#other people just like constantly dismissing transmascs

[rottendecomp]

It doesn't matter who made the post, it still enforces shitty gender stereotypes. (With "trans" in front of it.)

I don't have explicit context on why this Tiktok was made. I don't think it's trying to make the point that "it can be extremely dangerous for trans women to go out into the world not 'passing' completely" - That's true, but I dont think that was the videos goal. I think it's supposed to be a funny haha that you don't think too deeply about.

And yeah, while YOU PERSONALLY are of the mind you have it easier than trans women/fems, you do not speak for everyone. These personal anecdotes of "Oh, I have it easy compared to this group" can VERY EASILY balloon out into gross generalization. You may be able to throw on whatever and only worry about maybe getting called butch¹- That is not the reality for a significant number of transmascs, including myself- Another trans guy living in the south. Transmascs and trans men do NOT have it easier than transfems and trans women, and I'm sorry if that wasn't your intention, but it does come across that way.

(¹Butches also experience many Not Great things by virtue of being identified as butch, no matter their personal identity)

Individuals can have it easier/harder depending on race, class, disability status, location, and a million other factors- BUT AS GROUPS. There's not one subsect of trans people that have it easier than the rest. Not to mention huge overlaps we share in our experiences. And again, sorry if it wasn't your intention, but there's a large swath of transmascs who dismiss all of their own struggles as well as the struggles of fellow transmascs just to say "Oh well trans women have it worse, we should listen to them and not take up any space." WHICH SUCKS FOR EVERYONE. INCLUDING THE TRANS PEOPLE YOU'RE TRYING TO DEFER TO.

Not to mention NONE OF THIS IS EVEN THE POINT OF THE POST. The point is "Oh women take forever to get ready am I right fellas" and "Ugh men don't care about their appearance" are VERY OBVIOUS VERY ESTABLISHED STEREOTYPES. WHY ARE WE BEING WOKE ABOUT IT. I think this stereotyping is shit- and honestly I'm offended by the notion I can just put on men's clothes and suddenly people respect me. So many people AGAIN INCLUDING TRANSMASCS think that's how it works- FOR A VERY LARGE SWATH ITS NOT. I'm glad you are able to be yourself without that sort of pushback, that is wonderful, genuinely. But I think it's really dismissive to just say oh well I'm fine we should just let the trans women speak and only listen to them. (<- at least that's how it comes off to me.)

NOTE: Just because I'm saying transmascs can have it hard, that DOES NOT MEAN I think transfems have it easy. We're not opposites. Being trans can be very difficult for ANYONE. That's the point I'm trying to make. We are equals. If I don't make this extremely clear someone will say I think transfems ever face any problems ever. Also if this is disjointed, I just got off work. I'm not rewriting this.

[ID: two screenshots of text from a tiktok video. the first reads "trans femmes taking 2 hours 2 get ready vs." and the second reads "trans mascs throwing on their 'going out flannel'". end ID.]

this is just gender stereotypes with the word trans in front of them

[genderkoolaid]

something ive noticed as a very effeminate trans masc that dresses pretty androgynous & has been on hrt for many years is that the status of being a "dangerous man" can and will be placed on you (ime most often by cis white women) whenever expressing any kind of negative feelings. if i told friends of mine - even queer ones - that something they did hurt my feelings or made me upset, i was suddenly a dangerous man or a (man)ipulator or whatever - even if i didn't raise my voice. the very fact that i am unhappy combined with my proximity to manhood makes me a supposed threat in their eyes.

a couple years ago i had a group of cis girl friends. they would constantly pull me into women's bathrooms n such so i wouldn't be left behind saying its fine its fine bc im one of the girls (gender neutral) but then as soon as i was upset about something i was suddenly a dangerous man who needed to stay out of women's spaces,,,, despite the fact that of the 4 of us, the girl who joined after me was the one spreading this shit around my friend group so... how was i encroaching on womens spaces if i was there before her and i was invited in? luckily one of my friends told me that the other two were plotting to kick me out of my friend group on the sole basis of my proximity to manhood so i at least knew why they were suddenly treating me like shit

its just.. i cant understand why people dont think trans mascs and trans men are discriminated against when they literally said it was my "toxic man energy" that made them want me out WHILE ALSO being the ones convincing me to go into womens spaces bc they wanted to go somewhere and didnt wanna have to leave me behind & like i said im extremely effeminate and faggy and also NONBINARY so i dont understand what "man energy" they were talking about other than the fact that im on testosterone and thinking testosterone = man is just transphobic no matter how you try to twist it

but my taking testosterone was never a problem or made me evil or scary when they wanted me to go with them into women-only (&nonbinary too i guess unless youre amab (and they can tell) or been on testosterone for too long) spaces, it was only a problem when they wanted 1. a reason to criticise me relentlessly, borderline bullying or 2. a reason to dismiss any of my concerns or criticisms of their treatment of me

all of that, to me, is transandrophobia point blank. i dont know what else you could call it other than transphobia, but transphobia doesn't address any of the very blatant and obvious connection of how my transness affects their perception of my proximity to manhood and how that affected the situation

God that sucks. I'm sorry you went through that.

You make a very good point. This is why I don't want to define transandrophobia/ATM as just transphobia and misogyny directed at transmascs. I still think transunity theory is a really valuable way of looking at transphobia & its important to me that we are vocal about how masculine tropes are weaponized against trans people by cis people on the regular because of how we are positioned in relation to gender. Too many people think the that the only thing wrong with saying trans people have "dangerous male energy" is that its misgendering. So trans people who choose to associate themselves with manhood are left in the trash by the people who should know best how much being made out to be a Dangerous Male Invader hurts!

[velvetvexations]

I got this comment on my antigonism explainer and I asked for permission to address in it's own post because I think it's good feedback:

I appreciate your support of transmasc and transnull people more than you can ever know. I, however, think coming up with a phrase that distincts “transmasc friendly transfems” is deeply divisive- and will further the divide and discourse between transfems and transmascs We don’t need a speciality phrase to denote people who are friendly towards us since those that are AGAINST us are the loud minority- the majority of real world trans people (transfems especially) are in unity with transmascs I think that this may just worsen the divides that are already starting to exist, and will further perpetuate discourse where it isn’t needed. Transfems can just say they support transmascs and transNB people, you guys don’t have to come up with a special title. I mean this all with the upmost love and sincerity. Transfems who support transmascs are the majority of transfems, yes there is an issue with TIRFism online But that is not the majority of transfems on the internet- and especially in real life. We should be focusing on greater unity and talking about what makes us similar- not dividing ourselves even more into subcategories to be policed or pointed to. From a transnull who is just as deep in this discourse

I'm thankful for your perspective and that you've given thought to the issue, and wanted to share your thoughts in a way that I feel is really sweet, which as someone with NPD I appreciate a lot. This is something that's been expressed to me about the idea previously.

I disagree, though. Are transfems who support transmascs and other non-transfems the majority? Yes, absolutely! But when the vocal minority is as loud as it is, they need to be loudly shutdown. That kinna thing takes megaphones. They're going to go away on their own and I want there to be a way to take an active stance that throws oneself out there as someone opposed to that shit.

Already it's just taken as a given that transfems are all TRFs.* If we don't go further, we're letting the vocal nature of the minority take up more and more space and become more and more accepted. Because like, they are super aggressive about it. These things get spread around on posts with thousands of notes every day. TRFs do nothing but bitch about non-transfem trans, intersex, and GNC people, and in doing so make spaces an increasingly less safe place for them.

And the signaling is a really important issue too. A lot of the responses to antigonism from transmascs in particular have been saying that it makes them feel safer. I've gotten messages from people who feel really bad about the paranoia trans radical feminism has caused them to feel around transfems they don't know, and that sucks! I'm so not interested in dismissing that as people who need to be less online or something, especially since I've heard a lot of stories of IRL spaces being hostile to any expression of masculinity as well. These are people who are, at best, facing a massive bullying issue, and at worst being driven out of the trans community entirely. It's cruel and I'm not going to shame them for having this expectation hammered into them, especially because I've also constantly been let down over and over and over when I see a post about transmisogyny or the transfem experience that I really like, only to be gravely disappointed when I see they're a TRF. It constantly happens. It sucks. It sucks so unbelievably much.

Hell, a lot of TRFs are self-identified TMEs, and in fact, most of them are! Every time they do one of their polls trying to prove some dumbass point, it's overwhelmingly "TMEs" who respond. It's like, a relatively small number of transfems kicking around a little cult of sycophants, many of whom are weird as fuck in their own ways but also many who are just trying to be good allies. They should also be signaled to that, hey, when I tell them they actually didn't need to drop a headcanon of a character that gave them joy because a transfem said so, I'm not the freak anomaly I get painted as. Like, I've responded to things asking if something so not an issue was transmisogynistic, or what the problem with TMA/TME was, only to immediately have multiple TRFs zoom into the replies like "don't listen to velvetvexations, she alone has those opinions because she hates all other transfems."

And what about transfems who also need to have it made clear TRFs aren't normal, too? Who need to be gently caught before they get indoctrinated into this shit?

When you see a trans woman saying she thinks it's bad to call non-binary people slurs, identifying as an antigonist gives the messages she's not a random confused baby bird brainwashed by Big Transmisogyny to hate her sisters. She is just one of many who feel that way.

And like, is making it a "faction" like that divisive? I don't think so because holy hell, this discourse is already divisive and toxic as fuck. The intense vitriol that gets thrown at one side from another is already radioactive. What's going to make things worse than it is now? TRFs will have to put up with seeing that other transfems are enthusiastic about disagreeing with them? Those other transfems will feel an us vs. them mentality regarding radical feminists?

A friend of mine put it really well last night:

it isn’t enough to just be ‘normal’ about transmascs and intersex people, actually you do need to be actively working against the now baked in harmful ideologies that have gained traction

I don't want to be normal about these things, I want to be actively anti-transandrophobic, actively anti-intersexist, etc. in a way that sends a clear message to everyone. Being normal about these issues is only normal until it isn't. And even if it forever remained a minority with no threat of growing larger than it is today, TRFs should still have the door slammed in their face until they learn to play nice. If transfems who are Normal really are "normal", then make TRFs feel like pariahs rather than having the unmitigated gall to declare that transmascs invented the transmisogynistic concept of transandrophobia because "2024 is the year transfems united under the banner of transfeminism."

Should we let them have that, and just say oh, well, it's obviously intuitive we're the normal ones and they're the weirdos, we can just quietly continue to consider ourselves the default model of transfem while radical feminism continues to cause more and more division entirely on it's own?

*not that they use that language

anyone may reblog this!

[yukishirostar]

So people are talking about a post in the Zolu tag by a certain tumblr user in regards to their issues with Zolu as a ship. They shall be unnamed because i dont wish to bring attention to them and instead just want to focus on their arguments because they're not the first people to make some of these points and so this is also an opportunity for me to talk about these things (a tweet is going around on Twitter containing these screenshots with the username so you can find it there if you need to anyway).

The way this person dismisses the relationship between Zoro and Luffy as a result of needing to pair gay Zoro with someone is too laughable, they must be very fit in order to be able to do these mental gymnastics. I believe that many people who are going on about the Zolu scenes in the OPLA were already Zolu shippers who were familiar with the original story and are enjoying the moments because they were well, really good Zolu moments? And there is actually, shockingly, many good Zolu moments in the original story too which is why many people ship them. Wild, I know.

Then there's 'straight-washed Sanji'. Equally if not more of a bizarre thing to believe. I might make some people mad especially the Sanji stans out there who constantly insist on the 'repressed queer' narrative with his character, but Sanji is written pretty explicitly to be seen as a cisgender and heterosexual character. The way you say with your whole chest that Luffy is 'canonically' aroace but don't acknowledge that Sanji is 'canonically' cishet is beyond hypocritical. If you believe Sanji looking like a 'misogynistic straight man' is different from the way he is written in canon then maybe you should go back and reread/rewatch series with your eyes open this time. If you wish to headcanon him with the frankly offensive repressed bisexual/transgender cliché then go ahead, but that is clearly not the intention Oda has with his character.

There's also the fact that aroace people can uh. Be in relationships. Get married. Have children. Did it occur to you that many people who ship Zolu ship them as an ace couple or-

First thing I want to say here, as a trans man who is 'mlm', can other dudes stop with this idea that women or fem-aligned individuals enjoying homosexual relationships between two men is inherently fetishising or that as a masc-aligned individual your enjoyment of a ship is morally superior in some way. Stop pulling out your 'mlm/ transmasc / cis gay' card in order to justify why your ship is superior. Its cringe af.

But if we are to insist that 'cishet female gaze fetishising mlm' is going on then ironically Zosan fits that the better than any ship in the fandom. It being by far the most popular mlm ship means there is likely a higher proportion of people who identify as cishet women who ship it. Its also the classic 'two men who dislike/hate eachother and have a toxic relationship but hot sexual tension' slash/yaoi stereotype. Majority of Zosan I've come across is depicting Zoro as the masculine male man in the relationship while Sanji the effeminate twink that Sanji stans project themselves onto and they go crazy for the bickering that is apparently reminiscent to them of a toxic heterosexual marriage. Meanwhile every Zolu/Luzo shipper I've interacted with has been some flavour of queer and Zolu is closest to the 'falling in love with your same sex bestie' narrative that the majority if not every non-heterosexual person has experienced at least once in their lifetime. This is just my personal view of course, but I think noting a difference in perspective on this topic is interesting and reveals that at the end of the day this is totally subjective and based purely on anecdotes.

Also it's just a very weird point here that apparently OP has 'plenty of varied queer rep' (it actually doesn't have that many canonical queer characters in relation to its cast size but anyway) and other media doesn't so shipping aroace characters in gay relationships is valid in those but not in One Piece … HUH???? So you're saying if One Piece had 'less' queer rep, then Zolu would be fine to ship? Idek my brain hurts.

"I have black friends so I'll speak for the black community and get offended for them" (btw this person then proceeded to block aroace people who had issues with their depiction of aroace people).

Also if we're talking canonical depictions, the only thing Zoro has been canonically depicted as is also aroace, equally if not moreso than Luffy. So by your own rules, you can't ship a cishet (sanji) with an aroace (zoro), therefore Zosan is now invalid. Stop erasing Zoro's aroace identity bigot.

'Categorically wrong' makes me laugh. I don't ship Zoro and Nami but like, people can ship what they want to??

'The general public is aware enough of gay people and how to spot them these days' uh... firstly this sounds very homophobic. Secondly the general public (cishet ppl) are famously bad at recognising queerness even when its in flashing lights before them. Thirdly you make it sound like Zoro was going around on roller skates and booty shorts listening to YMCA and Madonna in the show. I do agree he was gay-coded but it was mostly because he had sexual tension with every man he interacted with, not for the strange reasons you pointed out...

Its kinda the elephant in the room too but like. These are just headcanons. You can have multiple headcanons and interpretations of a character's sexuality. I can see Zoro as aroace virgin one day and a gay h*e the next. I'm actually allowed, legally, to do that.

The way they think shipping Zolu is harmful to aroace representation when BOTH characters are closest to being canonically aroace than anything yet ship Zosan, label being anti-Zolu as some kind of pro-ace activism, and then proceeded to block aroace people for criticising their incorrect depiction of what being aroace is...

This was a lot of words to say that you don't like a ship. Just say you don't like it, and it gets in the way of the ship you like, instead of writing a virtue signalling essay to justify your reasoning. Please.

They had some more to say on future posts I'll just pick my favourite bits

They really have this narrative that Zolu is only popular because of OPLA and can't fathom that its just a popular ship in general and always has been huh. And they couldn't make it more obvious that they're totally salty about it ranking in the top 100 most popular tumblr ships, lmao.

Your classic case of 'self-identifying ally who speaks over the people they are supposed allies of'. Its a general rule that you feel the need to declare yourself an ally you're probably not an ally, actual allies know they need to just shut up and do the work. Saying 'this character's aroace' and 'I have aroace friends' actually isn't what allyship is, thats just accepting that ace people exist which is like... the baseline.

Calling a wholesome loving ship like Zolu an icky ship is a severe consequence of online brain (this person is 26 years old btw)

[shaingles]

This post might come off out of left field, since it’s unrelated to what I usually post, but i need to scream into the void.

• Transmisogyny is a term for trans women/fems. Not trans men or trans mascs. Trans women and trans fems.

Idk why, but I’m seeing an influx of people (mostly on tiktok) trying to convince trans men/mascs that bigotry uniquely targeted towards us is called either “regular transphobia,” “regular misogyny,” or “transmisogyny,” usually in response to a trans man/masc refereeing to it as transandrophobia or anti-transmasculinity. Additionally I’ve seen people try to say that “transandrophobia/Anti-transmasculinity doesn’t exist” because “trans women/fems have it worse.” Tiktok commenters are good at one thing, and it’s being LOUD AND WRONG !!! And its always cis “allies” doing this. Why are we pitting trans people against each other hello??

• Anti-transmasculinity exists, and we are presented with it constantly. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to recognize that trans men/mascs are treated differently from trans women/fem—and no, it’s not trans men/mascs being “more privileged,” because we’re not. The victimization and infantilization of trans men/mascs (“confused young girls” rhetoric) is a good example of Anti-transmasculinity. Another is r*dfems/t*rfs calling us “gender traitors” and saying we “hating ourselves.” Being treated as a fetish, while affecting all trans people, varies differently depending on the group targeted, like how black people are fetishized, but black women are fetishized differently from black men. Ergo, trans men/mascs face a unique kind of fetishization (mostly from cis men) that differs from trans women/fems. With these few examples in mind, this leads to my next point…

• Trans men/mascs are NOT Cis men!

Why are so many people so willing to ignore/dismiss trans-masculinity struggles just because trans-masculinity just so happen to include men?? Why are trans men being treated the same way as cis men?? Did y’all forget the TRANS part in TRANS men??

Just because a trans man is a man, doesn’t mean he suddenly gains male privilege, especially if he’s openly queer or don’t fit conventional gender norms. The only ones that do are the ones that pass, and not every trans man is a cishet-passing individual. It’s even more egregious when the target is a white trans man/masc, because suddenly people forget that trans men/mascs of color don’t exist, and when they do remember us they act like trans men/mascs of color have the same “privileges” as white trans men/mascs, or even cis white men because “male privilage” and/or “AFAB privilege (???)” im sorry, what???

Im a pre-t & pre-op black transmasc, I don’t recall gaining the privilege of a cis white man just because i go by he/they 🤔 I must’ve missed the update or something.

Anywho to sign this off: These are probably uninformed children or trolls causing an unnecessary divide between the community + its tiktok + it’s better to battle transphobia/transmisogyny/anti-transmasculinity irl than online, so honestly I shouldn’t let these obtuse things get to me. I’m just putting this here to get it out my brain.

[spitblaze]

There's some grass-is-always-greener type shit going on with the intercommunity discourse for sure and I think it's worth analyzing bc I think a lot of friction is coming from the fact that despite our similarities we still have enough differences that approaching things unilaterally doesn't work.

If you’re hypervisible, invisibility can look a lot like privilege. An easier ability to go stealth and not have to worry about constantly staying on your toes to pass, not having your existence scrutinized and weaponized and used as a cudgel to keep your cis siblings in line, not having to deal with compounded issues and large contingents of traumatized cis women who falsely blame you for society's ills. Being able to NOT be the most obviously queer person in the room at any given time would seem like an absolute privilege.

If you’re invisible, visibility can look an awful lot like privilege. A wealth of information on yourself and people like you, a world where even though there's shitheads who hate you there's people who will celebrate you because they know you even exist to begin with, being listened to and being able to have input on subjects, being represented and able to find more people like you, to be able to have a community without having to relegate yourself to 'and I'm here too'. Being able to see yourself in the world and have people raising their voices in support of YOUR community would seem like an absolute privilege.

And like, yknow, obvious disclaimer that everyone's experiences navigating the world as transgender is different, intersectionality comes into play and means that different people have different experiences depending on things even as small as how well you pass, and it’s not like someone who's transfem would never experience any of thr major issues faces by transmascs or vice versa- just that there's a difference in the types of negative experiences we tend to be subjected to, and that looking at what the other person is going through and telling them they have it easy does not foster a sense of community or understanding, it just sounds dismissive of the problems they DO face.

Also like I'm not an expert or a major advocate or anything I'm just someone who is making a post about something I have observed and I cannot speak for groups I don't belong to, please be nice

[unhinged-transmasc-man]

(This is a very long post, but worth reading)

Being a trans man is bizarre. Because you grow up being treated as a girl and sexualized as one, mocked and diminished and dismissed as one. “Oh you’re just a whiny little hysterical girl, shut up.” You’re constantly gaslit about your interests and experiences and trauma. You know what it looks like when someone sees you as small and insignificant, unworthy of listening to. You have femininity forced onto you and get punished if you disobey. If you’re Asian, you’re even more sexualized and infantilized due to fetishization. And if you’re black or brown, society never considered you innocent to begin with. You’ve been an adult from the moment you were born. Being socialized as having a white girlhood is a very particular experience. But if you’re on the internet and in queer spaces you learn that femininity is always really good, actually, that it never punishes anyone, and that you can be anyone except a man. You can be a lesbian, you can be non-binary, you can be butch, you can be transmasc, as long as you don’t Step Over The Line to being a man. As long as you Stay Good. These ideas slowly creep into your head and stay there, sometimes being what keeps you from realizing you’re a man.

And then you realize you’re a man. And you still have all those experiences, you’ve still been hurt by misogyny in the same way, you’ve still had violence enacted upon you. But now it’s somehow worse, because the same people who supported you when you were butch, or a lesbian, or transmasc but not a man, suddenly they’re gone. You can see the distaste they have for you. Suddenly those “jokes” about men you and others made out of pressure and internalized self-hate affect you, and it hurts. So you speak up, say that actually, you’re a man and you’re not bad. And they laugh at you. They say that either “oh we didn’t mean YOU,” or “if you’re a man, then you’re included.” And what are you supposed to say to that? Either all men are evil but you’re not evil so you can’t be one, or you become a victim of a kind of violence resulting from 2010s Buzzfeed “progressive” gender essentialist bullshit “feminism”, where you have to tolerate demonization of your identity as a man to be acknowledged as a man. Sometimes you’ll take it, because you want to be seen as a man so bad that even being complicit in your own dehumanization is better than being forced into womanhood. (I’m also talking about you, pick-me trans guys. If you grew out of it, good in you, but this may be a wake up call you need.)

So you go on the internet for a supportive trans community and you find that things have shifted since you thought you were still an identity of Not A Man. You still have the same experiences, but now you can’t complain about them. People call you “a whiny hysterical little girl,” but in different words. Now you’re “an aggressive toxic man.” Keep in mind, you’re still regularly misgendered and treated as a girl offline, but that doesn’t matter to these people. You’ve crossed that line, and now you’re Bad, and there’s nothing you can do about it. You can’t talk about experiences, you can’t talk about prejudice, you can’t talk about issues that uniquely affect trans men. You can’t talk about how cis women throwing a tantrum at inclusive reproductive language is at words meant to include trans men, not trans women. You can’t talk about how afab socialization still effects you, that it keeps you from speaking out at this very moment. You can’t talk about the rate of violence, or of murder, or of sexual assault. Suddenly the people who know full well how inherently violent it is to misgender trans women in death are saying “but terfs like trans men, they just want to save you, you don’t die like we do,” and you don’t know what to say. Because it’s so untrue.

You know exactly how terfs attack trans men, all the fear-mongering about “poor autistic lost lesbians,” and “amputating healthy breasts and fertility,” and “internalized misogyny, they did this to escape the patriarchy.” You know the fear-mongering about it and where it comes from, because you’ve seen it from the day you were born. It’s the language of putting men who they see as deviant women back in their place. And yet no one besides you and other trans men seem to see it. When JK Rowling comes out with her transphobic manifesto, she talks just as much about trans men as she does trans women. And yet the only response you see to her is “trans women are women!!!!”. And generally, that’s the only response you ever see to any type of transphobia. That trans women are women. This gets so ingrained that anyone other than you is completely unprepared for how to defend trans men against transphobia, because they think transphobia only affects trans women and don’t understand the unique language. It also doesn’t help that most of them already believe the same things (mainly, that being a man is Bad and Not Progressive) and they can’t argue against what they believe.

And so here you are, still experiencing misogyny and violence, still being misgendered and threatened, uniquely in danger for being visibly trans, but you can’t talk about it now. Because you use he/him now, and that makes you evil. Other trans people, who are supposed to be your family, think you’re evil. They project their hatred of cis men and masculinity onto you, and you’re bewildered. You realize they can accept you for being trans, but they can’t accept you for being a man.

They’ll try and get you to separate those parts, say nonsense like “all transphobia is only based on trans women,” when you know for a fact it affects people in different ways. If you say telling all men to die is problematic, they’ll call you transmisogynistic and sexist as though you don’t know misogyny like the back of your hand. You try telling people who have been dehumanized for being trans that you don’t want to be dehumanized for what makes you trans, and get demonized even further. You get the worst combination of all. You get diminished and mocked and condescended and dismissed, “Oh you’re just a whiny little hysterical girl, shut up,” turns into “Oh you’re just a whiny little hysterical man. Stop speaking over women.” You’re still constantly gaslit about your interests and experiences and trauma, because liking masculinity is seen as bad now that you’ve realized you’re a man. You know what it looks like when someone sees you as small and insignificant, unworthy of listening to (especially as growing up as a Jewish girl, and now a Jewish man). They see you as not only small and insignificant, unworthy of listening to, but they justify it with your identity. Before, it was that “women” weren’t worthy of being listened to because they were stupid and insignificant, and now it’s that you’re a man, and men shouldn’t talk about their experiences fear because they’re Evil. You had femininity forced onto you and got punished if you disobeyed, and now you get that again! But now you’re a “toxic man” if you hate being misgendered. You get the misogyny of being treated like a woman and the demonization of being a man, and you can’t talk about either. “You can’t complain now,” they say, “you asked for this. You chose this.”

They use the same language of those “he’s only pulling your hair because he likes you” teachers (“terfs want to forcibly detransition you bc they care about you”) or “you were asking for it” adults after being catcalled for the first time at age 12 (“you chose to be a man”) or the same fucking language as terfs, who they claim to hate. They use this same language, except now it’s a chance for them to project their trauma with masculinity onto you. You learn a lot of people only hate terfs because they don’t include trans women, not because they’re fascists who believe in innate gender essentialism and that your genitals determine everything about you. You learn a lot of trans people are terfs. In everything but name, they are. They believe in gender essentialism, in radical feminism, that all men are evil, just including trans women. In their view, they slot trans women into the status of white womanhood as eternal victims, and trans men into the status of white manhood as eternal oppressors. Except that doesn’t work.

(Not to mention that non-binary people can also be men or/and women, and are entirely left out in all of this except to fit into this oppression point calculator developed in a previous un-invented circle of discourse hell)

You find a small circle of trans men and mascs talking about the same stuff you’re talking about. You realize that realizing you’re a trans man means you have to become an activist for trans men. Every word you think of to describe your own experiences is, again, mocked and dismissed. You’re gaslit even more heavily than you were before, by the same people who claim you have power over them. People who have never talked to a trans man in good faith spread misinformation, that testosterone is easy to get (it’s actually harder to get than estrogen because it’s a level three substance that results in a felony if taken without a prescription), that it’s poison (and maybe it was for them, but they say it as a universal statement), that all trans men worry about is misgendering, ignoring the very real violence against us specifically for being TRANS MEN. And you die a little inside and grow very disillusioned and alienated from other trans people. You notice that traits of a testosterone-induced puberty are demonized even when that hurts trans women, and you notice any trans women who try to speak up are silenced, just as you are. And it hurts. Where is the community in this?

But still, you have your own community, slowly raising awareness for these things. You dust off your skills you got from validating yourself from harm from your abusive mother, and put on that same shield you used against abusive cis boys in high school who made period jokes and said cis lesbians just wanted to be men. You use the language to describe your own oppression that you know to be true. You use “transandrophobia” and “anti masculinity” without apology. You’re not going to apologize, flutter your lashes and give a nervous laugh the way you did for cis men when you were in danger, to other trans people about transphobia. Not anymore, not now, and not ever again. You work through your own self-hatred of masculinity that the queer “community” fully endorses and practices daily, and realize that being a man is good, actually. You start defining your own ideal of masculinity, and start being your own role model of what you want to be as a man.

You’re on testosterone and see it demonized daily by other trans people, and see that what gives you happiness is mocked as what makes you unlovable and disgusting. It hurts, but you learn to brush them aside. Solidarity is important, you’ve always known this. Sometimes you can get through to people, who will realize they’re hurting you and stop. But some people won’t, and will victimize themselves eternally. That’s not your fault, and the emotional labor you carried over from being raised as a girl means you especially need to hear this. That’s not your job. Not because women should have that job, but because no one should have to do more work than is equal. You are trans because you are a man, and so your manhood cannot be separated from your transness. Other people practicing transphobia against you is their fault, not yours.

You start to learn that damn, the patriarchy really does effect men from how other queer people treat you. Because people, especially women (both cis and trans) start treating you like a non-human robot, an emotional punching bag. That’s if they don’t demonize you entirely. But still, you have your community, you’re transitioning, and you’re happy. You start growing into your manhood and masculinity, really growing into it. And there are times when you’re really, really happy. You decide to make your own representation. Don’t let anyone take that away from you, fellow trans men. You are handsome, you are strong, you are resilient. Your are courageous and lovely and kind. You are worthy of love not despite being a man, but because you are a man. It’s been hard, it’ll be hard. But it’s worth it to be a man.

(This ended up being a long post, a combination of what started out as a rant and turned into more of a personal journey narrative. I want to make people feel heard. You are valid. It’s not just in your head, they are gaslighting you. You aren’t sensitive, you aren’t dramatic, you aren’t toxic, and you aren’t whiny. You’re a trans man who wants to be known as a man without being demonized for it. Never be afraid to speak up against transphobia, especially when it’s from other trans people. They should know better, it is not your fault. I love you. I’ve also learned more about multigender people and intersex people, but I can’t speak to their experience at all and so didn’t want to misrepresent. But I can only imagine it’s even more complicated and hard for you, so you get even more love and support <333)

(If you’re not a trans man or transmasc reading this, and you support it, thank you. This was specifically about trans men because it’s the man part people really demonize, and transmasc as an identity is still seen as “safe” because it’s “not a man”. For supportive trans women and transfems, I love you. Keep speaking up for us. But for anyone who comes at this in bad faith, re-evaluate why you feel attacked. Are you perpetuating harm against trans men? Are you continuing gender essentialism but justify it because you have a marginalized identity? Are you projecting your trauma against cis men, men in general, and masculinity against people who can’t fight back? Reflect and grow the fuck up. Are you a trans man who’s bought into dehumanizing yourself so you can be seen as “one of the good ones”? Are you a white trans woman weaponizing your newfound sense of white womanhood onto trans men, especially non-white trans men? Reflect on how demonizing men and masculinity as inherently predatory and dangerous effects jewish men, black men, brown men, disabled men, and Asian men. And maybe just white cishet men as well!!! They’re also people!!!! Being a man isn’t inherently a bad thing. You should be mad at systems, not people, and individuals when they perpetuate harm. Being marginalized in one area doesn’t mean you can claim to be the voice of the community while hurting members of the community you supposedly consider yourself apart of.)

[molsno]

it feels like every trans girl I know or hear about who's dating a transmasc gets treated like shit by them so I want to say this ladies: STOP DATING PEOPLE WHO MISTREAT YOU‼️ listen I know how bad we all want to be loved and other trans people can genuinely be great for that but I promise you that you deserve so much better than someone who's constantly getting into arguments with you and puts you down and dismisses your feelings and doesn't spend time with you. of course this goes for any romantic partner but please remember that just because someone is trans that doesn't mean they're necessarily going to be good for you. get some self respect ladies you deserve lovers that treat you like a princess 💖

[charmac]

People seem to forget that transmasc people can still dress feminine and vice versa. Men can wear wigs and dresses and women can cut their hair and grow beards. I think Charlie is transmasc and discovered this early so since he transitioned and looked like a male Bonnie dressed him femininely and he felt fine with it. some people are acting like men cant wear dresses and its annoying

It's definitely absolutely insanely accidental, but RCG really wrote Charlie as the most gender character of all time.

The Bathroom Problem is kinda the best example you can give anyone as to how you can have an infinite interpretation of gender: "cis man who poops transgender," I give you transman who can still enjoy wearing a dress in a certain environment, transfem whose closet is a bathroom stall, genderfluid in the place of bodilyfluids (okay, wait. WAS it definitely accidental?)

We're all on Tumblr, we all know anyone can look and dress any way and be any gender (or, if you don't understand that, I encourage you to explore and talk to trans mutuals!), which is why I think it's quite nonsensical to spend time arguing over a headcanon being dismissive of another. Charlie can be anything! Or nothing! (TY Charlie Day for my favourite line in Right to Chop "I don't really identify..." <3)

People aren't required to share the same interpretations or agree on what is a good or bad headcanon, and I think if you're getting upset by someone's own personal preferences or their interpretation for character analysis, you're just not supposed to be in the same circles of the fandom, and that's okay! You can share your own opinions, you can post your own content, but you can't keep people from personally disagreeing or expressing why they dislike a certain interpretation in their own, personal spaces online.

A lot of Sunny is pretty deep and also, very heavy. It's not surprising that people end up pulling a lot out of it, often projecting, and then find themselves very personally connected to their own interpretations and feel extremely validated when others agree with them, or feel upsettingly thrown when they see conflicting ideas. I feel all of that constantly, about many different aspects and characters, and a lot of the time I need to talk about it! I spent two years trying to do that on the SUBREDDIT and that's why I made this blog (and why my Twitter account is all but overrun by Sunny, lmfao). I think that's why most of us are here? And a lot of the time we're going to very heavily, crazily, completely agree with each other, but other times we're going to disagree as well.

Sometimes disagreement is something you can shrug off and move past (yeah, there are very clearly multiple interpretations), something you can just get over by venting more privately or one-on-one, but sometimes it's something you think is genuinely important to address/speak about, and I think that's actually how we can end up having very interesting and meaningful discussions and learn from each other.

(But if that's no good, just unfollow and block if you need to. Some people just don't get along or come from too-far distant places to agree on certain things, and that's a fact of life! This show has thousands of fans who think The D.E.N.N.I.S. System is actually a genius method, and a couple thousand more who think he is genuinely a killer ladies man)

[letssendacountrysomecupcakes]

So I got dumped yesterday for saying I believe that transfemmes do experience male privilege pre-transition. My ex did not give me a chance to expand on that belief *at all*, just got triggered and decided I'm unsafe.

I'm going to expand those views here because I genuinely think I'm approaching the topic pretty reasonably and at this point I need to get the processing I've been doing written down.

First off, let me say that my opinion here comes EXCLUSIVELY from transfemmes I've talked to over the years as well as my own experiences with transmasc erasure. (My ex claimed that ALL of the transfemmes I know who've said that they've experienced male privilege only think that because of "internalized transmisogyny" while simultaneously refusing to engage with any of my experiences with erasure that are *specifically* things that happen bc of the learned behaviors inspired by the external factors of male privilege and socialization.)

The actual line that I have on this is that male privilege is an *external* force, not an internal one. It is entirely based in how you're perceived and how *others* interact with you based on that perception. It is based in the *societal and systematic* benefits someone receives based on the fuckin gender marker on your ID.

I absolutely do not think that that means transfemmes *interact* with male privilege in the same way as any c*s person, especially pre-transition. I do not think the *effects* of that privilege are the same and in almost every case it's going to be extremely complex and nuanced based on the individual. I *do* believe that, because that external force is applied *constantly* from a very young age, some aspects of that force can and often do come through even after transitioning.

Part of this being so upsetting for me is that it sounds like a rehashing of the "gendered socialization doesn't exist" argument that was going around here in like 2016 and is apparently resurfacing again. As far as I remember, when that argument stopped because the people who were pushing the conversation were outed as t*rfs who'd been posing as queer teens. The intent was to confuse the community and divide the younger and older trans folx.

The argument that gendered socialization doesn't exist (which, as far as I can tell, is the same argument as "transfemmes never experience male privilege) is laughably dichotomous at best and harmful at worst.

On the dichotomous end, we have someone who talks *frequently* about missing out on "being raised as a girl". If that person also does not believe in gendered socialization, they have the belief that they were also "not raised as a boy". Unless you come from a family or culture that has a third option or treats their kids the *exact* same (unlikely), you were fuckin raised in a way that was distinctly *gendered*.

That can transition to the harmful end *very* easily simply by not processing, analyzing, and questioning your learned behaviors. My ex spent the whole conversation calling me misogynistic and denying/devaluing my friends' experiences. She also very specifically made all of her points while simultaneously telling me I wasn't allowed to respond. At the point that I said, "Hey, I can't keep getting messages tangentially related to this when I'm not allowed to respond so I'm going to respond to a couple things, please keep your boundaries in any way that makes you feel safe", she immediately reengaged herself into the conversation fully, sent 3 messages - one of which was the dismissal of my friends' experiences, and blocked me.

I want to make it very clear that I put my responses under a break, specifically so she wouldn't have to read them immediately. I cannot be the one to enforce *her* boundary that *she* was repeatedly breaking. At the point that someone tells me they want a break from a conversation, I say okay and don't fucking respond until they do. I got two additional texts from her, both of which emphasized her points while continuing to disallow me from rejoining the conversation.

If that ain't the EXACT shit I've dealt with for my entire fucking life 🙄

[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]

[horce-divorce]

"Trans men don't need an intersectional word that goes beyond "transphobia" because being a man is not an oppressed identity, it's easier for them to get resources, and they're not affected by transmisogyny"

Words spoken by people who have never met another GNC person offline (or another trans person who wasn't white) even once tbqfh. And yeah access to those spaces is difficult and often gatekept to shit so I don't think that's anyone's fault, esp not transfems. Your brutal exclusion is never your fault. Still, I think it is possible to have these CRUCIAL conversations about transmisogyny and how transfems are affected... without making sweeping statements about what other trans people do or do not experience. It might be easier for people to check their transmisogyny if they could understand how it does in fact affect them sometimes, their behavior, language, and the spaces they frequent, in addition to how it perpetuates this awful exclusion. Being hypervisible and yet constantly excluded IS something that transfems should have a word for. That IS something I do not understand the pain of as a transmasc. It must make them feel utterly insane. By all means, coin more words! It enriches these conversations when we can relate to each other more and we have more language for the discussions we're having. We want to tear down the walls keeping us apart, not build more.

to be clear, I don't think tma/tme are "unnecessary." Transmisogyny is real and transfems do really experience uniquely awful shit, especially from within the community. But that in an of itself is not a unique experience. Being excluded from "women and nonbinary only spaces" is actually not a uniquely transfem experience. So many transmascs do NOT benefit from patriarchy and I am tired of this claim coming from non-transmascs.

HOW we all get policed by our in-groups presents differently, but policing each others experiences is not something that bridges understanding. And I'm sorry but in 3 years of this convo I've not once seen someone bring up tma/tme to discuss transfems without entirely dismissing swaths of other queer people in the process. Maybe im not seeing the good faith takes, idk.

A lot of other bad-faith misinformation is STILL getting passed around about the coiner of the term "transandrophobia" and what it supposedly means, and how the term itself is transmisogynistic. None of that ever matches up with what I actually see in transandrophobia discussions. I see a lot of diverse people discussing and relating to transandrophobia, specifically a lot of tpoc and intersex people, even a lot of transfems. The people who talk ABOUT 'transandropobia truthers' present a much different idea of the discourse we're having than what i actually see. That inconsistency is a red flag for me.

Tldr i think the concept of tma/tme is fine actually, but I disagree with the usage of the term tme specifically. Terms describing what tma/tme are getting at AND transandrophobia can and should coexist. These are not mutually exclusive ideas actually. apparenrly i cant bring up one without addressing the other bc nobody has good faith conversations anymore.

Basically just. Please don't tell me what I have or haven't experienced, and I won't claim to know your pain intimately, either. we can still relate to each other over the ways we've been let down. I feel like that should be the goal, not determining who does or does not deserve to use certain words.

Also as an asexual, the whole "transandrophobia truther" dismissal feels eerily similar to the rampant ages-old acephobia from tumblr we know and love. You guys love mocking "novel" (to you) discourse and then 5+ years down the line acting like you weren't telling us to commit sepukku for suggesting that ace people can be oppressed for our orientation because we "don't even experience sexual attraction and you cant be oppressed for something you dont experience."

self determination is important for all of us for many reasons. I won't tell anyone else what words to use for themselves. If you're TMA youre TMA, end of story. But dont tell me by definition that makes me TME or that I have to use terms I feel are incomplete or inadequately describe my own experience. I'm not asking anyone else to do that.

Anyway.

[unhinged-transmasc]

been thinking somewhat on like. transandrophobia discourse and like. really it all just feels like a matter of being prickly over semantics. almost everyone can agree transmascs do experience some form of gender-based oppression. but whether we call it misogyny, transphobia, transandrophobia, etc -- complaining about what terms we use to describe that oppression just feels like a red herring argument, detracting from the real point.

so what if trans men don't "actually experience misogyny" because we're men and not women, still doesn't change the fact that we experience some kind of oppression based on often being perceived as women by society, no matter what you wanna call it. or "transandrophobia" doesn't exist because that implies "androphobia" is a form of oppression or whatever. at the end of the day they're words we use to varying degrees to describe the very real phenomenon of being oppressed, discriminated, and hurt for our gender.

how do you call my mother lamenting over the fact i was trans and trying to convince me i was meant to be a girl? me being called slurs all the time for being openly trans/gender nonconforming as an online presence with a decently large audience back then? how do you call me being fetishized/objectified while being more femme-presenting? what do we call that? it's still a fact that trauma exists. why argue over the words we want to use to describe it. why make pointless arguments about how misogyny "doesn't" affect trans men or how androphobia/misandry "doesn't exist" when that's absolutely not the point of the post.

is it a perfect terminology? debatable. but that's not the issue. use a bit of brains and think about what it means to be born and raised female in this society, and how you might be treated if you turned your entire life around by being transgender and acting upon the desire to transition. constantly telling people you're a boy and you go by another name, or maybe being so afraid to tell them. being told what a boy and girl should be, becoming so goddamn acutely aware of how stiflingly binary this world is. the multitudes of ways people can treat you in that position. hell, transphobes have a huge violent aversion to masculine presenting people having "female" bodily functions. people constantly called me slurs and degraded me/harassed me for being a boy with a "girl" voice, and later on being a boy with that "transmasc few months on T" voice (as a singer online). if you have a problem with whatever we call that phenomenon, that experience, that issue, let it go. drop it. just think about the issue itself. and maybe realize there's much more in common with the trans experience in general and that's why we have fucking got to stand up for each other instead of dismissing one anothers' trauma. in THIS fucking political climate? we cannot afford that.

[pretty-little-martyr]

for me i am constantly having the pharmacy talk down to me when i go to pick up my T or my needles. i quite literally had a cis dude working at the local pharmacy try to explain to me how i needed to take my T intramuscularly or it wouldn't work, completely counter to what my doctor told me to do, and when i informed him of this he got very snippy about it. this pharmacy is the only one in my city that takes controlled substances (it's Publix, for anyone wondering and/or wanting to commiserate), and my experience with this chain across cities has been that their employees are transphobic in that uniquely passive aggressive way. That part isn't unique, but if T weren't a controlled substance, i wouldn't be wrangling with this kind of thing, y'know? they would obviously be bullshitting instead of having plausible deniability

at a few points, ive gotten fed up with Publix's bullshit and gone to the CVS down the way for my needles specifically, because Publix loves to just, give me Not At All What I Asked For then insist that was my prescription. Once in the town i used to live in, someone edited my prescription to be a type of needle not compatible with my syringes, and i had to get my dad to help me by calling corporate fucking Publix because the employees in that town's Publix insisted their system (which they can edit, freely, at any time) couldn't possibly have been wrong, despite my doctor not having changed my prescription, my not having asking for that kind of needle, no one having given anyone anything to change. a few times at my local CVS when ive asked to buy needles over the counter, the person working there has suddenly decided there's a rule saying they cannot under any circumstances sell me any needles until i prove i have a prescription specifically with them (they refuse to deal in controlled substances, so, that's impossible). now, i don't know if that is genuinely a policy, but i will say if it is, it's commonly ignored. and it's worth noting that the people who've cited this policy often call me "ma'am" much louder than any other word in their sentence. i find it doubtful that it's policy as a few times when this happens, a different tech who knows me (i go to CVS for my mood stabilizers and anxiety meds) will interrupt and take over the transation, and i get my needles. Sometimes. they do love to give me insulin needles instead and then refuse to take them back once i've touched them, which i feel guilty as fuck about.

(i also of course being a floridian trans deal with the average bathroom harassment, threatening behavior, misgendering, deadnaming etc that comes with the territory of being here, but that's not unique to me and i'm just including it here so nobody can claim the pharmacy techs being difficult with me is all i face. lol)

i say this is likely transmasc specific because in my experience it occurs simply because T is a controlled substance, but obviously, outside of a transgender lens, many disabled and chronically ill people with controlled-substance medications deal with similar bullshit. they just probably still get called their proper name, during. i've commiserated with a few about this bullshit before.

on a more interpersonal level i have peers irl who frequently forget that i am trans (they have said so*) and express confusion when i talk about things like abortion rights and how male victims of sexual violence exist (i myself am a male victim of sexual harassment and the like, hi!) because apparently to them cis men don't care about that? this is more a footnote as it's been 1) personal to me and uncommon and 2) something i dont exactly have definite proof of, just the feeling of my words being completely dismissed, often by people just, changing the subject or flat out carrying on like i did not contribute.

*this part is very strange as i quite literally wear my transness on my sleeve. my battle vest has several pins and patches relating to my transgenderness and i wear bracelets with my pride flags on them. i mean i knew we were invisible but that's a new level lmfao

❗️❗️ This is asked entirely in good faith. This post is intended to open dialogue and help with solidarity and understanding. ❗️❗️

I would like to hear specifically from trans men and trans mascs how the system of [whatever the fuck you call the intersection of transphobia, misogyny, and specifically your gender- whether transandrophobia, isomisogny, antitransmasculinity, transandromisia, transmisandry, or any that I have missed as there are a lot of words to describe similar concepts] uniquely targets and affects you. Things that you feel other demographics do not experience. Reblogs and replies are very encouraged! If you would prefer, you could dm or send an ask to be added anonymously by me.

This is in the spirit of wanting to understand. I am listening. I encourage all non-trans-mascs to not speak on this topic and let trans mascs and trans men do the talking here. Reblog the post to spread it, but please say nothing.

Any and all people who identify as trans men and/or trans mascs are encouraged to participate.

This is not bait to start a fight. I will block without hesitation anyone who is actively being a shithead on this post. I want to hear and uplift your voices by getting it directly from you.

Click this to access the trans fem and trans women version of this post.

[the-mothmaam]

I Witnessed What I Wanted

I volunteered last weekend at the Montrose Center helping with a clothing drive. In the brief downtime I got to talking with Ben, a transmasc I'd met the week before. He is married to a nonbinary person named Mimsy. They've adopted three children. I got to meet the eldest, he's in 10th Grade.

That could have been us. I wanted that to be us.

Amy has me working on assertiveness training. Which is just fucking ironic as Hell considering that all Jessica or Emilie ever saw in me. They asked me how I saw myself, scoffed at the answer and assigned the label that fit their desires. How can one set of people see me as this angry force of nature and everyone else see me as a timid wallflower that never speaks up for themself?

I've been falling into codependent patterns again. I found myself Friday jumping between three separate activities all because I didn't want to let any of them down. The few times I spoke up for myself to the one person that was supposed to care, I was made to feel guilty for standing up for myself.

I wrote and wrote and wrote to her. Trying to never give up hope that I could reach her. But she's stonewalled me into giving up. It only took a year. A part of me feels bad about giving up. A part of me insists I should have tried a little harder, or a little longer. I don't know anymore.

I've submitted every letter and conversation to AI to pour over and show me where I failed. Why I continue to be or act in a way Jessica resents so strongly. And even Chat GPT can't find where in my words there is anything remotely selfish or nonredeemable.

So my therapist, my social workers, my friends (other than Ian) and the most powerful artificial mind on the planet can't find what it is Jessica insists is a problem. And yet every time I think even momentarily about just moving forward I get these pangs of guilt.

I've shifted my research from strictly Narcissism to incorporating information on Attachment Styles. It's obvious that we were a Dismissive Avoidant (her) and an Anxious style (me). Reading how these two interact with one another it's like I'm reading back transcripts of my marriage. I want to get Jessica to sit down and read it... to see it with her own eyes... but I've sent my last Email - and I need to stick to that.

Having deep dived on Emilie it's obvious now to see that she was never equipped to help two people through mid-life crises. It would be like Jessica leaving the library in a paraprofessional's hands and expecting perfection. I just wish Jessica was more receptive, but she's convinced herself she's got it all worked out. That's what DAs do in a breakup, they stonewall and celebrate. Until eventually the pain of it all catches up. Being married meant I could try and take bullets like that for Jessica. I constantly fell on grenades to reduce her anger and disappointment. But I can' keep doing that. If it happens, then it happens, and I'll find a way to mourn. Her feelings are her own to process and work through, and she'll either get there some day or she won't.

[vaspider]

Been having a very bad time of it lately because of some real shit transandrophobia from someone pretty close to me so we're gonna talk about this for a bit:

It is such a Fucking Problem that transmascs are told over and over again that "testosterone makes you violent" and that people around us react as if we have suddenly become the Hulk versions of ourselves the moment that they know we are taking T that I was actively warned about this when I started taking T, by other transmascs. Not that I would feel angrier, or that I would have a harder time controlling my temper, but that someone or someones close to me would start reacting to me as if I was behaving more irrationally or violently once they knew I was taking T, and that this would escalate once I started showing any physical changes.

No, nonsense, I said. The people near me are all trans-competent and most are trans themselves, this will never happen.

Well, dear reader, it fucking has, and I am devastated by it. No, I'm not going to name names, and I'm not going to talk about the intimate parts of my life that I keep off of here other than to talk about these things in very general ways that allow me to talk about transandrophobia in general.

Because I'm not angrier, or more violent, or more upset. At all. In fact, I'm much more calm, I raise my voice less often, and I'm more at home in my skin. However, any expression of displeasure on my behalf -- no matter how calm -- is characterized as me "screaming," and I have been repeatedly told I'm "more aggressive" than I used to be.

What was really the nail in the coffin for me was someone -- a transfeminine person, another trans person, someone who has known me for a long time -- telling me that "because I perceive you as more masculine now, any time you are visibly upset is now threatening to me, so you need to behave differently." I'm not allowed to look upset or sound upset, because my masculinity makes me threatening. I'm the same person with the same behaviors, but now I'm not supposed to sound upset because my voice is deeper.

Really.

This comes from a couple of different things, including this person's personal issues and trauma. (Which is its own problem: if someone's changing appearance or how they sound triggers your trauma, you can't make that the fault of the person whose body is changing. You need to work that shit out on your own. Can you imagine saying that shit to a teenager? Jesus. If you can, that's fucked up too.) But it also comes from the particular intersection of misogyny and transphobia which creates transandrophobia. On the one hand, my anger wasn't taken very seriously when I was perceived as a woman, so it was easier to shrug off as not that big of a deal. That's misogyny, bog-standard. On the other hand, my anger is perceived as far more out of scope because of my transness, because of the ways in which my body has changed. Not just because it is how it exists now, but because my body has changed and my voice has changed, I am now more threatening. This person is not threatened by other people close to them who have much deeper voices than mine -- they are, however, constantly characterizing my behavior as "yelling" and "screaming." Sometimes this happens when I am simply speaking normally, but if I do things like "speak more loudly to be heard over noise," I am "screaming".

On top of that, this whole "you are more irrational now" and "your feelings are XYZ because of this hormone" is just another way of reframing the "are you on your period" which is used to dismiss the emotions of women. It's a reframing of a misogynistic way of blowing off real feelings as "just due to hormones".

Because, look, even if my feelings were more extreme now (they're not), they're still real feelings. It's not permissible to simply strike someone's feelings as 'not legitimate' because you think they're based in hormones. That's bullshit.

(The funniest part of all of this is, because I microdose due to being non-binary and because my T was actually dangerously low when I started HRT, my testosterone levels right now are actually slightly low for a white cis woman, as of my last blood tests. I'm literally no more "swamped with testosterone" than the average cis woman, which should show you how much bias and how little reality goes into these assessments of me, my presentation, and my behavior.)

The fact that it is such a bog-standard transmasculine experience that "the people around you are going to perceive you as more threatening even when your behavior doesn't change one whit and they will tell you that T is making you more aggressive when your behavior isn't changing" that people warned me about it, and it turned out to be true even when like 90 percent of the people I allow myself to be close to are trans themselves is a real mindfuck.

I'm not really okay right now, and I don't know how long it'll be until I'm okay again. The last couple of days have contained me thinking about just stopping T because I'm so sick of being treated this way by the people close to me, and that was kind of a warning sign to me that I needed to deal with this shit, but I continue to be blown off by the person who is doing this to me, so, we'll see.