#for the tboys and transmascs who don't pass | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

your-subby-creature · 1 year

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This might be a strange question but I'm curious when you say entirely hairless what's the limit?? Like ok no body hair or eyebrows but also no eyelashes? No nose hair???? Lmao and does the lack of hair ever cause an issue/discomfort?

Not coming from a judgey place. I'm sure you look great regardless!

Hi! This is not that strange of a question actually, I've been asked this more frequently than you'd think! By completely hairless I do mean *completely* hairless. No body hair, no eyebrows, no eyelashes, no nose hair. I have alopecia universalis, which means that my body *can't* grow hair without it being attacked by my immune system.

I've been bald since before I can even remember, so I can't say how it feels any different to a person with hair's experience, but it has its pros and cons I suppose. The only real "issue" it's ever caused is that I constantly get stuff in my eyes because I have no eyelashes, but it's not super bad when I'm wearing my glasses.

On the more social level, if you will, it's created a *lot* of very interesting situations with people who are far too eager to get up in my business even though they don't know me at all. Strangers approach me in public to comment on my health, I've been publicly prayed for in a food court against my will, all the things that come with growing up visibly different and visibly disabled.

It also makes some aspects of existing as a trans man rather difficult. On the one hand, it reduced a lot of dysphoria I may have had pre-T surrounding my hair, and helps me pass in public better now. On the other hand, there's very little positivity or recognition for transmascs who can't grow hair, and it's rare that I feel seen by even a lot of horny posts about transmascs that don't focus on our genitalia. I'm probably going to make some myself this summer, because I know there's plenty of tboys like me who'd like to see something like that, so keep your eyes peeled.

I commandeered this ask a little, yes, but I wanted to talk about my existence beyond just the "freakshow" elements of it. I'm by no means offended by this ask, I get questions like this and worse regularly in daily life, but I did want to take the time to remind people that those of us who look different often have it impact much of our lives and the ways we move through the world.

Hope this answered your question

-your Creature

#Creature responds #anons #im not mad about this ask /srs #i dont appreciate the backhanded compliment but eh cest la vie #anyways here have a couple paragraphs of baldtalk

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cxparadisi · 23 days

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i feel like a lot of transmascs feel on some level that admitting that they are fundamentally different than cis men is an invalidation of their masculinity and it makes them go to bat for cis dudes as if they face the same pressures and societal expectations as trans men which ends up in them being very stupid and transmisogynistic because they come into conversations where transfems are talking about transfem eggs and the way that amab people interact with masculinity and transmascs join the conversation with "let men be masculine".

because trans men do in fact face transphobia for being masculine. masculine transmascs are constantly scrutinized and attacked for being ruined women who will never truly be men, with our masculinity being held up as a prize we will never earn no matter what we do and which we are arrogant and destructive of our natural female bodies in our urge to reach. that joke about how if bathrooms are enforced by agab the trans dudes who look like kratos are gonna have to be in the ladies' room ends before the punchline which is that those trans men either piss at home or are forced to invade womens' spaces which has very real social consequences including threats to their safety. trans men with full beards and male pattern baldness cannot pass as women to most people, so to anyone who knows or finds out your agab immediately knows that you're transgender, which means that situations where a trans person might closet themselves for their safety(visiting transphobic relatives, not having to come out to people who knew you pre-transition, trying to access gender-locked healthcare) are unavailable to you, so the non-op ftm with a lumberjack beard still has that while he's trying to get a pap smear and that joke about mom insisting that the trans guy wear a dress to the family reunion only for him to show up looking like hulk hogan ends before they tell you what happens after that. chasers who expect every transmasc to be an androgynous twink happy to perform femininity for their sexual gratification absolutely punish trans men who don't fit that standard, and your current partner preventing you from transitioning because you won't be their girl on command anymore is a well-known issue. masculine transmascs also get a lot of shit from other afab queer people, often even other transmascs, who also expect trans men to fall neatly under "women and trans men who i consider women" so they consider you a bad ending for a cute tboy who transitions too much, which makes swimming in a toxic pit lake preferable to existing in some transmasc communities as everyone politely informs you that they wish you didn't exist.

so like yeah, trans men do face discrimination for being masculine. that discrimination is called transphobia, and is why it is politically necessary for them to advocate for themselves in a way that cis men do not need to.

so why do so many annoying transmasc people add "and cis men!" into any posts they make about transphobia? why attribute this to an attack on masculinity generally as if cis men are also told by their boyfriends that getting bottom surgery would render them sexual pariahs? probably most of it is extending "trans men, being men, are closer to cis men than cis women", which is true, past its logical limit into "therefore cis and trans mens' experiences are interchangeable", which is not true, and they know it's not true because when they're called out for being misogynistic a lot of them will suddenly understand that they're a politically separate category from cis men. i am sympathetic to the overextending thing because spending your entire life being told that you will always be a woman often leads to an urge to frantically dig your claws into the only men you've been told are Real men and associate yourself entirely with them. wanting to be cis is a form of internalized transphobia almost every trans person experiences and not examining that can make you say some real dumb shit. i am not so sympathetic to them derailing transfem conversations that operate with the correct assumption that some "cis men" are actually women because, having staked the validity of their masculinity on being just like cis men, the idea that they might actually be women and especially the idea of having someone try to convince them to be a woman is painful and triggering.

counterarguments:

some trans men consider themselves closer to cis women than cis men or find the idea of forcefem hot: yeah that's why i said "a lot of transmascs" and not "every transmasc in existence", but also trans people can have complicated or contradictory feelings on their assigned gender which is why transandro bros who talk about androphobia like they're considered cis men will still understand that many trans men are considered women outside of just failing to beat the transmisogyny allegations.

a lot of that sounds similar to transmisogyny: that's because transphobia is a part of transmisogyny! tma people are also simultaneously held to the standards of masculinity and femininity and punished for a percieved failure to achieve either, and of course some of this is misdirected transmisogyny from percieving masculine trans men as trans women who don't pass. this is misdirected both because what works for trans women often is not helpful to trans men and vice versa so analyzing it as the same issue leads to suggesting solutions that only work for one group and are useless or harmful to the other, and because even if you're attacked for being a dude who looks like a chick, a lot of that transphobia can be avoided by proving you're not a trans woman. if an afab person gets accused of being a trans woman the main thing people do to defend them is cite their assigned gender, not argue that trans women shouldn't be barred from the olympics. this doesn't mean that transphobia against trans men, masculine trans men included, isn't real, traumatizing, dangerous, and often life-threatening.

medically transitioning doesn't automatically make a trans man masculine and is not interchangeable with passing: yeah i know but "transmascs who present as and are generally percieved as male" is really long to type and a lot of stigma against medical transition is based on its masculinizing effects. this is itself transphobic because it relies on the assumption that beards and penises are masculine while boobs and vaginas are feminine, but that is unfortunately what is systemically accepted and enforced.

are you saying that being forced to closet yourself is a privilege: not in any systemic sense or outside of the most general definition of "being beneficial in some specific circumstances with heavy caveats and downsides". like yeah being able to get into a women's shelter is better than not having that option but also being forced into the closet makes people kill themselves so it evens out.

feminine trans men experience a lot of this too: yeah "feminine" and "masculine" are socially constructed categories that in practice no transmasc 100% falls into one binary side of, and transphobia against trans men affects all trans men.

what about the assumption that transmascs face less oppression than transfems?: dude trans girls aren't saying that oppression is a quantifiable resource you are allotted a measurable amount of they're just saying that there is an extra axis of oppression you're not experiencing. a disabled trans man living in bhutan experiences more axes of oppression than an abled trans woman living in canada but that doesn't mean either of their oppressions aren't real, just that in comparison to a disabled trans woman living in bhutan they are systemically less oppressed. it's also possible that despite belonging to more or less systemically oppressed groups they as individuals could have any range of experiences from a pretty good life with a supportive social network to being killed in a hate crime at age 14. nobody in existence is on every axis of oppression, and TME means that you aren't on this particular exact one and nothing else.

but cis men shouldn't be forced to be trans women if they don't want to: and people who like astronomy shouldn't be forced to become astronauts, a trans girl asking a cis guy if he's ever thought about why he's more comfortable playing games as a girl applies exactly as much societal pressure to transition as asking a kid who's obsessed with space if they want to be an astronaut when they grow up. most of the time feminine cis guys aren't going to end up transitioning, as most people into space aren't going to become astronauts, but just posing the hypothetical isn't harmful and at absolute worst might be a little annoying if you get that question a lot.

#transmasc

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indoor-outdoor-tgirl · 2 months

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Seeing this for the Multiple times today and it's been bugging me.

Just to get the first one out of the way, “institutional transmisogyny doesn’t exist”, is a phrase I have a difficulty believing anyone has uttered within the trans community in earnest. Like who has said this? I need names. This is, as far as I'm concerned, a straw tboy.

There is much more to say about the second thing.

“transmascs have zero benefits of the patriarchy”, again like… I don't know if I've seen someone say that 1:1. But it's closer to a statement I have seen is "transmascs don't benefit from patriarchy" which is much more defensible.

Cause while zero benefits might not be true, if we're talking net benefits they do not. By most proxy metrics I can find trans men/mascs not only have it worse than their cis male counterparts, but also worse off than the cis female category (by proxy metrics I mean things like SA rates, Suicide rates, and wage gap). And I really have not seen any substantiated arguments to the contrary, only rhetorical arguments.

And it's not even about passing or whatever, patriarchal society simply does not value trans men, it would prefer that they never transition. Contrary to some naive assertions, sexism would not actually prefer women to be men, but prefers AFAB and AMAB people to fulfill their respective social roles and duties within patriarchy and within the patriarchal family unit, something that both trans femme and trans masc people transgress against. It goes without saying, cis men are rewarded disproportionately for fulfilling their social role, but it's not really true that trans men receive the same rewards, because the system does not actually respect their identity as a man. And this is outside of whether or not they "pass". Patriarchy is incapable of truly accepting any trans person because it is an intrinsically natalist system.

This follows from the way trans men/mascs are targeted by the anti-trans (TERF, gender critical, fascist, etc.) movement, it intends to """"correct confused girls"""" yet again trying to control the biology of people it views as women. WRT to the movement against us, as much as it paints us trans women/femmes as monsters to destroy, it paints trans men/mascs as objects to regain control of.

In interpersonal contexts some trans men can pass for cis (just like some of us can pass as cis women), but saying they have "cis male priviledge" is a bit silly given things like the wage gap between trans and cis men. I get the sense that the speed and consistency of masculine transition is often exaggerated, as someone who is transitioning along with my partner (he/they) (starting HRT within a month of each other) I certainly have my gender correctly assumed significantly more often than he does (dispite the fact that he has had surgery and I have not). Not to mention how "passing" gets complicated with institutions that know intimate details about you (ex. workplaces, governments, housing, medical institutions) where it doesn't actually matter if you look like a man and are a man, if they know that you were """once a woman""", this can play into how those institutions treat you in practice.

Like going back to:

"transmascs have zero benefits of the patriarchy".

Is the following true?:

"Patriarchy accepts and respects the identities of trans men/mascs as men"

Cause like… I don't think that any transness follows the rules of patriarchy. Trans liberation is not compatible with capitalist patriarchy, not for trans women, not for trans femmes, not for enbies, not for trans mascs, and not for trans men. That's not even getting into the issues that intersex people face. It is a system that does not see us as valid people for its purposes. Not to say any of us are incapable of temporarily benefiting from it in small ways, or wielding those systems against each other, but on the whole it is a system that directly aims to harm us all.

I believe trans men are men, but my belief does not have an effect on the transphobic patriarchal system that we move through. Being able to engage with that fact (that our beliefs do not alter the system's beliefs) is important for actually understanding trans issues.

PS: to the addition.

This logic always drives me up the wall. Like swapping the genders: Is asserting that trans-misogyny is a social force that effects all trans women and femmes asserting that trans women never pass? Does the idea imply that trans women don't only face misogyny in some way transphobic? Are passing trans women TME? (the answers are: No, No, and No) While I don't think passing has much to do with my problems here, it is enough to say that some trans people have passing privilege, some do not, but either way, this does not actually exempt them from transphobia in a true sense.

#t4t [discoursing]#There's no trans discourse like trans discourse #disk horse #as a trans woman #This type of thing really does bug me #Like did someone actually say “trans misogyny isn't real”?#Cause I've had people say that just for saying trans men also face societal issues #which is just true #gosh #gee gosh #wow #I am so bad at tagging #I am bad at this lol

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