#also trans women suffer for womanhood too

[impulsivelycontentious]

To be a woman is to sit at the character creator in a video game with dude's default settings and be like "nope I do not like this at all, it feels all wrong" and switch everything to the "woman" stuff. Especially the how other people talk to/about me.

Its not the ONLY nor the universal, but it's one of the things that makes me FEEL cis. I LIKE being a woman. I will always choose to represent myself as a woman.

What a woman is and how she thinks of herself is individual. Trans women's idea of their womanhood is as valuble as cis women's, and presents perspectives which can, if you're not fragile, help you understand yourself. In the same way people who are similar to you but not the same often can. Cis women don't have more authority on this one and I will not have some transphobe define my womanhood by suffering. I LIKE being a woman. I choose it. I am lucky enough to have been born this way; and I think i'd have chosen it regardless. The only reason i'm not trans is genetic lottery.

“to be a woman is to experience pain”“to be a woman is to perform”“to be a woman is to-” SHUT UP SHUT UP 💥💥💥💥

[busket]

garden variety conservative transphobia is going to get worse but radical feminism is also going to get worse. if youre a cis women terfs are going to try to recruit you and make you believe that the reason your rights are at stake is because of trans people. they're going to tell you that all men are your violent oppressors and they're going to include trans women in that category. they're gonna tell you about women who are gender traitors and joined the enemy and they're going to point to trans men. don't believe them. trans people are not your enemy, we have no power over you, and we desperately need your support and your solidarity.

be aware of radfem pipelines and dog whistles too. be skeptical of anyone that talks about the divine feminine or correlates birthing, menstruating, or female reproductive organs with womanhood. be especially skeptical of people who use those biological things as reasons to why women are more spiritual, or more in tune with nature, or just that they're better than men (read: anyone they decide is a man)

radical feminism is an expected reactionary outcome from cis women who are being oppressed by conservatives, especially when all they practice is ciscentric, liberal, white feminism. they feel the need to be radicalized but don't have the experience and information to pinpoint the true source of their suffering. trans people are not your enemy, AMAB people are not your enemy, anyone who identifies as a man is not your enemy. we're all being crushed under the same stone

[taliabhattwrites]

The Sexed Regime, or: You Probably Have the Wrong Critiques of "TME/TMA" Terminology

Let's begin by looking at an interesting dichotomy.

There's an oddly pervasive idea in queer spaces that a truly progressive trans or post-gender politic underscores the irrelevance of sex. In contrast to patriarchal society's utter fixation on "natal sex", queer existence must be transcendent, a space in which one's bodily configuration is understood to be entirely under one's purview, where presentation is simply something we inhabit and implies nothing about our sexualities or embodiments. It is an idea of emancipation rooted in agnosticism, an anti-patriarchal revolution spurred by the lack of belief in our cissexist society's deranged emphasis on knowing what's in our pants at all times.

It's a very appealing idea, I'll admit.

Here's the thing, though.

The naturalization of sex is the foundation of patriarchy, as well as the basis of the heterosexual regime it instantiates. Humanity is cleft in twain, with one sex marked for reproductive-sexual exploitation by the other. Like most other regimes, this one is also powered by belief--belief in the superiority of the 'male sex', the unfitness of the 'female sex', and most of all: absolute belief that sex is immutable, exhaustively binary, and non-overlapping.

What this also means, ultimately, is that those of us who dare to desert the sex we were conscripted into face different pressures and violence. It is obvious that many trans people are also subject to reproductive injustice, as cis women are, and consequently the transphobia they face is very acutely a regendering impulse, a patriarchal desire to drag them back to the confines of womanhood to fulfill their patriarchal purpose. There is, understandably, a certain amount of solidarity between cis women and trans people who have suffered these aspects of the heterosexual regime.

This is in fact the understanding that gives rise to even liberal-progressive uses of 'male socialization' directed at transfems. Trans women are understood to have been spared certain excesses of misogynistic violence and therefore expected to see and approach the world differently. It is simply a neutral observation, of course, no judgment behind it ... well, until it comes time to deny trans women epistemic authority over experiences of misogyny or womanhood, even their own. After all, can transfems really be said to have a full understanding of patriarchy? They weren't 'raised AFAB'!

Oftentimes, this becomes a double bind of proving that transfems did experience trauma, feminization, and abuse even pretransition, often as children, which is then usually dismissed as "trauma dumping" or "equating womanhood to being abused"--despite the minimization of our experiences being predicated on our "lesser" understanding of the trauma of being "misogyny-affected". So let's not retread that.

Instead, I'll point out that people assume a symmetry, a complementarian equivalence, almost, between the experiences of trans people. What I would like to stress is that there is no such thing as a coherent "AMAB" class or a shared "AMAB solidarity" based on shared experiences of oppression, because I have some shocking news that readers may wish to sit down for:

Trans women are oppressed by cis men.

Cis men are overwhelmingly the ones who rape us, beat us, kill us, and seek to abuse us. When we were children, we were bullied and violated for our perceived effeminacy, largely by the cis boys we were most proximate to. Most of us have been around cis men when they've voiced their most dehumanizing, misogynistic thoughts about women, and have been punished for not participating in these rituals of misogynistic rhetoric, too. The trauma of our upbringing involves being locked into spaces with those who sniffed out our differences, our non-conformance, and routinely punished us for being deviant. When we grow up, they are the ones who largely continue to prey on us.

The chief characteristic of transmisogyny is the presumed artificiality of trans womanhood, the idea that we are mimetics, and our womanhood is a farce, a costume whose only purpose is sexual. This dovetails with our disposability--our inability to be women who can bear children, further patrilineality, and secure what minuscule respectability is afforded to the domestically-confined women who continue the male line. As such, our hyperfetishization marks us for extreme violence, as sexual objects that can be freely used and discarded, guilt-free, because after all ... We asked for it.

Why would we "choose" womanhood if we did not want this?

Which, ultimately, brings me to my point: Sex is a social regime of difference imposed on us, but it is, unfortunately, a regime still in existence. My sex is the basis upon which my womanhood is denied and my disposability justified, because the transfeminized are degendered--we are not, as a rule, provided a path "back" to manhood. Our "effeminacy" ensures that we are 'failed' men, because gender is ultimately hierarchal. Losing status, being unmanned, is frankly trivial, and is what underlies the oppression of queer men--trans men included. Most of us are ultimately subject to some kind of degendering, largely due to how a patriarchal society regards those who defy the reproductive mandate, but transmisogyny is a specific manifestation of degendering that trans women experience.

"TME/TMA" may well be an imperfect categorization--all undertakings in boundary formation are imprecise, though not always violent, given that we need descriptive terms to communicate--but the real issue with it is that it's an overly-ponderous and ultimately clunky terminology for the frank reality that the binary sex imposed on us shapes the contours of the violence we experience. I have never experienced the specific kind of misogyny that sees me as nothing but a broodmare, because I'm a filthy troon, that dehumanized abject thing whose only purpose is absorbing (sexual) violence. Yet the acknowledgment that transfems experience forms of violence that others do not--or sometimes, even the acknowledgment that transfems face violent misogyny at all--is much less forthcoming.

Our struggles are indelibly connected, of course, stemming from the same source and promulgated by the same regime that seeks to define us as nothing more than male property. The shape of each is distinct, however, and because people frequently misunderstand the shape of mine, the idea that my struggles are even connected to theirs, that I experience misogynistic violence homoousian with that which they experience, is frequently dismissed, or considered outright offensive.

This is why I talk and write about transmisogyny, and why more people need to become more familiar with how the naturalization of sex and the regime of heterosexuality under patriarchy necessitates our common struggle.

And unfortunately, in order to properly express these ideas, we do need to talk about the regime of sex.

[shamebats]

Not only do I believe that if someone who was previously assigned the role of woman/girl transitions out of it because they want to escape certain expectations that come with that role & organs they happen to have been given by nature, I also believe this will on the long term benefit cis women.

They should have all the same options available to them as trans people do & they should be aware that they have them.

Don't enjoy having periods? Take medicine to skip them. Womanhood =/= suffering through periods.

Don't like your boobs? Yeet them. Womanhood =/= having a non-flat chest.

Don't like having vaginal sex? You don't have to, there are other things you can do. Womanhood =/= putting up with unsatisfying sex just because you have the organ for it & your partners want to use it.

Dont like that you can get pregnant? You don't have to. Womanhood =/= suffering through pregnancy & childbirth.

Don't like the idea of being a mother? You can be a father instead. Or neither. You can opt out entirely. Womanhood =/= motherhood.

Don't want to be a girlfriend/wife? You can be a boyfriend, a husband, a partner, neither, anything you want. Womanhood =/= being a girlfriend/wife.

You don't like having a vagina? There's surgeries for that too. Womanhood =/= having a vagina.

We're still at a point where people in the social role of woman think there's this whole laundry list of things they just have to suffer through & put up with because of their assigned role & anatomy.

There's no virtue in suffering and if we help women learn this, they will put up with less bullshit from society.

(I also think this is a huge element of the transphobia afab trans people face. Misogynistic men don't want women to know that they can have that kind of power over their own lives & bodies, and a lot of cis women who've suffered needlessly all their lives have the instinct to push back against afab trans ppl exercising our bodily autonomy for the same reason that ppl who sacrificed a lot to pay a fortune for their education don't want it to be made free.)

[genderkoolaid]

hey i’m sorry to bother you but what are some warning signs that someone is a terf? i would very much like to be out as gender-fluid at my small town southern school (surprisingly supportive) but the school nurse had that “fallen sisters” book on her desk :( i don’t want to put myself in danger and i don’t know if she was reading it because she’s a terf or because she was curious about what was in it. thank you for your time!

Quick note: a lot of transphobes are not TERFs; they don't subscribe to the movement of radical feminism. But especially right now TERF ideas have become more widespread, since a lot of transphobic people turned to TERF speakers and authors for support. But that's also because a lot of TERF ideas meld very nicely with traditional patriarchal ideas (like the idea that the gender binary is required for safety of women). Things like "trans men are manipulated girls suffering from misogyny!" has gotten really popular recently, but in the past your average transphobe would probably be thinking more along the lines of "huh what a freaky dyke" than assuming it's the patriarchy's fault trans men exist.

Anyways! That's all to say that someone might use transphobic or radical feminist rhetoric without being a radical feminist themselves. Here are some things to watch out for:

Use of "female" and "male"; in medical contexts I tend to give people more grace, but if she's really insistent on sex language that's a red flag.

Highly concerned with pushing womanhood on students AFAB; if they're a TERF this is less likely to look like "pink and bows" and more likely focus on Female Power, uteri and menstruation, and identity with womanhood as a feminist act itself. Comments like "remember you can dress/act however you want and still be a woman!" can be well-meaning but they can also be a subtle way of trying to prevent GNC students from thinking about transitioning.

Fearmongering about the effects of HRT (especially T); educating about all possible effects is important, but if she focuses on negative effects, treats them as horrifying or more dangerous/common then they actually are, that's a red flag. Especially when it's tied to reproductive ability. Same when it comes to surgeries.

If she believes ROGD (rapid onset gender dysphoria) is a real thing, she's transphobic. If she doesn't use that term she might talk about transness/transmasculinity being a social contagion or trend, something young girls are pressured into (esp. by misogyny/lesbophobia), even if this is dressed up with "obviously SOME trans people are real but there's just too many now!!"

Of course, any kind of weirdness around trans people in locker rooms/bathrooms is a major red flag

If she does end up being transphobic, since you mentioned your school is supportive you might be able to tell the admins about that and have them back you up. If there are other trans people at your school, definitely ask them if they've noticed any transphobic behavior from her (you can ask cis folks too although they may be less aware of what subtler transphobia sounds like)

[rivetgoth]

Can I be honest I see tguys say stuff like this all the time and it’s just so fucking crazy sounding to me. I can’t believe how many of them felt some kind of camaraderie or community with cis women. I was consistently ostracized by women and girls in my life for my not being able to successfully assimilate into girlhood/womanhood and almost exclusively friends with boys through my entire childhood. My closest “female” friends growing up literally all came out as FTM around the same time I did. When I was fully “female”-passing pre-everything closeted etc I was still treated like a freak for being in the women’s room & at the very minimum was presumed gay throughout middle and high school to the point that I was called slurs & people would tease me by asking me how lesbians have sex with each other etc. I don’t mean to like invalidate people or say that these people’s experiences aren’t valid but I just think it’s crazy how common of a narrative “lamenting losing your community with fellow women” is in the FTM community when not only is that like a lifetime away from my experience but tooooons of WOMEN I know don’t even feel a universal camaraderie with fellow women 😭 Black women, trans women, autistic women, butch women (and obviously all those categories can overlap), even just cis women who were Weird Girls, I’ve talked to many who didn’t feel any of what OP is describing…

Crazier too (& I always see comments like this too) is people in the comments of this post being like “yeah OP being a man sucks because men are so cruel to each other and aren’t gentle and warm like women are and men’s bathrooms suck and are nasty and grimy and you can’t compliment women without being seen as a creep,” and I also don’t get that shit. Just detransition if you hate being a man that much bro I’m out here living as a man because I want to. I remember the time this goofy trans guy wrote some article going on and on about how the men’s restroom is a cold disgusting space of toxic masculinity and internalized homophobia and how men are performatively cruel to each other in there so they don’t seem gay or something and it was just. Incomprehensible to me (I’d seen that article and hated it before this even happened, but that SAME GUY later wrote some insane “how to pick up trans girls” article about how to seduce trans girls that was literally insanely dehumanizing, creepy, and misogynistic, shocker). I’ve been in men’s rooms all over the damn place in conservative areas liberal areas in foreign countries and men’s bathrooms are just. Fine. They’re fine. I think it’s really overshooting to assume some unspoken hostility when men in bathrooms aren’t super social because the social dynamic of men’s rooms has always made perfect sense to me lmao the goal is to spend as little time around the damn toilets as possible and just do your business and get out without bothering people or holding anyone up.

Idk. I don’t really have a uniform thesis in all this I just think it’s one of the most bizarre frequent things I see from the FTM community—so many guys seem to genuinely hate being men and feel that they felt some warm connected community with womanhood and this even comes out in way more genuinely toxic ways, the guy who wrote the weird “how to seduce trans women” drivel being case in point, or like, mis/degendering trans women by claiming they don’t understand the like innate female connection™️ that they have or by sounding like straight up incels being like “oh women are so beautiful and soft and kind meanwhile as a man I’m forced to be alone and suffer in silence the male loneliness epidemic is real” or whatever. Like I’d understand and be much more interested in analysis from trans men about the pitfalls of identifying with manhood in relation to patriarchal power structures or how harrowing it can be to be accepted as a man in a community of men and be made privy to the way some men will so brazenly speak about women in their presence and how to navigate that, but it’s never even about hating manhood as an oppressive force or dealing with actual bigotry from fellow men, it’s about feeling like manhood is isolating and lonely while womanhood is warm and connected and community-oriented and I just find that kinda batshit and just not. True. I have cishet male friends who tell me they love me, who offer to go with me into the bathroom to help me throw up if I’m too drunk, who wish me happy birthday with heart emojis…

I honestly think a lot of the problem here is that a lot of trans men have exclusively female friends pre-coming out (which again is still kinda wild to me, but w/e) and then when they do come out and begin transitioning feel the divide form between them and their cisgender girl friends and become convinced this is some epidemic of male isolation rather than like. Just the reality of having old friends who you could relate to more at a different point in your life. I think making more male, trans, and LGBT in general friends would really make a difference for these people. And just generally making friends that are contingent on more than “we were assigned the same sex at birth.” As an adult now I’m pretty discerning with who I’m friends with and I have amazing friends who are both cis men and women & trans men and women and I don’t feel like I have trouble relating to them or feeling left out by any of them. I guess ultimately it’s harmless unless it becomes the weird spiraling incel stuff I was talking about before but I find it kinda incomprehensible how often “I hate being a man” is uttered in spaces comprised of people who are undergoing massive trial and tribulation medically, physically, socially, financially, etc with the express purpose of being a man.

[farnorthdoll]

i think you have a very strange way of looking at transandrophobia theory.

no one is saying those experiences are transmasc only, just that they do happen to transmascs and other people some consider "TME".

plus being excised from communites for being too masculine is a real thing that has happend to multiple transmascs i know, includeing myself, its not "TERF theory", its something that happens to us in queer spaces. it sucks and is horrible but you cant close your eyes and go nu uh.

im not being accuseitory here, i just want you to try to read our theory in good faith. transmascline people have again and again been called stupid little girls and crazy ladies by cis society, so it would be nice if the rest of the community would at least try to engage with us.

if your theory is premised on the idea that transmisogyny does not exist (which is inherent to the idea that violence against trans women is directed toward us because we are "seen as men," or because we are "associated with" masculinity; this automatically strips transmisogyny of any meaning and reframes it as misandry), then it centers misandry as the crux of this issue. it frames trans women being misgendered as collateral damage to the underlying issue, that queer spaces hate and oppress and exclude men.

(i understand that there are people who associate with transandrophobia theory that decry any hint of trans women being "seen as men"; while i appreciate these people's refusal to validate this transmisogynistic rhetoric, they are the vast minority in your community, and most theory it produces is in direct contradiction of them.)

frankly, i do see instances where the expressed justification of excising a community member is their "masculinity"; this always stems from transmisogyny. the member being excised is not hated for being a man, rather, they are being maliciously denied their femininity or womanhood. i have seen this happen to TMEs occasionally, but they are nonbinary people who happen to be mistaken for trans women, which still centers the experience itself in transmisogyny. the rhetoric used is always intended to strip the individual of femininity and access to womanhood. the experience itself comes from transmisogyny, not misandry, and it being leveraged against a TME is an individual instance of misgendering, not a moment that tips the hand toward the real, secret evil of misandry that underlies society.

i also reject the notion that men who openly and proudly identify as men are suffering some sort of oppression by being asked to leave spaces that are specifically not for men. many TMEs are bad-faith reframing "being excluded from women's spaces" as "being excised from community because they hate men," when really all that happened was someone made a simple and reasonable request or boundary, such as requesting men do not sexually interact with them or enter their private sexual space. i feel it is ridiculous to ignore that these things are being said in bad faith, even though it is not by everyone in your community, as it is happening often enough to be notable.

i appreciate you reaching out and requesting good faith. i do try to approach everything in good faith, and my rebuttals are meant extremely sincerely, from a position where i am analyzing the dynamics unfolding in spaces i have been in and am currently in. i am attempting to analyze gender dynamics from a broad lens, not zooming in on individual instances of exclusion or discrimination.

[velvetvexations]

The TRF argument will literally always come down to just "Oh yeah? well if transphobes see trans women as men, then why are they oppressed? men aren't oppressed and androphobia isn't real, so they must think they're women, because only women are oppressed! I'm smart."

Trans women aren't oppressed for "being men," or for their "maleness" or "masculinity." They're oppressed because people AMAB are supposed to be one way and they aren't. It's SUCH a simple concept to understand that being seen as a man is not an automatic get out of oppression free card. If you can understand Black men are oppressed in spite of being men you can understand that there is also a faggot modifier appended to trans women being a perceived man. You have to believe that gay men aren't oppressed and were never historically murdered at the same rates as trans women, or that cis people have just in the last ten years been able to distinguish between cis gay men and trans women as concepts.

Being a trans woman does not need to be made scarier than it is. It's already maximum scary. It does not diminish our suffering to understand that transphobes don't think we're men. But some people are legitimately just desperate to be a Women in every single way cis women are and want the radfem conception of womanhood based in misery and oppression to confirm they're women because they're too weak to be women from pure will alone. They need the oppression to be based on their womanhood being recognized because if even one person doesn't recognize it the TRF falls apart and can no longer consider themselves a woman.

That's weak. That's a weakness. Fucking feeble. If you need to tell yourself that you're ~taxonomically~ a woman in order to be one then I'm better and more powerful than you because I simply think I'm a woman and therefore I am. You're a fucking scrub if you can't just be your gender all on your lonesome the way I can.

Just like TERFs, TRFs cling to anything they can that tells them their identity is "real." When a TERF throws up an image of a uterus everywhere, it's because she can't identify in any other way and feels an overwhelming need to confirm to herself over and over that she's a "real" woman. But newsflash: cis women aren't real women either! There is no such thing as a man or a woman except what exists in our mind.

It's ridiculous that I get accused of not thinking trans women are women simply because I don't think it needs proving with hard science. Insecure motherfuckers. Literally just get over it. This includes trans men who are so insecure in their masculinity need to be told they could oppress the shit out any woman ten times a day.

Get over it.

[tirfchu]

sometimes i feel like, in certain cases, "detrans woman" and "nonbinary woman" ain't too different. and could even be used simultaneously by the same person without much issue. after all, isn't processing internalized misogyny and escaping the gender roles box for womanhood also a way someone can at the same time not feel like a binary man, not feel like a binary woman, but not feel like a not-woman either? after unlearning all the bullshit male society taught us, it can be destabilizing and create distance between us and other women. we might no longer feel like a normie woman. we've been awakened. we're no longer a gender roled woman, rolled up in everything she was taught she needed to be or she would fail at womanhood. we're an unfailible woman, we can't get a bad grade in womanhood bc we don't care about gender grades. we know it's all bullshit. we took back the power patriarchal society had over us. in that sense, we're not willingly binary anymore. and i think, over time, it's only going to get harder and harder to find women who are happily into the gender roles, the gender box assigned to them.

people fucking hate that, ofc. especially male people, and doubly so cis/bio men. they hate that we're awakened women. they hate that we found feminism and sisterhood and go detrans or use nonbinary in addition to woman, bc we reconnect with our body type and our upbringing. and by they, i mean both sides btw. the patriarchy hates that we found our power, of course. non-feminists scoff at us.

and... mainstream trans activists hate that our journey got us here, and hate how we make dysphoria seem curable in unmedical ways and transness more complex than they like to think. we complicate things. they hate that they found power in changing themselves (whatever makes them feel at peace ofc), while we tried to as well, but in the process we found our power was within us all along. we found that just being neutrally sexed animals, just female humans, female animals, girls the way that one calls a cat a sweet girl, cat first girl second, human first girl second... our bodies, our gender category, don't define us. anymore, anyways. anyone who defines us by our womanhood is a bigot, and we scrubbed our brains free of all the shit patriarchal brainwashing left in us. and for us, personally, it was enough to free us. that's not the case for anymore. some folks need more than that. some folks need to modify themselves beyond recognition to feel at peace with themselves. but i do hope they know that deep down, they were always good beings all along. i hope they know that gender is bullshit and sex says nothing about anyone's worth, personality, goals, interests, etc. it says fuckall about any of that. i don't care if i get a male or female rabbit. a rabbit is a rabbit. if i feel affection for a new pet, our connection is what matters [*]. i would never assign someone gender roles based on their sex. but it's sadly done way too often by parents and male society. if you're trans, temporarily or forever, you gotta clean up all your internalized misogyny and sexism/gncphobia. find kinship with other female people, or male gnc people if you're male. just check off some boxes. clean everything up. deep-clean your mind and your heart first.

[*] insert tras here being like, "why can't you be like that about dating? you dirty close-minded terfy homo dyke? why can't you love beyond genitals? beyond just bodies?" and these days i laugh and laugh and laugh at that shit because wow they have zero clue!! they don't know the sense of peace at having my female/afab body against another female/afab body, at knowing we were born the same, at knowing we went thru the same growing up, at knowing we understand eachother so, so deeply without saying a word bc she is what i am, she is where i have been, and i have suffered as she has suffered, and we are a love born of the connection all female beings share, the connection of bio dick havers treating us as prey. not knowing we're more powerful than they could ever dream of. do bodies like ours not hold the godly powers of creation itself? are we not gods in the literal sense, born creators, who get to choose if a new life should be made? do we not hold the future in the palm of our hand? to the dismay of penised beings? and do me and my beloved not love eachother only the way two gods could love one another, knowing the struggle, knowing the power? is the patriarchy not fighting tooth and nail to control us, wrestle us into submission before their phallic altar? do they not know it's impossible, for everything in us would dry up at the sight? do they not know that we can rely on sisterhood to get us through fucking anything? do they not know we masculinized ourselves and found ourselves happily female anyway? do they not know that i'd love her with a beard and five eyes, but if she was reborn male we would not be the same people to begin with (tho ofc i like to think the bodyswapped versions of us would have a love story too, we would not be us anymore, not this timeline's love story, she would be a different version of her and i would miss our og love)? because what is anyone without memories, and aren't childhood memories, puberty memories, some of the experiences most affected by one's body type (under the patriarchy), some of the most developmentally significant memories of all? is female just genitalia and estrogen puberty to tras, to "hearts not parts" type folks?

is female just a meat suit and not also the life experiences linked to it, our upbringing, a rich female culture one is born into? trans women might be immigrants into this female culture if they pass post-transition, they might get the exact body, but they just don't know the culture the way born into it do. any transfem will admit being transfem is hard, it's hard to merge into female culture when they self-admittedly don't know much about it. anyone not having been born into this culture, not being fluent the way only a native resident of femaleness can be, will show signs of it even if it's been 50+ years. you can't just wipe someone's upbringing clean, your past always leaves traces, and a transfem wouldn't be able to bond with other female4female lesbians on basic female upbringing things... when those are the things that make being into other female ppl so attractive for many of us! we just get eachother. we understand without even saying anything. we understand female body issues. there's a warm sense of peace emanating from that knowledge in my heart, knowing me and my girlfriend were born the same. we went through so many of the same things, all the good and the bad sides of growing up female. and i find that attractive as hell, and it brings me immense joy in life. there's so many inside jokes a transfem just wouldn't get the way my gf can. and i unfortunately need to add, since people get defensive, that this isn't shaming the transfem for not having those experiences. i hope the transfem will come to terms with not being female too. she can be a woman in society, but she's not born this way, she's an immigrant into womanhood, and that's okay. she still needs to let lesbians who are only into people raised female enjoy our unique sexuality that she just can't understand. i can't understand the transfem4transfem experience either. so what? isn't lgbt or 2slgbtqia+ or whatever culture all about inclusion and diversity in sexuality and gender expression? what about those who are girls the way animals are girls? we hate gender roles but we're personally definining cis womanhood as being female animals, female humans? what's so twisted about that? what about female4female lesbians? transmasc4transmasc can exist, why not us? why make everything so stupidly complicated for no reason? why shame us for how we were born, for being into others like ourselves?

i pity them, honestly. watch them bring girldick and male upbringing experiences to female4female lesbians, watch as we'll all dry up like the dying succulents on our windowsills and sip drinks laughing at the naked male bodies before us because they're so unsexual to us homodykes. watch as we raise eyebrows at the male's lack of misogyny in her upbringing, her lack of expertise on female culture, and just... everything that's so fundamentally unappealing to us. we can be friends. we can be allies. thankfully though, sex and marriage isn't activism. you can't play woke in the sheets. if you do, that's honestly sad. love isn't political. heteros made it political, but love is just love. and the love between two female people is normal. boring at times, even. we're normies. and if mainstream tras can't see that, well, maybe they have issues to work through in therapy. idk.

if two dysphoric ppl working through really hard shit end up feeling at peace with being female animals, female humans, and loving one another, if that's threatening, if that's bigoted, if that's twisted, well...

we detrans chicks and homodykes will find our own place to hangout. and we'll be nice to your faces, of course, but behind doors we're having a blast with others like ourselves. people like us have done this for as long as humanity has been alive, anyways. we always go underground and make it work anyhow. radblr is proof of that. idc if i have to go door to door checking if any homodyke is there, or if i have to comb thru tra spaces to find cool detrans folks, i will find others like me. that's what the marginalized have always done.

we're like lizards. we'll just find a cooler rock to party under🦎✌️

[stil-lindigo]

okay so, not entirely sure what the last anon was on about (and it very well could be a troll just trying to bait. they really should have at least brought up what they meant if they wanted to appear in good faith), but it may be in relation to "drink up" and how it attracted terf attention on twitter? (which I know you addressed btw, so I hope this doesn't come across as an attack or anything)

personally, I think the phrase "our only natural predator" might have appealed to terf rhetoric just a little (but that's my opinion - I very well could be 100% wrong). I have my own personal feelings on the use of "natural" in the phrase (men don't naturally prey on women like animal predators do their prey - if anything, it's unnatural, deliberately chosen behavior - and it reminds me of the excuse that "it's just naturally how men are," like "boys will be boys." HOWEVER, I see how that phrasing ties into the "lioness/women turning it around and preying on the predator" theme, so honestly it works well there), but aside from all that, I can also see why it might've attracted terfs: bc they very often view and frame trans women as male predators to cis women. I know that's definitely not how you intended it though!!

and this also isn't meant as a nitpick to your work, so my apologies if that's how it comes across. I really like your art and your writing (and "drink up" has a very cool theme)! it's just that I can see how terfs might've interpreted it a certain way. it's not your fault that they viewed it like that though, and you've made it very clear you're NOT down with trans exclusionary BS. so that's literally the only thing I could see anon complaining about tbh, assuming they're not just being a troll. also I'm sorry for the super long message (I have an issue w/ typing too much smh). I just thought I'd share my thoughts on it in case it's at all helpful, but also this might just be annoying to read instead, so honestly feel free to just discard it if you prefer!

It’s not annoying at all anon, and I appreciate you taking the time to send this in. The comic you’re talking about is one I think back on with a lot of regret. It was made in a furious haze after a big time female streamer revealed that she was being mentally abused for years by her husband, where he would waste her hard earned money, threaten her dogs and her livelihood and overall be a monster to the woman who was their primary breadwinner. The reaction online to this information by her largely male audience was so genuinely vile and violently misogynistic that I made the comic, without thinking broadly about the implications you’ve already pointed out. In reality, the comic was meant to talk about how all women (cis and trans) suffer under the patriarchy and how the label of womanhood can often be an open call for baseless derision, dehumanisation and entitlement at many levels.

TERFS quickly co-opted the comic, and I’ll always regret ever giving them an opportunity to feel empowered and validated by my art, but I’ve learned from the experience overall to do better by my trans siblings. Thank you for engaging in good faith - I hope my behaviour now and in the future can make up for past mis-steps.

[thedandelionresistance]

Intersex transneufemmasc here, @luxiomahariel is right. AFAB transfem and AMAB transmasc are NOT intersex-exclusive. Any prescriptivist argument about what the "real" or "true" definition of any part of womanhood is fundamentally rooted in ra//dical feminism, even with a decidedly non-radfe//m caveat added in to "protect" a marginalized group.

It's true to some extent that "AFAB transfem" is not an identity. Transfem is the identity, AFAB is incorrectly assumed to be or used as an adjective modifying transfem, when it is actually an event that happened to you at birth with no correlation to your anatomy nor gender presentation that affects your relationship to your transfemininity.

However, taking a word for word T//ERF argument about what a "woman" is, adding "trans" in front of every instance of the word "woman", and then saying "but actually as long as you're this intersex to ride this doesn't apply to you" is just a different flavor of bioessentialism and gender essentialism. By insisting that you must meet a certain standard of being physically non-dyadic (whether genetically, hormonally, at a direct macro-anatomical level wrt sex characteristics, or any other form of intersex), is in fact insisting that there is a particular way transfemininity can look, but broadening the category slightly. It also typically results in sorting intersex people into "perisex-AMAB-adjacent-enough" and "too-perisex-female-adjacent", either through physical features or based on the gendered experiences someone had while growing up and being raised.

It also defines a subset of womanhood/feminine genders (specifically, the intersection of womanhood/femininity, transness, and intersex identity), as based around the suffering and struggle and oppression one had to face to get there.

Using status-quo-"hater"s arguments, someone with a subtle genetic intersex variation without outward nondyadic sex characteristics who was raised female can never be transfem, someone whose parents started raising them as a boy but immediately accepted that they were a woman the instant they were old enough to understand and express gender (since they were never treated as anything other than a woman from the moment womanhood was applicable to them)* can never be transfem, and so on - unless there's just a blanket rule of "if you're intersex in any way, you can do whatever you want forever", which then arbitrarily denies the transfemininity where some perisex snd intersex people have experientially identical lives and internal relationships with their gender (such as in the case of intersex identities that can go undetected for a person's entire life, and therefore be functionally identical to a perisex person's life other than the unknown invisibility of their identity).

(Note: it's pretty rare for a person who was assigned FEMALE at birth rather than MALE to be raised as a boy, this is more likely to apply to an intersex transfem who was AMAB. Not unheard of, but a pretty rare reason to identify as AFAB transfem.)

You can see which it might be in cases such as perisex AFAB people being raised as boys by abusers or cults being attacked for using an "intersex exclusive" term, while AFAB intersex people with outwardly perisex-female-typical characteristics who are raised as women are either denied the term that is for intersex people for being "too perisex"/"not intersex enough" or arbitrarily allowed to use the word despite not having any of the experiences determined to "count" as an intersex AFAB transfem experience.

"AFABs who want to be trans girls" is also a transradfem dogwhistle. Besides being dripping with the misogyny transradfems define transfemininity around and the mixed bio-/gender-essentialism and intersexism of simultaneously treating AFAB as a coherent biological or legitimate social category while also erasing intersex AFAB people (Remember, bigots know they are contradicting themselves. They simply don't care if it's useful to them.), it is commonly used by people who appoint themselves arbiters and gatekeepers of intersex and transfem identity alike, who do not speak for the majority of either community and who often rebinarize intersex identity into male and female intersex. The vast majority of these people are perisex, with a few, typically self-hating or "the leopard won't eat my face" token intersex hangers-on who temporarily benefit from throwing their own community under the bus to gain conditional acceptance for as long as they are useful as a token.

Because yes, this is also harmful to intersex people. It is harmful to intersex people who have a sense of their internal identity, but do not yet know they are intersex - whether because they are uneducated or misinformed about what counts as intersex despite having nonnormative outwardly visible sexual characteristics, or because they are not aware that they have an intersex variation entirely. It is harmful to intersex people who may have faced abuse, bullying, or oppression, such as medical or even community gatekeeping from outliers within the intersex community, and don't feel confident identifying as intersex - especially if you demand people must do so in order to be able to identify as transfem. It will hurt the people not able to safely openly identify as intersex (even where they might be able to safely identify as trans).

The idea that it's primarily people who want to "look traditionally masculine" who are perisex and use the AFAB transfem label is a misrepresentation at best and a particularly odious and ass-pulled strawman at worst. While it's not untrue that rarely, perisex AFAB transfem people happen to want features typically considered more traditionally masculine, it's more complicated than associating transfemininity generally with features they consider masculine.

Sometimes the desire for those features is entirely unrelated to their transfem identity or even related to the masc part of an identity such as "transfemmasc". Sometimes it's related to butch identity tied to their transfemininity. Sometimes it's because they consider those features feminine in the exact same way some perisex AMAB transfems and trans women do. The reasons as in the examples are often far more complex and not rooted in transmisogyny if there is any relation, and all experiences that some AMAB transfems share. Far more often, the people who were assigned female at birth who are using the transfem label and are perisex have experiences such as:

-being multigender and having that experience inherently queer their experience of femininity and womanhood, because "manwoman" does not match the gender of assigned female at birth. nor does any component of "genderfluid" when, even when experiencing only one of the genders they are fluid between at a time, the genderfluidity itself changes the nature of each individual gender

-being a demigirl, a feminine xenogender, or even transitioning towards femininity as someone who was previously a masculine, androgenous, neutral, or otherwise gendered woman. also, transitioning towards a feminine nonwomanhood, such as your gender going from butch dyke to femboy or a femme man (yes, you can be a transfem trans man or transfemmasc, just as you can be a transmasc trans woman or transmascfem)

-being an introject or syskid in a plural system, where you may have soulbonded or joined a gateway system from your original life, where you were born a different sex or identity or born into the system with an internally intersex body (for example, we have several headmates like this. one canonically has a different intersex variation than our body does in their source. another simply formed with non-triadic sexual characteristics (they're also not human, hence the use of nontriadic, and are intersex by the cultural norms of their species' society)

-for that matter, all manner of alterhumans and nonhumans alike, who may have had different bodies in past or parallel lives, experience endelic or otherwise body-identity related harmless delusions, and so on

(People who consistently rage about not shutting down or talking over minorities about their oppression and experiences are very quick to shut down and talk over plural, alterhuman, and delusional people about our own experiences, even those of us who are notably also bodily intersex within this shared reality. It really reveals that it was never about centering vulnerable and suppressed minority voices, but about centering themselves.)

(It also, particularly when all these groups mentions face significant sanist oppression, is directly perpetuating and participating in that oppression, by defining what is an acceptable and allowed identity that these people can claim as both real and valid, as well as by denying these groups autonomy, historically one of the primary ways we've been oppressed. It's one thing to talk about different experiences - though this can also often devolve into denial of exomemories or exotrauma, something that on a neuropsychological level is registered as real by the bodymind indistinguishable from memories and trauma in this reality - but this is also often reductive and exclusionary to the non-monolithic intersex community that doesn't share these non-universal experiences that they are defining intersex identity around.)

It's also worth briefly noting that reality checking or fakeclaiming delusional people, regardless of whether the belief is harmful or not to anyone, is itself directly harmful to the delusional person unless they've explicitly consented to it, full stop. You are doing direct IMMEDIATE harm to them if you do so without their express, uncoerced/manipulated permission.

- This is also not an experience I can speak on personally, but the masculinization of some women of color and feminization of some men of color, especially where the lines between perisex and intersex blur, may be a factor for some people. It's also a complex situation entirely - because the entire definition of intersex is based around white dyadic standards. I debated including this at all, because I don't want to tokenize people of color, but wanted to bring up that how gender and sex and race all interact is important to acknowledge and to listen to people of color about. Nonwhite people are not always treated as their assigned gender at birth, sometimes to the point of feeling they have to transition towards it, from what I've heard from my friends. And intersex variations are underdiagnosed in people of color even in spite of being based around deviations from white perisex female and male standard bodies.

(People also forget that perisex AFAB and AMAB are a range of bodies and significantly wider range of experiences, and that intersex is an extremely wide variety of bodies and experiences basically encompassing everything not within the range of the dyadic sexes. There is absolutely a threshold at which it can be unclear whether someone is simply towards the end of the perisex range, or just outside of it.)

In any case, the experiences of perisex AFAB transfems (and much of this also applies similarly to AMAB transmascs, who are hypererased much the same way AFAB transmascs are, only compounded by the hypererasure of AMAB nonbinary/nontransfems. This is in part because of demonization of any perceived maleness or masculinity in transradfem spaces where it is treated as an impurity or contaminating aspect of gender, and in part because the centering and defense of (white, ontologically harmless and vulnerable victim-gendered womanhood) is crucial to upholding patriarchal gender standards and colonial racial oppression. But that's part of a much larger, more complicated conversation even than this).

At the end of the day, it's just a form of ladder-pulling to deny people the right to identify as transfem, and furthermore, it relies on circular logic. Deciding who can identify as transfem and therefore is allowed to define transfem and therefore is allowed to decide who fits the definition of transfem and who therefore can identify as transfem effectively is used to justify not letting anyone they've defined as a "non-transfem" define transfem in a way that includes their transfemininity.

It's the exact same way TER//Fs use eternally goalpost-moving definitions of women to exclude trans women from being "real women" and therefore having the "right" to define "real womanhood". All exclusion relies on this.

(I will instablock anyone who goes "oH bUt wHaT aBoUt rAciAL/eThNiC/cULtUrAL iDeNtiTiEs aNd aPpRoPriAtiOn". That is both fallacious and racist. Systemic racial oppression and gendered oppression are not the same thing, and you are not here to have a nuanced conversation about cultural appropriation vs sharing, open vs closed cultures and their exceptions (such as appropriation from primarily open cultures, or exceptions to joining closed cultures in good faith as determined by those peoples. I have not yet met a person of color, jewish person, muslim, or even nonwestern white person who has not said "stop it, you're being racist/antisemitic/islamophobic/xenophobic", in all the literal thousands of interactions I've had with these groups of people on this specific issue.)

Anyway, I could add stuff about the conflation of transfem with trans woman and the way this simultaneously erases nonbinary identities and treats them as "trans woman lite" (further contributing to AMAB nonbinary hypererasure, as well), about the way that someone's personal relationship between gender and sex can be intertwined, but how sex has literally nothing to do with gender in any way at a general/universal level and that the vast majority of people who claim it does are doing sex=gender, trans edition levels of reductivism. (Note: not all people are, but where some nuance exists it lacks depth, effectively being gilding on a shitcake.)

I don't know if status-quo-"hater" is speaking over people who hold an entirely different identity or a shared identity, and can't be arsed to check. I honestly don't care either way.

All forms and experiences of AFAB transfemininity and AMAB transmasculinity are valid. I will not debate nor entertain any responses trying to convince me otherwise (I actually won't even see them before they are removed where possible and you are blocked, thanks to help screening my notifications). There is no way in this universe that you will convince me that believing people about their own internal identity and experiences is somehow the bigoted option and that actually the people controlling the labels that people can and can't use are the good guys who are just victims of the horrible meanies who are... minding their own business and going about their lives. All cops are bastards includes label cops (and I say this as a disabled person who nearly died due to police violence, so I don't give one singular flying shit about anyone telling me I'm "co-opting" that phrase).

Block me if you don't like it or whatever. Usually I ask people to not include my username in the screenshot to avoid harassment, but despite trusting my currently four followers maximum that will see this to not harass any of the screenshotted people, I can admit that would be hypocrisy, so like, do whatever.

Tl;dr Linguistic prescriptivism and bio and gender essentialism harms everyone involved, including intersex people, and also relies on contradictory and faulty logic to even try to justify itself. People can use whatever gender labels they want forever.

[cedarnommer]

There's a big and frankly stupid debate about trans women in sports and how we're supposedly predisposed to win in sports. I'll talk personal experiences rather than some big research. Not that people that hate trans women care for what we say, but I digress.

Prior to being on HRT, my body had a far higher nmol of t than actual cis men. It hovered between 230 and was almost above 250. The dysphoria I felt from that was awful. I was aware that at some point I had the crazy ability to just repeat a physical exercise a bunch and get muscular rapidly. I always avoided arm exercises yet I could lift up fairly heavy things. After starting estrogen, I noticed that I got weaker. After I started taking t blockers, it became significantly more apparent. Groceries of 5-10 kg that became easier to carry around now feel like me trying to carry them in my preteens to early puberty time.

None of this is to say cis women are weaker. Since our bodies are not absolutes and some cis men have lower t and some cis women higher t. But, trans women are likely to be taking some form of t blockers if transitioning. And this does affect our physical strength a lot.

The sports discourse is a fascinating intellectual tool used by actual sexists. It isn't necessarily just transmysogynist in its structure. The core argument made is that women are more physically weak than men. Therefore women need intervention so that they're protected from the physically superior men. It asserts that a patriarchal hierarchy is natural and actually beneficial to women. And I feel like it's this logical tool which tricks people into assuming this is to their benefit. We're nothing but a tool for actual cis men to assert themselves and gain power. So people that use the label feminist yet defend these actions aren't all that feministic. It reminds me of how many issues second wave feminism had in the US due to excluding non white women and lesbians. This isn't real feminism in this case. It gives acknowledgement that men are indeed superior and all feminism amounts to is an idea to beg and seek approval of spaces that men decided for women.

But all I hear is how we, trans women, dominate women's sports. Most of us can't even lift a bag of groceries well, let alone dream of doing this. The other rhetorical reasoning behind this is to belittle and attack our femininity as trans people. Our womanhood is denied while we're also called failed males. And ya know, this rhetorical idea was used by white feminists in the past to deny non-white women too. You're not the defender of women you think you are, if you're not seeking genuine liberation from this garbage gendered system.

But what do I know. I'm just the supposed weak "man" that's also somehow super powerful and superior to cis women. I'm also supposedly having a super imposing male privilege because everything I say is heard and enforced over cis women while people debate my literal right to pee in a public restroom.

Do I feel privileged and mighty? No. And I certainly doubt I can overpower cis women. And to be quite honest, I don't understand why I'm supposed to. I've never understood why men have this idea of domination and aggression. That should hint to you that I'm not a man.

Trans rights. Women's rights. The ghouls that enforce all this suffering can go to hell.

[deservedgrace]

Am I being petty? My dad is always saying stuff like “I’m praying for you to be successful” or “god made you perfect”. I know he means well but it’s so uncomfortable whenever he does those things. I don’t want you to pray for me, I need real help. You don’t know the real me and you probably wouldn’t be as proud if you did. He still thinks I’m the perfect Christian boy instead of an atheist who’s figuring out their gender. He claims to love and support whatever I want, but he always leaves out being a girl when listing off topics, and has questioned me at random times about trans athletes when I’m too tired to think of an answer.

In my opinion, absolutely not.

I was actually just talking about the prayer thing with my friend last night. So many christians use prayer as almost a silencing method, whether intentionally or unintentionally. When I left the church I realized just how abysmal my comforting/supporting methods were because while I was in the church, I and everyone around me relied on cutting uncomfortable topics short with "well I'll be praying for you" or ask to pray with you about it, and offer literally NO other support while also expecting prayer to, just fix it magically. Hilariously, the same people that are always like, "god's not a genie, you're praying wrong if you're expecting him to answer every prayer you have" seem to ask for and expect genie-like responses from him while doing NO work of their own to support the people they're praying for. Prayer is Very Very often used as a substitute for support. Even when I was deep in the church it never felt sufficient, but I couldn't say anything because it was supposed to be sufficient and if it wasn't sufficient that was a problem with me and my "sinful nature". Churches and christians that focus on prayer over actually being the hands and feet of jesus (fucking doing something about it) aren't fostering proper community and support. They're fostering a culture of not being able to talk about difficult things, of suffering in silence, and of relying on a silent and unprovable god which often results in being taught to rely solely on yourself.

I really feel for you with the gender thing. I don't know the full context of your specific situation but I see "god made you perfect" used to silence any notion of being trans far, far too often. The implication being, being cis is the default, being trans is going against who "god made you to be", etc. I've noticed this especially of christians who believe in complementarianism (men and women have different roles to fulfill), many of them tend to "love and support whoever you are"........ so long as it falls into their tiny box of what they deem acceptable. I don't want to turn this into a whole thing about gender but even in a worldview that doesn't recognize the existence of trans people, there isn't a definition of womanhood that includes every woman and excludes every non-woman and vice versa for men ("a woman is someone who can have babies" excludes those with infertility issues, something that affects up to 20% of women, "a woman is someone who has XX chromosomes" excludes intersex women, "a woman is someone who has a uterus" excludes women who have had hysterectomies, "a woman is someone who has had a uterus at SOME point" excludes women that simply born without one, which happens to about 1 in 5000 based on a quick google, etc etc). My point being, they're trying to draw these confining and limiting boxes where they can't. Humans don't work like that. Their idea of perfection is something that is simply biologically and sociologically and historically unsupported. Gender is complicated because humans are complicated. It's disappointing that some people can't see the beauty in that and it's devastating that it often causes so much pain and suffering to those around them.

I really hope you're able to find proper support. If possible, I encourage you to (safely!!!) continue exploring your gender. And it makes complete sense that you'd feel uncomfortable about these things. Prayer without proper support is skirting responsibility at best. Tearing down trans athletes and doing the christian "god made you perfect" thing with the implication of cis being the default is not a supportive environment to be around. I'm not going to be able to remember the quote verbatim but one of my favorite god/trans quotes is something along the lines of "god made trans people for the same reason he made wheat but not bread and grapes but not wine; so humanity may share in the act of creation". I'm not necessarily encouraging this as a "gotcha" statement, I can hear in my head exactly how my church would respond to that. But outside the church I think it's a beautiful reframe despite me not believing in god anymore. And if you would prefer something less religiously related: I'm deeply sorry you're not in a supportive environment. There's nothing wrong with you. As far as I can tell you're having a very normal reaction to the shit you're having to put up with and the situation you're in.

[terra-feminarum]

Thank you for being here. I might not always agree with what you say but your posts are thoughtful and nuanced and you carry the energy of a great philosopher with you.

It's a pleasure to have you on my dash.

And I might be just emotional tonight for unrelated reasons but reading your post about how societal changes are fast and women are getting fed up really helped me.

Thank you.

I'm glad to hear. I'm also glad to hear you don't always agree with everything I say but you still find it valuable. I don't agree with everything I've said a year ago, and I probably won't agree with my future self either. I think thinking, writing and having conversations is the best one can do to try to make sense of things, and hopefully that clumsy process will lead to better outcomes than sticking to one opinion for the rest of one's life.

I invite you and others to disagree with me in public, maybe we could try having respectful disagreements and learn? I ask this selfishly as I'm actually very bad at disagreeing and am very quick-tempered and would like to learn something else.

About societal changes being fast: they are. I always give trans issues as an example because that's the one I've lived through and participated in, for better or worse. It was a fringe phenomenon and now it's what it is. I've seen gay rights advance, too, though I didn't participate in that but rather just enjoyed the fruits. I remember when it was illegal to write or talk publicly about homosexuality in a way that might be interpreted to advocate homosexuality. And now the most popular presidential candidate in my country is openly gay.

Now I'm just rambling but I have hope for a change. One reason is really that so many women seek to escape womanhood by identifying out of it: this is an expression of suffering. This is better than not even realizing you suffer. I doubt it will be an identity they will keep for the rest of their lives, and what then? Where they will turn after that? There are so many women who seem to be fed up in other ways. Younger women are critical of hook-up culture and porn industry and that was such a surprise for me and I've learned so much from them. Women are realizing they've been sold shit. The ecological situation causes more and more people to look into the values that has caused the destruction in the first place and that will have a profound effect: these are men's values and what they do with nature, they do with us, too. This is a time for profound changes in our value systems and the iron is hot, so to speak. Of course others see that too so there will be competition, but I believe there is a good chance women will gain some serious wins.

[genderkoolaid]

I don't know if you know blue eye Samurai, but I hate how people talk about the protagonist.

I'm a non binary Trans man, and I actually identify a lot with Mizu (the protagonist), but I go here on Tumblr and I see a lot of posts that say: "I know everyone can see Mizu however they like, but I want everyone to know that the right interpretation is that she is a woman pretending to be a man... but everyone can think whatever they want, not forgetting that she is a woman of course."

And it's a bit annoying because when I see explanations of why is "wrong" to see Mizu as a Trans man, I see people going "Why can't there be representation of gender non conforming women!?" And "she wouldn't pretend to be a man if it wasn't for the society she lives in!"

The last one makes me especially angry, because of how many Trans men get erased from history with that same argument.

I don't know, I think it makes me mad because that fandom feels like a micro cosmos of the anti Trans masculinity a lot of Trans men have to face.

And it's not like I think it's wrong to see Mizu as a woman, but when everyone goes "of course she is a woman, why would she want to be a man for anything other than necessity?" I don't know how to feel.

I'm gonna steal my own words from that post about jeanne d'arc:

And the best part is, we can say all of this and also see her as part of women's history! Because women's history, too, does not have to be exclusively about woman-born or woman-identified women. It can be about a larger cultural experience. And Jeanne d'Arc suffered because of transphobia which is always fundamentally misogynistic. I would argue it even makes sense to say her death involved transmisogyny in a very literal sense. The thing about transfeminism is that it can free us from the need to view personal identification with the role of "woman" as vital to feminism. Being a woman, in whatever sense, is certainly not unrelated to feminism, but one can be a feminist and have any kind of personal or communal relationship with womanhood. Anyone can be inspired by the story of Jeanne d'Arc and her bold defiance of both misogyny and transphobia, no matter how she may have personally understood her gender.

People have this idea where if a character or historical figure (or even currently living person) is anything but a woman, then any kind of Feminist Story falls apart. Especially when it comes to misogyny! People act like someone being a trans man means all their experiences with misogyny are like. gone? Or the story is now, essentially, about a cis man being mistaken for a woman, and thus women are Not Allowed to feel any connection at all.

All of this on top of the fun hypocrisy that is "we can't say this person/character is a trans man because they wouldn't have that concept, but we can say they are a cis woman because those are both the only options and ciswomanhood is a natural and universal concept we can apply regardless of any other context :)"

& with Mizu its like. you literally can see her as a GNC woman. people calling him a trans guy or transmasc or genderqueer or anything else are not taking away your experience of her as a GNC woman. Transmasculinity is not just Negative Womanhood, the idea that transmasculinity is something which saps away representation/power/dignity/identity/value from (cis) women is like ATM 101.

But the whole way people treat trans men and misogyny really annoys me, I guess because the assumption is that for women, having to dress as a man to get respect inspires anger at one's position in society, but trans men are incapable of having any complex feelings about that. Like trans men must fully enjoy not being able to have sex with others, or go to a doctor, and having to live in fear of being outed and facing the brunt of transphobia and misogyny, and trans men also couldn't possibly be angry about misogyny that they experienced, and also nonbinary people don't exist and no transmasculine person could possibly be anything but fully comfortable being seen as a cis man all the time. Sure, some trans men are perfectly happy passing as cis men, but like. there is more than one trans man. & ignoring all other transmasc experiences besides The One is a form of erasure, it just passes as something else because technically you are acknowledging A transmasc existence.

[gsnap125]

Reading The Second Sex - Preface

I recently received a copy of the Second Sex, by Simone de Beauvoir. Since this is such an influential text in modern feminist thought, I've decided to give it a careful reading. A few days later, I'm several chapters in, and have a great many thoughts about the text, so I've decided to journal them here. This post is to provide personal context, so that my other posts can be focused on the chapter of the book in question.

The point of this is not really to make any major contributions to feminist thought. I don't have much background in academic feminism, so I don't have a fantastic sense of how exactly feminist thought has evolved in the 70+ years since this book was published. That said, I have been listening to feminist ideas for several years; I expect many of the thoughts I have on the text are retellings of previous writers whose ideas I have heard over the years. With that in mind, the idea is not that my reading of the text is especially groundbreaking.

Rather, this is a way for me to organize my thoughts as I read. I have a specific perspective on the text that is informed by my experience, and I think it will be helpful for myself to synthesize some ideas as I read. If this is of any interest to others, then all the better. With that in mind, I thought I would ground my commentary by referring to specific parts of the text. I am reading the unabridged version translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, published in 2011 (as best I can tell). I will cite page numbers as I have them, and the analysis we be categorized by chapter so it should hopefully be intelligible for other versions of the text. I am not fluent in French, so I will be limited to this English translation.

The translators have fortunately used the terminology of the time of the original text intact. Notably, this excludes concepts such as the delineation of sex and gender, and includes use of terms like "sexuality" that may seem discordant to a modern reader (who is more likely to hear that term in discussions of LGBTQ+ people). While I am immensely thankful the translators retained the original wording, I see no reason to hold myself to the same restriction. I plan to replace the terms in the text with modern terms that I think most accurately reflect my interpretation of the text. I'll use brackets to denote this, and the page reference will hopefully be sufficient for the interested reader to critically evaluate my substitutions.

As far as personal context, I have read far enough that it has become clear that I have a few identities that are important to how I read this text. The first, and least important, is that I am a practicing scientist. I am a physicist, so I don't expect my technical expertise to be too relevant here, but working in science colors how I interpret the sections on science, and makes me aware of my limits when speaking to topics where I am not an expert; perhaps in ways someone who has less claim to expertise may not, for better and for worse. I am also a white woman, born and raised in the United States. This colors my understanding of racism, imperialism, and the international effects of colonialism - they are often academic and impersonal issues, vitally important ethically and historically, but ultimately not immediately and directly oppressive to me.

I am also a transgender woman. I am not interested in debating whether this part of my identity makes me unable to speak from the perspective of a woman. I suffer under patriarchy because of my womanhood, experience misogyny, and my daily life has far, far more in common with a cis woman than a cis man. But there are some relevant differences between the trans and cis experiences of womanhood. There are some obvious differences of anatomy, in my case I benefited from male privilege for two decades before I came out, and I "opted into" womanhood in a way cis women typically don't. Of course, I didn't actually choose to be a woman any more than cis women; no one chooses their gender identity. But I did decide to transition, to present to others as a woman, despite patriarchy, despite misogyny, and despite transphobia. This is an often underappreciated part of the trans experience. Throughout my commentary, I will refer to the parts of it that I understand differently as a trans woman. I think this will be interesting in many ways; for me it will help understand the ways in which my intersectional identity affects my reading; for cis folks I'm sure it will reveal some interesting parts of the trans experience that are not obvious.

I think that is just about everything I wanted to preface my reading with, and now I can write while conscious of my starting point. ^^