#did i say theyfab was a slur?

[spiderbitesandvampirevenom]

Do you think cisbian is a slur too

[ego-similis-testudines]

I may very well be swinging a bat at a hornet's nest, but I find it very interesting that the crowd that (rightfully) says "Read another book" to Harry Potter fans among the J.K. Rowling bullshit has a not-insignificant overlap with the crowd that has also only read one book (and that book is Whipping Girl).

[transhuman-priestess]

[Apologies if this is undesired, I just keep seeing a specific post no matter what I block/blacklist and want to get it off of my chest. Apologize if this is a bit "much" so to speak.]

If I see that " """"""""genderfuck"""""""" TMEs making jokes about using the bathroom with the shortest line/their pronouns/confusing cis people/having fun with their gender exist only to victimize trans women" post one more goddamn time, I'm going to lose my whole mind.

Gee, did generalizing the Wrong Not-Actually-Trans Trannies™ to throw them under the bus, insinuating that the "TMEs™" are incapable of feeling unsafe in gendered bathrooms and/or getting assaulted/arrested/murdered due to people being "confused" by them entering the "wrong" bathroom, and on top of that, assuming that trans women (including entirely perisex white trans women that identify solely as women, because I've been seeing people get dogpiled for saying the phrase "binary trans woman" because people are now running with "binary trans woman is a slur because trans woman are incapable of being binary" for some reason, while simultaneously throwing explicitly non-binary + multigender + cultural gender trans women under the bus) are incapable of making the same kinds of jokes or having fun with their genders, make you (general "you", referring to the kinds of people making these kinds of remarks) feel good? Make you (general "you") feel all warm-and-fuzzy inside??? Did you (general "you") finally own The TMEs™ and The Thefabs™ this time? Got them quaking in their little Inevitable Detransitioner™ Theyfab™ boots???

That post makes me so mad. If I never see it again it'll be too soon. Petty infighting bullshit just boils my piss at the best of times.

*pulls a long drag on a cigarette*

yeah.

[thesuncantreachyouhere]

Im sorry to bother you but I saw you making a protest about transandrophobia and needed someone to vent to. I went down a rabbit hole and found a really popular transfemme blog called pl@idos (censored just in case) that just... constantly says transandrophobic bullshit and none of the other transfemmes bat an eye?! Justifying calling us slurs like theyfab, sheit and shemab because trans women can't oppress trans men or some bullshit, it made me so fucking sick. And now I'm panicking because I was always for solidarity between transmascs and transfemmes but now I'm so shook seeing so much support on the post, like 3k notes. Now I feel like I can only trust other transmascs because what if they don't actually take me seriously? And they just call me those terms behind my fucking back? I'm sorry if I'm bothering you again I just really needed to vent /gen

ur not bothering me! also i spent like an hour writing a really long reply, but it was getting too long, so im gonna summarize really quick

your feelings are valid, 1000%. there are a few big accounts sharing and saying really, really awful shit about transmascs. because some people heard "trans men are men" and took it to mean "trans men have the same societal power and privilege as cis men and that means we can degrade and humiliate them without recourse or backlash" (not that you should treat cis men like that either tbqh?)

let me make it clear i understand where you're coming from, i felt the same way as you did for a good while. at the same time we cant let a few dogshit people ruin our trust of an entire community, then we're no better than them

i lost all hope in the queer community because of this fucking website, but i got it back when i started going to in-person queer events/meetings/social groups. bc to be honest most trans people dont even know this discourse is happening, let alone are actively bigoted towards transmascs in any way

it also helped me to keep in mind that social media is literally designed to piss you off as much as possible, and that most of the people saying these awful things about transmascs are probably deeply unhappy and lashing out bc their lives are miserable

its not a coincidence that when you open up these peoples blogs, they tend to be posting about how lonely and sad they are 24/7

[velvetvexations]

Went to check out that ptmyg artist's twitter to see what that anon was talking about and it's so bad I was legit shocked. Like I stayed on the fringes of this whole thing because I'm neurodivergent and comics like those that rely so heavily on metaphor and allusion that they tend to go over my head and are just frustrating to read, but my god. She's reposting tweets that are open anti-bi/transmasc lesbian dogwhistles and when I checked the most recent account she's been interacting with a lot it legit just says radfem in the bio, and her feed is full of ALL the usual garbage and even a post justifying using theyfab which like...I had to stop then. The original artist had a tweet that felt genuine saying they support nonbinary people, but I'm sorry, as an afab nonbinary person, if you're happily interacting with someone who is arguing it's fine to use slurs that cishet people came up with to attack people like me because we deserve it somehow for just existing as the wrong kind of trans person you have truly ceased to be an ally to the trans community in any meaningful way.

Like I just can't even believe it. It's sad and infuriating, she really did a 'turn on your community' speedrun. What happened to the days of recognizing that radical feminism is inherently anti-trans? How can you claim to be posting "cutting edge transfeminist theory" while agreeing with people who think it's okay to hurt other trans people because their existence is an insult to you somehow?? How do you even go from making comics that the majority of queer and trans people felt incredibly seen by to making friend with radfems??? What the hell is going on????

I'm really, dearly sorry anon. I fucking hate her for the hurt she's caused you and others, I really do.

[rjalker]

(1/2) This is kind of a silly question I guess, but I'm being told that theyfab was originally used by transfems as a way of grouping AFAB trans folk in the nineties, starting when Michfest was excluding trans women from their organisation while including aforementioned AFAB trans folk. Further, I'm being told that it's mostly an offline thing, so obviously I won't see any definitions of this online, and I just don't know enough transfems IRL.

(2/2) I don't really know how to argue against this, since it's kind of unfalsifiable, and you seem intelligent, so I was wondering if you knew how to better find resources for this? You don't have to answer this publicly/at all, especially if I'm wrong -- I don't really wanna keep arguing this point with the person I'm talking to, since I'm not a great debater. I've never heard it used IRL and I do live in a queer-heavy area, but I'm not very social so I can't tell if they're right or not.

made with speech to text so there's probably some typos. I'll fix them at some point when I have my laptop on but feel free to reblog before that anyways.

well, I'm happy to tell you that that person is full of absolute shit, and that is completely and utterly made up in one of the most ridiculous things I've heard. This is literally just making up lies to justify using slurs..

Like that's literally all of it is They are literally just lying through their teeth. Whoever the heck said that, just just do not waste another second of your time on them, they are not worth speaking to if they are going to this length to justify using an exorsexist slur.

The trans radphones have recently started just flat out making shit up about the Mitch fest women's festival and claiming that all of the trans people who were not trans women were betraying them, and literally all of it is just a giant pack of fucking lies that they're hoping nobody will do 5 seconds of research to disprove. Because it's literally all just lies.

You just Google Camp trans. I'm sure there's documentaries about it and I know that there are books.

These people are literally just coming up with the most absurd lies in the world to retroactively justify using a slur made up apparently by 4channers.

First they started claiming that it has been used recently by transfems to criticize trans misogyny, now they're like okay well that didn't work because that was easily disprovable so now let's just come up with an invisible and tangible inaudible dragon that nobody can disprove the existence of by just saying that this was a thing in the '90s so therefore history didn't exist yet so nobody can ever disprove this.

There is no other way for me to say this This is just absolute bullshit. Whoever told you this is literally just so full of bullshit I don't even know how they managed to say that without their brain combusting.

This is just a new level of reprehensible. They are literally trying to rewrite trans history to suit their narrative that everybody always forever hates trans women and wants them dead and that's literally not fucking true at all, they are literally erasing decades of solidarity so that they can play the victim and pretend that everybody is always been out to get them.

Do not waste a single second more of your existence trying to reason with this person because there is literally no reasoning with someone who is willing to just make up such blatant lies about actual real queer history to suit their bullshit agenda. Omfg.

When the women's festival banned trans women from entering, the trans people created Camp trans and everybody stayed outside with them in solidarity, and if I remember correctly at one point, the people deemed acceptable did at one point purposefully go in explicitly to give a speech written possibly by the trans women or at least on their behalf to ask them to let them in.

transrad-Fems are so fucking desperate to call non-binary people a slur that they are willing to lie about actual real trans history to paint themselves as the ultimate victim, because they would rather shit on so many actual activists memory and legacies so that they can just keep calling non-binary people a slur without any consequences.

@furbearingbrick looks like the person you found saying this is not the only one. These bigots are literally ready to shit all over actual queer history of solidarity to just keep calling us slurs.

I hope the people spreading these lies die before any of the surviving people who actually attended Camp Trans have to see this bullshit being spread in their name.

You can look up books by Leslie Feinberg on the internet archive, which talks about the women's festival in multiple instances, I forget exactly which books it is though. And like I said I'm sure there are documentaries from people who were there, you can probably find them on YouTube.

It is kind of hysterical to me that these people are claiming that because it happened in the '90s, it wouldn't have been written down anywhere... As the books and cameras didn't exist back then as the writing was invented in 2010. It's just fucking hilarious.

[caffeineandsociety]

The thing is, right, violence against trans people is often dismissed in two very distinct ways based on gender.

Violence against trans women is dismissed by justifying it. In the mainstream, we all know what that looks like - they're pretty blatant about it. If someone assaults a trans woman, they immediately assume it was self-defense - she must have tried to sexually assault them, obviously. If she's denied medical care, it's probably because she got belligerent, not that she was trans, though really what's the difference, ALL trans women are secretly big bullies of men deep down, and she deserved it for being such a self-destructive freak anyway, what a waste of medical resources, right?

Violence against trans men is dismissed by minimizing it. In the mainstream, this looks like writing off corrective rape and other assaults with the same old victim-blaming excuses we've always heard, or talking about our difficulty accessing transition AND gynecological care as a frivolity - "ugh, quit your whining, some people have REAL problems" - or stalwartly refusing to count us even as a footnote in discussions about the latter. It's "noooo, we're not trying to HURT you by cutting off your access to transition care, we're trying to make sure you REALLY need it, because you're CLEARLY too trend-obsessed and incompetent to be SURE about what you want for your own body." At "most affirming", it's "okay, well, if the stupid little baby girl wants to play at being a real human man, we'll play along - this means we get to hit you now, right? Men can take a hit! If you're really a man, stop whining about it, it wasn't that bad!"

And the thing is...on an intracommunity basis, we often get the same treatment, just usually dressed up in a pretty rainbow tablecloth and shoved 5 inches to the left.

We don't immediately ASSUME that a trans woman reporting an assault deserved it in a queer space - we know transphobia exists! We know people just randomly assault trans people for no other reason than being trans! Or, at least, we do in theory - but of course that doesn't always stop people here from IMMEDIATELY accepting "oh, well, I guess she was an exception" if the assailant comes and says "nuh-uh, I was just defending myself, she sexually harassed me!" Never mind that we know damned well that many people's threshold for what they think constitutes "sexual harassment" coming from a trans woman is "she flirted with me in a space where flirting is socially expected" or "she made a joke about her dick in an adult space where we have no problem with cis people making dick jokes" or "she spoke to me twice in the NSFW channel in this Discord server" or "she posted lewd selfies on her own personal blog while we were mutuals" or "she talked to me about an anime with more fanservice than I'm comfortable with (and THAT means she's a PEDO on top of what she did to me!)" or even just "she existed near me while trans" - that doesn't come into play, because We Should Believe Victims, right? Also, geez, I know you're being medically abused, but calm down, no one WILL treat you if you keep bellowing about it like that! Yeah, it sucks that they misgendered you and called you slurs when they fought back, but you don't SOUND like you were the victim in this altercation the way you keep ranting and raving and throwing your weight around!

And with trans men, barely ANYTHING has to change. It takes a bit of a pop-feminist bent, with "but perfectly passing and gender-conforming trans men get paid more than cis women, so clearly you are The Privileged One in this conversation" being a running assumption throughout, but despite the slightly different justification, it's...almost if not exactly the same shit on the surface. Corrective rape? Well, was it REALLY? Or did you just have sex with this person and then find out they have a slightly different opinion on some petty intracommunity issue? Because that's all the likes of you theyfab blue-hair-and-pronouns types care about anyway, is stupid arguments over terminology and ship wars, obviously. Being denied transition care? Ugh, you're sitting here whining because you can't get taxpayer-funded plastic surgery, grow up, some of us have real problems, other queer people are getting murdered in the streets and you're crying about your appearance, how selfish can you be!? (Ignore that I just called transition care lifesaving three posts ago...) You're saying you don't have accurate violence statistics because when you DO get killed, you're usually misgendered in death? Well it's fair that they're reporting it as violence against a woman, because that was probably the motive anyway, suck it up and stop worrying about petty optics shit! Oh, and now you're whining about a GIRL hitting you? Well, you're a man, so she couldn't have hurt you THAT bad! No, no, I'm not talking about the physical injury (but that too, you're still ALIVE, after all), I'm talking about the PSYCHOLOGICAL impact, you're a MAN and she's a WOMAN, so you know that YOU have the POWER in this discussion, so brush it off! You got hit by a man? Yeah, well, welcome to BEING a man, learn to take a hit, get used to it, at least he wasn't hitting WOMEN, you're a man, you SHOULD be our shield, you CHOSE that responsibility when you CHOSE to become a man, if you don't like it, well, be grateful I'm telling you to just shut up instead of detransition like the REST of the world would!

But the real sneaky thing in the dismissal of trans men's issues is how often people - usually but not exclusively cis people - will use the violence against trans women to shut us down, presenting that as the "REAL problems" that we DEFINITELY don't experience anything even CLOSE to no siree and it's SO cruel and trivializing to compare such petty nonissues as the highest rate of corrective rape in the queer community and being barred from treatment for gynecological cancers to that! Of course, most of the people who make this claim are the same ones who take the previously mentioned approach toward trans women, but let's not worry about that, right? The point is you need to shut up so we can focus on REAL issues - like this non-passing she/her multigender woman ~*~*making us all look bad*~*~ by posting lewds while non-passing being a HORRIBLE SEX PEST.

And the thing I need more people to realize is: this is bioessentialist.

Look at what's happening here. The approach taken against trans women is exactly the same one taken against most marginalized men - being stereotyped as violent, sex-crazed, not innately weak enough to ever be a VICTIM, only a LOSER. The approach taken against trans men is all the same shit we constantly hear used against women - being stereotyped as infantile, incompetent, weak, frivolous, vain, hysterical.

I don't expect better of a garden-variety transphobe, but I demand better from our own fucking community. Watch yourself before you start parroting that shit.

[enigmaticpink]

I did not say all trans ppl. I said that this term is only used for calling out afabs like theyfab and also the concept of "trans misogyny exempt" is very baseline misogynistic bc it is only targeting those assigned female at birth. How odd that you're OK with using the literal slur faggot yet it's not ok and "terfy" to call out outright misogyny.

??? The term transmisogyny exempt is not misogynistic?? It's used to describe those who aren't direct targets of transmisogyny, afab trans people absolutely can face misogyny but transmisogyny is different than misogyny 🙄 it's a form of transphobia and misogyny that is faced by primarily transfem people and having a word to describe what they face isn't a bad thing

I can use the term faggot bcus I'm a literal faggot, calling out misogyny is okay but what you're doing isn't calling out misogyny and is in fact very terfy

[spiderbitesandvampirevenom]

since ive gotten 4 anons asking today alone. no i dont consider theyfab a slur. what i do consider it though is a childish and petty insult, and its usually a pretty good indicator that the person saying it is an immature shitheel who i dont want to be around. its the variety of insult that you hear in a school cafeteria or perhaps a summer camp. i have never heard a real, living adult say "theyfab" to someone face-to-face, and i think if i did i would laugh at them. its like saying "unalive" to me

[jerek]

Dude you really should not tell people who to kill themselves, that is genuinely not cool, be better than that. Also, 'theyfab' is a transphobic slur, seriously.

1 The power of transmisandry is mine to command!

2 uhh. I don't know how you grew up but I've been hearing the 'when I was young and had no sense' rhyme since I was an actual toddler. Looking it up it seems like it's actually just from beavis and butthead but.

I was talking about pissing on an electric fence and getting shocked in the balls. Which is NOT lethal. Trust me on this one.

3. I'm trying my damndest to give Wrathion an oedipus complex. Is that not coming across. It's always "stop talking about transmascs like that completely unresearched fanfic anatomy is valid" and never

"Hey Jerek why did Wrathion forcibly kiss someone he keeps calling a clutchsister. Can we get a pretentious psychoanalyst scene about that. What sort of environment would someone have to live in for 12 years where they're so sexualized they say fuck it and kiss their sister just to keep her from getting disappeared by a Wrynn whose house motto is 'Our Sadboy of Perpetual Motherlessness'."

Like. Anons dont even appreciate me! Last time I offered dirt on the anduin feeder harem. Nobody wants to hear what ever clever Jerek has to say 😔💯

[velvetvexations]

wild wild wild to me how this infighting is perpetuated by people who continuously assume bad faith of everyone they disagree with -- if u believe in transandrophobia theory, its bc u dont have transfem friends (all my transfem friends reached similar conclusions as i did independently of myself and of each other re current discourse but apparently their opinions dont matter bc i must be manipulating and abusing them). every tme person has to unlearn their violent raging trans/misogyny (everyone does. misogyny - transmisogyny included in this - is taught to everyone and therefore must be unlearned by everyone, women cis and trans included). all of it, all of it, is ... people approaching you on the assumption that you are inherently a bigot against them and they are not inherently a bigot against you (like the sorta person that excuses their use of the word 'theyfab'; they can be transphobic to you, bc its not actually transphobia if its not transmisogyny. its only transphobic if its YOU "being mean" to THEM, or if u get upset that theyre trying to slur you or whatever). its just fucking insane how ... hypocritical it all is.

... most of my close transfem friends have told me that other transfems had been the cruelest to them. one told me she had been treated better by transmasc communities than by transfem communities. i didnt know what to say to that. it was heartbreaking to hear. but no, its those same transmascs that are a cabal of secret transmisogynists directly targetting transfems to hurt them and push them out of the trans community. like yeah, there are transmisogynists in the trans community. and its you, too. ykwim? no one is immune to perpetuating bigotry, but transandrophobes think they are.

The thing that bothers me most about it all really is that transmascs, specifically ones who believe in transandrophobia have been so nice and loving towards me, so reassuring whenever I worried about if I had power over them, the exact opposite of everything transandrophobes assume. I cannot stand that.

[opanowane]

no joke i actually do cause i used to know these people online and i told this t4t couple they need to stop saying racial slurs. so this one person (it wasnt even the owner of the account, it was actually someone that was just using their account) messaged like 10 people so they would message all their friends and call me a cunt and a bitch for being “transphobic” )very ironic as i was nonbinary at the time) i did not know these people at all. but they were all from rybnik. terrible place. one of the people from that group of people (i was a friend of one person from there) turned out to be a pedo and would take his theyfab 16 yo boyfriend to brothels

i have opps in rybnik ):

[velvetvexations]

I'm losing my mind at these posts like NO ONE is saying only trans women use theyfab we're literally saying *anyone* using it is bad including the 4chan losers who coined it and the truscum trans assholes who spread it around because targeting a specific marginalized group for cruel mockery that downplays their suffering and low-key implies they aren't queer is transphobic, actually, but for some reason the minute someone says that dozens of people show up to claim you're saying trans women don't expirience oppression. Like bestie we did not call you out, we were not talking about trans women specifically, you showing up like this is giving angry conservative and that's super weird. Like if you take being asked not to use an unreclaimable slur as a personal attack that says more about you than it does about anyone else.

I s2g this is bihet all over again.

they either refuse to accept that it's a slur created and still actively used by cis people or claim that's immaterial

[velvetvexations]

but you did compare it to cracker, people are constantly saying "theyfab" is like cracker, the "hypothetical" situation I described is exactly that whether or not anyone spells it out in those words, and you're ranking slurs by ignoring what actually makes slurs "ranked" which is the relative privilege of the person being slurred which non-transfem trans people do not fucking have - there's zero reason to be obsessed with shemale being "worse" beyond that

okay but no for real, it's hilarious to realize that this lad thinks "shemab" is somehow going to offend transfems as much as calling us "shemales" like... young man, your nuance is weak and you will not survive the winter.

sure, shemab is equivalent to theyfab, since you know, they're both the mildest fuckin terms I've heard. By even trying to coin a new term you're showing that you clearly know shemale is more virulent slur.

[mentallystill]

bear with me okay, this is a lot

[ID= First image is a picture of a tweet. The poster's name and URL is blacked out, apart from showing that she uses she/her pronouns. The post reads:

It is not appropriate to use "theyfab" to refer to anybody who is nonbinary & AFAB. It is specifically for people who identify as "AFAB nonbinary" and are transmisogynistic. Some of y'all care more about this specific term than the ongoing transmisogyny in this community and it sucks.

Also - if you use "theyfab" to refer to people who do not fit the specific definition above, you are an asshole.

Endless love to all my nonbinary siblings (except the TERFy ones).

Second (has alt text), third, and fourth images are a Twitter thread from Vaspider that reads as follows:

I see "AFAB" is still trending because people can't stop defending using a term from the constipated bowels of reddit, so here's your reminder that "theyfab" is a shitty term created by shitty people, and if you use that term for any reason in any context, people may think you're shitty!

The simple solution to that is to not use a word sourced in bigotry, used to reinforce bigotry, and created to misgender trans people.

You cannot fix intracommunity bigotry by perpetuating a different strain of intracommunity bigotry.

No, you can't. Knock it off.

Whether or not the people you're aiming that term at did a shitty lateral aggression -- and I'm not saying that lateral aggression didn't happen, I'm in a polyfi triad, I don't know shit about dating apps -- you can't fix that by doing more lateral aggression!

You cannot perform surgery with a fire hose. The only thing accomplished by all of this is more division, more people on my fucking block list, more people I know I can't trust to have my back.

If you're not trying to label yourself as "too full of lateral transphobic bullshit," then like... use more words to say what you mean, and say what you actually mean, rather than using a shitty little shorthand which is a blunderbuss when you need a scalpel.

What's killing me here is that people are complaining about intracommunity bigotry by using intracommunity bigotry, then getting upset and defensive when they're asked to maybe like not be bigoted.

Yes! That's what will happen!

This whole conversation is like fucking weeding with a flamethrower. Yeah, like, I guess the weeds are dealt with, but look what you did to the fucking garden.

I thought we all learned "'they started it' isn't a defense" in kindergarten but I guess some of us didn't.

Images five and six are tweets from @janetwerther (they/them) reading:

If someone called me a "theyfab" I'd assume I was being a shitty community member and ally. I experience transphobia (ask me about my time as a gestational parent dealing with the medical system - oof!) and I experience misogyny, often from the same people, but I remain transmisogyny exempt.

I feel like people are not reading this one all the way through LOL! Just because I'm trans enough if I wanna be... I'm still TME and if a trans woman calls me a theyfab my first question is "how'd I fuck up this time?" Don't tone police marginalized members of your communities y'all!

The last (seventh) image is a tweet from @spyritsolz replying to a tweet that is not included that reads:

Theyfab doesn't mean every AFAB NB person ever, it just refers to the ones who do it for attention. Nobody's saying every single AFAB NB on the planet is a trender, just that a lot of them tend to be. /end ID]

I didn't read past the first image before I started to transcribe this and I've gotta say.... That last one hit me like a rock. We're just going right back to "only the trans people I think are trans really are" huh? Like, sorry, no, my first thought if I’m hate crimed is not going to be “what did I do wrong?” because I know that there is no excuse for bigotry. 

Using a slur is not a tone, and telling people not to call me or my community members a slur is not tone policing. Questioning my identity is not a tone.

I unlearned taking bigotry personally along with the rest of my Christian trauma!!

its. not okay to use slurs just because you insist they are only about people you hate.

and like this is a slur yeah? this is an insulting term applied to members of a marginalized group to shame/mock/insult them. and idk about you but I have always, always seen it used BY transphobes about ANY nonbinary person who was AFAB. it has never been a term used for transmisognynistic NB people (and why would we have an AGAB-specific term for that? what the fuck?) like there is no getting around this. you just want an excuse to call other trans people transphobic slurs.

you don't need to call people "theyfabs" to talk about their transmisogny. you don't need to use transphobe's language to hurt fellow trans people. you are not being silenced because people are asking you not to use transphobic insults.