#hyperscrutiny

[roguetelepaths]

the thing is that yes, post-hunger games young adult dystopia books like divergent are soulless copycat cash grabs that don't hold a candle to the thing they're imitating, but also I highly suspect that part of why they were so popular during their heyday is that they're just what being in high school is like

[taliabhattwrites]

Transmisogyny is not about being a 'masculine woman'.

Hint #1: A lot of trans women, such as myself, are not particularly masculine. Some of us are, and I know several trans butches, but the majority of us perform femininity, often because we are punished and gatekept from care if we are not perceived as performing our "chosen" gender adequately.

Rather, transmisogyny is about--as May Peterson so excellently put it--rejecting the imperative to inhabit, embody, and perform manhood.

Read that again--transmisogyny is the specific corrective, policing mechanism directed at those of us who refuse to be coerced into the patriarchal notion of the "male sex", a refusal that is punished by specific manifestations of degendering, monstering, sexualization, hyperscrutiny, fetishization, and violence. We are treated as a combination of failed, neutered man and barren woman, marginalized on the basis of choosing to shape our sex and don the banner of womanhood while being unable to further patrilineality in a society absolutely fixated on and organized around the heterosexual, reproductive mandate.

The mechanisms underlying transmisogyny crop up in many places because the root of societal transmisogyny is societal misogyny and the over-arching structuring of our entire civilization into a regime of heterosexuality. That is not the same thing as everyone being subject to transmisogyny.

Because, to be blunt, at the end of the day, when the chips are down, we all know who's treated like a troon and who isn't. Those of us who cannot be absolved of the original sin of being branded with the male sex keenly understand it to be the source of our disposability.

[trans-girl-nausicaa]

the whole “Every trans woman is a Crushed Butterfly a Trampled Flower a Bleeding Dove” emotional vulnerability thing is tiring to me. I probably would have related to it when I was 21 but i am 31, coming up on ten years of hrt, and I am on the tail end of a lot of growth and healing.

on that note i dont think that trans women are uniquely good at making music or uniquely smart or uniquely perverted or uniquely sexually promiscuous. trans women are just one demographic of women in general.

most people become more interesting and unique the more you get to know them.

not that it matters, but i think most trans women are relatively ordinary all things considered.

idk i could be wrong. i know i personally fulfil several stereotypes about trans women but i just think those things could be value-neutral. i am tired of the existence of the stereotypes. we should be allowed to live our lives without receiving the weird hyperscrutiny that we do.

[taliabhattwrites]

This is not an exaggeration in the slightest, by the way. Sister Janice Raymond and her Transmisogyny Bible are the product of a deeply Catholic ontology of bodily purity, treating "medicalized intervention" as something akin to blasphemy against the "wholeness of spirit".

Crucially, in order to promulgate this argument couched in pure vibes and quackery that TERFs somehow passed off as feminist scholarship for decades, Sister Raymond, one of the most transmisogynistic individuals to ever have lived, acknowledged that trans women change our sex. She also said that we do so because we failed male socialization.

Now, this doesn't mean that she considers us free of the taint of maleness or doesn't happily contradict herself when she feels it's more expedience to libel us as one gender rather than the other--Raymond is, after all, a rabid transmisogynist--but it bears noting that if you actually read the Transmisogyny Bible, the book that contains basically every modern Gender-Conservative objection to trans healthcare and trans people, you will read, in its very first pages, an acknowledgement that trans women bodily change their sex.

That popular discourses about trans women have drifted so far to the right that many people who consider themselves progressive and allies to trans causes go around saying things like "Nobody is saying you can change sex" (an anxiety about sex's immutability I covered in more detail here) and also treating 'male socialization' like an inescapable taint that all trans women are marked by, that we have to actively unlearn as though we were indistinguishable from cis men and led highly privileged cis lives prior to the moment of transition, indicates not merely that Sister Raymond in some sense achieved a total victory, but that the consensus on trans women in the mainstream has become thoroughly devoted to denying us womanhood in any material sense.

That is to say, denial of recognition--one of the very foundations of transmisogyny--has become an inextricable part of trans politics, especially towards trans women.

I didn't spend 25 years fucking around with terfery to deconstruct and critique it just to have people come along to say "but they saaaaay they hate men so that's why they hate trans women" with approximately negative analysis to back it up.

You can't just look at their words, you have to look at their actions. Really you have to look at everything they say, not just the parts that support what you want to believe. Hell, Janice Raymond herself outright acknowledged that trans women are female and aren't male socialized. Just ask @taliabhattwrites. Or rather check her twitter for her live read of The Transsexual Empire.

Also, terfs are not the primary source of transmisogyny.

Stop trying to put men at the center of women's oppression.

[auramgold]

i asked my girlfriend abt the magnus archives reference to confirm

and it drives me FUCKING INSANE how callout poster #1, without a HINT of fucking irony, named themself fucking CEASELESS WATCHER, which is apparently the god or something of THE FEAR OF BEING SCRUTINIZED

this person NAMED THEMSELF CHEEKILY AFTER THE FEAR OF THE FUCKING PANOPTICON and said they weren't a transmisogynist

they made a 150 page google doc about a trans woman because she posted about a homestuck poll under the pseudonym of the fear of being stared at and scrutinized and judged from all angles and claimed they weren't a transmisogynist

"no siree bob, i'm not a transmisogynist, i'm just larping the FUCKING PANOPTICON to stare at a trans woman for posting about homestuck because i think she's evil, here let me highlight usernames for 150 poorly-formatted pages to prove it"

it is BEYOND FUCKING PARODY. the person harassing a trans woman. hyperscrutinizing everything she does and every third or fourth or fifth degree social connection she has. documenting in detail everything she did. basically named themself "eternal panopticon". says they aren't a transmisogynist for LITERALLY NAMING THEMSELF AFTER THE HYPERSCRUTINY THEY'RE FUCKING DOING

are they aware of what they're doing? is it a dogwhistle? i physically cannot tell if hanlon's razor applies here. do they actually believe they're doing good under THE NAME OF THE PANOPTICON or are they signaling to the other transmisogynists how they want to be let in the cool boys club?

it doesn't matter in the end. whether they're a hapless rube or an intentionally malicious actor, they're still wielding the weapons of social murder. it doesn't matter if they think they're doing actual justice, no matter what they say, they're still trying to kill her in the end.

and people act like the term "transmisogyny affected" isn't useful.

[uncanny-tranny]

I wonder if the discontentment some people have with their gender stems from the contradictions in expectation for their gender.

I mentioned this in passing, but as a man, I've found there's this simultaneous expectation to be hyperindependent and hyperindividualistic while also being concerned about if the people around you accept your masculinity or manhood. It's an interesting paradox to both be expected not to care but also to care so deeply that it alters how you see yourself. It's the contradiction of hyperveneration and hyperscrutiny and, even, hatred of manhood.

This isn't even touching on the intricacies of nonbinary and intersex experiences with the way people enforce these (cissexist) contradictions of what you "should" be.

[vvitchgrindergeneral]

My entire transition so far even after 5 years has been like.

You don't get to do things like go on cute dates with people you don't get to wear cute or revealing clothes you don't get to go swimming or to the beach you don't get to dress up and go out with other girls you don't get to be flirtatious or desirable you dont get to be carefree and dumb and just exist,,, but you DO however get infinite contempt and disgust and disrespect and judgement and ridicule and hyperscrutiny from every single person around you wherever you are

[qqchurch]

who the fuck is cooking up bullshit incest discourse on I'm In Love With The Villainess when the incest in question is apparently between two antagonists that get exposed and exiled out of the country and the story, and is never mentioned again????

the anime isn't even out yet and it's already like this, omg, 🤦‍♀️

i haven't even read this series but now i have to look it up to actually see what's wrong because it's always fucking yuri that gets this hyperscrutiny aaaAAAAAAAA—

[taliabhattwrites]

OP, I want to highlight and reinforce your point about transfems not experiencing reproductive exploitation and the violent regendering inherent to being viewed less as a person and more as a reproductive asset. That part is completely true and is the chief way in which the transphobia transfems and and transmascs face is distinct.

However, where this goes completely off the rails in the second half of your post is, frankly ... your apparent belief that trans women don't face misogyny?

I hope you are aware that trans women are rarely treated as credible epistemic authorities on our own bodies. Medical gatekeepers are reluctant to provide us the care we ask for and eager to demand we cease hormone therapy before treating us. Research about trans women's medical needs and outcomes is sparing, and we do have needs particular to having E-dominant systems that are under-served and often overlap with the medical neglect of cis women. Medications and treatments don't affect us how they would affect cis men, and the tranfeminized body is not the median subject of medical research. Finally, doctors do indeed deny us credibility on account of viewing us as either women, or strange gender freaks if they have access details that out us.

We are not treated as "babymakers" or broodmares--that's regendering--but we are degendered, treated as a dehumanized brute or barren woman, a creature fit only for violent sexualization and being discarded. That is the manner in which our oppression is asymmetric to transmasc, but our anatomy does not spare us patriarchal scrutiny! Rather, it condemns us to brutalization and hyperfetishization. It is the core of transfeminine disposability.

That we see ourselves in media largely portrayed as rapacious perverts, cross-dressing deviants, and disposable, abject sex workers whose humanity is utterly elided does not constitute a privilege. These are portrayals of us, not by us, and they are the product of cissexual society's hang-ups about us. They are not authentic portrayals of our lives and stories, and their purpose is to either inspire revulsion or titillation in a largely cis audience. Hyperscrutiny is not more beneficial than invisiblization, and is in fact a core component of our monstering.

Lastly ... "don't get treated as a privileged whiny joke that just needs to shut up and let others talk by their own community." Do I ... actually need to spell this out? Do I actually need to remind you how the refrain of "male socialization", presumed privileges we accrued "as men", or the sin of being "male-bodied" is frequently instrumentalized against us to deny us the ability to speak about our own oppression?

OP ... do you realize that trans women are, in fact, dismissed and belittled and minimized and ignored in a manner that is very much misogynistic? Because we navigate a patriarchal society as women, and a cissexist society that abhors us for rejecting manhood?

This post began so well and seemed poised to elucidate how the transphobia that transmascs and transfems face is distinct but related, but veered off into territory that I can only describe as detached from the reality of transfeminine oppression. I seriously hope you re-evaluate how you approach this topic and your view of transmisogyny, because it is abhorrently incomplete at the moment.

I personally have a lot of privileges over most trans women and fems as someone who isn't typically trans-feminized. When we've walked down the street together, they're the ones who have gotten shouted at from passing cars, not me. I'm not subjected to transmisogyny in my social groups or anything even nearly resembling it. I don't get hypersexualized and fetishized in the same way, am not popularly sensationalized by cis people as a threat to others, I don't fear the same kind of public violence they tend to, don't get the same vitriol and harassment from TERFs, don't have the same worries as to pay and housing and being forced into sex work. Not every other transmasc has the same experiences as me just based on our shared demographic; these are the privileges I personally notice in my life. I generally don't experience transmisogyny.

But this isn't one-sided. Trans women and fems generally do not experience the same kind of medical misogyny I do; don't have to worry about being detransitioned through forced pregnancy; don't get treated as too stupid to know what they're doing with their bodies; aren't treated as ruining valuable property, as needing to be beaten down into their proper submission as babymakers; don't grapple with the painful invisibility of never seeing themselves in media, history, research, etc.; and don't get treated as a privileged whiny joke that just needs to shut up and let others talk by their own community. They generally don't experience transandrophobia. Is it really fair to say one of these experiences is worse than the other? Or that either group has gendered power under patriarchy? I think not.

[uselessheretic]

Obviously they'll keep going with "anything Ed does in his Babygirl Kraken Era is actually Izzy's fault", that interpretation may buckle at some point and then it's jumping to "This Is Bad/Racist Writing" lol at no point does Ed retain agency or responsibility for what he does

yeah that's what i'm worried about 😭 i wanna be careful to not make fun of the idea of people being critical of writing or the potential for racist writing since it is a very common trope of portraying moc as hyper violent. so i can understand the concern from people, but also i am just placing my faith in the creative team for right now because so far i've found the way they navigate race and identity to be really solid. here's hoping that continues! but i do understand why many poc would feel incredibly wary of something like that occurring for stereotypical racist writing. that and ik that poc are often dismissed in literally every fandom when bringing up very valid concerns about the source material, so i personally want to be careful to make sure i'm not mocking that idea, ya feel me?

but like the writing team is p solid and diverse and david jenkins is very open to feedback from the actors/crew so i think it'll be fine. like ik vico said that if they wanted something to be different they just talked to him and he was like "yah bet that's cool go for it!" so i just feel like taika is smart enough to be conscious of his character's racialization and that he is nowhere close to shy and will just say something if there's a problem.

but like dndndn i do worry about how i don't think fandom is always the best at critical engagement and can take shallow standpoints often divorced from historical context to justify certain viewpoints. they're also not very patient and have a hard time differentiating between flawed characters vs bigoted writing. i think there's a good chance that a part of fandom might get so absorbed into an ideal of edward who has his more glaring flaws sanded down, that when that comes into direct conflict after 1+ years of no new content, they might immediately jump to a conclusion built on incomplete information that the writers are wrong and bigoted.

fandom ain't really the best at nuance and i think it gets people confused when protagonists of color do bad things. altho again, i do feel like there has to be some empathy here because i know this is learned behavior after years of poc in fandom feeling as if they need to defend the characters of color from hyperscrutiny. like you have people in star wars saying finn is disregarding rey's consent by grabbing her hand, or people in the hannibal fandom who talk about how jack is an abuser and evil and vilify him completely because that makes it easier to uplift hannibal/will instead of recognizing jack as a nuanced chara as well. (also will is into hannibal's atrocities so idt we need to spend time vilifying jack as if there's a threat here 😭)

but it just sucks because it's taking on a defensive position that then sucks away agency from ed himself and erases key aspects of his character. there's so many poc in the show and that's great bc we can have a huge range of personalities. because there's so many poc, ed is able to be more morally gray and violent and full on babygirl because he's not being forced to represent the entirety of communities of color as the singular brown rep!

[aeide-thea]

i’ve been spottier lately than i’ve ever been in my life, and like, i’ve been trying to treat my skin very gently while it’s having this crisis which does finally today seem to maybe be starting to work, knock on wood, but like—

it’s been interesting to go through this, and to compare my fairly equanimous experience of it with how frustrated and self-hating eg Baby Sister gets about her acne—and like, she’s never had it as bad as some people but she’s certainly had it worse & for much longer than i have, so i don’t mean to pat myself on the back abt being comparatively more evolved or whatever; more like, i can really see how all the work i’ve put in wrt decentering decorativeness (or, like, not even so much ‘decorativeness’ as ‘desperately wantingneeding my own appearance to gratify me and experiencing a sudden whole-body flush of shamemisery when it inevitably doesn’t, for a bunch of reasons including—but very much not limited to—genderstuff’) has paid dividends in helping me let this happen without real angst? instead it’s just been like, huh, ok, skin is cranky & doing an unaccustomed thing, sounds like that’s my cue to be patient & gentle with it and avoid… the same self-critical physical hyperscrutiny i’m already avoiding? cool, glad i built up those muscles already: thx past self!

[girldraki]

Ok to be fair in regards to Socialization Discourse i assume the fact that we became a weird hermit at age twelve probably is at least part of why we didn’t get all that hyperscrutiny or whatever that according to twitter all queer and neurodivergent people experience as children but still

[taliabhattwrites]

A useful concept here might be 'degendering'.

Because trans women disrupt gendered fixity, specifically by defying compulsory manhood (thank @maidensblade on Twitter), the forms of punishment we are subject to degender us. Ironically, under patriarchy, being 'cast out' of gendered categories looks a lot like misogyny, because patriarchal gender is already a somewhat unipolar phenomenon: 'man' is autonomous, independent, dominant, aggressive, virile, imbued with agency, while 'woman' is a subordinate category characterized by dependence, infantilization and sexualization, define by an 'incompleteness' where men are whole, and thereby abjected as less-than human when compared to the whole, intact humanity of 'man'.

As such, transmisogyny is both a hurling out of gendered categories, with the commensurate dehumanization that entails, while also being an intense form of sexualizing misogyny that relocates the trans woman's sole, singular purpose as a site upon which any (sexual) violence enacted is justified. She becomes, in essence, an inviolable woman, because she has no dignity, no worth, and thus can never be meaningfully considered violated irrespective of the harms enacted upon her.

How does this differ from the forms of transphobia directed at those who aren't trans women? I've written a lot on the subject elsewhere, but the key difference is that the misogynistic intensification differs if patriarchy views someone as a lapsed reproductive asset instead of a failed, degendered human. One form of transphobia is corrective, reclamatory, a re-assertion of patriarchal womanhood over a trans person, while the other is a hurling-out, a totalizing dehumanization that expels the one who would not further a patrilineal bloodline and cannot be a reproductive vessel into an untouchable underclass.

Isn't it funny how cis people appoint themselves the transphobia deciders? Also the rhetorical shift from transmisogyny to transphobia. @dianapocalypse's added tags are fire

[jageunyeoujari]

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_G9mnMtWfGY

rly liked this analysis of criminal. the reciprocal gaze of celebrities & the general public & the enthrallment both sides have of the feedback loop of spectacle & fame but how this is inherently harmful & dehumanizing to both sides... taemin is both the victim & perpetrator of this dynamic & the duality of his work being a labor of love but a corrosive love that constricts in an industry based on hyperscrutiny & strict image maintenance... but art still having meaning in & of itself to him & while act 1 is a sort of hell/purgatory, the necessity of creating a new identity will lead to act 2... taemin concerns himself a lot w the Gaze & duality & self-indictment/self-obsession in his work but criminal took it to a new level.

[queernuck]

i shouldnt get involved with drama but like...this is just above and beyond like you are seriously looking at someone who I think is incredible, who has gone through a whole lot, who has been DIRECTLY victimized by Amerikkka (as a result of the OG 9/11, not the Good One) and yet you think you get to talk shit about her because...of normal-ass blogging. not even anything she did, just a callout of someone associated with her, sketchy behavior of someone in the same sphere that is connected to various others and also overblown in that criticism and just...yall just really hate trans women! thats it!!! when we have leninist v primmie debates, you look at the trans women and target them in the most reductive and violent of ways. when we discuss Foucault, who’s problematic for reading that? trans women! the hyperscrutiny of trans women creates an environment where the exact same action or even more blatant ones can just be passed over. it is just the absolute worst, it creates that kind of like, plausible deniability when awful trans women ARE outed and there ARE awful transmisogynist understandings of their actions rather than ones that look at how women abuse trans women, how gender non-conformity and race and gendered experience of the body (and the gendering of race and racialization of gender!!) are all combined into this fucking awful reactionary politics FUCK

[taliabhattwrites]

I've received replies from people clearly unfamiliar with how the academy views transness, so take a gander at an explicative extract from a gender theorist:

You wanna know the funniest thing? Kate Bornstein is MTF.

In academia, even in the fields supposedly dedicated to counterhegemonic gendervoidery, the troon is view as a relic, an unperson from a bygone era clinging to a distant, unachievable, regressive dream of womanhood, unlike the hip, modern, inherently subversive non-transfeminine gender revolutionaries. The disdain for us is palpable and thick, to the point that a chaser with no academic training talking about being oppressed for enjoying trans porn and fucking trans women was anonymously featured in an issue of Trans Studies Quarterly.

All of this exists on top of reams of anthropology that degenders trans women of my culture, sexology that is fixated on calling us deviant perverts, and a psychiatric establishment hell-bent on denying us care and pathologizing our identities.

Despite this, society's singleminded fixation on denigrating and vilifying us, the hyperscrutiny under which we are expected to survive, is considered a "privilege" by some, ignoring how we are only visible because we are singled out for mockery, denigration, example-making. Many queer people reflect these attitudes, but have the additional gall to posture as though their garden-variety transmisogyny is actually "punching up" against a "privileged" population, as though our anatomy secures us a patriarchal cache instead of sealing our fucking fates.

I wrote this post in a measured and careful tone, but I am honestly so livid, so furious about how polite and measured I have to be when I beseech people to let go of the phantoms they have conjured in their minds and focus on our empirical reality when discussing us. I am so fucking nauseated by how much I have to prove, over and over, that we are dismissed and spoken over and held up as everyone's favorite monster and so could everyone please, please, start thinking of us as human.

It's not too much to fucking ask for, is it?

I don't think there is a significant or notable number of people who believe transmascs are not oppressed.

I feel slightly insane just having to type this out, but this is rhetoric you inevitably come across if you discuss transfeminism on Tumblr.

The mainstream, cissexist understanding of transmasculine people is the Irreversible Damage narrative (one that's old enough to show up in Transsexual Empire as well) of transmascs as "misguided little girls", "tricked" into "mutilating themselves". It is a deliberately emasculating and transphobic narrative that very explicitly centers on oppression, even if the fevered imaginings misattribute the cause. As anyone who's dealt with the gatekeeping medical establishment knows, they are far from giving away HRT or even consults with both hands, and most transfems I know have a hard enough time convincing people to take DIY T advice, leave alone "tricking" anyone into top surgery.

Arguably, the misogyny that transmasculine folks experience is the defining narrative surrounding their existence, as transmasculinity is frequently and erroneously attributed to "tomboyish women" who resent their position in the patriarchy so much they seek to transition out of it. This rhetoric is an invisiblization of transmasculinity, constructed deliberately to preserve gendered verticality, for if it were possible to "gain status" under the sexed regime, its entire basis, its ideological naturalization, would fall apart.

Honestly, the actual discussions I see are centered around whether "transmisogyny" is a term that should apply to transmascs and transfems alike. While I understand the impetus for that discussion, I feel like the assertion that transmisogyny is a specific oppression that transfems experience for our perceived abandonment of the "male sex" is often conflated with the incorrect idea that we believe transmasculine people are not oppressed at all. This is not true, and we understand, rather acutely, that our society is entirely organized around reproductive exploitation. That is, in fact, the source of transfeminine disposability!

I know I'm someone who "just got here" and there is a history here that I'm not a part of, but so much of that history is speckled with hearsay and fabrication that I can't even attempt to make sense of it. All I know is that I, in 2024, have been called a revived medieval slur for effeminate men by people who attribute certain beliefs to me based on my being a trans woman who is also a feminist, and I simply do not hold those views, nor do I know anyone who sincerely does.

If you're going to attempt to discredit a transfeminist, or transfeminism in general, then please at least do us the courtesy of responding to things we actually say and have actually argued instead of ascribing to us phantom ideologies in a frankly conspiratorial fashion. I also implore people to pay attention to how transphobic rhetoric operates out in the wider world, how actual reactionaries talk about and think of trans people, instead of fixating so hard on internecine social media clique drama that one enters an alternate reality--a phantasm, as Judith Butler would put it.

Speaking of which--do y'all have any idea how overrepresented transmascs are in trans studies and queer theory? Can we like, stop and reckon with reality-as-it-is, instead of hallucinating a transfeminine hegemony where it doesn't exist? I'm aware a lot of their output isn't particularly explicative on the material realities of transmasculine oppression despite their prominence in the academy, but that is ... not the fault of trans women, who face extremely harsh epistemic injustice even in trans studies.

The actual issue is how invisiblized transmasculine oppression is and how the epistemicide that transmasculine people face manifests as a refusal to differentiate between the misogyny all women face, reproductive exploitation in particular, and the contours of violence, erasure, and oppression directed at specifically transmasculine people.

You will notice that is a society-wide problem, motivated by a desire to erase the possibilities of transmasculinity, to the point of not even being willing to name it. You will notice that I am quite familiar with how this works, and how it's completely compatible with a materialist transfeminist framework that analyzes how our oppression is--while distinct--interlinked and stems from the same root.

I sincerely hope that whoever needs to see this post sees it, and that something productive--more productive dialogue, at least--can arise from it.