#its all trans erasure

[gnometa233]

It's so interesting when people say "mspec lesbians have a long and complicated history" and then you actually research said long and complicated history and it's all just biphobia. That's it. It's just people thinking person dating opposite gender = straight and person dating same gender = gay. It's the most straightforward bi erasure I've ever seen and I REMEMBER even in the early days of tumblr bisexuals fought against people reducing their sexuality down to just gay and straight. And now while people are clamoring to be bi lesbians, I see no one vying to reclaim "bihet", which is just the same thing in another direction. Really makes you think

[strawabri]

"being seen as your agab and misgendered is a privilege compared to being visibly trans/nby" we have lost the plot i fear

[pikslasrce]

pussy so androgynous it causes a major fandom schism approximately 194 times a month

[astranauticus]

btw now that ive gotten set me free out of my system womxnly by jolin tsai has become my new cpop translation white whale like not because the song itself is that impossible to translate but because i cannot think of any way for me to make a post about that song without getting completely sidetracked into a deranged rant about chinese pop culture's unceasing efforts to try and act as if that song's message about overcoming adversity and discrimination can be applicable to everyone and that it is not, in fact, explicitly a song about homophobic/transphobic violence

[carvour]

on the topic of pride i hope that every single person who told me and my gf that we're a token straight couple just because we are m/f knows that they owe us 100 dollars each

[x-crowmancer-x]

“My body, No choice”

[taliabhattwrites]

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.

[jellyfemmedyke]

is it just me or is the "trans guys are just some boring guys and they make lame music and trans women are cool and interesting and make loud music" jokes almost like. an excuse for why theres not that many trans guys who are popular content creators or musicians or actors or authors or what have you. like blaming the invisibility of trans men on being "boring" and therefore not doing anything rather than oppression.

not to mention the example of music being that people have heard of one singular trans guy who works in a genre they dont like [people really love to act like cavetown is like specifically bad or cringe but thats just what most indie pop/rock/folk sounds like] and theyve heard of a handful of trans women who make hyperpop that they already like [and laura jane grace of course] and its really telling on themselves. theres trans guys making hyperpop and trans women making ""lame ukulele music"" and both of them and nonbinary people making music of tons of other genres. like. cmon. it reminds me of xkcd 385.

also i dont think these jokes are intentionally malicious or anything [most of the time] but it also feels sort of weird to be joking about how boring a group of marginalized people are. im not going to act like its the biggest deal in the world but its sort of low level bullying, innit? and i imagine having this weird expectation to be "cool and interesting" isnt fun for trans women either. its nice to get to be lame sometimes.

Yeah it's super weird, especially because it's repeated over and over, that part is the suspicious part. I even saw it on reddit a few days ago in one of the ftm subs. I do think it's like blaming the lack of trans men artists on trans men being "boring" instead of, you know the bigotry, the erasure, the inequality I think it's also a weird expectation that we all HAVE to live up to what other people think of as "cool" like if we're all not making hardcore metal and being as "SICK" as humanly possible, we are failing at transgender music and therefore are the reason trans men aren't represented as artists enough, which is ummm. okay.

why can't we make soft love songs about being bugs, or whatever. What happens to trans women who don't live up to the metal hardcore aesthetic? Look at Dylan Mulvaney. She made a dumb cutsie girlypop song and everyone acted like she is the founder of misogyny herself. So not only are we ridiculed for the music we make, we're trapped in transphobic expectations of what music we can or should make.

If you expect all trans women to make metal, you'll only see trans women who make metal, if you expect all trans men to make soft music, that's all you'll find! because that's all you looked for! Another thing is like, Oh all trans women music is cool and hardcore rock and roll, but trans men music is dumb and cutsie ukulele music? I wonder what gender those genres are normally associate with? Uhoh we're doing a sexism maybe the person making the joke doesn't have malicious intent, but the joke itself sure does.

[penisbagelbite]

"Affirmation" & Malgendering

"Fine, I'll 'respect' your gender, but I'll make it absolutely miserable for you. What? You don't like the way I'm 'affirming' your gender? Guess you'll have to stop being a (trans) man then."

I want to put something out there about what I call "malgendering". I see trans men talk about the phenomenon and acknowledge it as a part of antitransmasculinity but not the concept of "malgendering" itself and what it's purpose is, and as trans men and transmasculine people are especially caught in the lose-lose situation between misgendering and malgendering I think it is an important concept to establish. The erasure of transmasculinity, particularly as a unique gender and gendered experience, also serves to keep the transmasculine trapped within this double-bind, positioned between the gender binary of cis patriarchal ideas of womanhood and manhood, where for us there is only misgendering (being abused with the Woman gender) or malgendering (being abused with the Man gender).

I define malgendering as the practice of "validating" someone's gender identity only when it can be used against them and to hurt them, and malgendering almost always involves the enforcement of only the most negative sexist stereotypes available onto the victim with none of the "positives". If misgendering is forcefully pushing you back into your 'proper place' such as by calling you a "girl" or a "her" and showing you that you're really a woman through sexual assault -malgendering is scaring and traumatizing you into it by using your own gender against you. Malgendering is the realization that you don't need to misgender someone to hurt them or to punish them for the way they identity and push them towards the gender they're 'supposed' to be - you can do all that through 'validation'. It's psychological warfare on the sense of self.

This violence and abuse under the guise of "respect" and "identity affirmation" creates plausible deniability of intent and places the blame on the victim for "identifying that way", so much so that even other trans people will defend it and believe it's not maligned (especially because "but being seen as and treated as your gender is what trans rights is all about!" and "errm but its transphobic to not treat u this way?/ur misgendering urself by wanting to not be treated this way :/" with the hidden message being "don't like it? stop being trans"), even when faced with evidence of the (very much intended) effects it has on stalling and outright eliminating transmasculinity (ie. repression, detransition, suicide).

Some examples I can pull off the top of my head:

A transphobe is talking about a pregnant trans man. The whole energy of the Facebook video is 'comedic', and while calling birth the most “feminine” thing someone can do and alluding to how the trans man is really a woman, they still use he/him and call him a “guy” (in air-quotes). Not out of any respect but because the idea of a man being pregnant, calling a pregnant person a "he", and the very existence of the trans man in question, is the whole joke. In doing so, the transphobe has turned the act of using the proper pronouns and gendering him into a source of humiliation and made the experience of being properly gendered a demeaning one. -

The Ukraine military situation where all males aged between 18 and 60 were banned from leaving the country and obliged to serve in the military. Trans women were denied passage out of the country "because they were men", and trans men were similarly denied passage out of the country "because they were men". With the discrepancy between invalidating the gender of trans women and "validating" the gender of trans men, you'd think the motivation behind this would be obvious - that trans people are expendable meat and it's better they die than cis people. It shouldn't of needed to be said that "I'm only affirming your gender because it allows me to put you in a position where you will likely suffer and die and put the blame for it on you" is not 'respect' or 'affirming' at all but somehow this was taken as evidence for the idea of that trans men are more 'respected' and seen as their genders than others (and are thus 'privileged'). -

A common one almost every trans guy deals with at some point is cis people threatening to beat trans men up (and often following through), because "If you're a man and not a woman (anymore) that means I can punch you," using the proximity to masculinity that transmasculine people claim as a justification for violence. Every other week there's a new story in online transmasculine spaces about someone having their ribs broken with "Since/if you want to be a man so bad-" preceding the attack. -

The above is in a similar vein to when accounts of violence done to transmasculine people by cisgender men are brushed off and they're told something along the lines of "welcome to being a man", "that's just what men do to each other", "that's just the way things are with men", etc. along with the insistence that their attack had nothing to do with antitransmasculinity, making it an immutable problem with (cis)men as a whole - creating a sense hopelessness and that this is all they have to look forward to. -

Transmasculine individuals being refused treatment, tests, or insurance for gynecological issues, especially cancer, despite the knowledge that they are transmasculine, because "men don't deal with these problems" and they don't want "men in women's spaces", and if you don't want to be 'treated like a man' and get the care you need (and not die), you're going to have to go ahead and detransition, change that M marker back to an F.

All of this functions to create contention, and eventually a rift, between the individual and their sense of gender identity. Creating an association between being gendered 'correctly' and 'respected' as your gender (and ultimately existing as a transmasculine person) with abuse, violence, helplessness, trauma, fear, isolation... and by making transmasculinity and transmanhood uninhabitable and driving a wedge between the individual and their sense of gender identity you can more easily drag them back to their 'proper' place. Plant seeds of doubt by making being transmasculine an exceedingly unhappy experience. Make them think that everything that's happened is their own fault for choosing to be transmasculine or trying to be a man. That maybe since they're so unhappy this isn't for them. That living as a transmasculine person is just too difficult and they're not cut out for it, that if they "gave up" and were to be women again things would be easier and they would be safer and happier.

This also all serves to maintain cis patriarchal ideas of gender and the gender binary and police the boundaries of manhood, in a way I can't articulate right now.

Through all this, despite being called "men" during malgendering, we are not actually perceived as such. We are always an "other". Acknowledging us as "men" is just another weapon, and why some transmascs flinch at the phrase "trans men are men". Our own genders are used to beat us.

Using a scrap from my .txt journals:

"[...] on the subject of having a core aspect of yourself taken from you and turned into a weapon to beat you with, with the result being that aspect of yourself now becoming a source of trauma and pain so you abandon it and lock it away like an awful secret, that’s exactly what happened with my gender. Being genderless and a(nti)binary is what I’m most comfortable as, a(nti)gender is my ~real gender~, but I have to admit a lot of this is because I have been traumatized out of any gender with binary associations and have consequently come to know gender itself, and the act of gendering, as violence. Gender is but a designation for what exploitation, abuse, and violence can be enacted upon you and the justification there of. When someone asks whether you are "masc" or "femme", behind their back as they face you is a hammer in one hand, and a knife in the other, and what they are actually asking is if they can pummel you or lacerate you. When it comes to the “direction” I’m transitioning in though, it is obviously “masculine” (as much as a negation of "femininity" is always taken as stepping towards "masculinity") and you wouldn’t be entirely wrong to call me “transmasculine”, though I have been scared to death of being acknowledged as such."

My first encounter with malgendering was when I was 13 and had just started to realize I was "ftm" and looking for community online. My first exposure to any affirmation of transmasculinity was someone I came to respect reblogging a post about how Kill All Men includes trans men. This would set the precedent of the next decade of my life of existing while transmasculine. A decade of only hearing the words "trans men" and "transmasc" used negatively and as the butt of jokes that served to reinforce patriarchal ideas of gender. The consistent and relentless denial of transmasculinity as a unique gender and gendered experience, the denial of transmasculine reality especially in regards to misogyny, and continuous abuse and threats of violence, all under the guise of affirming trans men's genders as men (and affirming the gender binary in the process). A decade of having antitransmasculine sentiment fed to me in every way possible.

For me, the experiences of antitransmasculinity and malgendering from non-transmascs has effectively "chased" me out of my transmasculinity and any acknowledgement of it. For years I have hidden my transmasculinity and presumed "AGAB" out of fear, even in queer and supposedly trans-friendly spaces. I have not been able to associate with any “masculine” language in reference to myself without feeling that I am in imminent danger, have made a grave mistake, and suffocating in anticipation of punishment. I have always been scared of posting any of my art that eludes to my transmasculinity. I have always been terrified of being referred to or perceived as “transmasc”, a “trans man”, of being called a "guy" or “dude” or “bro”, of using "he/him" anywhere. All of it. Deep down on some level I do desire it, but it’s been forbidden and only aggravates existing wounds.

And this, in turn, pushed me out of associating with other transmasculine folks out of fear and internalized antitransmasculinity towards other transmasculine people, isolating me from any community or connection with anyone similar to me, exacerbating my loneliness and alienation as a youth to the point where now as an adult my ‘normal’ human social needs – connection, community, relationships, empathy – are completely broken. I don’t feel loneliness anymore, or the desire to connect to anyone, despite in ways being even more alone now than I was then. In a way I believe antitransmasculinity shaped the path of my schizoidism. Isolating and divorcing me from my transmasculinity and the world at large is what I understand to be yet another point of this type of antitransmasculine rhetoric - because when you've destabilized and isolated someone from their whole sense of self and community, they are much easier to control.

[genderkoolaid]

some musings on transmasc mulan:

i think the reason why Reflection & mulan as a trans man is impactful to me is the fact that mulan appears as a woman and has the social role of a woman. i love rep of transmascs who are fully transitioned/present masc or male! but ive thought a lot about the erasure & invisibility of transmascs throughout history. the bits of our history we do have tend to be people who had the ability to pass as men, but there were undoubtedly so many trans men&mascs who lived as women, who could not pass well enough to live full-time as a man, who were wives and mothers! and idk i find it really impactful to read Reflection as the pain of a trans man in the closet, or who doesn't even realize that being a man is a Thing they can Do. i love how it touches on the pain of failing to be a woman. i think part of it is how often people want to dissociate trans men from misogyny, or at least control how we are "supposed" to relate to it. again, the mainstream (queer) narrative around transmasc history (and present) is trans men who could/can pass as cis men, who live their lives fully stealth. but there are and always have been many transmascs who live as women, most or all of the time, and who have to struggle with the demands of misogyny to be good daughters/wives/mothers, and the knowledge that to be a trans man would make you such a disgrace and disappointment ("if i were truly to be myself, i would break my family's heart"). i think its important to give a voice to the trans men past and present who live as women and their gendered experiences! i desperately want to give a voice to every trans man throughout time who lived and died in a dress, who had children, who thought they were the only one or who didn't even understand what or why they were.

obviously mulan does crossdress and does pass as a cis man, but specifically "Reflection" to me means a lot because i love how it can be read to be an expression of closeted transmasculinity. with transmascs, the bits of history we do get are constantly scrutinized by everyone; there's an unspoken rule of "cis woman until proven otherwise, why do you want to erase women?" and again! thats just when it comes to "women who crossdress" situations! people are so stingy when it comes to who they will "allow" transmascs to claim, seeing a "feminine cis woman" expressing transmasculinity feels transgressive in a very good way to me. also, i think we need more recognition that there are a lot of feminine women who really wish they were men (because they are), and its important to represent that experience and make it clear that being feminine (while presenting as a woman, or in general) does not mean you can't be a man.

[notchainedtotrauma]

Once again...Black users (and a great deal of those Black users Black trans women) as well as sex workers are the canaries in the coal mine. Because there was a sweeping disappearance of Black blogs orchestrated by the site and officially justified by "Russian interference" (as in those Black bloggers were conveniently branded as bots). Even though the little bit of Russian interference there was showed up under the form of organized white supremacists. Then the FESTA-SOSTA bill came along, a bill that should have gotten the same attention than KOSA, because it opened the floodgates and was largely responsible for the erasure of sex workers on Tumblr and the fight against any type of nudity, at the same time there is an increase of porn bots and non consensually taken nudes and other videos. It took years of escalation for a lawsuit to be filed, when if all of Tumblr, as in, its user base, had congealed around the disappearance of Black blogs, maybe we would be nowhere near those vicious catastrophes. A lot of the Black users exterminated...were Black cis women and Black trans women. The pattern has been very clear on Twitter, it's now happening in Tumblr in different ways. Once again canaries in the coal mine and all...

ID [Tweet by @Blackamazon. Dated May 22, 2021

Everyone is shocked that the attacks are more blatant and things are worse.

But you treated everyone who said it was going to get this bad

Terribly

And in public

People went out their way to show "the canaries in the coal mine"

didn't matter] End of ID

[nothorses]

I think one of the ways that tranandrophobia seems to distinguish itself from the other forms of oppression it is connected to is in the way it attempts to convince you it is indistinguishable and that transmascs are always just collateral damage to everyone else's "real" problems.

One example is the very blatent tirf claim that transphobia on its own isn't real, that it is all misdirected transmisogyny, and that transmascs only experience oppression due to our association with transfemmes.

But there is also the insistence that anti abortion laws and similar things are targeted at cis women and therefore are "women's issues" - transmascs shouldn't complain about being excluded because it "isn't about us". Same with homophobia and butchphobia. Even the terf talking point that they are just protecting "little cis girls" from making irreversible mistakes pretends that actual the transmascs being harmed is just an accident and not the goal.

Trying to talk about transandrophobia is a constant stream of "It's just transphobia. It's just misogyny. No, you can't call your experiences misogyny because that isn't about you. You can't call yourself a lesbian or a butch or compare your oppression to lesbophobia. It isn't about you. Yes, terfs hurt you, but you aren't their main target. This isn't about you. Yes, you need abortions and experience medical misogyny, but you can't talk about it because this isn't about you. You were sexually assaulted because of misdirecred misogyny. Don't make it about you. You've never contributed to the history of gay men, or lesbians, or the trans community. It isn't about you. Those cross dressers weren't trans. Stop trying to make women's history about you. You can't reclaim cunt or faggot or dyke because those words aren't about you. I don't care how many times you've been called a tranny. That word isn't about you. Why must you make everything about you?"

Because sure, transmascs exist, and we might be impacted by everyone else's oppression, but it is always thought of as a theoretical consequence of what is really going on, if it is thought of at all. Transmascs are not considered to be oppressed in our own right.

This idea gives the lawmakers plausible deniability, allies an excuse to ignore us, and feeds into transmasc erasure. If we are never the actual target to begin with, then clearly, we can't be uniquely targeted. The law makers don't need to be held accountable for their transandrophobia because it isn't like they are trying to hurt transmascs, right? We need to let the real victims speak, the ones being targeted on purpose.

Nobody ever sees the way it all piles up, and even if they do, they think "well it's just an accident, right? If we fix the main problem, then this fringe issue will go away on its own" without ever considering that transandrophobia isn't as rare, fringe, or accidental as society wants it to appear and that actual effort needs to be put into dismantling it.

It isn't that they actually believe that transandrophobia isn't real. It's that they just don't believe it is about transmascs. Because even if we are the common denominator, we are still just collateral damage and could not possibly have anything of value to say. Because as collateral damage, our issues are never our own and thus never need to be discussed on our own terms.

100%. And I think this is exactly what this sort of cycle of erasure depends on.

We are erased, our problems are erased, and our oppression is erased, which means it's easy for people to ignore us, our problems, and our oppression. There's so little evidence, so few people talking about it, and they never really see or hear anyone name us in this violence, so surely, it isn't about us at all! It must be about the people they know about already, the problems they know about, and the ones who are always readily named in these conversations.

If we're speaking up, there's no reason to believe us; if anything, we come under scrutiny for trying to talk about these issues nobody else can see. We must be crazy, hysterical, whiny and overdramatic, or perhaps malicious. We're stealing attention, stealing space, and stealing help. We might be victims, but we are incidental and unworthy victims.

And ignoring us, our problems, and our oppression means we continue to be erased. Which makes it easier to ignore us, and erase us, and easier to perpetuate violence against us. And so on.

It's understandable, in a way, for people to ignore us; most people don't know about any of this in the first place, and when they do, they're not inclined to take any of it seriously. Even if they do see convincing evidence that our problems are real and worth talking about, it's easy for that to be a one-off that they eventually forget about. Everyone else is talking about everything else, so we sort of fade away.

It's not their fault; they're not trying to ignore us. They just haven't learned to recognize violence against us, and they just don't seek us out, and can they really be blamed for that? Can they really be blamed for the violence that continues because they and others don't see or try to stop it? We're so hard to find in the first place. You know, because we've been so thoroughly erased.

There are a lot of people who've been fighting this for a long time, and even more we don't-- and probably won't-- ever know about, who've been fighting for even longer. I think it's getting better; the organized backlash against us is, imo, a sign that our reach is getting stronger and wider. But it's a hard cycle to break.

[genderqueerdykes]

i love you so much i love the way u talk abt trans men and our struggles i makes me feel so seen especially bc youre older than me, i want to be understood , keep posting please

THANK YOU !!

i appreciate that. i feel like nobody (aside from some very cool bloggers on here) is advocating for trans men anymore. like unless its a trans man talking about these issues, it just doesn't happen. nobody advocates on our behalf for the most part. everyone just leaves us to the weeds. we have to help each other because most people just don't even understand what trans men and mascs want. like it's absolutely positively insanity inducing

when i was in college, at my pride group, there were just. no conversations about trans men. at all. in fact. at the time i was beginning to realize i was a trans man but i couldn't find support or acknowledgement of transmasculinity anywhere. whenever i would participate in the conferences, and large group meetings for LGBTQ communities in our part of the country... I was forced into queer women's groups. i did not identify as a woman or bigender at that time. i asked them where a female-to-male genderqueer person should go, and they put me in every queer women's group. i was not being considered trans. i was being viewed as a cis butch lesbian.

i was fucking pissed.

i learned the word transgender and what it meant and the example that was given was male to female, which was informative. i heard a lot of things about feminine transition, drag queens, cis gay male culture, bisexuality, pansexuality, and even asexuality. i want you to know that my college's pride group in 2011 - 2012 was more accepting of asexual people than trans men, which is insane for that time frame. i was actually allowed to help with a presentation on asexuality

i had to go online and research trans men, though. there were none to be found in the group that were at least out and able to talk to each other. we were all very stealth and nervous. my long term friends there ended up being gay men, lesbians, and a transfem agender person. i never met a single trans man there. it was heartbreaking.

i am tired of participating in transmasculine silence. i will not participate in self-erasure. trans men are trans. we're men. we're mascs. we NEED support, community, and care. we need to learn how to access transition resources, to comfort each other, to laugh with each other, to help each other find what clothes make us feel like ourselves, to say each other's names and pronouns, to see one's self in the other.

we need people who will protect us from misgendering. we need to be able to talk about our unique issues. we need to be able to talk about how yes, we experience misogyny, but also that transandrophobia is literally a thing. we need people who will stand up for femme trans men and gay trans men. we need people who understand that it's not okay to call every single trans man a confused butch lesbian and assume that they're a queer cis woman. trans men can be butch lesbians and that's okay. but you can't rip away a trans man's manhood for the sake of being a catty asshole. it's misgendering. it's transphobia. care about being transphobic. transphobia hurts all trans people no matter where it's directed. we all lose when you opt to deny trans men and mascs the right to community.

i am transmasculine. i am a trans man. i love being a trans man. i'm not ashamed. i'm not going back in the closet. i love my transmasculine brothers and siblings. i will not silence them. silencing them is a disservice to us all. i refuse to do that to us.

thank you for sending this ask. stay safe, take care of yourself, you're an important part of the LGBTQ community, don't let anyone take that from you.

[lycandrophile]

next time someone tries to tell me people don’t demonize and act violently toward trans men and transmascs, i’m just going to make them read this reply i got to a positivity post that was specifically about trans manhood and transmasculinity. this is basically just every negative thing people say no one says about us rolled into one message that’s aimed directly at us.

and as if this isn’t enough on its own, their whole blog is full of this disgusting shit. it seems to be dedicated to it, actually. (fair warning, don’t look at the next two screenshots if you don’t want to see even more genuinely awful transphobia.)

you can say what you want about how they’re probably just a troll or baiting or doing this for attention but the fact remains that, regardless of their true intentions, these are real things that a real person is saying about trans men&mascs, publicly and proudly and to our faces because they want it to do damage.

i’ve dealt with people like this before, on a much closer level. when i was a teenager, i had a grown woman come into my dms just to send me very graphic and detailed instructions on how to kill myself. literally entire paragraphs with all of the steps she wanted me to take. before i blocked her, i told her she was lucky she sent it to me and not someone more vulnerable, because otherwise she might have real blood on her hands. she just sent the whole thing again.

we can argue all day about infantilization versus demonization, erasure versus hypervisibility, what counts as violence, what words we use to talk about our oppression, and so on. but the reality is, whether you believe people want us dead or not, they clearly do, and a lot of them really aren’t making any effort to hide it. at this point, if you can’t see it, it’s because you don’t care about our lives enough to look at the reality that’s right in front of your face.

before you do anything else, block this person. don’t engage with them directly, don’t give them the satisfaction of the attention they might be fishing for, just block them. but don’t forget that they exist either, especially if you’re not a trans man or transmasc yourself. don’t just block them and move on and forget that there are real people out there who will say these things about us, who genuinely enjoy the thought that their actions might have deadly consequences.

because these are the people you empower to come out of hiding and start being blatant about their hatred when you insist that no one wants us dead, when you openly mock us and demonize us and try to cast us out from the community that we were supposed to share. when even our own people decide we’re an acceptable target, these bigots throw a fucking party because you’ve just told them they can get away with murder as long as it’s our blood on their hands. this particular blog was started recently, and i guarantee it’s not a coincidence that they started it in the midst of a rise in online anti-transmasculinity.

it really is telling, how much hate a positivity post has incited. y’all can’t stand when we talk about the bad things that happen to us, but you hate our happiness even more.

[trans-androgyne]

Seeing her Trans-Misogyny Primer again, I've been having to come to terms with just how heavily Julia Serano's original framework of transmisogyny relies on misrepresenting transmasc experiences to make it seem as though we have things near universally better. It's not malicious, and I've seen transmasc theorists misrepresent transfem experiences as well, it's an easy mistake to make. But the idea that transmascs just experience Regular Transphobia while trans women and fems have an Extra layer on top of that for being fem instead of masc really is core to her original theory, and she makes that point in a lot of disappointing ways, including by using our invisibility and erasure as evidence we don't suffer as much. I understand why so many people think transmascs don't have any unique experiences or gendered elements to our oppression if her work is all they've read on the subject. And I get why they see us sharing our actual experiences as a threat to transmisogyny theory if they believe it cannot stand on its own without downplaying what we go through. But I've read other works on transmisogyny and I guarantee there are ways to discuss the unique victimization of trans women and transfems while leaving us out of it. I just want to see people acknowledge that different kinds of trans folks deal with transphobia and sexism in different ways, is that really so much to ask? Seeing all this has made me deeply committed to never publishing any writing about trans oppression without the input of trans people with different genders, races, and experiences from me.

[imoanurparentsnames]

"Affirmation" & Malgendering

"Fine, I'll 'respect' your gender, but I'll make it absolutely miserable for you. What? You don't like the way I'm 'affirming' your gender? Guess you'll have to stop being a (trans) man then."

I want to put something out there about what I call "malgendering". I see trans men talk about the phenomenon and acknowledge it as a part of antitransmasculinity but not the concept of "malgendering" itself and what it's purpose is, and as trans men and transmasculine people are especially caught in the lose-lose situation between misgendering and malgendering I think it is an important concept to establish. The erasure of transmasculinity, particularly as a unique gender and gendered experience, also serves to keep the transmasculine trapped within this double-bind, positioned between the gender binary of cis patriarchal ideas of womanhood and manhood, where for us there is only misgendering (being abused with the Woman gender) or malgendering (being abused with the Man gender).

I define malgendering as the practice of "validating" someone's gender identity only when it can be used against them and to hurt them, and malgendering almost always involves the enforcement of only the most negative sexist stereotypes available onto the victim with none of the "positives". If misgendering is forcefully pushing you back into your 'proper place' such as by calling you a "girl" or a "her" and showing you that you're really a woman through sexual assault -malgendering is scaring and traumatizing you into it by using your own gender against you. Malgendering is the realization that you don't need to misgender someone to hurt them or to punish them for the way they identity and push them towards the gender they're 'supposed' to be - you can do all that through 'validation'. It's psychological warfare on the sense of self.

This violence and abuse under the guise of "respect" and "identity affirmation" creates plausible deniability of intent and places the blame on the victim for "identifying that way", so much so that even other trans people will defend it and believe it's not maligned (especially because "but being seen as and treated as your gender is what trans rights is all about!" and "errm but its transphobic to not treat u this way?/ur misgendering urself by wanting to not be treated this way :/" with the hidden message being "don't like it? stop being trans"), even when faced with evidence of the (very much intended) effects it has on stalling and outright eliminating transmasculinity (ie. repression, detransition, suicide).

Some examples I can pull off the top of my head:

A transphobe is talking about a pregnant trans man. The whole energy of the Facebook video is 'comedic', and while calling birth the most “feminine” thing someone can do and alluding to how the trans man is really a woman, they still use he/him and call him a “guy” (in air-quotes). Not out of any respect but because the idea of a man being pregnant, calling a pregnant person a "he", and the very existence of the trans man in question, is the whole joke. In doing so, the transphobe has turned the act of using the proper pronouns and gendering him into a source of humiliation and made the experience of being properly gendered a demeaning one.

The Ukraine military situation where all males aged between 18 and 60 were banned from leaving the country and obliged to serve in the military. Trans women were denied passage out of the country "because they were men", and trans men were similarly denied passage out of the country "because they were men". With the discrepancy between invalidating the gender of trans women and "validating" the gender of trans men, you'd think the motivation behind this would be obvious - that trans people are expendable meat and it's better they die than cis people. It shouldn't of needed to be said that "I'm only affirming your gender because it allows me to put you in a position where you will likely suffer and die and put the blame for it on you" is not 'respect' or 'affirming' at all but somehow this was taken as evidence for the idea of that trans men are more 'respected' and seen as their genders than others (and are thus 'privileged').

A common one almost every trans guy deals with at some point is cis people threatening to beat trans men up (and often following through), because "If you're a man and not a woman (anymore) that means I can punch you," using the proximity to masculinity that transmasculine people claim as a justification for violence. Every other week there's a new story in online transmasculine spaces about someone having their ribs broken with "Since/if you want to be a man so bad-" preceding the attack.

The above is in a similar vein to when accounts of violence done to transmasculine people by cisgender men are brushed off and they're told something along the lines of "welcome to being a man", "that's just what men do to each other", "that's just the way things are with men", etc. along with the insistence that their attack had nothing to do with antitransmasculinity, making it an immutable problem with (cis)men as a whole - creating a sense hopelessness and that this is all they have to look forward to.

Transmasculine individuals being refused treatment, tests, or insurance for gynecological issues, especially cancer, despite the knowledge that they are transmasculine, because "men don't deal with these problems" and they don't want "men in women's spaces", and if you don't want to be 'treated like a man' and get the care you need (and not die), you're going to have to go ahead and detransition, change that M marker back to an F.

All of this functions to create contention, and eventually a rift, between the individual and their sense of gender identity. Creating an association between being gendered 'correctly' and 'respected' as your gender (and ultimately existing as a transmasculine person) with abuse, violence, helplessness, trauma, fear, isolation... and by making transmasculinity and transmanhood uninhabitable and driving a wedge between the individual and their sense of gender identity you can more easily drag them back to their 'proper' place. Plant seeds of doubt by making being transmasculine an exceedingly unhappy experience. Make them think that everything that's happened is their own fault for choosing to be transmasculine or trying to be a man. That maybe since they're so unhappy this isn't for them. That living as a transmasculine person is just too difficult and they're not cut out for it, that if they "gave up" and were to be women again things would be easier and they would be safer and happier.

This also all serves to maintain cis patriarchal ideas of gender and the gender binary and police the boundaries of manhood, in a way I can't articulate right now.

Through all this, despite being called "men" during malgendering, we are not actually perceived as such. We are always an "other". Acknowledging us as "men" is just another weapon, and why some transmascs flinch at the phrase "trans men are men". Our own genders are used to beat us.

Using a scrap from my .txt journals:

"[...] on the subject of having a core aspect of yourself taken from you and turned into a weapon to beat you with, with the result being that aspect of yourself now becoming a source of trauma and pain so you abandon it and lock it away like an awful secret, that’s exactly what happened with my gender.

Being genderless and a(nti)binary is what I’m most comfortable as, a(nti)gender is my ~real gender~, but I have to admit a lot of this is because I have been traumatized out of any gender with binary associations and have consequently come to know gender itself, and the act of gendering, as violence. Gender is but a designation for what exploitation, abuse, and violence can be enacted upon you and the justification there of. When someone asks whether you are "masc" or "femme", behind their back as they face you is a hammer in one hand, and a knife in the other, and what they are actually asking is if they can pummel you or lacerate you. When it comes to the “direction” I’m transitioning in though, it is obviously “masculine” (as much as a negation of "femininity" is always taken as stepping towards "masculinity") and you wouldn’t be entirely wrong to call me “transmasculine”, though I have been scared to death of being acknowledged as such."

My first encounter with malgendering was when I was 13 and had just started to realize I was "ftm" and looking for community online. My first exposure to any affirmation of transmasculinity was someone I came to respect reblogging a post about how Kill All Men includes trans men. This would set the precedent of the next decade of my life of existing while transmasculine. A decade of only hearing the words "trans men" and "transmasc" used negatively and as the butt of jokes that served to reinforce patriarchal ideas of gender. The consistent and relentless denial of transmasculinity as a unique gender and gendered experience, the denial of transmasculine reality especially in regards to misogyny, and continuous abuse and threats of violence, all under the guise of affirming trans men's genders as men (and affirming the gender binary in the process). A decade of having antitransmasculine sentiment fed to me in every way possible.

For me, the experiences of antitransmasculinity and malgendering from non-transmascs has effectively "chased" me out of my transmasculinity and any acknowledgement of it. For years I have hidden my transmasculinity and presumed "AGAB" out of fear, even in queer and supposedly trans-friendly spaces. I have not been able to associate with any “masculine” language in reference to myself without feeling that I am in imminent danger, have made a grave mistake, and suffocating in anticipation of punishment. I have always been scared of posting any of my art that eludes to my transmasculinity. I have always been terrified of being referred to or perceived as “transmasc”, a “trans man”, of being called a "guy" or “dude” or “bro”, of using "he/him" anywhere. All of it. Deep down on some level I do desire it, but it’s been forbidden and only aggravates existing wounds.

And this, in turn, pushed me out of associating with other transmasculine folks out of fear and internalized antitransmasculinity towards other transmasculine people, isolating me from any community or connection with anyone similar to me, exacerbating my loneliness and alienation as a youth to the point where now as an adult my ‘normal’ human social needs – connection, community, relationships, empathy – are completely broken. I don’t feel loneliness anymore, or the desire to connect to anyone, despite in ways being even more alone now than I was then. In a way I believe antitransmasculinity shaped the path of my schizoidism. Isolating and divorcing me from my transmasculinity and the world at large is what I understand to be yet another point of this type of antitransmasculine rhetoric - because when you've destabilized and isolated someone from their whole sense of self and community, they are much easier to control.