#please don't let me become a dedicated transmisogyny blogger

[gaogaigoatgrrl]

i get the feeling the transmasc thing isn't just surface-level what-it-says-on-the-tin stuff, so i gotta ask what's the actual problem for us with transandrophobia? it just looks like a word like transmisogyny (though structured differently) so i don't really understand what the immediate problem is

you have to understand that a significant part of the reason the term "transmisogyny" exists in the first place is that everyone (generalizing), including tme trans people, routinely treats trans women and transfems like absolute dogshit, and they get away with it because they have privilege over tma people.

i'm not just talking about being mean. i'm talking about denying us community support, pushing us into precarity, then taking advantage of our desperation to use us as scapegoats and sexual objects and throwing us away when we're no longer useful. it's not just cis men who do this. tme people in general engage in this bullshit. i've been on the receiving end of it myself, specifically from transmascs.

there is no "equal but opposite" counterpart, but some (but not all) tme trans people are immature enough that when they hear tma people trying to develop terminology to name this dynamic, their first thought is "hey, no fair! why don't i get a fancy oppression term too?"

in the past, it was en vogue to just deny the existence of transmisogyny outright, or to use semantic trickery to claim that it affects all trans people (the latter method is gaining popularity again, however). now, the angle's that everyone's oppressed in their own way, so there's no need to point fingers, right? but that ignores the fundamental nature of oppression. it's a thing that groups of people do to other groups of people to subordinate them for their own collective gain. who's subordinating men?

this is the part where someone will want to accuse me of saying that trans men aren't oppressed at all. and that's outright untrue. trans men are oppressed, and viciously at that. but that's not because society oppresses men. transphobia is just that bad on its own (not to mention when it intersects with other oppressions besides misogyny-- we'll get to that later).

tl;dr: it's bad because it gives tme trans people a way to duck responsibility for the way they treat trans women (and transfems more broadly). it obfuscates intracommunity power dynamics that regularly get transfems trapped in isolation, povery, and homelessness and killed and makes them easier to avoid addressing. if everyone involved were cis, it'd be easy to see this for the antifeminism that it is. i was seeing manosphere circles (mra, mgtow, incel, pua, etc.) use a lot of similar arguments and talking points in a cis context ten years ago.

i should cap this off by saying that transmisogyny isn't the only power dynamic that bears mentioning within trans circles. racism, particularly antiblack racism, is also a significant problem in similar ways (arguably worse), and white trans people (like myself) should not be dodging responsibility for that either. all of us have a responsibility to make sure that the most vulnerable among us do not get left high and dry, and i believe that in general it is both ethical and strategically smart to work in solidarity with other oppressed groups that sometimes overlap with our own. there are tme trans people who share this insight wrt women, and i am grateful for their willingness to stand up for us.

liberation does not come from sweeping conflicts like this under the rug, but from treating them like real problems that need to be taken seriously and actively worked against. fundamentally, my beef with transandrophobia theory is that it interferes with this process and is therefore anti-liberatory.