#some ND people think in paragraphs I think in gotdamb essays

[shyocean]

Thanks for the reassurance that you don't have to submit to abuse to be trans or not transphobic.

I'm actually so sad right now. I didn't really understand this term existed before tonight, but I duckduckgoed it and went onto Twitter and it's just. It's just a fucking term to invalidate the gender of nonbinary people who don't try to medically transition.

There's one urban dictionary definition. Just one.

That's it.

On reddit, it gets used specifically to mean afab nonbinary people who are not medically transitioning. That's the term. That's what it means. Not transmisogynist behavior. Nonbinary people who aren't medically transitioning or still look relatively femme, and trigger dysphoria, distrust, or a sense that they are faking. that's the whole thing. It's a transmed truscum term, and a term for people you don't respect or believe, or a term for people who aren't suffering as much as you.

Instead of striking at the people using this term, I want to talk about why this is painful for me.

1. I'm plural. I have strongly binary male and female system members, as well as genuinely nonbinary people. For a long time, I was really fucked up about whether I belonged in the trans community.

1.5 I'm not medically transitioning: because there's no way to make everyone happy so I am going to have soul-jarring dysphoria til I die regardless; because I have elevated T due to PCOS anyway; because the female fronters are mostly dormant and we miss them and are afraid of they may never come back; because genderplural, not a single nonbinarity, and there's no way to fix that. I have a haircut that lets me do both. The only way thing I can do is ask people to respect my identity or not, and I am not out out as plural in real life.

So normalizing this term just encourages people to dismiss me. I bet I look like a skinny white afab who's just cosplaying transness to most people.

2. So a lot of my personal trauma connects to people looking at skinny white afab people, and having emotions based on their perceptions--emotions like resentment and jealousy and lust and the desire to control--and then projecting responsibility for that onto us. I don't know if it's there or not, but it's coming up for me.

It's a huge personal trauma because of the whole mindfuck of evangelical purity control culture, to the larger culture that spreads from dress codes to rape apologists, to friendships that were attempts to fuck me, to actual SA, to being disliked and resented by people who saw me as competition or an impossible standard. As a society, part of what we do when we gender someone female, is make them responsible for how we feel about their bodies, and for comforting and pleasing us.

And it's so prevalent that it's hard not to see it in something that really is focused on putting gender onto nonbinary bodies. Especially in the context of a lot of posts about having dysphoria triggered, and posts about dating profiles and a sense of rejection around who people are dating, and the take that even mentioning one's agab is in fact a form of transmysogyny because instead of being, you know, a complex part of what's going on with someone who doesn't fit the binary well.

Like, the take that "giving your agab is inherently transmisogynistic" is really giving "me getting triggered make you morally bad."

3. Trans twitter is just fucking incredibly toxic. And right now, it really feels like this is not unconnected to the thing with that transmasc guy who recently got bullied off, that there's still discourse around.

It feels like some people are getting triggered, and deciding that it's okay to go into fight and be cruel to other people because they are triggered, so long as that other person was really really bad, or conversely, so long as they can convince themselves that they are have a position that gives them moral immunity.

I'm sensitive around this pattern, because it happens in any space where there are a lot of people who have dealt with trauma. And it's not true. Nothing gives you moral immunity--literally anyone can become an abuser. There's a whole cycle where people who have CPTSD use going into adrenaline/fight as a means of feeling safe and powerful and regulating their emotions, and if you are not really fucking careful about that cycle, that's how you become an abuser.

And to keep feeling good about yourself, you just make sure that the victim really deserves it, that they are a target that it's somehow morally justifiable to punch. And sometimes it's specific victim-blaming. And sometimes it's employing the language of social justice--our desire to not allow people who are genuinely speaking about their oppression to be silenced--to get away with self-soothing by being mean.

And it's very tricky, because we don't actually want to tone police (usuing the technical definition of ignoring a person's arguement or making it unspeakable because of the presence of emotion or rhetorical style) or silence people or use calls for civility as a means to continue or reinforce oppression.

But if we are really over here at the take

"people telling a trans woman not to use this term (that's used to dismiss and deride non-transitioning nonbinary people) are tone-policing, and her experience of transmisogyny is so much more important than these people's standing in the community that anyone who has an issue with it is the problem and should be blocked"

And the take "the problems that trans women face are so much worse than the problems that anyone else faces that you can't actually expect them to be considerate of other people, and of course they can't participate in being oppressive to others, and anyone who says they can is just transmysogynistic, unless they themselves are trans women. In fact, literally the only person who can be critical about a trans woman's behavior is another trans woman, no one else has the standing ever for any reason"

and

"also, can't trans women have a goof? little a spite-take as a treat? can't they safely use theyfab (derogatory) because their oppression is so much worse and the people they might be hurting are either Bad Oppressive People or Fakers who DOn't Experience REal Oppression"

that's um. my fuck.

I guess you have to decide whether you think people like me belong in the community or have a right to object to this term.

Me? Am I T4T because I have a trans girlfriend, or am I fucking weird cis chaser who doesn't actually get a say in the community or terms that might apply to me?

No I am probably someone that doesn't deserve consideration, in this economy, because by almost any measure I am not a real trans person at all, or even really disabled, just somebody who wants to be oppressed. But even if I am.

As soon as you don't care about hurting other people, only about being hurt, you don't care about justice, just about being on top.

There's this thing about justice sensitivity. If you are have high victim sensitivity, but low perpetrator sensitivity, then you are incredibly likely to be aggressive and participate in hurting other people. And you feel justified, because you are very sensitive to being the victim, and don't care about being the perpetrator.

And I fucking hate it so much. I am trying so hard not to do it, (which I talked about this in terms of my experience and my triggers) because it's so normalized. And like.

Fuck.

Honestly I am really sad because it's clear that I don't belong in the trans community, if such a thing exists, but I can't be cis, so what the fuck do I do, you know? Pretending to be a woman was fucking killing me. But it's not like I can pretend to be a man either.

I'm just so fucking sad.

Apologies to OP and anyone else reading this, I am just having a rough time rn, actually. I am not meaning to trigger anyone else, and I am sorry if I do.

its. not okay to use slurs just because you insist they are only about people you hate.

and like this is a slur yeah? this is an insulting term applied to members of a marginalized group to shame/mock/insult them. and idk about you but I have always, always seen it used BY transphobes about ANY nonbinary person who was AFAB. it has never been a term used for transmisognynistic NB people (and why would we have an AGAB-specific term for that? what the fuck?) like there is no getting around this. you just want an excuse to call other trans people transphobic slurs.

you don't need to call people "theyfabs" to talk about their transmisogny. you don't need to use transphobe's language to hurt fellow trans people. you are not being silenced because people are asking you not to use transphobic insults.