#and actually same for cis people

[castielfucks]

theres actually no rules to transitioning and youre allowed to want contradictory things for your transition. it's fine if you only want some of the changes that come with hrt and take preventative measures for the rest (like wanting bottom growth but not body hair or vice versa). you can want to have vagina AND a dick. you can be a woman and want top surgery, or wear a packer. you can be a man and want to have a pussy. you can change your transition goals one or a million times or not have any goals at all and just take things as they come or as they feel right.

there are no rules.

[trans-androgyne]

Radical feminism cannot ever be trans-inclusive.

Why do I keep saying this? Because I have increasingly been seeing transmasc and transfem folks weaponize radical feminist ideas against each other and I am tired of it.

(TL;DR at the end, I know this is lengthy.)

So, what is radical feminism and how does it differ from other kinds of feminism? It’s the idea that patriarchy is the primary root oppression from which all other oppression spawns. It holds that the two primary classes are men/males and women/females, and that men are responsible for creating and maintaining all oppression, with women playing a more passive, secondary role. We're off to a bad start already; this is an inherently racist framework that absolves privileged women of their role in creating and upholding oppression, as the idea is that if women ran the world oppression would not exist. Intersectional feminism, on the other hand, understands the way many forms of oppression are rooted in racism, and that all systems of oppression are interconnected without having one singular root.

The way it functions and its prescribed remedies rely on the idea of a sisterhood--all women/females are connected with each other against men/males. The common belief is that males as the more powerful* class will always try to oppress women unless women band together against them and intervene. Men are framed as the enemy to be fought, not potential allies to be recruited into feminism.

Many of us have an idea of traditional cis radical feminism and how that leads to TERFism. But how does it function in the trans community? For radical feminism to work, a "sister" class oppressed by misogyny and an enemy class causing it must be identified. Radfem trans women will say that their identity as women means they experience the worst misogyny--trans men and mascs just get the weaker "misdirected" version, and in fact have a motive to uphold misogyny due to their identification with manhood*. Trans men are the enemy class that oppresses trans women. Radfem trans men will say that people afab are the real class that experiences the worst misogyny due to their ability to give birth*--while trans women and fems as people amab* are more aligned with cis men due to having received male privilege and been "socialized male" in addition to not having the same reproductive capabilities*. Trans women are the enemy class that oppresses trans men.

Both of these notions rely on painting groups of trans people as having access to patriarchal power they do not. They downplay the way misogyny functions in the lives of the perceived patriarchal class of trans people. It inherently ignores the real experiences of trans people and paints some of them as an enemy class; it cannot ever be truly inclusive of all trans people. Intersectional transfeminism would take into account the way misogyny functions in the oppression of all trans people, and analyze the material conditions of trans folks to reveal that no group of them is granted access to patriarchal power and cis male privilege. It means banding together as a unified trans community and understanding where our experiences are shared, as well as accounting for the way other systems of oppression critically shape the lives of trans people of color, disabled trans people, intersex trans people, and other groups.

*There are a lot of assumptions present in this analysis like the assumed agabs and reproductive abilities of trans men and women; these are not my beliefs but the oversimplifications espoused by the radfems I'm describing.

TL;DR: Radical feminism requires identifying one class as the patriarchal oppressors and the other as the oppressed victims. In the "trans-inclusive" version, this means downplaying the experiences with misogyny of either trans men and mascs or trans women and fems. It identifies either transmisogyny or "afabmisogyny" as the real root of all oppression, ignoring the voices and experiences of the most marginalized trans people. Truly inclusive transfeminism would unite all trans people against the patriarchy instead of falsely implicating us in it.

[snekdood]

notice how when you hear about all these rich white men in high positions of power doing heinous shit, none of them end up being trans men or mascs 🤔 but surely we're just as privileged as any other cis guy right?

[princessefemmelesbian]

Transandrophobia truthers are so damn racist and white oh my fucking god y'all actually piss me the fuck off every time you tokenize Black and brown men for your stupid as fuck "mra but make it trans-inclusive" ideology created by a creepy guy with a corrective rape fetish(something I'll never let up on for as long as I live, btw). If I ever see another one of y'all say "Black and brown men face discrimination because they're seen as overly masculine and that's why masculinity in men is oppressed in this society" I will literally kill myself. Stop using Black and brown men as brownie points for your bullshit arguments about misandry being real when you don't have the slightest idea how racialized oppression works. White boys are so annoying and dumb istfg.

@punkeropercyjackson @punknicodiangelo @pinkpinkstarlet

[biracy]

I can't remember if I've posted abt this before but regardless: I'm sorry but I really and truly cannot get behind the idea that there is any wide-scale societal "pressure for trans men to be feminine" or "to be twinks" or whatever. You are either conflating a very small online community's beauty standard (usually some kind of transmasc pseudo-appropriation of "femboy" aesthetics, which yes, are often Bad and regressive and fetishized and etc.) with Mainstream Society, or confusing society not wanting trans men to transition with "wanting trans men to be feminine", which are certainly not the same thing. Ultimately if a cis person believes there is any validity to the concept of being trans (i.e. not a Posie Parker-esque "there's no such thing as a trans person" type), they are more likely to think that trans men should be like as masc and buff and hairy as possible or whatever bc that's what cis people think men look like and it's easier for a lot of people to recognize someone who Looks Masc as a man. It is difficult sometimes to see derision of trans guys who are Too Feminine and Not Hairy Enough or whatever (which is not always something someone has control over btw) as anything but "this is Skye who I think is a confused little girl because Skye does not pass" slightly restyled for 2023 "filthcore fagdykes" or whatever lol

[elftwink]

can i say something. about the way you people talk about dungeon meshi. i find it extremely... interesting how headcanons about laios being nonbinary are framed exclusively as a way to shoot down other people's headcanons about laios being transfem. like you are aware when you have a hc that a character is nonbinary you can just... say it... and you don't need to preface it with "well i don't think they're transfem BUT".

and also i think its interesting that i never actually uhm. see anyone discussing their nonbinary laios hc in literally any detail. obviously i can't read anyones mind but it comes across to an audience like you saw someone hc laios as a trans woman, got irrationally irritated about it, found a 'progressive' and 'trans friendly' way to shoot it down, and then proceeded to continue treating him like a cis man in every post, meta, fic, etc, only ever bringing up the fact that you think laios is nb when someone else thinks laios is a woman. almost like you don't actually think that at all, and keep the idea around exclusively because transfem hcs make you uncomfortable for reasons you refuse to interrogate.

i don't think this is necessarily intentional on anyone's part, but i do think considering the discussions we have been having about transmisogyny on this website its not unreasonable to ask (especially of fellow tme trans people) that you have a long hard look at the way you respond to things like transfem hcs. while obviously fandom is #notthatdeep, it does not bode well for your ability to make room for your trans sisters for things that actually matter if you can't even do it regarding gender headcanons for anime characters

[tinystepsforward]

ngl it makes me want to die a little bit that it's so often trans people who feel that sex is mutable but oppression is always-forever based on asab in ways that allow them to demand that information from other trans people. like it feels fucking bad. it feels bad when it's people holding up someone who posts a lot of selfies as transition goals to a degree they have to clarify what they have or haven't done or what "direction" they're going in, it feels worse when people are out there like "caster semenya is not tma" or whatever the fuck. i am, as always, not a trans woman, but here's a sentiment echoed by many of the trans women around me who log the fuck off, quoted directly from one: "people who draw a clear line where they say that semenya or khelif are tme and then call me tma are just calling me male at this point".

like i get it. i really do. we seek community and shared experiences, and we feel betrayed when people have less in common with us than we thought they did. [*more on this later.] but that's not those people's faults and my god in the case i'm seeing play out on twitter rn this poor person did absolutely nothing to intentionally mislead people, just posted pictures of their actual kid self. who looks a lot like i did, because shockingly enough "we can always tell" doesn't fucking work for trans people either!

on the one hand i move in intersex circles which are unapologetically welcoming in cis "dyadic" people with pcos, because it serves nobody to draw a clear line where mutilation or genetics or some ineffable childhood suffering are what make somebody intersex, especially when most of us (esp in places like nz) have never been karyotyped and are being treated for symptoms without a pinned-down cause anyway. the more of us there are the stronger we are, the more pressure we can exert on a medical profession which doesn't like to consider how common outliers are, how uneasy sex is at all. and then on the other hand there's dyadic trans people on the internet who've yelled me out of spaces because a couple of traumatised incarcerated trans women i worked with as a prison abolitionist assumed i was also a trans woman and i didn't immediately tell them my entire csa-involved history of being sexed in varying ways as an infant and child and/or exactly how big my phallus was at birth or where in my junk config my urethra lives so they could decide i was tme or whatever.

returning to the * for a related but not identical thought: i think presuming shared experiences leads to some fucked shit in general! "oh we all had a radfem phase" or "oh we all were channers" no we fucking weren't and it's particularly obnoxious when me & mine are trying to build trans community locally to organise and resist the growing wave of far-right backlash against our existence, and there's just white people in there on a spectrum from "straight up being antisemitic and trying to get the n-word pass" through "handwringing about how they need to make space for people who aren't politically correct" to "handwringing about how brown people are right to be mad at them but doing shit fuckall". and then the other fucking brown people in the space are on some identity politics shit where they're like "trans joy inherently excludes those of us who could get deported" or "big city white queers are killing us by being visible instead of going stealth bc it stirs up the discourse" or whatever the fuck i've heard pulled out this year. there's a bunch of reasons i primarily organise outside of trans spaces and that's one of them. i've never felt more alone in spaces where people claim we're all the same than being left as the brownest moderator or organiser in a space full of people to whom "this is a safe trans space" apparently means they get to abdicate all other responsibilities not to lapse into presumed shared patterns that are fucking racist or otherwise alienating. i've never felt more alone than surrounded by exclusively trans people who sort people into boxes and assume everyone in those boxes has the transition goals they have. like i was on cypro until it disagreed with me to the point of endocrine crisis and now i'm on t and at both those points people were so fucking presumptive or entitled to my reasons or journey or personal relationship w my body

literally just submitted on (and was invited to consult on) the nz law commission's review of the human rights act and like. it's straight up fucked how many nz trans people fully do not comprehend that any "sex assigned at birth" type definitions fundamentally exclude migrants who have no way of proving it and many intersex people who happen to have been reassigned later or many times or never assigned at all as a baby. we can't make law with this shit and that's why we have to have symmetrical protections for all genders/sexes/expressions/presentations, bc naming and defining a protected class here often leaves the people who already are left out from those shared experiences of marginalisation out in the cold when they face violence

[whitehairedanimeboyfriend]

I feel like even in trans positive spaces trans men are seen as less authentic than trans women, because we supposedly have something to gain by transitioning or wanting to be men. (social power.) It's reflective of how we look at historical people that by today's standards we would see as trans men (Joan of Arc) or fictional characters that live as men while secretly being women. (Naoto from Persona, Sheik from Zelda.) And this is going to be an uphill battle until we get rid of gender essentialism in our spaces completely.

[mantisgodsdomain]

Now that we are being followed by people, we need to make some thoughts and opinions clear so that people are not later Shocked And Disgusted or whatever by thoughts we have held for many years. We think it's weird and also bad to treat queer people like they're a different species from cishet people, and we think that treating things like Having A Sexuality makes a character better than if they have a different sexuality is bad no matter what way you put it.

We also think that, if in your setting queer folks are widely accepted and straight isn't a "default", it may be worth noting that, say, a straight woman might need just as much self-discovery to work out she's straight that a lesbian does nowadays. In the same manner that, in Ace Attorney, Larry Butz needs to tell Phoenix that no matter how many photos of handsome men he shows him, he's tried, he's just not attracted to men,

[buggbuzz]

my gender is like meat leaf i think. boy materials in the structure of girl. like im a girl made out of boy things but not in a transman way like i like being female im just. a girl-leaning boygirl. maybe??

[musical-chick-13]

Regarding the whole "Fandom Is An Escape, so why should I have to care this much about misogyny/racism/ableism/transphobia/etc." thing. Idk about the rest of you, but it gets kind of hard for me to "escape" when I keep seeing people say the same vile things about characters who share aspects of my identity that I hear all the time in real life.

[orcelito]

Like OK so I've been reading a fic with trans wolfwood in it that is so. HONEST. About how it affected him and still affects him. In a way that's very much not an average cis writer portrayal of a trans character.

Like. Either this writer is trans or did plenty of research, but it just feels REAL to me. And it has me thinking about my own way of writing trans Wolfwood.

I'm not there yet. But I've been thinking about it. The ways that what the EOM did fucked him up... but it also acted as HRT that affirmed his gender. So what do you do when you're in a body you don't recognize, but looks much more like a man than ever before? There's some gender euphoria in a way, but dysphoria at the same time bc you didn't grow into this. You didn't watch yourself transition. Suddenly you just Were this, and it's not you, but also it's nice to finally be seen as a man, but it also feels wrong to feel grateful for any part of what they did to you...

On and on and on

You see? This is what I want to think about with him. This is why trans Wolfwood is so compelling to me. It's just so Complicated, he'd have such Complicated feelings about his body and the way he lives with it. He learns this new body, it starts to feel more like his, but he also mourns the fact that he didn't get to watch it grow into this like he should've.

That kind of thing.

[biracy]

The way people on this website like confidently assert their superiority over "TikTok teens" (concept I have complained about at length) bc "they wouldn't survive in the NINETIES when everyone said FAG and DYKE". Like yes obviously people shouldn't police other people's language usage but also treating people like cringey loser idiots for not feeling super comfortable personally using terms that could potentially carry a lot of baggage for them that you don't know about is extremely bizarre and I cannot believe this is where we're at. This is "if you are uncomfortable with me calling you A Queer it's because you're a terf" all over again except with this shitty faux-edgelord coat of paint over it

[uncanny-tranny]

If you want a weird piece of advice on how to treat trans men and transmasc people you know... I think my piece of advice is to hold off on calling us things like "cute", "twink", or anything adjacent to these if it hasn't been made clear that a person is okay with being described in that way. I promise, it's better to ask than to assume we're all the same, because it genuinely sucks when people make the assumption without even caring.

[kraviolis]

im god's strongest soldier bcus i've been headcanoning luz as a trans girl since before we even knew she was canonically bi

[roadside-oddity]

Tumblr be normal about transmascs challenge