#ive talked to many trans women who've had this experience

[chiffer178]

[kienansidhe]

Saw your tags on a post and wanted to mention that trans women having their bulge be seen as gross also isn't an exceptional experience. It's definitely more visible because they face hyper visibility, but bigots treat all trans people that way.

If you need a one to one many NBs who have a penis will have their bulge treated the exact same as trans women. For a different but comparable experience, people who pack have it treated as gross as well and it's assumed to be a sexual thing. Same thing with people who've had phalloplasty.

I've also seen cis gay guys treated that way too. It's "gross" and assumed predatory. Because the cisheteropatriarchy punishes any deviance from traditional masculinity and femininity, queer bodies are as a whole demonized and policed. And that means a lot of bulges are treated as inherently sexual, threatening, and gross by mainstream society.

You kind of ended up doing the exact thing the post was warning against, where you assumed X doesn't happen to Y group of people, and only Z group of people experiences that. It's something that's easy to do but I hope you'll be able to expand your knowledge of the topic with this and also consider future things more broadly. There are definitely a few experiences one group will have different than another, but there's also a lot more overlap than people think. And there are very few experiences that literally only one group has, even if the exact way people experience it might differ some.

thank you for your thoughts! i inhabit a transmasc body that has chosen to only partially transition, and i struggle a lot with moral ocd, so on this site where there r a lot of loud ppl saying that trans women / transfems have it the worst of anyone, while other people say that different trans ppls struggles are different but not better or worse, while trolls and bullies muddy the conversation constantly, i really have trouble figuring out whats what.

i kinda default to deferring to trans womens voices because i dont know what its like to be transfem, but like, of course different transfems say different things and not all can be right at the same time, so its very confusing! im very afraid of erring on the side of dismissing transmisogyny, i guess? and theres so many ppl on this site who jump at the chance to call any statement transmisogynistic that i am maybe putting 'ofc trans women have it worse' disclaimers in too many places? (this is NOT trans womens fault, i see this from every demographic and often most viciously from other transmascs.) like. not gonna lie, im very scared of people on social media lol.

im sorry if ive made people feel invalidated by the way i talk abt this stuff, especially since i feel invalidated a lot when ppl call transmascs transmisogynistic for talking abt transandrophobia/transmisandry? maybe i need to just stop commenting and listen more until i can comment more confidently and with less fear. i dont know? im open to input!

[edit: heres the post and my tags that anon is referring to]

[rosalesbeausderholle]

i think about language a lot too. eps now as it's so easy to get angry and lash out. i see ppl using slurs or talking about bodies in horrific/cruel ways and it's ridiculous. but i do do use 'tim' for t-lesbians. bc theyre literally trans identified men. an entire male %100 absolutely. in fact i just say men/male tbh. ive just gotten to that point it's too much for me to even indulge bc it's crazy. but usually i use 'them' or names if i can esp w females

And that's your prerogative and like, you do you, but I don't like the way it's used. Even for trans women. I've seen people say "these aren't trans men anymore these are tifs now" when disagreeing with certain trans people on a topic that had nothing to do with transness at all, in a "I somewhat respected them before but not anymore and I'm gonna denote that with this language" way when again, their opinion had nothing with transness, so why would respect for the fact that they identify like that be conditional on whether or not they agree with you on an unrelated opinion?

I also think words like that do people who criticize the modern trans movement no favours at all. Like we need to look like the sane party people, we need to look like we've got something valuable to say. The way things are now, when people hear "terfs are horrible and hate trans people" and they go check out any average radfem blog, it'd look to them like yes, radfems do hate trans people, because as you said, it's all about saying disgusting things about the bodies of people who've transitioned, you also have people going "they're all fetishists" "they're all insane and delusional" or treating them like poor victim children who cannot ever make any rational choice for themselves, you also have had in the past certain bloggers whose thing was to find the personal pictures of trans teens/young adults in order to bully them, and in the worst cases you have people using, not slurs but words that sound incredibly insulting, and in others you have people actually using slurs. The critical theory gets lost under all that, whether we want it to or not. And many people, esp people WITHIN trans activism who, and radblr seems to forget sometimes tbh, are the people who get the worst of the manipulative and abusive dynamics of the community, can't see the good along with the cruelty, especially when it comes to cruelty against people like them.

(Also just in general I don't think it's good to become so jaded and angry that you end up hating a whole group of people and blaming all of them for the actions of some tbh like not healthy overall, nor rational, like it's not just about image for me at least, I refuse to let the world turn me into a cruel person despite how easy it'd be)

Add to that that the radfem community as it is now doesn't seem to have a project forward or anything like that, that it's often even apathetic to the idea that anything CAN be done against patriarchy, that people on this community, much as they like to pretend otherwise ALSO can't handle disagreement just like trans activists can't because any little disagreement immediately turns into a huge fight, that any talk of "sisterhood" seems to be conditional on a lot of things and things like the racism, the support of collaborating with the right wing, the ableism, the lesbian vs bi fights which are the dumbest things and I'll be honest, we don't look attractive at all. I wouldn't have listened to radfem ideas if this was what I had seen when I found a "terf" blog all those years ago.

I believe we need to build bridges among all female people (yes, even ones involved in trans activism!) to fight for female liberation as a whole, I believe that in order to do that we need to act with baseline respect for each other and each other's experiences, at least at the very least, and that would also foster healthier community dynamics as a whole, which is the entire root of the problem with trans activism, that it acts like a cult right? Well, let's not be that.