#academic transmisogyny

[taliabhattwrites]

I wonder if folks realize just how much of modern queer discourse and academic feminism is rooted in theories promulgated by the most rancid transmisogynists to have existed.

From the International Journal of Psychoanalysis:

From chapter seven of Whipping Girl:

Similar to how the most-cited work on the hijra repeatedly misgenders them as "male homosexuals" and confidently declares that the hijra are "too vulgar" to be women, unlike Docile Submissive Well-Behaved Indian Females, so much of queer theory is uncoupled from materialism, from robust feminist analysis, and from the empirical reality of transsexual women's oppression.

Let's leave these blighted pages where they belong, please.

[communistkenobi]

whenever you open an academic article about gender and the author only uses the word queer and never mentions trans people specifically it’s gonna be a shit fucking article

[anissapierce]

netflix is so wild bc like... of how vast it is. Like dave c gets a special.... but then hannah g gets to have a showcase for gender variant comedians ... they ll have disclosure which criticizes the same shit that then kaos then pulls...

[redheadedfailgirl]

Fam I actually had a decent respect for J. Halberstam cuz I love the queer art of negativity and I think their intro to Fugitive Study really gets to the heart of what's going on in the book. But like. Wtf. What the hell is this? Can we just be normal about trans women for five fucking minutes everybody?

[chantylay]

Not to be a trans woman on main but this is really stupid. Imane Khalif was not affected by 'transmisogyny by proxy' she was affected by transmisogyny directly. Full force. Period. I know everyone likes to live in idealism land where the hate-crimed's identity actually matters when they're being attacked, but it doesn't. Are we the intended targets of transmisogyny? Yes. Are cis people who 'step out of line' in regards to their gender expression (particularly racialised people) intended targets of transmisogyny? Yes.

To iterate further: transmisogyny is a social system affecting all members of the society. It would be non-functional if it only applied to trans women because we're a tiny portion of the population, and because the cis can't clock us to save their lives. It's supposed to hurt everyone by victimising ANYONE who does not rigidly conform to their presumed gender.

Hostile architecture is also a great analogy for this because it is not only prejudice against the homeless being in public, but also the elderly or disabled, and hell, people who like to sit or stand around the place (especially racialised people). This is a feature and not a bug. City Council members don't conveniently forget the existence of other groups. Instead they say: Look at that, all the undesirables kept away with one neat trick! It does wonders for the property values!

Just because we call it 'transmisogyny', that doesn't make it ontological truth that it was designed specifically with us in mind, or that we are its sole recipients. The purpose of a system is what it does.

saying that "transmisogyny exempt" is not a useful term because transmisogynistic society ends up affecting everybody by proxy is like saying that hostile architecture isn't prejudice against homeless people because everyone likes to sit on benches sometimes y'know

[ghelgheli]

Historians are rarely challenged just for applying words like ‘woman’ and ‘man’ to the past; it would not inevitably cause a backlash to say that a historical figure wanted power, or grieved, or felt anger. A trans historian, though, is caught in the double-bind of the DSM-5. Our experiences and our desires are quite literally mad. We do not have the social license to see ourselves fractured and reflected in historical figures; we are standing in the wrong place to write. Put simply, if you foreclose trans readings, you foreclose trans writing. When we reflect on the similarities between our lives and those of historical figures, we are accused of spreading our social contagion to the dead. To read our own anamorphoses in a text, to communicate that to a cis academic establishment who have rendered our unqualified subjectivities unimaginable, we are forced to accuse historical figures of transness. And then, of course, we are chastised for pathologising them. For a trans historian, it is not viable to simply universalise our experiences of gender. In order to relate to historical figures’ gendered experiences in our writing in a way that is legible to cis readers, we have to assert that those figures were trans. There is a gap to be bridged, and the onus to bridge it falls on us… Transmisogyny and anti-effeminacy were and are integral to the structure of patriarchy and therefore to cisness (or vice-versa). In ‘Monster Culture (Seven Theses)’, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen proposed a methodology for reading cultures: ‘from the monsters they engender’. In concluding this sketch of Byzantine cisness, I would like to attempt to apply this method. To monster a group or an individual is a violent act, and through examining the way transfemininity was monstered in Byzantium, we can begin to understand the shape of the violent regulation of gendered possibilities that constituted Byzantine cisness… Synesius [of Cyrene] did not simply compare the image of the elegantly coiffed effeminate with the shiny dome of the soldier’s helmet; he went one step further, proclaiming that pretty hair was the give-away for hidden effeminacy. He rails against ‘effeminate wretches’ who ‘make a cult of their hair’, who he suggests engage in sex work not out of economic necessity but as an act of sex and gender exhibitionism, to ‘display fully the effeminacy of their character’. Then, he goes on to say:

And whoever is secretly perverted, even if he should swear the contrary in the marketplace, and should present no other proof of being an acolyte of Cotys save only in a great care of his hair, anointing it and arranging it in ringlets, he might well be denounced to all as one who has celebrated orgies to the Chian goddess and the Ithyphalli.

The implication is clear: long, well kempt, perfumed and curled hair is not just hair, it is a signifier, one that signals total abnegation of manhood, and therefore of cisness. This demonstrates one of the mechanisms by which cisness was maintained and enforced in the Byzantine world. Relatively minor embodied gender transgressions, like too-long or too-pretty hair, could be linked to transfemininity and to sexual receptivity, the two farthest points from patriarchal manhood. That is not to say that this prevented people from committing such gender transgressions; rather that it made them risky, a weapon that could be used against you by anyone who wanted to do you harm. The other thing demonstrated by Synesius’ invective is the relationship between effeminacy, unmasculine vanity and presumed sexual receptivity. It would be tempting, based on the relationship Synesius draws between long beautiful hair and receptive anal sex, to suggest that the animating force of this antipathy is, if not homophobia, a narrower pre-modern equivalent. There is, however, a fantastically complicating detail in Synesius’ remark on the reasons such ‘effeminates’ engage in sex work: being sexually available is presented as an instrumental, rather than terminal value. In Synesius’ imagination, sex work is the means, but social recognition of the feminine gender of the sex worker is the end: to ‘display fully the effeminacy of their character’. The monster Synesius invokes to shore-up his own gender position, to guard his own cisness and his access to hegemonic masculinity, is an unambiguously transmisogynist fantasy. It is here that Byzantine cisness most sharply converges with twenty-first-century cisness.

‘Selective Historians’: The Construction of Cisness in Byzantine and Byzantinist Texts, Ilya Maude [DOI]

[trans-androgyne]

For the person in my inbox worried about becoming transmisogynistic in the middle of this discourse, as they notice themselves becoming defensive when hearing trans women discuss transmisogyny nowadays: first, I'm sorry your ask disappeared when I was working on responding to it, this is the best I can do from here </3

But more importantly: I get it, I really do. I'll tell you about how I handle it. I used to check the transmisogyny tag daily with the intent of better understanding and supporting trans women and fems, but had to stop for my own wellbeing. Just scrolling for a minute would force me to see so many people who absolutely despise trans men and mascs, considering us the oppressors to punch up at. They'd misrepresent our theory and experiences, claim we had things easy, generalize and stereotype about us, and so many other hurtful things. Almost every single time I would go to reblog any post about transmisogyny from there (and I do mean on literally all but two occasions), I would check the person's blog and find out they would shittalk "transandrobros" and "tme trans people" and attribute the systemic transmisogyny they were discussing to us as though we had just as much power as cis folks. I was given a lot of reasons to feel put on the defense, and I noticed myself start to prepare myself for an internal argument every time I opened the tags. That's when I realized I needed to step away from those discussions for now, at least on tumblr. It is simply not a good environment to learn about transmisogyny in. Instead, for that I am turning to 1) academic resources (e.g. A Short History of Trans Misogyny) and 2) trans women in my life I trust. I suggest you do something similar. It's important to learn about transfem issues, but it is very much not your responsibility to listen to every hateful tumblr user. If you can find trans women who discuss transmisogyny on here while also believing us about transandrophobia, I will be overjoyed for you.

This is something important to think about. People of all genders are in fact being radicalized in this discourse. Someone I hated just became a full TERF! And as I've mentioned, there are far too many radfem leaning trans women and transfems who become not only defensive but actively hateful and mask off bigoted when hearing us talk about our oppression. It's too common in the trans community right now. It doesn't make you a bad person to notice defensiveness. It just means something needs to change. Be sure not to end up associating trans women in general with discourse; engage with trans women and fems outside that, whether it be friends and acquaintances, their art/music/etc, funny content, cute stories, anything. Listen about transmisogyny when it is the right time and place. See trans women and fems as your beloved sisters and siblings first and foremost, and work on what you need from there.

[autolenaphilia]

Transandrophobia isn’t real because misandry isn’t real. This is the basic truth of the matter.

The very structure of the word implies some kind of intersection of transphobia and misandry, which is impossible, because again misandry doesn’t exist. The phrase “transandrophobia” exists as a transmasc counterpart to transmisogyny, and it doesn’t work, because while misogyny is real, misandry/androphobia is not. The things that are described as “transandrophobia” which are actual instances of oppression are better explained as plain transphobia.

The antifeminism of transandrophobia theory

“Transandrophobia” theory often launders antifeminist concepts of misandry. Of course this is openly often denied. The defense is that transandrophobia doesn’t imply that misandry exists, but only describes transphobia directed at transmascs.

And it’s often disingenuous. I’ve come across numerous transandrophobia blogs that clearly believe in misandry. The very coiner of the word, says it’s caused by “the effects of irrational fears of masculinity and manhood“ (taking “androphobia” quite literally) which implies both the existence of misandry and also misogynistically dismissing women’s fears of men’s violence as irrational.

Of course they change the language around, using euphemisms for misandry. In fact transandrophobia is a clear evolution of the term “transmisandry.” Genderkoolaid and ey’s idea of “anti-masculism” that I criticized here is maybe the most obvious example of that on tumblr today.. The belief in some kind of systemic force that “negatively impacts men and masculine people on the basis of their manhood and/or masculinity.“ to quote genderkoolaid is as succinct a definition of misandry theory as any. And ey even outright admits that “antimasculism” is just another word for misandry. Other transandrophobia bloggers like the transunity blog outright use the word “misandry.”So for simplicity’s sake, I’m going to use “misandry” for whatever euphemisms transandrophobia people use, like “antimasculism”, “androphobia” or claims that “society hates men” or “there is a widespread irrational fear of men and masculinity.”

The use of feminist language like “patriarchy” common among transandrophobia people is either severely confused or outright dishonest. It’s a symptom of the terrible understanding of feminism on this site, as I lamented before. Patriarchy as a term that inherently implies male privilege, men are privileged for being men, not disadvantaged. Claiming the patriarchy oppresses men on the basis of their gender is a contradiction in terms. And belief in misandry is inherently misogynistic and anti-feminist.

How terms for systemic oppression actually work

Let’s however assume that the word “transandrophobia” just means “transphobia aimed at transmascs.” Then I don’t see why this word needs to exist. It contradicts most academic work on systemic oppression. New terms are generally not made just to describe “specific experiences of an oppression”. Instead they are created to describe meaningful intersections of different forms of oppression. Often these are intersections with misogyny, because that particular oppression affects about half the population. So misogynynoir describes an intersection of anti-blackness/racism and misogyny that black women experience, and lesbophobia describes an intersection of homophobia and misogyny that lesbians experience. And transmisogyny describes an intersection of misogyny and transphobia that trans women and transfems experience.

The lesbophobia example is especially pertinent to this discussion. The homophobia that gay men experience is often distinct from that lesbians experience, and homophobia against gay men is no minor prejudice, gay men have literally been murdered for being gay. Yet there is no “homoandrophobia” (to borrow an argument from this post by catgirlforeskin) and that’s because misandry/androphobia isn’t real. Men experience systemic oppression differently from women experiencing the same oppression, but that’s because of the absence of misogyny, not the existence of any misandry.

So a word like transandrophobia does imply an intersection between “androphobia/misandry”and transphobia. Otherwise it doesn’t have much reason to exist.

Misandry must affect all men in order to exist

I have seen claims that while “cis misandry” doesn’t exist, trans men and transmasc people are in fact oppressed for being men or masculine. And that’s how transandrophobia works

.

But that’s just transphobia. Misandry can only be real if it affects all men. Misogyny is a viable term because all women are oppressed for being women, even if they can also be privileged because of things like being cis, wealthy or white which balances out their oppression for being women (intersectionality is complex). I wouldn’t claim misogyny was real if it only affected a subset of women.

You can’t claim that men are oppressed for being men or being masculine, that it is some stigmatized gender or gender expression, when being a man and specifically a masculine man is what is expected of about half the population, and in fact men gain privilege for the successful performance of masculinity.

It’s true that trans men and other transmascs are systemically oppressed, and do indeed experience severe pushback if they express their manhood or try to transition in a transmasculine direction. But that’s because they are trans. Transfems experience a similar oppression for expressing their womanhood or trying to transition in transfeminine direction. That’s why the word transphobia exists.

Let’s make an example of a common bit of rhetoric among transandrophobia people, and see how it is all explained entirely by transphobia. Transandrophobia people talk about some general “hatred of testosterone” as part of transandrophobia, often dishonestly conflating transfems expressing their dysphoria with transphobic rhetoric about how testosterone ruins transmasc bodies.

But any idea about society hating testosterone fail to account for why the testosterone flowing through bodies deemed naturally male is seen as okay. In fact being “high-t” is seen as a positive in a man. It’s not even a prejudice against medical testosterone, being “low-t” is a fad disorder that cis men can easily get testosterone prescriptions for. And trying to lower your “natural testosterone” levels is something that’s actively hindered and gatekept, something I’ve experienced. I waited three years to get on t-blockers due to medical gatekeeping. In my country Sweden getting your balls removed legally and thus permanently lower your t-levels is something you have to petition the government for, something I’m trying to do.

Any kind of theorizing about a misandristic hatred of testosterone can’t explain this. It’s only so-called “cross-sex hormones” that are seen as bad, not testosterone in itself. And this is entirely explained by transphobia, not misandry.

It’s of course true that men are oppressed, but it’s never on the basis of being men. People who try to argue for misandry often use (often appropriatively) the struggles of oppressed men and try to argue they are oppressed because they are men. And transandrophobia theory is no different.

“Deserving a word”

The attitude among the transmascs who support transandrophobia theory seems to be “transfems have transmisogyny to describe their oppression, we deserve a word too.” Except again, transfems don’t have the term transmisogyny because we are very special girls who need a special word for our oppression, it exists because it describes the intersection of misogyny and transphobia we experience. It exists for the same reason as lesbophobia does, to describe an intersection between misogyny and another oppression. Gay men are not disadvantaged compared to lesbians because they “only” have the more general term “homophobia” while lesbians have the more specific word “lesbophobia.” And I don’t think transmascs would be disadvantaged if nobody accepted transandrophobia as a tern for their experiences.

You don’t need a specific word to talk about your experiences with transphobia, just as gay men don’t need a world like lesbophobia to talk about their experiences with homophobia. You can just talk about them, and use the word “transphobia” as a label for it.

And sometimes acknowledging that our experiences of oppression can be similar is useful for solidarity and community building. All trans people are negatively affected by transphobia, and that is the real “transunity.” theory.

Don’t end up like nothorses who once unironically listed “Misgendering over the phone,“ as an example of transandrophobia/transphobia only affecting transmascs.

Words exist in a context

Transandrophobia clearly exists as some transmasc counterpart to the transfem transmisogyny. It was even more obvious when the word was “transmisandry.” Words always exist in a context, and is often built by binaries. How someone who believes it defines transandrophobia does say a lot about how they define transmisogyny.

I’ve already described how if transandrophobia merely means “transmascs specific experiences with transphobia” it doesn’t have much reason to exist. But it also by implication diminishes and reduces transmisogyny. If transandrophobia only means “the transphobia experienced by transmasculine people”, transmisogyny is reduced by implication to only meaning “transphobia experienced by transfeminine people.” It’s another symptom of how tumblr discourse is uninterested in acknowledging misogyny, and in this case that misogyny is intersecting with transphobia in transmisogyny.

And well, if transmisogyny means “an intersection between transphobia and misogyny experienced by transfems” it does imply that transandrophobia also should describe an intersection, for why else does it exist. And we are back to it describing an imaginary intersection between transphobia and misandry, a misogynistic and antifeminist idea.

Who gets to define their own oppression?

Of course I am a trans woman, and I will of course get accused of hating transmascs, and robbing them of their ability to define their own oppression.

I would be more sympathetic to this argument, if transandrophobia theorists didn’t keep on constantly defining transmisogyny as the result of misandry. It is common in these circles for transmascs to reject any tme/tma distinction too. Literally going “I got mistaken for a trans woman once, that means I’m affected by transmisogyny.” There is absolutely zero respecting transfems rights to define their own oppression in transandrophobia circles, so why should I respect theirs?

Seriously, the “transmisogyny is actually misandry” claim just keeps happening. Genderkoolaid did it, the transunity blog too, and this dude who I literally found by browsing the “transmisogyny” tag spewing his misandry nonsense.

The problem with “transmisogyny is misandry, actually” is that misandry isn’t real, men are privileged for being men. Transfems experience oppression because we reject being men and performing masculinity. Men are in fact our oppressor class. When transmisogynists talk derisively about “men who wear dresses and say they are women”, they aren’t saying that being a man is bad (in fact they are often men themselves), it’s that “being amab and rejecting masculinity and manhood and claiming to be a woman is bad.” Its an intersection of transphobia and misogyny.

“Transandrophobia” is seldom just talking about the difficulties of being transmasc, it wants to redefine how transfems think about their oppression as well. And it does so in misgendering and transmisogynistic ways.

The transandrophobia theorists generally ignore the existence of transmisogyny, especially in queer communities. In fact it often implies or outright states that transfems are privileged in the trans/queer communities for being women or feminine, which is bizarre. In reality, Transmisogyny is rife in queer spaces, with “crazy trans woman syndrome” being common.

And it’s not like transandrophobia discourse is immune to that particular syndrome. Transmisogyny-exempt privilege dynamics remain very much in play. Transfems tend to get accused of being transandrophobic. The accusations are framed as “lateral aggression” not oppression, although the tone of these posts suggests “lateral aggression” is another polite euphemism word swap game like misandry for “androphobia.”

It feels like the antifeminist, and specifically anti-transfeminist roots of the whole transandrophobia idea coming to the forefront.

[alexkablob]

[clears throat] in my experience, at least, realizing that I could just be a girl as much as I want and that I didn't need to think up scenarios (and manufacture a few in real life, I used to make so many bets as an egg) where I could dip my toes into femininity without it being "my fault"

didn't actually make those scenarios any less fun (or hot) for me! it just made me way better at them.

a year ago I would have been way too paranoid and insecure to make forcefem jokes on main and BAM now look at me

[tpwrtrmnky]

to me its kinds confusing because it would seem transmisogyny is the intersection of transphobia and misogyny, and people who are transphobic and misogynistic would see trans men as women (transphobia) and opress them for 'being women' (misogyny)

And the answer to this is that you can't figure out the meaning of a term that's got a specific academic use from vibes. You have to at least look it up on Wikipedia and read the first paragraph.

[punkitt-is-here]

insofar as transfemininity describes a specific relationship to transmisogyny (which is a fact about the world and a structure used for the underclassing of a specific class of people) i would just like to suggest that it is important for anyone thinking about the term to seriously consider what their relationship to transmisogyny is, and to consider to what extent they belong to the demographic deliberately underclassed by transmisogyny vs. the group of people who can wield transmisogyny as a cudgel against this underclass

I dunno man I just don't really think I care too much about an AFAB person using the term if it's meaningful for them. As much as we can be academic about this stuff ultimately I feel like your inherit feelings about your own gender are the best determinate of what label you want to use and if you come to the conclusion that transfemme is what you want then I'm not gonna be one to stop you since, as a trans woman myself, I get that femininity is different for others and also man who fucking carrrres I genuinely don't think you need to read Queer Theory and its intersection with other Topics (altho I recommend it) to figure out what you wanna call yourself. If someone irl told me they were AFAB transfemme I'd go "yo swag, that's really interesting" and that would really be the extent of it.

[taliabhattwrites]

"materialist" is a really great word for indicating "only the aspects of this ideology that flatter me, but presented as though they are comprehensive and unquestionable."

I think this would be a more cutting jibe if I hadn't gone through decades of academic literature where the respected scholars who set the discursive parameters on how my culture is discussed in the West all were kind of blatantly making shit up.

We're talking stuff like "Oh, this practice doesn't mean X, it's actually something subtly different and culturally-specific, called <the literal Hindi word for X>."

I've read about the "gender-expansivity" of Hinduism, the "docile nature" of "real" Indian women, and the "enlightened attitude" of people towards gender-variance. All claims made without a shred of substantiation, which might as well be describing an alternate dimension or a fantasy setting if you're someone who actually grew up in the place(s) discussed.

So no, "materialism" is a word that means "let's try to make sure our assertions describe reality, perhaps by empirically observing reality-as-it-is instead of basing entire subfields on wild conjecture". If you talk to any number of overworked and straining marginalized grads in the social sciences, you'll quickly learn that this is very much not the norm in the hallowed institutes of knowledge-production, and is in fact an idea that is rather frowned upon.

[communistkenobi]

thank you so much for the transmisogyny reading post! im definitely gonna be reading into those. in a similar vein, do you have a recommended reading list for decolonization/anti-imperialism?

Do you mean molsno's post? def cannot take credit for that but yes I have a couple!

high-level recommendation is discourse on colonialism by aime cesaire (this link goes to a pdf that is a collection of essays, you can skip to cesaire's essay). probably one of the most formative essays for me personally in terms of how i think about colonialism

decolonization is not a metaphor by Tuck & Yang is a famous article in decolonial scholarship and will likely come up pretty frequently if you're reading academic work. if you read that article, i recommend following it up with Slavery is a Metaphor by Garba & Sorentino - its a Black critical commentary by two marxist scholars i believe on Tuck & Yang's work, working through the anti-Black thinking that is present in the work, particularly the deeply problematic conceptual attention given by Tuck & Yang to slavery when historicising and analyzing settler colonialism in North America. These are both academic articles and they're both jargon-laden so your mileage will vary

I originally included decolonizing transgender 101 by b binaohan on here before realizing that it's already in the linked post above lol. in that post is a link to the full book that i'll repost here (usually you can only find the introduction online) so definitely make use of that. anyway great work, very accessible and insightful, makes direct linkages between white supremacy, settler colonialism, and transmisogyny in a way i found extremely helpful

i read beyond white privilege: geographies of white supremacy and settler colonialism during my master's about four years ago (jesus christ the passage of time!!!) and found it very insightful - the authors talk about white supremacy as a process rather than a historical event, as well as talk about some of the conceptual limitations of the popular focus on white privilege (as opposed to white supremacy) that i found very helpful for me personally. its another academic article

I've been recently introduced to Anibal Quijano's work, particularly the Coloniality of Power. this is an extremely theoretical work that focuses on the construction and universalization of race, the 'invention of Europe,' modernity as a colonial construction, and a bunch of other pretty dense topics. thats not to scare you off, but its probably the most theory heavy article i've linked here

this list skews towards academic work because that's what im most familiar with (all the links i provided are open-access links so you should not need institutional access to read them). For books, you can read Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon or Orientalism by Edward Said, they're both pretty foundational decolonial texts and are also pretty formative for me. Fanon's work is on decolonial struggle and the pathologization of colonized people, Said's work is on the construction of "the East" to justify and reproduce Western hegemony.

Hope this was helpful! I'm by no means an expert and this is only scratching the surface of scholarship on the subject. I'm still in the process of reading, but hopefully this is a good starting point for you!

[genderkoolaid]

^ lets deconstruct this post

So. Look. If you want to define transmisogyny not as "transphobia targeting transfems" but as the intersection of transphobia and misogyny, that's fine. Honestly, I'm for differentiating between anti-transfemininity and transmisogyny, while acknowledging that transmisogyny is fundamental to anti-transfemininity (and fundamental to anti-transmasculinity, and sexism/genderism based in male stereotypes ("misandry"/"antimasculism") is also fundamental to both, but I digress).

However. If we are seriously defining transmisogyny as the intersection of transphobia and misogyny, then it makes no sense to say that trans men can be transmisogyny exempt. If its just about the intersecting oppressions and not identity (or perceived identity), then it makes no sense to center transmisogyny entirely on transfeminine experiences. Under this definition, trans men are transmisogyny affected not only when we are perceived as transfems but all the time because its a fundamental part of transphobic rhetoric against us. The best example would be how transmascs experience the intersection of anti-trans bigotry against "unnatural" modification of bodily sex/gender status and the misogynistic obsession with controlling pregnancy and the bodies of those who can become pregnant.

For example: a trans man is outed to his family, who then force him into a marriage with a cishet man where he is maritally raped and impregnated. Its inaccurate to say that this is just transphobia or just misogyny; this is about punishing him for threatening the patriarchy on two levels: taking autonomy over his "female" body, and transgressing the gender/sex boundary.

But if "transmisogyny" refers exclusively to the intersection of misogyny and transphobia which targets transfems, then it only makes sense that we need another term to describe that which targets transmascs. You can't both complain that transmisogyny isn't "transphobia targeting transfems", so there doesn't need to be a transmasc equivalent, and argue that transmisogyny only targets transfems and transmascs are capable of being TME.

The rest of this is just the same shitty takes on transandrophobia discourse:

"Its a term made in retaliation against transfems!" No it isn't. It was and has always been a term made for transmascs so we have our own language to center our own experiences. Your obsession with making everything we do about transfems says more about you than it does us.

"Its just used to say "when transfems are mean to transmascs!"" No it isn't. For one, personally and from what I've seen from others, we tend to complain a lot more about self-identified TMEs than about transfems because honestly? Other transmascs have been the most annoying in this discourse. But two: it is disgustingly reductive to say this shit when we discuss the very real issues of suicide, rape and sexual assault, forced pregnancy, forced marriage, the way criminalization of T criminalizes transmascs and especially TMOC, the murder of transmascs and how we are erased after death. Again, this is your obsession with making everything we do about transfems.

"As it seems to be used only on this site" No it isn't. Multiple academics, including the literal coiner of the term, are doing research onto this concept & terminology.

EDIT: OP was not aware of the ongoing sexual harassment. I still think saying "trans women taking the piss" is downplaying a lot of the lateral transphobia that takes place, but she's not referring to anything specific I believe.

[metamatar]

i now have an instinct for detecting transmisogyny in feminist academic writing that keeps hitting professors at major depts.

[ghelgheli]

no lie the most clarifying theorizing I have read about being tma has only ever come from twitter threads and tumblr posts and discord messages and physical conversations. never from an academic publication. so it is difficult to construct a syllabus of transmisogyny that extends beyond prefiguring works in feminism and contemporary historiographies into the materialist analysis of it all. week 2 maybe some jules gill-peterson and susan stryker I guess. week 4 check out some of these medium and anarchist library posts. week 6 do you follow ash @ bloomfilters on twitter. week 8 screenshots of a convo with my friend about "transfeminine" embodiment of masculinity. week 10 I tell you about a dream I had.