#and that's just really fucked up and filled with so much transmisogyny

[brick-van-dyke]

This, plus I'd argue that it often leads to being treated as trans women as well and being subjected to parts of transmisogyny, it's why I don't really think the whole TME and TMA thing really works very well in actually identifying transphobia because of how often we're all grouped together as either "lying men pretending to be women" or "lying men pretending to be women and lying about being female to male transgenders", or just "you don't look like either so you must be a male" or some other brand of transphobia and intersexism as well mixed in.

Tbh actually I think that's kind of the point. There's so much intersexism and sexism in general that goes into the whole idea behind "all those who don't conform to gender roles and are their assigned sex are automatically trans women" in terms of grouping us all together as a monolithic entity. "You can't be a happy trans man, so you must be a trans woman" and "it's only when you're unhappy that you're a trans man who's a victim that we must save". Like that in and of itself is kind of the point with transphobia. We can't exist because we undermine the idea that "the issue of transness is trans women so trans men and intersex people are all trans women by default, unless they are sad or traumatised in any sort of way because then they're victims of trans women". It's only ever one or the other, and that always changes he idenity you're perceived as because the only "real" ftm in existence are "victims" they have been able to label as 'detrans victims of the transgender cult". If you're not, you don't exist; you're not supposed to exist. So you "must" be a trans woman, that's the "only" explanation for your being here. So they treat you as that because anything else is a lie.

A lot of the times I've been called transphobic bs on the street or online, or treated like shit in an institutional setting like a hospital, it typically starts off with assuming I'm a pre-transition trans woman and start treating me with either microagressions meant towards trans women or explicitly start calling me things like "a creepy man pretending to have a girl's name", and then when I say I'm a trans man they either deny the fact I'm a trans man or insist that's another word for "trans woman" because that ruins their transmisogynistic world view of "all trans women look like men" and "trans men don't exist" or "are broken women so they can't look like men", and I don't look like a frail, broken down victim to them, so I "must be" the former.

"Trans men benifit from invisibility", actually we suffer from the intentional erasure of our identities, history, and culture. An erasure, that is violently enforced through the constant assault, rape, and community isolation that we have to endure silently (because if we speak up we are further punished, further pushed out of communities, and silenced harder).

[theyjustadmitthathuh]

Okay, so, I was born with XX chromosomes and normal female organs, and I transitioning medically; I don't care if you don't want to think of me as a man, I really don't care about the label, all I know is that whatever I'm doing makes me able to function and without it I get depressed and nonfunctional. Now that that's clear, I will say I feel solidarity with radfems more often than the trans community.

Especially with the insanity I see on tumblr from the trans community. Absolute dogma that trans women are oppressed by trans men, that so-called "transmisogyny" is the greatest social burden any person can take - gaping holes in their own arguments that they fill with misogyny

On the other hand you have idiots trying to call blatant misogyny "transandrophobia" just because it happens to those of us who prefer to be called men. It's still fucking misogyny.

I'm also glad you talk about how the "trans community" is the "trans women community". I disagree with you that there's more transitioning AFABs than AMABs, but the fact that this trans solidarity/community only really extends to the bio-males and not the bio-females happens everywhere

I have so much to rant about how in many regions of the world, AMABs in the trans group historically and culturally have their own communities and safety nets which is unimaginable for AFABs due to the level of objectification + being treated like property + isolation of females, from the level of family (birth family -> married family) to society, which is something AMABs do not experience!

Anyways, this is getting long and incoherent, to sum it up I'm tired of the trans community, so tired I'm coming to radfem blogs for relief

I dont blame you at all for transitioning to relieve your issues. I dream about it all the time and am just on the edge of doing it at all times. Ive binded since i was in high school, I have short hair that I claim is for ease but is truly because long hair makes me feel like a drag queen and so does dressing feminine. It’s really just my understanding that transitioning would make me a transitioned female and not a male that keeps me from going full on with it (and the fact that I have high t levels naturally which already cause me health issues.)

I empathize with you a lot on that front.

Im glad you can find some afab solidarity here on the rad side of tumblr. I know there can be some nasty people, still, more worried about being rude to trans people than they are worried about helping afabs deal with and fight their oppression.

My claim that there are more transitioning afabs than amabs was from a stat I saw from a gender clinic claiming 80% female, but I have no way of knowing if that stat was accurate or is still accurate. We also have no idea how many of those afabs are still living transitioned and how many stopped treatment, since those stats usually arent recorded and these clinics usually dont follow up with patients who dont return BUT with the up rise in diy hrt, there could very well be a very large number of males who are transitioning without contributing to those stats. I have searched out diy hrt for ftms and it’s either illegal, sketchy, or both. Im sure the same is true of the sketchy-ness of mtf hrt, but the illegality is not a hurdle they have to jump for diy, so all we know for sure is that our stats are skewed.

I do believe that since the trans community has been spotlighted by celebrities, transphobia has made itself anew. Before, transphobia and the oppression associated with gender non-conforming people was one and the same.

Now, even tho I’m gnc af and could be a trans man as far as anyone would know or care, if I were to ask to switch pronouns or names (or god forbid ask my employer to call me by anything other than “girl���), I would most likely be fired. I would be fired because, even though I am already doing everything it would even take to be trans, trans people now have a stereotype of being self-absorbed, lazy, and volatile. My years long history working with that company most likely would not outweigh the ferocity of those stereotypes. I know there are some prominent figures creating these stereotypes from top down, but people need to learn that trans people are just people who have transitioned, theyre not monsters and they all have a reason why.

That being said, misogyny benefits males at the expense of females, and there is nothing that can be done on an individual level to change this fact. I am currently doing a reread of Invisible Women. It’s probably my favorite feminist book, and it outlines every way in which misogyny is ingrained into our lives and highlights just how much work and how many years it would take to reverse this bias, but the problem is not many people are working on it.

If you’d like access to a copy (i prefer the audiobook version) dm me and I’ll send you the link I use. I think I’ve posted it around here before but I’ll post it again after this as well bc I love it.

But I only bring it up to say that transitioning cannot change one’s relativity to sex-based oppression. There are, of course, nuanced cases but for 99% of the population you are either born on one side or the other of sex-based oppression. You’re either the sex that cars, stoves, ppe, public transit, healthcare, hand tools, etc are made for or you’re not. Transadrophobia is misogyny+transphobia. Transmisogyny is transphobia(if it’s not about the manipulative “cis women need to fuck me but they wont #cottonceiling” bs claiming to be transmisogyny that I’ve seen)

I really wish that trans women could say “wow. Im going through so much just from being perceived as female. I should boost women’s voices and trans people’s voices” instead of what’s usually said. I know that some of them do, and I’ve had the pleasure of speaking with one or two of them on here. I guess I just wish that we had a way to choose our representation. So that it’s not just whoever shows their ass on camera the most who gets listened to.

I think I’m also starting to get long and incoherent. Im gonna try not to ramble and just close this off by saying that it’s so much more important to have female solidarity as a radical feminist than it is to hate men or oppose trans ideology. Female solidarity is the base level that all of our work must sprout from. Without it, our work will wither and turn fruitless.

(In the above text, female, afab, woman, and girl all hold the same meaning while male, amab, man, and boy all hold the same meaning.)

[agp]

took a peek at sitting/standing to pee discourse and was reminded of something i havent heard mentioned in a long time, and its that urinals use much less water than a toilet per flush. and sure, you have those half flush technologies that reduce water usage, but ime those are not common in public facilities, and afaik generally still use more water than urinals. if we seriously want to reduce our water use we should invest in urinals in womens bathrooms. yeah yeah itll destigmatize people peeing standing up in the womens, whether with an assistive device or not, but what im trying to say is that you dont need to give a shit about trans people, tma or tme, to get invested as a cis woman in the movement to get urinals in womens public bathrooms because it is honestly also an environmental issue.

and honestly a dedicated pissing toilet where there are social rules about not putting in solids, what we call a urinal, doesnt need to be exclusively for standing either. i might be misinformed about how these work but part of the problem with half flush toilets is that they still need to fill the bowl enough to anticipate solids, whereas a urinal can have much less or even no standing water.

the problem is how do you establish that this toilet is different? that its a urinal for peeing only if it also has a seat function? esp if it looks identical to a regular toilet. i think were far away from having those big group urinals where a row of ppl can simultaneously pee into the same long contraption along a wall, so these are also likely to be in the same kind of stall as the regular toilet nextdoor.

ngl as a person who sits to pee 95% of the time i probably hover rather than sit to avoid a cold or public seat more often than i pee standing when there are no facilities. and even then if its not too cold and the space its private enough i do squat sometimes because i might as well get comfy if im here 20 seconds, and sometimes my legs are tired of standing. but unfortunately we live in a world of transmisogynists where peeing standing up is ontologically advantageous and im tired of constantly putting myself in a position that challenges the prejudice of others so squatting to pee is a thing i have plenty incentive to avoid

but i dont think a urinal designed for hovering over and peeing into 'backwards' as opposed to the wall/standing design should be that big a deal in womens public bathrooms. and like i get it some of us have made a whole thing out of castration so i dont want to insist on standing urinals for all. 'just learn to use an stp device' kind of defeats the whole idea of womanhood for some people, cis or trans.

like idk it sucks that my choice as a trans woman in public bathrooms is either half a dozen urinals and like two stalls on one side and twice as many stalls on the other side, which both have their own problems. i had to throw up at a mall recently and ngl i dont wanna have to manage my vocal pitch while im vomitting but then i had to wait forever in the mens room only to be asked why im in the mens while waiting. at a big event where everyone tries to pee at once? all those urinals make the line process so much faster that it isnt considered that strange in my experience for women who really need to go to say fuck it and use the mens. men seeing those massive lines generally get the problem. transmisogyny not being challenged here is also relevant.

womens urinals now lol

[cliveguy]

I had a cis woman 'friend' send me a huge paragraph and block me out of the blue about a year and a half into my transition. The message was long and had clearly come from the heart but the main gist of it was 'even though we've known each other for a decade, and been great friends for all of that, I can't trust you anymore'. The direct quote, that I remember exactly because of how much it affected me, was "I can't trust you now, because you chose to ally with the enemy."

what a wild thing to say right?? So yeah that sent me on a huge depression spiral where I detransed for a few months before my mental health got so bad I had to be sectioned. In my stay at the hospital pretty much everyone was like "please keep transing your gender I'm begging you" and thanks to them I got back on track and stopped taking so much stock in other people's opinions on me and my transition.

This is longgg ik but your post just reminded me. Last I heard from that 'friend' was from one of our old mutual friends, we had a laugh because she shared that post that said 'transmisandry isn't real but I wish it was' and it's like... Yeah if anyone was gonna get close to it, it's her lol

oh yeah sorry that's absolutely a fucked up thing to say to someone and i'm glad you were able to recover from it. unfortunately in my experience it's a pretty common form of transphobia used by cis women. the narrative of transition as a "betrayal" of womanhood and as a form of misogyny is something i used to only see in terf circles but is just sort of everywhere now.

also cis women coopting the transmisandry debate has been really harmful for discussions surrounding any forms of transphobia... so many of them take "transmisandry isn't real" to mean "trans men aren't oppressed" and because this confirms their internal transphobic biases they're very happy to believe it and just like... dismiss forms of transphobia that all trans people experience when trans men talk about them, which just leads to the belief that support for trans people is conditional to them behaving. it all comes down to not knowing WHY transmisandry isn't real tbh, tme people should have to fill out a form explaining what transmisogyny is before posting about transmisandry online lol

[josies-not-suicidal-now]

There was a wild-eyed excitement to her that Josie found a little unsettling. It just didn't make her feel especially calm being next to so much girl that was moving with so much frenetic energy. It had been a constant from her first message on grindr: "you're so hot, I'm begging you to ruin my life." And even as Josie felt the evening drawing to a close, Ash was persisting with her positive mood. Josie felt the sinking feeling that she thought Ash wasn't pretty enough to be allowed to be this unashamedly attracted to her, but acknowledging the internalized transmisogyny of the thought was beyond Josie's capacity at this point. So she tried to ignore her own feelings entirely. Ash was the ideal online trans lesbian, and just like all the tumblr posts had warned, she was a bit autistic and kinda fat, and Josie was unsure if she had it in her heart to dismiss such a girl. But as conversation pressed on, from undesired subject to undesired subject, Josie felt no love in her heart for the girl, only the desire to sleep, it was tragic. The golden retriever girlfriend for her annoyed cat self had shown up, and they were so incompatible that they weren't even gonna fuck and it was upsetting. Dearly upsetting.

"y'know like not like we're gonna hook up or anything, but I always tell this joke of like, I can't hook up with someone unless I know their favourite song and their least favourite parent, and now I kinda wanna find out what yours are." Ash said, it was a loud bright thought, Josie barely held on to half of it, the wine was overwhelming her senses.

"Sorry you wanna know my favourite song and my least favourite parent?" Josie asked.

"Yeah, yeah!" Ash answered.

Josie took a second to parse the question, it wasn't formulated in the way that normal people construct sentences, but it was also kinda cute. Actually the question was kinda charming.

"Okay favourite song, let me think." Josie could tell now that she was looking for the right answer not accourding to her taste but accourding to what would garner her the most appreciation from Ash. She searched through her mental library of songs, and then found what she wanted.

"Chaser by femtanyl."

"Isn't that an album?" Ash questioned.

Josie felt like she had made a social faux pas, she had failed the coolness test, she was the biggest idiot there ever was, literally mistakes georg. She was supposed to name a song and named an album, any cool person who likes trans girl music would know that.

"Eh doesn't matter, and it's a short album, so it's basically like listening to a long song. Yeah I really like that, I listen to it when I'm at uni all the time, it's really relaxing when you gotta deal with neurotypical cishets for a day." Ash said.

Josie felt elated, the cool kids liked her after all. A moment passed before Ash noticed Josie wasn't thinking of her answer to the other question, "So then who's you're least favourite parent?"

"Oh. Well obviously my dad."

"Oh, is he a shitty guy?"

Josie was struck by all her memories of her father in person, the solidity of his frame, the confidence with which he smiled and walked, the ways he used to tease her.

"When my sister was born he competed with her for my mother's attention. He's an asshole."

It felt odd saying it out loud. Josie would have dwelled on the feeling it filled her with for longer, but fortunately Ash had more questions.

"Oh so when did you parents get divorced."

"They were never married actually, I'm a bastard, literally."

There had been too much nicotine in the joint, or perhaps she was just reaching that level of tiredness where the distinction between waking and sleeping ceases to hold meaning. With a terrible suddenness Josie felt like the floor of her chest had fallen off, like her insides were scattered across the floor and that she needed to be held. She needed to be squeezed, gripped, she needed someone to rearrange her insides in such a way that she contained them again, and then she needed that someone to grab her tightly to guarantee no spillage. It was a feeling emptier than unresolved desire, it threatened to punch a hole clean through her.

She wordlessly threw herself into Ash's embrace, who valiantly did her part in holding her, and not taking advantage of her in this state. For Josie's recovery this was a godsend, she could demand to be held tighter, without having to worry about sexual miscommunication, or worry for her own safety or anything. For her self esteem it was less than ideal, she began to worry that Ash was disgusted by her, that this show of complete trust and vulnerability was burdening her unfairly, or even scaring her away.

Ash's body was a completely new kind of comforting. Her frame was big and solid in that way that fills you with comfort and certainty, but it was covered in soft skin. Everything about her was soft, even as Ash's arms strained around her and strained her lungs, the restriction felt soft. It was nice finally meeting the kind of girl who ate more than weed and drank more than monster. It was comforting that that kind of girl was even out there, that some girls managed to take care of themselves, that people were living womanhood and having a good time with it too.

With time Josie explained the actual cause of her sudden panic:

"My Dad used to say that to me all the time, he used to tease me with it 'you're a bastard, literally.' and it just felt so gendered from his side back then, and it just brought a lot back for me all at once."

Ash was sympathetic, and mused about the nature of trauma and recovery for the next half hour until Josie fell asleep on her shoulder. She stayed for another half hour to see if Josie would wake again, read some interesting tumblr posts about common anti-civ critiques, and eventually picked up her things and left.

She left Josie with the text: "Hey babe, you fell asleep on my shoulder and it was unclear if you had consented to me sleeping in your bed, and I didn't want to wake you so I just left. I had a really good time with you! I hope we can hang out again soon! :3"

Josie couldn't think of a response so she waited to think of one, and forgot about it for a week at which time she had already given up on Ash. The relationship saw the light of life for a day.

[garetthawke]

I'm honestly SO not behind this current trend of downplaying the transphobia transmasc people face in an effort to boost awareness for trans women.

y'all know you can do the latter without the former, right? like straight up instead of seeing "trans women face more violence from this problem/deal with it on a much larger scale," I'm seeing a lot of "trans men don't ever deal with this" language and it's spreading to the point that people are not only outright erasing transphobia, but are disqualifying trans men from experiencing things even CIS men face issues with.

e.g. being caught participating in things stereotypically of the "opposite" gender. trans women obviously face much more when they are seen as masc/doing masc things, however....i am sick to death of that message ALWAYS coming hand in hand with "trans men can be feminine and there's no problem with it! no repercussions for trans men not conforming to gender roles!" and honestly? fuck you.

even cis men face repercussions for gender non conformity, and at BEST with that kind of statement, what you're really saying is "trans men are fine with being feminine because society sees you as women anyway so there are no repercussions" which...that is also a form of violence. being misgendered IS a form of violence, even if it's on a smaller scale.

I'm just. so tired. y'all really can't be out here claiming to be trans allies when you're blatantly erasing transphobia. NO ONE needs to be stepped on or invalidated in order to boost trans women. and the truly sad thing is, i never see trans women doing this, it's always so called "allies" or even transmascs out there invalidating other transmascs.

even if discussions are being derailed from issues on transmisogyny, the derailing is what needs to be addressed, you don't need to tell transmasc people they don't deal with the issues they're talking about.

trans masc and trans fem people have more in common than not. transphobia is an experience that is universal across the whole community. we NEED to be able to boost trans fem people and discussions on transmisogyny without derailing or invalidating the experiences of other trans people. the equation of "privilege over trans women" NEEDS to not be "entirely privileged, faces no oppression here."

i want to reblog all these posts i see boosting trans women and their issues!!! but it's fucking polarizing to the community and hampers the amount we can spread those posts when they're filled with invalidating language towards trans men. i am not going to hurt people just to spread the good parts of a post.

the next time you find yourself starting to say "trans men don't face this," check your fucking self. is the truth actually "trans men don't face this as badly or as often as trans women?" then don't fucking say it. address the issue of derailment, but don't tell trans men they don't face the transphobia that they absolutely do. it's literally making me queasy to see it.

[autogyne-redacted]

Identity politics is fucking tiring.

I'm really critical of the hyperbolic, totalizing way of talking about privilege "the left" has normalized, especially when people claim it as more than hyperbole. EG doubling down on "all men are trash," "all men are inherently sexist," /fill in whatever axis of oppression you want.

I see these frameworks failing us several ways:

1) the counterpoint to these is the idea that oppressed identities are inherently radical.

It pushes us towards the idea that we should rally around and be loyal to these identities. And that leads to not holding people to a real radical standard, so long as they can mobilize the right oppressed identities. Fuck loyalty.

2) These types of frameworks regularly facilitate punching down in the name of punching up.

Whether in the form of attacking camab trans folks in the name of opposing male privilege, or just people tactically keeping an artificial focus on a dimension of oppression in which they're oppressed and their target is privileged and ignoring all the other dynamics at play. I've faced so much transmisogyny in the form of this shit.

3) More generally, these frameworks push us towards a totalizing view of the oppressed and the privileged groups as discrete, easily identifiable groups at the demographic level. Good guys and bad guys.

This is a huge component in the worst authoritarian abuses. Eg kulacks deserved it, labeling certain ethnic groups as reactionary, framing certain states as good and radical because they're controlled by the "right" demographics, condemning demographics based off of voting patterns and thus justifying violent them, etc.

///////////////////////

What's neglected in all this, and what I see as the way to avoid both this and a vulgar rejection of idpol is rigorous analysis of the non-identity social categories that undergird, cross between, and break from these identities.

Let's talk more about how individuals are rendered as civilized or savage, rational or mad, part of the imagined community of the nation or a threat to it based off of a combination of race, gender, criminality, neurodivergence, behavior, presentation, education, ability, political orientation, worldview, sexual orientation, language, (lack of) religion, and waaaaaaay more.

And how you can be includes in one space and pushed out in another as different metrics are employed by competing power structures. How you can be conditionally included. How the nation can try to pull you in and you can betray it and align with the oppressed or vice versa.

At the end of the day, my affinity lies with the rag-tag bunch of weirdo-rejects I see fighting to take care of each other and embody anarchism.

And our discourse has some catching up to do.

[thedeadflag]

What are abo fics...?

A/B/O stands for Alpha/Beta/Omega, or Omegaverse for short. It’s a fandom trope created by mashing a whole bunch of smaller tropes together into a big one, built around the famously misunderstood notion that real life wolves operate within a power hierarchy, with the hypermasculine alphas dominating, betas filling the ranks, and the feminine omegas being the submissive breeders. It was created for m/m slash fics in fandoms like Supernatural (and later Teen Wolf), but it’s been carried over to het and f/f fandoms as well.

It implements a lot of rape-fic and bestiality elements, on top of egregiously intense power dynamics along the line of those found in 50SoG (so…not a good handle of power dynamics, essentially) that are essentialized (people are born into them, they can’t escape these inherent dominance/submission dynamics, you’re born dominant or born to submit, and you will always eventually give in to your biological imperative to fulfill your role). And femslash a/b/o is built ona  foundation of transmisogyny, cissexism, compulsory heterosexuality, heteronormativity, sexist gender roles, misogyny,toxic masculinity, and all sorts of other wonderful (read: terrible) influences.

There are the Alphas, who always have penises (cis perisex men and g!p women), though sometimes in the female alpha’s sake, they might have a ‘were-penis’ that emerges when aroused, or during a set time of year like rutting season (when they are, or nearly are incapable of controlling their biological urge to fuck someone relentlessly). who are capital D dominant, who exude a scent that helps tell Omegas how powerful the Alpha is. They also tend to roar, and be violent, aggressive, and usually embody a lot of toxic masculinity. Essentially, they lead, and others submit to them out of nature due to their innate power.

There are Betas, which basically tend to be average everyday people, who might sometimes have better senses. They’re usually unaffected by Omegas, but will cow to Alphas.

There are Omegas, who are cis perisex females, or b!p men. They give birth, and give off scents of their own to signal their heats, which is a period when they are overcome by their desire to be fucked by a powerful alpha, and usually can’t help but submit to the biological urges/their nature. Omegas are nearly all submissive, or if they appear not to be, they nearly always end up giving in to their ‘nature’ and submitting later in a fic to the prime Alpha, becoming what was expected of them, even if just for their significant other/mate. They are generally considered (especially in m/m works) the most inferior of the three classes of people. They are the lowest rung in regards to respect. Originally, at the start of the a/b/o trope, they were also called “bitch males”/”bitch females”

I’ll copy-paste the rundown/criticism @hobbitkaiju gave on A/B/O because it’s much more detailed (user changed names, so I’m not sure how to link to the full actual bit, so I’ll just copy from the word file I ripped the original to way back as reference)

I. TRANS PEOPLE EXIST, REALLY WE DO

I’ve never once seen any A/B/O fic that acknowledges the existence of trans people. Mind you, there’s very little fanfic that acknowledges the existence of trans people anyway, much less does it in a positive and affirming way, so maybe this is just a coincidence. But at least when authors are writing about a gendered/sexual universe that’s like our current one, I can believe that trans people do exist somewhere, even if they’re not characters in that particular story. In A/B/O? Not so much. So it’s like cis authors have gone to the trouble of creating an entire other universe where people like me don’t (and couldn’t) exist. Wow.

A/B/O as a trope is often about the authors asking certain questions and then answering them via fic. Those questions are often as follows: “What if some men could get pregnant? What if some women had cocks and/or a desire to penetrate others?”

Well guess what, cis authors. Some men already can get pregnant, some women do have genitals many people would label ‘cocks’, and some women do want to penetrate others. (Those two groups of women aren’t necessarily the same people, btw.) You didn’t have to invent a fantasy universe where cis men and women could do what trans bodies are already capable of.

But in A/B/O-verse, the bodies are nothing like trans bodies. Nothing at all. So it’s this weird alternate universe in which cis people are using the idea of trans bodies but making them ‘more attractive’ and thus more erotically acceptable to a cis audience.

Wow.

II. TRANSMISOGYNY IS A THING

Let’s take the idea of “female alphas” as an example. In A/B/O-verse, “female alphas” are people who were assigned female at birth, who have curvy bodies and breasts, and who also have ‘functional’ cocks and testes. They can get and sustain erections, ejaculate sperm, and impregnate their partners, and often they want to do all those things.

So basically, “female alphas” are everything that cis people want from the gross fetish porn they make of trans women, but minus everything that cis people don’t like or feel uncomfortable with about trans women. “Female alphas” are “women born women,” having somehow been identified as female from birth despite their penises and testes. “Female alphas” don’t have broad shoulders, defined muscles, facial hair, Adam’s apples, or any of the other physical characteristics for which cis people stigmatize trans women. They never need implants or other surgeries to look that way, so they’re “all natural”–unlike trans women, who are stigmatized for being “unnatural”.

So basically A/B/O involves taking the characteristic cis people find so erotically fascinating/disgusting about trans women and to which trans women are so often reduced–their genitals–and putting them on a cis woman to make them more acceptable. Wow.

And yet I’m somehow supposed to believe that it’s just a coincidence that A/B/O smut perfectly mimics mainstream trans porn, in which real trans women are so often portrayed in ways that don’t reflect the actual behaviors of trans women IRL.

III. BIOLOGICAL BULLSHITTERY (THAT’S ACTUALLY MISOGYNY)

I know it’s always perilous to look too closely at the logic of any particular fandom trope. Many tropes are just meant to be a silly shared joke, and that’s great. It’s a community game we all play together, a shared culture of ideas and happily accepted trends. “Sure, these two characters have to get married as part of a secret mission! Sure, they’ll fall in love by accident! This is totally reasonable!” And that’s fine. It’s sweet, it’s lovely, because it harms no one and is just in good fun.

A/B/O, not so much. It’s a silly trope, yes, based on a completely unfounded notion about how wolf packs function. (I’m not even going to address how ridiculously inaccurate A/B/O is even in referencing wolf behavior, because I’m not a zoologist and I don’t give a shit about that. Wolves don’t care if their sexual lives are misrepresented in erotic fanfic.) But A/B/O says a lot more about how its authors think about gender and sexuality than it does about wolves and pack dynamics.

In most A/B/O, “male omegas” have kind of a cloaca thing going, where they defecate, breed, and give birth via the same orifice. Which, wow, gross. Almost no fanfic ever acknowledges that people poop out of their butts, which, okay sure, it does ruin the mood of fanfic (just like it ruins IRL sex) to get a dick in someone’s butt and realize via doing so that the recipient has to take a dump. Fine, I can accept that fandom doesn’t want to acknowledge poop.

But the fact that “male omegas” don’t have anything resembling a birth canal is significant. In fact, many “male omegas” in fanfiction don’t have anything that could even remotely be mistaken for “female genitals”. (hint: there’s nothing female about that genital shape actually) They certainly never menstruate, even though they’d have to if they were capable of pregnancy! Instead, most “male omegas” also have ‘functional’ external genitals: cocks that get and sustain erections and can be used for penetration, and testes that ejaculate white fluids.

Why would “male omegas” ejaculate white if they don’t produce sperm? Why would they have external testes at all, in fact? It makes far more sense for their testes (if they must have them) to be internal, where they’re protected. The reason testicles are outside of the body at all is so sperm can develop properly at slightly lower than body temperature. And why would “male omegas” need erections if their reproductive “role” is to be impregnated? Come to think of it, why do “male omegas” never develop breast tissue, either? Not even after they give birth and theoretically nurse their own infants!

There are two answers to this, and the answers are: transphobia and misogyny, either singly or together, with a possible bonus of homophobia. Cis fanfic authors either can’t or don’t want to imagine men with breasts and vaginas (transphobia), or they don’t want to write about anything that even remotely resembles what cis people consider a “female” body (misogyny), or they just plain want to write about men having anal sex without having to address real-life gay men’s needs like exogenous lubrication (possible homophobia or just sex-negativity, who even knows at this point it’s so busted). No matter which of those options it is, WOW. JUST WOW.

The end result is that pretty much everybody in A/B/O verses have erection-capable cocks and testes that ejaculate white fluids. Male betas have them! Male alphas have them. Female alphas have them! Male omegas definitely also have them! That means that it’s just two sexes out of six that have anything resembling a vagina? Wow. That’s a pretty disturbing ratio, given that fandom is mostly cis women.

IV. BIOLOGY AIN’T ALWAYS DESTINY

A/B/O as a trope is often about biological imperative. Its primary appeal is basically “I’m helpless because my body wants something so intensely and I have no choice but to go along for the ride.” And I get the appeal of that, really I do. Everybody struggles with disagreeing with their body from time to time, including about sexual desire. It’s fine to write about that as a topic. But A/B/O is different, because it’s also about gender and sexual function.

If the primary thrust of A/B/O as a trope is biological imperative, think about what it implies about trans people. Trans people often want to alter their bodies’ sexual/reproductive capacity in some way, and often engage in sex that doesn’t match the normative narrative for people with their genital shape. Meanwhile, many A/B/O fics are about the overwhelming pleasure, the natural rightness of accepting one’s reproductive role and submitting to that. It’s about people giving in to or being made to give in to their biology. Which, as a trans reader–wow. NOEP

Now, this is not to imply that all trans people are dead set on altering our reproductive capacities, or that all of us use our genitals in ‘unconventional’ ways, because we’re not and we don’t. But a trope that is founded on the idea that everyone should just give in and get fucked as their bodies were ‘intended’ to be fucked? That’s harmful to trans people who do want to change their bodies or have sex in alternative ways. Hell, it’s harmful to cis people who don’t want that either. It’s just harmful to everybody.

So yeah, super super gross and fetishistic and full of compulsory het, misogyny, heteronormativity, cissexism, transphobia, etc. Not a good trope.