#academic transmisogyny

[taliabhattwrites]

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

A note on the sheer cultural diversity of the subcontinent

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

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

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

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

Etymology and Usage

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

[transmandrake]

It's really particularly ghoulish how much trans suicide / abuse rate studies gets tossed back and forth by the 'community'.

Super fucking cruel and dehumanising to reduce something so dire into evidence for or against 'which flavor of trans person is the most oppressed and needs to be listened to over the other'.

Kind of revealing ime that this isn't really about queer rights or mental health but just like. A fucking slap fight. That one side will 'win'. And I guess the other shuts up and dies quieter.

Damn really trans men are the most likely to be suicidal / commit suicide? Makes perfect sense to me I know how invisibility kills. I know without other queer people I would have no one I'd feel safe to talk to who I trust to not make it gendered or use my vulnerability to try and turn me away from manhood or force me to conform to it.

Damn really trans women are the most likely to be physically abused and murdered? Makes perfect sense. Transmisogyny is dire and allows systemic violence to occur without repercussion more frequently than other trans people or cis women.

If you use these studies as fucking tit-for-tat fight winning material, you are reducing the lives of other trans people to fucking numbers to prove your fucking point. Do you feel good? Do you win? Do we win. Have the numbers gone down. I don't fucking think they will.

[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]

[plaidos]

sorry if you’ve answered before and i’ve missed it, but why move to america? the reasons ive seen you list are the exact ones that make me feel like i need to get out of here as fast as possible

there are places in the US that i would consider among the safest places to live as an english-speaking trans person who wants to actively surround themselves with the trans community.

like, i’m sorry, but when Yanks tell me that “the US is just as bad as the UK for transphobia” i can’t help but bitterly laugh. the city closest to me is considered the safest in the UK for trans people to live in and i have experienced endless transmisogyny there. the local university (a massive & prestigious world-famous one) is basically chock full of terfs; the academics & students alike. there is nowhere in the United Kingdom where i have felt remotely as safe as in Brooklyn, Chicago, LA.

that’s the other thing, if somethings shit in the US you can move to a whole other political climate without having to move country. it doesn’t matter who gets elected, democrat, republican, moderate, liberal, etc, places like New York City and Chicago are always going to have legal protections for trans people, it’s always going to be easy to get HRT there.

some of the HRT waiting lists in the UK are — i shit you not — over a decade long. there are people who have been waiting to be seen by the gender clinic for fucking years. even the so-called left wing party is actively constructing anti-trans legislation at a rate much faster than the conservatives ever were. they’re talking about national bans for trans kids in HRT, and unlike in the US, it’s actually a lot more likely.

if you are from the US i promise you dont know how good you got it. anything you think about the US being the worst place for trans people is doomerism through and through. i’m sorry if your state sucks or if you live somewhere rural, there are some truly dangerous places in the US, but the UK as a whole is fundamentally less safe to be as a trans person.

also my fucking fiancée is from the US you donut. simple questions have simple answers. i always think this question is kind of strange it’s like “oh why do you live at number 12 of your street instead of number 17 i think that house is prettier” well we take the fucking opportunities we get. i’m not a Sim i have very few chances at getting the hell out of here and i’m lucky enough to have people who love me already living in one of the trans capitals of the world. i think Brooklyn supposedly has a higher density of trans girls than anywhere else on earth.

[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.

[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]

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]

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.

[assaultmystic]

if i had a criticism to make of a short history of transmisogyny, it would be that gill-peterson seems to shy from identifying transfeminised people on the historical record as trans women as a form of hermeneutic injustice, but not from identifying them as queer men - which at points she seems to treat as a matter of course. not approaching these labels with equal caution is an issue imo

the emphasis on the colonial/state apparatus as vehicle of transfeminisation is fantastically useful. her attention to culturally specific identities is particularly careful (it seems to me, an outsider).

still cant help but feel the baby has been thrown out with the bath water in her dismissal of the psychologistic queer theory approach (of which her criticisms are very much warranted). i mean this specifically with regard to the identities of people who would simply call themselves trans women, about whom she often has very little to say. but also more generally

am of the opinion that transmisogyny is in need of a treatment from a multiplicity of discursive fields - in that it transverses them. the rejection of one lens for another in the exploration of the process of transfeminisation, rather than embracing that need for that multiplicity, is a shortcoming. strikes me as academic in a very literal sense (emerges as a rhetorical move as a result of the pressure of the academy)