are victims of trans-misogyny, and also for our straight cis brothers, who’ve been socialized to avoid femininity like the plague, and whose misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and so on, are driven primarily by their fear of being seen as feminine. While I don’t think that my femme expression is subversive, I do believe that we together as femmes have the power to truly change the world.”]

julia serano, from excluded: making feminist and queer movements more inclusive, 2013

[thanatos-girl]

Not to write an essay abt it but the thing that frustrates me the most about fans of "transandrophobia" theory is that not only are they completely illiterate when it comes to basic transfeminist theory (they will deny this and often attempt to smear Julia Serano as a "gender essentialist" truly proving they have never genuinely engaged with her work), but they also parade around other marginalized groups of men to claim men as a political group are oppressed, proving their illiteracy of any liberationist or feminist theory. Men do not face "anti-man oppression" by society, even marginalized men. They're affected differently than marginalized women of the same socio-economic groups specifically because they are not subject to the misogyny aimed at those women, and not experiencing transmisogyny or misogynoir or lesbophobia on top of homophobia or transphobia or racism is not a special new form of oppression in any way.

[self-loving-vampire]

Much of the above conversation is wrong. Transmisogyny does not affect everyone. It's a form of bigotry that targets a specific group of people. Specifically, trans women, who are attacked for being women (misogyny) and transgender (transphobia) creating the intersection we describe as transmisogyny.

I don't know if you know this but Julia Serano (quoted above) is best known as the transfeminist author and activist who coined that term. She thinks that trans men do experience that same intersection (just in a different form) and also that this whole discourse feeds a self-defeating doom loop.

The above opinions are wrong because they misunderstand a fundamental aspect of how oppression works: Oppression targets identity, not appearance.

This would be huge news to all the cishet people who got bullied for "looking/acting gay", if it was true. Until recently transphobia and homophobia were not even explicitly separated in the first place. I grew up with people who thought trans people were just extra gay and that you can tell if someone is either one based on gender non-conformity or even the sound of their voice or the way they walk.

If you read A Short History of Trans Misogyny (whose author is also quoted above) the author makes the point very early on that a lot of the victims of transmisogyny historically do not necessarily think of themselves as trans women in the first place, but are instead "trans-feminized" by oppressive forces meant to punish them for deviation regardless of their specific identities.

I believe that the popular adjective used to describe this kind of analysis around here is "materialist".

These are not things that can protect someone targeted by transmisogyny. These are not things that will happen to someone targeted by transmisogyny. We cannot be defended by people pointing to our identity as trans women, because our identity is the what we are being targeted for. Or, to put that in simple terms: People who take splash damage are not being aimed at. Transphobes wanted to hurt trans women and they did not care whether Khelif was actually trans. She was a secondary concern. They were aiming at trans women and the idea that we can be athletes. She was just acceptable collateral damage to the bigots.

1- They doubled down and damaged her career anyway. It turns out you can't just tell bigots something like "even though I look like this I am a cishet just like you" and have them believe you and back down, even if it's true.

2- Why say "transmisogyny exempt" when what you really want to say is more like "transmisogyny collateral damage" or "transmisogyny but with a more defensible position"? This seems like a misleading motte & bailey argument at best.

The attitude that transmisogyny affects everyone or that it's somehow bigotry for trans women to talk about how some people aren't affected by transmisogyny, it's particularly derogatory to hear that coming from anyone in the trans or queer communities.

Transmisogyny (and homophobia) and the threat of it even compels and restricts the behavior of normie cishet men. I don't know what to tell you if that isn't clear already. A lot of men are incredibly afraid of "appearing queer" in any way because they know it results in a variety of punishments. Whether we think that "looking queer" even makes logical sense or not (and I for one think it doesn't) is irrelevant. You need to apply some theory of mind to this.

In some places "appearing queer" can take as little as having a lisp and those men are aware of this.

By saying transmisogyny effects everyone they're actually saying that you can tell a trans woman is a trans woman because of how she looks, so anyone being targeted because they look like us is also being targeted by transmisogyny. They're saying that they agree with transphobes that claim we look like men pretending to be women. I don't think many people with these attitudes quite understand that, but I also don't think that they're actually considering the logic of everything they're saying either.

That is not actually what I am saying, nor what those transfeminist academics are saying. I recommend actually reading them instead of putting words in people's mouths. Here's Serano again:

People can be affected by transmisogyny even without literally being assumed to be trans women, for one (it's enough to just be a man who is "too girly").

Just like how homophobia coerces people's behavior even if they are not directly under suspicion of ever feeling attraction outside of heterosexual standards and norms.

The threat of being assigned these labels and punished accordingly is part of the enforcement mechanism for gender roles, whether the labels fit your identity or not. The vast majority of people punished in this way are cishet because these strict roles are artificial and people need to be "trained" into them and sacrifice their individual preferences and personalities to fit them.

These things are uncomfortable to talk about and it can be hard to understand it all, but the only way we can stop things like this is by trying to educate ourselves and listen to the people affected by bigotry. Please listen to trans women when we talk about transmisogyny, both in wider society and also coming from in the community.

1- I did this, but primarily by reading books and their follow-up articles instead of tumblr and twitter posts. I think that's the best way to learn about just about any topic, wouldn't you agree?

I didn't even fully agree with everything on those books (I think Serano strawmans gender constructivism for instance), but I still think they make for a more insightful resource that it is useful to at least be familiar with.

2- I am literally a trans woman who had to become an international refugee because people in the country I was born into would have killed me over it. I still think this terminology is garbage and I have been analyzing and discussing transmisogyny for over a decade now without ever having any use for it.

Instead I'd agree with Peterson's argument that no one is completely exempt from transmisogyny, only affected to different degrees and in different ways.

are you tme or tma

"i know you're nonbinary but which of these two arbitrarily constructed gender categories do you fit into" genuinely are you having a laugh

[man-squared]

I'm looking into Julia Serano a bit on my own and I ran across this, which sort of rubs me the wrong way in general:

"Cultural feminist views of trans male/masculine people are more complex and varied. Sometimes trans male/masculine people are viewed harshly, as 'traitors' who have abandoned sisterhood to join 'the enemy.' Other times they are viewed more sympathetically, as presumed 'lesbians' who are simply (and understandably) attempting to flee sexism and homophobia. Still other times they are viewed maternalistically, as young 'girls' who have been 'brainwashed by gender ideology' or 'groomed' by 'TRAs' (a gender-critical acronym for 'trans rights activists' intended to equate us with 'MRAs/men’s rights activists').

"'Gender critical' author Abigail Shrier recently wrote a trans-kids-moral-panic book entitled Irreversible Damage; the cover image is a cartoon of a young girl with a hole cut out where her reproductive parts would be (read: her body has been violated). Notably, the subtitle of the book is 'The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters' [emphasis mine]. And who is supposedly doing this 'seducing'? Trans female/feminine people, of course."

+

"Cultural feminists also tend to view trans male/masculine people as relatively 'safe' given that they are supposedly 'innately female' and 'lacking' the organ that imparts sexual stigma (and perpetrates sexual violence) upon other people."

I don't know. It just seems like she solely is focusing on harsher forms of transphobia for transfemmes and not as harsh forms of transphobia for transmascs. Maybe it's a play at painting transfemmes as more oppressed and transmascs as not (and therefore contributing to the idea that we don't deal with 'real transphobia/harm'). Or maybe she just isn't knowledgeable enough about us. Either way, it doesn't sit right with me.

[comrade-meow]

Below is a statement we received from LGB Fight Back in the States, a new group that advocates for LGB rights under vicious, homophobic attack by trans ideology activists.

LGB Fight Back, a US-based organization that represents the interests of lesbians, gay men, and bisexual people, launched on February 14, 2021 with a Valentine’s Day-themed Week of Action. Protests took place across the US and Canada, co-sponsored by LGB Fight Back and Parents of ROGD Kids, a nationwide organization of parent support groups whose children are at risk of being medicalized and harmed by transgenderism. The protests sent a message of love to non-conforming kids everywhere: We love you just the way you are!

LGB Fight Back formed in response to the exponential rise of transgenderism and the forced teaming of the LGB with the transgender movement. Society at large is being gaslighted by activists into supporting the false idea that trans is “gay-adjacent.” The transgender movement, driven by medical corporations and Big Pharma, reinforces conservative stereotypes of male and female behavior, and directly targets LGB people for medical experimentation that shortens their lifespans, turns them into lifelong medical patients, and renders them sterile.

“Trans is not Gay Plus. It is not Gay 2.0,” says LGB Fight Back co-founder and lifelong progressive Belissa Cohen. “In fact, it’s just the opposite. The T is a parasite on the gay community.”

In pushing transgenderism for profit, Big Med preys on the internalized shame and external homophobia experienced by so many members of the LGB community. The invention of the “trans child” out of whole cloth reinforces the public narrative that trans identities are innate, lifelong, and unchangeable, and works to prevent LGB people from resisting medicalization.

“Not conforming to sex stereotypes is not a medical condition,” says Cohen. “It’s perfectly normal, especially for homosexual and bisexual people. So-called ‘transition’ is being used to force people, especially LGB people, to conform. Woke homophobia is just conservative homophobia with more glitter.”

The Valentine’s Week protests, most of which took place at youth “gender clinics,” addressed the harm being done to children by trans ideologues spouting the quasi-religious claim that it’s possible to be “born in the wrong body,” and their highly successful efforts to squelch research, discussion, and debate surrounding the subject. Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, the site of one of the protests, has opened a second clinic in New Jersey to capitalize on this profit-driven fad. And Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, where protesting parents were welcomed by local news crews, currently refers healthy girls as young as 13 for double mastectomies that will cause them lifelong chronic pain. CHLA’s Medical Director Johanna Olson-Kennedy has also created guidelines that allow children as young as 8 to be poisoned with artificial hormones. 

Pediatric “transition” causes sterility and lack of sexual function, echoing the “progressive” eugenics movement of the 20th century, in which more than 60,000 Americans, primarily women of color and “mental defectives”–including homosexuals, who were pathologized in the DSM until 1973–were sterilized.

Medical experimentation on non-conforming children concerns LGB Fight Back greatly, as these children are likely to grow up to be the next generation of LGB people. Ample research shows that, if not affirmed as “trans,” the majority of non-conforming kids grow up to be healthy lesbians, bisexuals, or gay men. The “trans-affirmative model” that turns young LGB people into poor facsimiles of the opposite sex saddled with lifelong medical issues is highly unethical. At best, it’s a new form of gay conversion therapy; at worst, it’s a new form of LGB eugenics.

“Lesbians, gay men, and bi people have been intentionally targeted for medicalization at least since Nazi doctor Carl Vaernet started using hormones as a ‘cure’ for homosexuality in the 1930s,” 

says LGB Fight Back co-founder and former trans activist Carrie Hathorn. “Big Pharma and Big Med turned our community into a revenue stream, and now they’re doing the same to kids.

“I was once captured by this ideology, too,” Hathorn continues, recalling the two trans activist workshops she led in 2014. One of the workshops was designed for supporters of whistleblower Bradley Manning, a gay man who declared himself “trans” on the day of his conviction. “As a trans activist, I thought I was being supportive. But now I realize that Manning and my ‘trans’ friends were just attempting to distance themselves from their own homosexuality. Just like ‘praying the gay away,’ transing the gay away doesn’t work.”

Hathorn is hopeful that the growing tide of detransitioners, many of whom are lesbian, gay, or bisexual, will soon become impossible to ignore in the US. In the UK in 2020, a high court ruled that children under 16 cannot consent to bone-disintegrating drugs sold as puberty blockers. The ruling was prompted by Keira Bell’s lawsuit against the Tavistock gender clinic. Bell, a detransitioned lesbian, has been vocal about the internalized homophobia that drove her own “transition.”

“LGB Fight Back is standing up for LGB people because we know we’re perfect just the way we are,” Cohen says. “We don’t need to be ‘transed’ into fake straight people.”

But medicalization is not the only threat that transgenderism poses to the LGB community. Lesbian and gay history and LGB historical figures are being “transwashed”, or rewritten as “trans.” Stonewall icon Stormé DeLarverie, a butch lesbian, has been posthumously rebranded as a “trans man”. Malcolm Michaels Jr, a self-described gay man who sometimes went by the name of Marsha P. Johnson, has been rebranded as a “trans woman” and made the star of the Stonewall Uprising in the popular imagination, though historical accounts place him far from the scene. From Joan of Arc to We’wha and Billy Tipton, the Chevalier d’Eon to Moll Cutpurse and Elagabalus, historical figures who had same-sex relationships and did not conform to sex stereotypes are being subsumed into a revisionist “trans history”.

One of the most serious issues currently facing the LGB community is that of sexual coercion and shaming by heterosexuals under the guise of “inclusiveness”. Heterosexuals adopt trans identities in order to gain access to lesbian and gay spaces; they demand that lesbians have sex with straight men calling themselves “trans lesbians” and that gay men have sex with straight women calling themselves “gay trans men”. The concept of “same-gender attraction,” which transgenderists have invented to replace same-sex attraction, is a tool of sexual coercion and conversion therapy rhetoric. Lesbians and gay men who have themselves avoided medicalization face accusations of “genital fetishism”, demands that they undergo “therapy” to “rethink their genital preferences”, stealth rape by deception or omission, and an overall climate of gaslighting.

Of particular note is the insidious concept of the “cotton ceiling”, a term coined by pornographer Drew DeVeaux, a straight man calling himself a “trans lesbian”, for a coercive tactics workshop held at Planned Parenthood. The “cotton ceiling” is a reference to the cotton of a lesbian’s underwear, and the term is used by straight men who view lesbians’ homosexuality – to borrow a word from lesbophobic straight man Julia Serano – as “systemic” oppression against men.

The reframing of homosexuality as bigotry has been used to systematically colonize and destroy precious lesbian and gay bars, events, dating apps, and community centers. LGB people, who rely on single-sex spaces for socialization and community as well as romance, increasingly find themselves isolated, alone, and vulnerable to homophobic bullying and sexual coercion.

“A lot of straight people think that by paying lip service to ‘LGBTQ+,’ they’re supporting us,” Cohen says. “But that couldn’t be further from the truth. Our organizations have been ideologically captured, LGB funding appropriated by the TQ+ and our political movement co-opted. We understand that straight people want to be allies; they want to help. But the culture of No Debate surrounding transgenderism has turned the people who should be our allies against us.”

“If we don’t stop this new form of homophobia,” Cohen continues, echoing concerns expressed by former staff at the Tavistock, “soon there will be nothing left of our lesbian and gay communities. It’s time for LGB people to stand up to LGBT Inc. and say, ‘Enough! Leave lesbians alone! Hands off the gays!’”

Websites: LGBFightBack.org & parentsofrogdkids.com

[the-nerdy-autist]

I think for a lot of marginalized folks who experience a degree of privilege while also being oppressed there's a major...cognitive dissonance.

Everyone knows how they are and have been oppressed. No one wants to talk about privilege. Especially when it's often used as a club to deny oppression. You see this a lot with people sticking the word "white" in front of Jewish, gay, trans, or woman and thinking they're fighting racism.

Buuuuut on the other hand...those groups can be racist and can and do benefit from white privilege.

They ALSO face antisemitism, homophobia, transphobia, sexism, and misogyny.

And then there's visible vs invisible minorities. Erasure is no fun. Being visibly marginalized is also no fun and a totally different experience.

A closeted trans girl will grow up facing transphobia and not the same as a cishet boy. Absolutely true.

But they will still get treated very differently from AFAB folks/cis woman. And the problem is we can't have an honest conversation because TERFs wield the phrase "male privilege" to justify transphobia.

I honestly think Julia Serano in her book Gender Games has the best and most nuanced take on the situation and I also know it would make a lot of people on Tumblr Very Very Angry.

This is might end up being super edgy or smth, but I believe that a certain subset of transwomen, especially those who transitioned late in life, don't understand that they did benefit from male privilege for a significant portion of their life and that they socially don't understand the social oppression women, transmen, and generall AFAB people experienced growing up as "women" from birth. And that at certain points they'll still recreate that privilege subconsciously. This does not negate the experience growing up trans, queer, or with other marginalized experiences, it's just one puzzle piece making up an entire human being.

Experiencing a female upbringing is something you can never relate and experience if you just never did so in your formative years. That also applies vice versa. Meanwhile these subset group of transwomen still try to insert themselves into a conversation where they just genuinely have no experience with. This isn't some game to see who's more oppressed, or who's a "true woman" or some other bullshit. Transmen are men who also experienced a formative female upbringing, that doesn't mean that they're any less men because of it. This is legit just about how your upbringing from birth and your formative years shape you in your later years, and yes that it something you can't "catch up" with, either you went through it or you didn't. To make this about transphobia or trying silence transwomen's voices is dishonest, and makes absolutely no sense, and I don't understand why this is some times framed as such.

--

[gcintheme-blog]

um. Trans women aren't "men pretending to be women". The scientific understanding of gender identity has passed that stage like twenty years ago. Also trans people aren´t asking women of color to be "props for them", they're asking to be recognized and not excluded which is like the bare minimum. You don't get away with being transphobic because you're a woman of color, just like for example gay people don't get away with being racist because they face homophobia.

Okay, let me call out your falsehoods for what they are. You are being intellectually dishonest here and this needs to be addressed.

Scientific understanding proves the opposite of what you’re saying because our brains aren’t gendered. There isn’t a “male brain” and a “female brain.” By suggesting that “feminine” things like makeup, high heels, and being emotional are intrinsic to how women are mentally wired (rather than social expectations) trans activists uphold the oppression of women.

Medical scientists examine sex characteristics including male, female, and intersex bodies whereas social scientists discuss gender because gender is a social construct.

Trans people are asking women of color to be their props when they suggest that sexual orientation is akin to racism and imply that women of color can be liberated by sex. Women of color globally are fighting for an end to sexism and sex-based violence and trans activists like Julia Serano make a mockery of us when they write about how our oppression is not in fact violence against our sexed bodies but "femmephobia.”

If women are oppressed because of our inner “gender identities,” why not just change them? You know just as well as I do that women cannot escape violence by declaring that no, we are not women at all! Nor can we escape violence by adopting masculine stereotypes.

Also, I really do not care if you call me “transphobic” for criticizing a construct that harms me and people that uphold that construct. I have not and never would call for violence against trans people, and I actually believe that healthcare--including mental healthcare--is a basic human right and that dismantling the patriarchy and the construct of gender will allow any man or woman to express himself or herself as desired without trying to conform to a constructed “identity.”

[bored-gay-werewolf]

"Man alive" and "Amature" by Thomas Page Mcbee are both memoirs but still a good place to start; same with "We Both Laughed In Pleasure" by Lou Sullivan and "Stone Butch Blues" by Leslie Feinberg for gay trans masc and lesbian trans masc memoirs respectivly

"Men in Place" by Miriam J. Abelson explores masculinity through in-depth interviews with trans men in the U.S. West, Southeast, and Midwest and its intersection with homophobia, transphobia, and racism

I also dont know any specifically trans masculine theory but for theory about generally masculinity theres "The Will To Change" by bell hooks about patriarchal masculinity. Otherwise you will probably have to look for (cis) butch lesbians or (cis) gay mens masculinity theories and draw your own conclusion from there

As far as i know "Whipping Girl" by Julia Serano doesnt include or badly misrepresents trans masc experiences, so idk how useful that would be for you, but its a pillar of transfeminism none the less

Transmasculine Theory

Hello friends,

A more unusual post for my typical content but I need some resources.

I am planning a theory-informed personal memoir on my experience of transmasculinity for a queer literature class of mine. I am seeking to find some theoretical bases as a launching point for my narrative. However, I haven't been able to find many books/papers/essays that specifically focus on transmasculine issues.

If anyone has suggestions on queer theorists or works with that specification, that would be immensely helpful!

With love, T.C.

[ommadusk]

How 'cis lesbian' and 'cis gay man' reveal the homophobia in the transgender movement

I have seen the terms ‘cis lesbian’ and ‘cis gay man’ used by transgender individuals. Here’s how these terms reveal the homophobia at the core of the transgender movement.

To examine use of the word ‘cis‘ we can turn to Julia Serano who thus defines this term thus:

“people who are not trans, transgender, or transsexual, respectively”

We can look to Serano again for a definition of ‘transgender‘: