#and like as someone who is transmasc nonbinary but reads 100% as a cis woman i know what im getting into and im fine being seen as a woman

[dashiellqvverty]

i fucking hate the fake progressive transphobia of saying (for example) "ummm well men can wear dresses nowadays, why should i ASSUME someone i perceive as a man in a dress is a trans woman" like okay why are you prioritizing the feelings of a hypothetical cis man over an actual trans woman expressing frustration with being misgendered. and also lets be real its probably going to be a lot less hurtful to this hypothetical man and easier for him to correct you if you gender him as female than if it were the other way around. anyway THIS IS NOT ME SAYING PRESENTATION = GENDER this is me saying i personally feel that its generally a good idea to err on the side of "hey if this person seems to be presenting as something different than what i perceive as their sex, i am going assume they want to be read as that gender." basically if you act like its offensive to ever assume that someone might be trans, you are at best prioritizing cis feelings, and at worst being extremely facetious and saying you HAVE to misgender people for progressive gender nonconformity reasons when actually you just dont see them as the gender they say they are

[genderqueerdykes]

This is no hate to you at all (I've been following you for a while), and I'm curious as to why "man hating" isn't considered progressive. If it's because "man hating" diminishes Trans men and Transmascs the right to exist, then I can understand that. I know TERFs and radfems (they're literally the same ngl) usually go overboard about it, and are borderline supporting the idea of committing eugenics towards men since they somehow don't understand that marginalized men do exist.

I consider myself an Intersection Feminist, but I'm still learning about the concept of intersectionality. I would like to know what's the difference between man hating and having valid criticisms about men (especially cishet white men, including those who are also rich, Christian, abled bodied and neurotypical). I acknowledge that marginalized men exist, but I'm still trying to figure out what is man hating and what is just a criticism.

Anything helps! I'm just really confused by this, and I would like to see someone clarifying this.

I'm curious as to why "man hating" isn't considered progressive.

i know you're just asking a question, and i deeply appreciate that. but this particular sentence is extremely disturbing. please re-read this sentence. please ask yourself how that could ever, possibly, in any world be progressive. like seriously. i am very curious as to how you see it as progressive. please just take some time to reread that and think about it. to help, let me phrase it like this:

"I'm curious as to why "woman hating" isn't considered progressive." Is this okay to say to women?

women can and do hurt people. terfs and rad fems are women. some of the most abusive people in the queer community are literally cis women. terfs and rad fems are cis women. they're not safer to be around because they're women. abusive mothers exist. abusive partners exist. if it's not okay to hate all women for the individual acts of women who have hurt people, how on any planet in our solar system would it be okay to do the same to men?

profiling people based off of their genders is not progressive. hating men will not patriarchy go away. hating men will not stop toxic masculinity. only a very tiny percentage of men benefit from patriarchy. there's a high chance most men you meet are actually at a disadvantage, either for their disabilities, their race, their neurotype, and so on.

man hating hurts queer men. i'm happy you're asking about this, but it disturbs me deeply that people think it's 100% okay to hate even queer men. queer men. why the hell would it ever be progressive to hate gay men? that's literal homophobia. hating bi men is biphobia. hating trans men is transphobia. hating intersex men is intersexism. this affects genderfluid, genderqueer, nonbinary and gender non conforming men.

this hurts men who haven't hurt you. manhood isn't what hurts us under patriarchy. it's specific men. you should never hate someone who hasn't hurt you. that's never okay. telling men that they'll always be evil hateful abusers who can never get better strips away individual mens' accountability from situations where they hurt someone else. hating a man for being a man is removing their ability to be accountable, especially if you're deuhmanizing them.

profiling strangers based off of the way they look, act, and sound hurts everyone. there are trans women and transfemmes who have to go stealth or never transition. there are trans women who identify as men. there are trans women who received shitloads of hate for being a man before they came out. is that fair to subject them to? is it fair to subject a questioning trans woman to scathing hatred before they've confirmed it or come out?

man hating is not gender liberation. we are not being oppressed by manhood. we're being oppressed by individual men. getting rid of manhood is not gender liberation. it's literally the exact opposite. we have to liberate everyone of every gender, or none of us are free. i hope this helps. thank you for taking the time to stop by and please consider that you and everyone else needs to care about men because we are human. we are not evil abusive assholes who deserve to be hated, especially when we are queer, and the people hating us are also queer. this will never, ever be okay.

here are some more points articulated by another asker:

[opinated-user]

On the one hand, I want to be glad Lily only writes "intersex" characters when they're sexy hot futas fucking everything in their path. It means that all intersex people who don't have two sets of fully functioning genitalia - which is the overwhelming majority of us - are safe from being depicted as lusty rapists or TERFy villains.

On the other hand, while the number of intersex people who actually match her porn/hentai influenced version of the word are very few, they still got depicted as serial pedophiles in Lily's work, incapable of not raping people because intersex = horny all the time for all things.

As an intersex person who Lily would never write due to not being sufficiently sexy to masturbate to, I have privilege over those who are most often reduced to fetish fuel by her and other horny porn addicts online. And I do want to acknowledge that. I'm safe from her horniness, but not all intersex people are.

Plus, with how Lily thinks gender and sex work, you know she'd 100% be one of those people to write intersex people as nonbinary and go "biologically they ARE nonbinary!" and ignore the vast majority of intersex people who identify with a binary gender. (And then never write rep for binary-identified intersex people due to her utter lack of diversity in writing; she puts in a maximum of one non-sapphic non-cis non-perisex character at absolute most.)

they still got depicted as serial pedophiles in Lily's work, incapable of not raping people because intersex = horny all the time for all things.

i bring up this part in particular because this is not exactly how LO wrote rainbow. she wrote this character as a pedophile who is horny all the time and has her entire personality reduced to having sexy very specifically because of the presence of testosterone in her body. she actually writes a doctor who explains that for people with testosterone is pretty normal to be attracted to teenagers (of 14 years old if you're curious) and as long they can supress some of the hormones then it will be fine... which at the time was also bizarre to read because this is literally more gender essentialism. terfs and other bigots constantly like to talk about testosterone like some kind of poison that makes someone into a raging horny animal. transmasc people many times speak about how this kind of rethoric was what kept many of them from hrt for a long time. this was written by a trans woman. Brittany can confirm this, but i think that LO was just coming to term with being trans or was still not out when that fic was written so... considering that, it sounds disgustingly as someone trying to cope and justify the ugly tendencies they already know they have by blaming it on biology. speculation from my part, but still noteworthy. it's not so much a reflection of intersex people, as a reflection of what she thought a type of hormones could do to a person.

[justbutch]

How do you feel about the concept of cisgender as a butch? I detransed after 4 years on T and aside from throwing away my packers and pronoun and sex marker reversal i live pretty much the same i did as ftm so as a gnc female i feel in the nowhere land of where both trans and cis sound absurd applied to me. I wish gnc was recognized as third option but i feel kinda crazy and guilty for this view.

Hi there, first anon ever. Sorry for replying so late. I’m not very good at putting my thoughts into words, which is why you’ll find very few original posts on this blog. However, this is a topic I have thought a lot about, so I’ll try my best to give you a good answer.

For context: I never medically transitioned, my social transition was relatively half-assed and while I have definitely experienced feelings that could be justifiably put under the dysphoria label as it’s currently used, I never had really strong sex/body dysphoria, all of which obviously influence my perspective on gender topics.

Regarding any discussion of labels and terminology, I think a big problem at the moment is that terminology changes so quickly and varies so strongly between communities that it is really hard to make yourself understood regardless of how you label yourself. And because labels have become a battleground for ideology, certain concepts/identities will be extremely difficult to express within certain communities no matter how hard you try and which label you choose (this is true for both queer as well as radfem circles).

If I am entirely honest, my first reaction to being called “cis” is a very strong internal cringe moment. I really, really hate using this label. This is largely because of how trans, and therefore cis as its opposite, is currently conceptionalised by the majority of people, not because I think there is no value in the concept of “trans” at all. At the moment, many people use the label trans for any discomfort around gender and/or any tendency towards (visible) gender nonconformity. In this context, the idea of a “cis” butch seems pretty absurd. On the other hand, I do think it is useful to acknowledge that I do not mind people recognising me as female (anymore) and that I am not actively trying to change the fact that people gender me as a woman. So I do think “cis” has its uses in that context and many butches who call themselves cisgender are probably using it that way. And then there are of course butches who really actively consider women their gender identity, whether that’s inborn or constructed.

In the end, I do think that gender identity as a concept has its use and that it is important to acknowledge that both gender performance and medical transition will change someone’s position within the social framework of gender. However, I do not think that the current use of cis/trans as a strict binary, applied to simultaneously to these three different concepts by different people, is really doing that job particularly well. Because that’s how you end up with nondysphoric gender conforming people lecturing medically transitioned male-passing “cisgender” butches about cis privilege…

Regarding labels for me personally, I often try to target the words I am using somewhat to the group I am speaking with, but it’s quite exhausting and in the end it’s never really perfect. I really wish that I had a good way of describing my alienation from social womanhood, while still acknowledging that I am largely gendered as a woman by society due to being visibly female/afab. Currently, identifying as trans seems to preclude that due to the whole “sex is a social construct and your gender is whatever you want it to be” thing. I really wish the queer community was actually serious about distinguishing between sex, gender identity, gender performance and social/perceived gender, because that would fix a lot of these problems for me, but alas...so since there is currently no universally accepted label for “gender nonconforming afab/female person without an internal gender identity who largely gets gendered as a woman and is not too bothered about it”, describing myself as a gender non-conforming woman seems to do the best job of getting my lived experience across. It will still mean people in queer circles assigning some kind of internal identity to me that I do not possess, which is eternally frustrating, but this is just one of the points where my own framework of gender is so out of line with the mainstream that I don’t think any label would get across how I really feel. It will also mean that certain radfems will get very mad at me for calling myself gnc because no one is really 100% gender conforming, which is technically true (kinda like with that whole cis/trans not-actually-a-binary), but also, not everyone gets spotted as a dyke from 20m distance and makes other women uncomfortable in the restroom by their presence, you know?

For your own situation, I completely understand why you would be even more uncomfortable with the label cis as I am due to the fact that you medically transitioned, still get read as male and probably have a history of dysphoria, all of which are experiences not usually encompassed by the cisgender label. However, I also understand not wanting to use the trans label due to its current strong connections with gender identity. I think that this is one of the situations that show very clearly the limitations of the cis/trans binary and the current focus on identity at the expense of lived experience. I think it is only natural that you would want a label that encompasses both your sex and how you are seen by others in terms of gender given that both will have a strong impact on how you move through the world. Unfortunately, given the current state of the discourse and especially the fact that some people seem to be extremely unwilling to accept that anything besides gender identity might ever be relevant, you will probably not find a label that will make everyone happy in this regard. I personally think that considering yourself a gender non-conforming female person is perfectly reasonable and it is very similar to how I think about myself, though I know that it’s not particularly catchy and won’t fly with the “sex is a social construct” crowd. Other labels I’ve heard people situations similar to yours use are e.g. “passing woman” (probably a bit old-fashioned), “butch/trans cusper” and “functionally nonbinary”, all with slightly different connotations. There are also plenty of people who use transmasc,  nonbinary or even FTM labels to acknowledge their gender expression, lived experience and/or identity while still considering themselves female (though not necessarily women). This is obviously highly controversial these days, but let’s face it, pretty much everything any gnc female/afab person does is.

So, this has turned out super long and ramble-y in the end and I’m not even sure if it’s still relevant, but I hope there was something useful in there for you.

I know that this all sounds a bit negative because I’m currently very tired of all the fighting about labels, so let me just say that people like us have always been out there and always will be, regardless of which labels we choose. And while labels can be important, I really hope you will find people who will take the time to understand you regardless of what labels you use in the end, because you deserve it.