#racialised transmisogyny

[tabby-shieldmaiden]

Reading through the propaganda on the victims of yaoi and the canon misogyny polls is harrowing in the sense that like. Firstly, the fact that we have this many characters spread out throughout multiple pieces of media to have the polls in the first place is bad enough (and I know that this isn't even all of it, or even possibly the worst of these phenomenons). But even besides that, when you read the propaganda I am struck by how similar all of it sounds after a while.

"This character was viciously hated on by the fanbase for being an emotional teenage girl." "This girl was set up as someone cool and promptly got ignored by the writers/fandom in order for them to focus on the development of male characters." "This woman chronically gets sexually assaulted for a joke." "This woman of colour was thrown under the bus in favour of a white m/m ship." "This girl's only purpose is to prop up the male characters at the expense of her own development." "This woman's contributions to the story were all for naught and she ultimately was there to play damsel or die developing someone else." "Here's an awful racially charged portrayal." "Here's a blatantly transmisogynistic writing decision." "Here's a story where all women except for some special girl who is different from the others are all either cruel, idiots, or cruel idiots." "Here's a girl who just... kind of exists I guess? What did they even do with her?"

So much of it is all like that. Bad enough that when people talk about 'media and fandoms treating female characters poorly', it seems like almost every one has some sort of story to tell. But when you really look at it from a big picture perspective, so much of it is so banal. It would be bad too if it was all "interesting", don't get me wrong. But perhaps it does say something about the nature of oppressive systems if so much of it ends up looking so nauseatingly cookie cutter.

[cibolasburn]

if you go on someone’s blog and they don’t talk about like. Anything other than oppression against trans men, they are someone who needs to understand that the world isn’t just whatever suburb they grew up in

like I don’t know if it’s living through the end of the metoo movement and watching the decimation of bodily autonomy and right to privacy (particularly for trans women) but like. If you cannot acknowledge that men can be misogynistic in 2024 and that that is not women’s fault. I will Not want to speak to you

[sophie-frm-mars]

Queer Culture is an orphan culture

Queer people aren't normally born into families of other queer people, so the way that for example the culture of racialised people can pass down intergenerationally, this doesn't happen for queer people. The advice for surviving as queer doesn't pass down to queer kids the way that advice for surviving white supremacy passes from racialised parents to racialised kids or advice for surviving patriarchy passes from mothers to daughters. The way that elders in racialised communities can guide the resolution of conflicts or harmful patterns or older women can advise younger women, we don't have that. We have an orphan culture.

Immediately we will say that this is what queer elders are for, and this is true, but it isn't the same. We aren't raised in families with any kind of consistent framework for what it means to be us, in fact we're often raised by families that try to actively stop us from being ourselves. There will never be as many elders (who are actively engaging responsibly in their roles as community elders) as younger queers and even if there were they can't be in those younger queers' lives in the way that a parent ideally is from birth.

I'm not saying this to undersell the value of found family, or the ways that found family relationships can be robust and long lasting and bigger than interpersonal turbulence the way family is supposed to be. If anything, I want to stress how important the role of queer elders is, because in a lot of smaller queer communities elders just don't exist. A queer elder isn't just a queer person who has been around a while, they're someone who chooses to take responsibility for the younger people around them by sharing the lessons they've learned and providing the benefits of greater life experience to others.

In smaller queer communities, older queers may choose not to act as elders because if they did they would be seen as responsible for everyone. There has to be a critical mass of older queers before all of them feel safe to engage with community as queer elders. I was outlining this to a friend in Seattle, talking about how barren of elder queers most UK queer communities are, and she said "oh yeah I live down the road from an LGBT retirement community. I know a bunch of queers in their 40s and 50s." In more queer friendly areas of the US, communities aren't just bigger: they contain more of our collective gathered knowledge and history.

In some places the orphan culture is more pronounced, and in some places it is partly remedied by the presence of elders. For many queers, we either learn the lessons about the patterns that shape our communities by reading about them in books and online, or we learn about them the hard way - by repeating them.

My dad had a brain tumour that was diagnosed when I was less than a year old. The effects of the tumour and the surgery to remove it completely transformed him as a person. Growing up I got to know about who he had been through stories that people told me. I identified ways that I was similar to him not by seeing him being like me, but from those stories. Seeing social media dissections of transmisogyny, advice columns from queer authors, endless discourses about mental health in queer communities, I feel the same way I felt learning stories about my dad before he was sick.

I think young queer people cling to queer people of note they see in the public sphere in that same way. It isn't an adequate substitute for a parent who can teach you about who you are, but it's often all we have. Even if those publicly visible queers aren't focussed on queer politics, even if they don't give the kind of support that elders provide to communities, even if they have no experience to draw from and no advice to give, they will inevitably be looked up to by a tonne of young queer strangers, because we're all orphans trying to raise ourselves and each other at the same time.

[pretty-kitten-paw]

Holy shit you’re under every transandrophobia post whining and whining and whining because you can’t possibly grasp the idea of people who aren’t *you* having it bad. Everything always has to be about how *you’re* the most oppressed person around and everyone has to bow to you and kiss your feet and these stupid little girls- oh I mean trans men don’t know what being trans is actually like and have no idea what oppression actually is because they don’t perfectly align with YOUR experience.

Bestie. Why did you just misogyny yourself to insult me?

And again. No bowing. Just acknowledgment of oppression would be swell

Also I'm only on the ones that dare to minimise the transmisogyny that my sisters go through.

Like this is so telling on how you view trans women. Do you think we are happy when we discover we're often at the bottom of the social barrel? Do you think it gives us comfort to see our racialised sisters death count rise every year?

No. The comfort you see from us, the confidence with which we talk about our oppressions and the community we have was forged by pressure and burning hatred from the likes of transmisogynists like you.

Of course you think we want you to bow and kiss our feet. Because the only.imsge you have of trans women in the queer community is an image of power. An image we have had to create to reduce the attacks from folk like you. Folk who'd rather send a trans woman active hatred than continuing their day just blocking and moving on

I wonder what makes us an acceptable target for you?

[recreationaldivorce]

honestly though every notoriously transmisogynistic public figure i can think of (matt now included) has been publicly zionist for quite a bit to a lot longer than they've been publicly transmisogynistic. i do wish it were taken just as seriously as these ppls vile comments about (white*) trans women, many of these public figures' careers would have been cut dramatically short had they been deplatformed for zionism instead of waiting for them to gain a big platform and joining the culture war against trans women and children

*as in their transmisogyny begins to affect white trans women, as opposed to their zionism which only targeted palestinians. not as in their transmisogyny doesn't affect racialised trans women.

[dykepuffs]

Really starting to lose my patience with the people who are happy to talk about the harassment of the two intersex boxers as misdirected transmisogyny, but who try to shut down any attempts at talking about the intersexism and racialised misogyny and misogynoir.

Those factors aren't an accident and aren't secondary, they're the absolute heart of it. Intersex women and, within the category of Intersex women, especially Intersex women of colour have always been a primary target of hatred and policing- because their (our!) Bodies are the thing against which whitewomanhood is defined - We are the immediate Other.

[chantylay]

Not to be a trans woman on main but this is really stupid. Imane Khalif was not affected by 'transmisogyny by proxy' she was affected by transmisogyny directly. Full force. Period. I know everyone likes to live in idealism land where the hate-crimed's identity actually matters when they're being attacked, but it doesn't. Are we the intended targets of transmisogyny? Yes. Are cis people who 'step out of line' in regards to their gender expression (particularly racialised people) intended targets of transmisogyny? Yes.

To iterate further: transmisogyny is a social system affecting all members of the society. It would be non-functional if it only applied to trans women because we're a tiny portion of the population, and because the cis can't clock us to save their lives. It's supposed to hurt everyone by victimising ANYONE who does not rigidly conform to their presumed gender.

Hostile architecture is also a great analogy for this because it is not only prejudice against the homeless being in public, but also the elderly or disabled, and hell, people who like to sit or stand around the place (especially racialised people). This is a feature and not a bug. City Council members don't conveniently forget the existence of other groups. Instead they say: Look at that, all the undesirables kept away with one neat trick! It does wonders for the property values!

Just because we call it 'transmisogyny', that doesn't make it ontological truth that it was designed specifically with us in mind, or that we are its sole recipients. The purpose of a system is what it does.

saying that "transmisogyny exempt" is not a useful term because transmisogynistic society ends up affecting everybody by proxy is like saying that hostile architecture isn't prejudice against homeless people because everyone likes to sit on benches sometimes y'know

[canmom]

(Making a post about this because I haven’t seen it hit Tumblr yet. Tweets pictured: [first] [second] [third] [fourth] [fifth] [sixth and seventh])

You may have seen this 30,000 note post with a video excerpt from Sylvia Rivera’s famous “y’all better quiet down” speech at the 1973 Christopher Street Liberation Day rally, along with commentary from various trans women on the impact that day had on her and Marsha P Johnson and broader context on the horrible way Sylvia Rivera was treated by white, assimilationist gay organisations and the precursors to trans woman exterminationist feminism.

The video was uploaded in 2012 by Reina Gossett, a Black trans woman whose archival work is integral to our understanding of the lives of trans women of colour such as Sylvia Rivera, Marsha P Johnson and Miss Major who began the gay rights movement. Reina Gossett’s research is the basis for many recent histories of Stonewall, STAR and the struggle in New York, often without proper credit.

The video has now been removed.

In the week of 17 April 2017, the “Lesbian Herstory Archive” made a copyright claim on the video, and Vimeo took it down. Above are tweets from last week by Reina Gossett and others commenting on this use of repressive copyright law to attempt to hide a crucial piece of gay and trans history.

Thankfully, that is not the only online video of the speech, and it can be seen (from a different source, I think) here on Youtube. You can also hear a recording of the speech (and the one before it) in Morgan M Page (@odofemi)’s podcast episode on Sylvia Rivera, Marsha P Johnson and STAR. Reina Gossett is presently part of the crew making a historically accurate, non-whitewashed film about Stonewall called Happy Birthday Marsha, presently in post-production, and has also made a short animated film with Miss Major called The Personal Things.

[psychotrenny]

And yes, the line between “chaser” and “non-chaser” is not some clear cut ontological state of nature. It's a dynamic of power that exists to some extent in any sort of relationship between a TMA and TME person. But like whenever someone used the phrase "A Chaser", they are talking about a point where that dynamic has manifested in an especially severely exploitative way. Like are you going to go on about how actually dynamics of racial oppression are always present in interpersonal relationships involving racialised peoples whenever someone uses the phrase "A Racist"? Like my problem here is that even the serious manifestations of this dynamic are consistently not treated with the seriousness they deserve, even by those who are forced to live under them

Because the fact of the matter is that many Trans Girls are not in fact meaningfully aware of Transmisogyny as a discrete form of oppression and the way it manifests even in "positive" forms. Like experiencing a form of oppression does not make you instantly aware of, nor will you spontaneously arrive at a useful stance on how to respond to it. This isn't some personal moral failing (i.e. stupidity, naivety) but a natural product of living within a set of material and ideological conditions, with many features of the latter existing to defend the former. It's why agitation and education is so important in the first place; we wouldn't need transfeminist theory in the first place if just being a trans woman granted conclusive insight into the nature of transmisogyny

I reckon the whole HalimedeMF thing was a funny enough bit by itself, but it's a really grim sign that so many people completely missed the point. Like you've got this comical exaggeration of a Chaser "ally", someone whose "support" for trans women is clearly nothing but the product of dehumanising sexual desire, and yet Trans Women are such a viciously marginalised demographic that so many girls will latch onto every illusory shred of support and "acceptance" they see. It's especially miserable when you think about how that's more or less the way real chasers operate too; exploiting our vulnerability for their own gratification and half the time getting thanked for it

Your average HalimedeMF post was something like "It's so sad that Trans suffers when she should be giving me dick. Dick specifically. Did I mention the dick?" and so many people responded like "Wow she actually thinks it's sad when Trans suffers? I need her so bad". Like girl this isn't someone you're meant to want around this is the caricature of someone to be laughed at and blocked.

And I know a lot of girls were just playing along with the bit but there was consistently a scary amount of sincerity to that sort of thing. Like seeing girls so desperate to feel wanted in any way that they develop positive feelings towards the shadow of an exploitative creep really reminds you of just how dire things are. Living under societal transmisogyny really does make you feel like a lower form of life; even scraps of decency seem like a privilege

[spoekelse]

Chronically online discourse mfers need to realise that types of oppression overlap!! And that doesn't mean they don't exist!!

Some horrifyingly stupid takes I've been subjected to are

"asexual people aren't discriminated against. corrective rape again asexual females is just misogyny. corrective rape against asexual males is just toxic masculinity/patriarchy and it's the asexual's fault for bringing this upon themself"

"islamophobia doesn't exist. it's just racism. you don't see them discriminating against christians and jews because they're white and muslims are brown."

"when adult transmascs get top surgery and people call their doctor criminal for giving a consenting adult surgery, and there's a bestselling book called Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, that's not transmisandry, it's just misogyny"

"the historical belief that jewish men menstruated isn't antisemitism, it's misogyny. the stereotype that asian men are weak and effeminate isn't racism, it's misogyny"

"gay men getting hatecrime'd for being effeminate isn't homophobia, it's transmisogyny"

"asians being stereotyped as emotionless or expressionless isn't racism, it's ableism"

It can be more than one thing, things can nest within each other, they can overlap.

After 9/11, Americans treated Sikhs really awfully, because they thought they were Muslim, and blamed them for the attack. But you wouldn't (if you're smart) say "Sikhs aren't oppressed, that's Islamophobia sweaty" when they got hatecrime'd. The xenophobia, racism, and ignorance inherent to knowing so little about Sikhs or Muslims to actually think they are the same… is a part of what led to this type of fucking discrimination!

These things have context. In a culture that considers femininity bad, considers intersex people bad, the mediaeval (and in some circles modern) notion that Jewish men menstruate is meant to other them, racialise them, make them seem strange and alien and demonic. Christians said they bled because they'd been smote on the bottom as punishment for the death of Jesus. It's not misogynist, transphobic, or perisexist to point out this is antisemitism.

Lesbophobia and biphobia are both real, they don't discount one another, they're not mutually exclusive. Transmisogyny and transmisandry can both exist. Anti-Asian racism and antiblackness can both exist.

It's also foolish as shit to compare "competing" types of oppression as a means of discounting one type. Yes, lesbians can be biphobic, that doesn't meant biphobia is more important and "wins". Yes, Muslims can be antisemitic, that doesn't mean Islamophobia is no longer relevant. These are not binaries!

[irynochka]

Can you white girls stop using the concept of intersectionality to make feminism about men? It's about how women of color deal with racialised sexism and sexualized racism. But you only ever use the term intersectional feminism to whine what about the men.

that’s. not really very intersectional of you is it

“intersectionality’s important but only to combine these two specific axes, pls ignore any others” ok. what about classism? ableism? those never come into play either?

racism clearly being a key one doesn’t discount there being another relevant axis / multiple axes of oppression as far as I can see. systematic, everyday discrimination and prejudice against trans people regardless of their sex or gender is easy to see, as well as transmisogyny specifically.

so, no I won’t stop thinking and learning about how to be more of an intersectional feminist and activist, and I don’t think coming into someone’s askbox to whine about them caring about a different issue than your priority cause in a couple posts is productive.

[recreationaldivorce]

i think "transmisogyny affected" and "transmisogyny exempt" are unfortunate terms bc they basically do invite tme* (*using the terms tma/tme in this post bc they're widely-understood shorthands for "camab trans person" and "not a camab trans person") people to go "well i'm transmisogyny affected because i got mistaken for a trans woman once" - because they aren't incorrect that that is an instance of transmisogyny affecting them, it's just that tma/tme doesn't literally refer to whether or not transmisogyny has any effect on your personal life obviously and i don't think anyone who uses the terms tma/tme believe that transmisogyny has no effect on people who aren't camab trans people.

i also don't think that involving "intention"/the idea of "misdirected" oppression resolves this issue because i don't think "misdirected" oppression is a thing; that implies lack of intent on behalf of eg a harasser or an institution with reactionary policies. if a homophobe calls a cishet person a faggot, that's intentional. they intended to call that person a faggot. if they then find out that their target is actually cisgender and heterosexual they're not going to go "oh sorry my bad, you're not a faggot after all". yet nobody denies that faggot is specifically a homophobic and/or transmisogynistic slur even though it does (quite frequently in fact) get intentionally used against cishet people. similarly when transmisogynistic policies affect gnc cis women, intersex cis women, racialised cis women, etc, these are not accidents; tme people who are victimised by transmisogynistic policies are also additional intended victims alongside the camab trans people those policies are intended to target.

similarly i don't think it's correct to say that transmisogyny only incidentally affects tme people. tme people who are likely to be mistaken for trans women put active effort every day into not being mistaken for trans women because they know it will result in violence against them; that's something that affects all their social interactions every day. i don't think you can draw political distinctions based on a quantitative difference of how much a given oppression affects you—i mean, then you have the obvious issue of where do you draw the line, at what point do you experience an adequate quantity of oppression to be categorised as "affected". the difference between being what's termed tma and what's termed tme is not quantitative, but qualitative.

the main point that's poorly communicated with tma/tme language is that it's not for categorising the experiences of individual specific people based on how often they get called slurs in public. it's identifying a group of people who are the subject of transmisogyny, which is a system of oppression that rhetorically and structurally targets camab trans people. like all the news articles fearmongering about women with penises are obviously not talking about cis women with penises; they are talking about trans women's penises, even though this "culture war" shit does indeed "affect" cis women with penises too. obviously all systems of oppression affect everyone because systems of oppression are social totalities, but that doesn't mean they don't have social groups (not the same as aggregates of individuals) stratefied into oppressors and oppressed.

so, what, are we to replace tma/tme with "STM"/"NSTM" ("subject of transmisogyny"/"not subject of transmisogyny")? no, probably not—tma/tme are widely-understood enough terms for what they refer to & it'd be a bit silly to start a campaign to replace them with something more descriptive on the basis of pedantry really. i just think it's kind of unfortunate how they're named in a way that very loudly invites bad faith derailing of conversations into a completely irrelevant argument about who's "affected" by an oppression (everyone, obviously), and also baits tma people into arguing that actually tme people are completely unaffected by transmisogyny, which presumably most of them don't actually think.

[girlgrandpa]

Hey, what did you think of Feminism, Interrupted (if you've finished it)??

Lola Olufemi’s book? Haven’t read it yet except for a chapter i used for my diss. i think lola is magic, and so is her work! i think its super important bc it doesnt re-represent the feminism that we usually get basic overviews of. and i say basic overview just bc it reads super accessibly, so for ppl more well versed in complex theory it’s not like a “challenging academic text”, and nor should it be! i like her writing, and her thinking, and i think its a very very important book in its broadness, in its simultaneous simplicity & complexity, in its addressing of transmisogyny & racialisation and white supremacy and the ways feminism is over and over again implicated in these Not Explicitly Feminist Related (but obviously feminist related) structures of power... it tends to a lot of things, that most ~Not explicitly/overly academic~ texts on feminism would either ignore, or criticise (unwittingly or not)! makes a very deliberate move to bring black experiences & histories, trans experiences & histories, muslim experiences & histories, sex workers experiences & histories, into the mainstream when mostly....they’re absent unless u seek them out elsewhere (i know there is writing on each of these, but feels special to have it available in a single book, written from a radical/critical perspective that doesnt pander to white supremacy/transphobia etc etc) (im not a reviewer, and like i said i havent read the book! just the chapter on feminism & food [love the fact that a chapter on feminism & food is included! i agree w/ most of what she says in this chapter though some of it IMO needs more nuance, but on the whole made me think a lot about a lot of things] and a brief skim over when i got the book!) would love to hear your thoughts though?!

[gothhabiba]

I find it very interesting that the implication that white immigrants are not the main rhetorical targets of anti-immigrant sentiment in Europe and so shouldn't be nearly sectioning themselves off from white supremacists who spew it suddenly birthed a slew of accusations about you- the funniest of which is your saying that "immigrant" is racialised in context somehow invalidates this specific white Chilean immigrant's experience of xenophobia, transmisogyny, & hardship when you never... did that

🤷🏽‍♀️🤷🏽‍♀️🤷🏽‍♀️

[radicaltransfeminismzine]

Radical Transfeminism Zine

“We are dreaming, and have been dreaming for decades, of forms of radical social transformation, rooted in Black radicalism, anarcho-communism, Gay Liberationist and other collectivist politics. We have been necessarily working towards alternatives to capitalism and practicing them on a micro level (when we can steal the hours to do so). Our feminism has emerged through the experiences of our lives of transgressing gender norms (gender norms that are always racialised, classed and abled); through challenging the gender identity police (psychiatrists) and the bourgeois politics of trans and queer liberalisms; through imbibing feminist writings and the writings of women and men of colour, of queer and trans writers, through pulling a transfeminist herstory out of obscurity.”

Featuring writing, visuals and manifestoes on transmisogyny, boredom, erasure, agency, trauma and embodiment, strikes in the university, sexual politics, healthcare, activist and cultural spaces, reproductive justice, justice, desire, poetics.

Autumn 2017. 64 pages.

Pay what you can/donations: £1 - £2 - £3 - £4 - £5 - £6 - £7 - £8

When using the PayPal link, click ‘I’m paying an individual’, and add the following note: ’radical transfeminism and enter your postal address’.

Free UK/International Postage.

We’ll be doing more accessible copies of the zine on request - including digital copies (available) and audio copies (not yet available). Please contact us at radtransfemzine (at) gmail (dot) com.

Illustration by Mukund.

[canmom]

I have since been told that the article was changed because according to his friends, Bubbles did not self-ID as trans and preferred 'he' pronouns. I don't know why his attorney called him a trans woman. I have corrected the information below, please stop circulating the version with incorrect info.

Copying this over because I haven’t seen it here yet:

Above are pictured tweets by @ztsamudzi (Twitter) reporting that Bubbles, a gender nonconforming gay man, community activist and DJ, was murdered in Tenderloin, San Francisco some time after 3am on September 10, 2017. His attorney initially referred to him as a trans woman, but this is apparently incorrect.

The tweets above read:

[CN: fatal transmisogyny] A local community activist, Bubbles, was shot and killed in the Tenderloin; fucking awful [link]

Worse still, she was killed in the Compton Trans District: historical commemorations are well & good, but we’ve got to support community NOW [link]

And where community support goes, @sfexaminer better get their shit together and STOP *REPEATEDLY* MISGENDERING/DEADNAMING HER. Fix this. [link]

On the left is how the article read when I first opened it, on the right is what it looks like after its “corrections.” THIS is a violence. [link]

Bubbles was killed by the same kind of transmisogynist violence as a long list of almost entirely Black, Latina and Native trans women who have been killed in the US, and a much longer list of racialised trans women murdered around the world.

Tenderloin is historically the site of the 1966 Compton’s Cafeteria Riot where Black street queens (in today’s terminology, trans and gender nonconforming people), many of them sex workers, fought back against police violence three years before the Stonewall Riots.

To add an extra horrific layer of cruelty, the newspaper that reported this, SF Examiner, has “corrected” its article after publication to not just repeatedly deadname and misgender her, refer to her as ‘LGBT’ rather than originally as trans, and even edit quotes by her attorney to change each use of ‘she’ pronouns and deleted his statement that her transness is relevant to her murder. (I’ve included a screenshot of the original article above, the edited version is linked in one of the tweets.) As noted above, the newspaper has since explained that a close friend of Bubbles has stated that this is more accurate to how he self-described, and the attorney was wrong to describe him as a trans woman.

Since the original version of this post has so much incorrect information, please stop circulating it.