#many animals never stop playing and finding comfort and. we're animals too. we've got the same urges and desires

[uncanny-tranny]

You know, if animals can have comfort objects and favourite people and relax when they have nothing to do, maybe we have that same permission. Maybe life - regardless of size - is about finding comfort, happiness, and security.

[caffeineandsociety]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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