#this has always been about trans people existing

[gwemmieee]

Yeah. I have a big bone to pick with women who go out of their way to gatekeep someone out of our club. Most of them are cis and straight, but trans fems who do this unfortunately exist. That instance looks like some disgusting hypocrisy to me, because most baby trans fems really emotionally lean on the willingness of this community to emphasize that you are your gender and you are valid no matter how many steps you've already taken and been successful with. That is a crucial, supportive message, and suppressing it in any way is tantamount to pulling up the ladder behind you. Which, yeah, every community has its assholes who pull up ladders.

It is also a tough line to walk sometimes for women, because most of us have learned that there are certain ways we can't entirely just open up to most masculine folks and let them into our entire lives and every space. Not without a lot of pain. So we are incentivized to wait until someone makes it clear that they're safe, before they're let into our inner lives more. This function has caused me SO much strife, because before I was accepted as a woman, it kept me outside in the cold, alone, really close to an early grave, but now that I am fully living as a woman, and even before I was doing that, my efforts to ignore this function entirely and just let any masculine person into my heart, my inner world, and my safest spaces, have not always gone well, and sometimes those efforts have backfired, made me unsafe, and deeply traumatized me.

These days, the only conclusion I've been able to find is that women need to work on what we recognize as red and green flags, for who is safe. It's pretty easy to see that the average set of red and green flags you see most non-queer white women adhere to are... crap. Truly crap. Delusional, not based in reality, etc. And that sucks because it isolates them more and it gives them more excuse to be really shitty to people, or to gossip about them in ways that really aren't fair to them.

Earlier in my transition, I still had it internalized that I had had so much trouble because I wasn't good enough, because I didn't do enough, and that's why women didn't let me in. But I was literally running around freely saying out loud that I was genderfluid, that I had no concept of manhood and little concept of gender, that I thought it would be cool if I was born as a woman, that I wanted other pronouns to be used on me, that I could be pretty gay/queer, acting pretty gay/queer, openly rejecting most masculine behaviors and modes of thought, constantly openly celebrating femininity, experimenting with gender presentation... I was a very queer little dude. And I've only been able to recognize that in retrospect. Because nobody let me in. Trans fems may have let me in, but they weren't around much in the late 00s and early 10s. I never met one. But I did meet and usually deeply connect with countless fellow eggs, before any of us knew. In situations like mine, trans fems generally didn't even get to find themselves until a bisexual cis woman took it upon herself to date them as a perceived man, and then recognize their queerness and allow them to explore gender with her acceptance and assistance. Because being allowed into womanhood was so rare and taboo that it had to happen behind closed doors as part of a romantic relationship. I was aro/ace, and I unconsciously looked to get the same experience out of a platonic friendship, but all I got was led on. Told I was a close friend but still treated like a stray animal compared to their feminine friends. Not let in.

Meanwhile, cis women, and fem-raised queer folks who at the time universally saw themselves as, yknow proudly not quite men at least, universally treated me like a burly cis man deserving of none of their support or curiosity and all of their suspicion and gossip about how "he's creepy." Consistently. Until I finally came out as a woman in 2022. And that's so 100% on them. They went out of their way to not see me for who I was and just keep me out in the cold. So yeah. The state of gatekeeping of womanhood is *bad*. And in my experience, most of it comes from people who had/have easy access to unquestioned claims of womanhood, whether that's because they're AFAB or because their transition into womanhood was really fast and made them really conventionally attractive.

But what about trans fems? Well, we aren't perfect with our red and green flags, either. It's hard to be. Personally, I've noticed there is a small contingent (VERY small) of trans fems my age who operate more like the old world transsexuals in that they really are truscum gatekeepers, often also ableist, and borderline psychopathic in the level of emotional labor they expect from you as a friend vs. what they're willing to put up with in return. And that is very unfortunate. My early transition saw a lot of them genuinely help me as incredible new friends, but then hurt me badly and burn bridges for no good reason. And I feel that there is a bit of a schism in the trans fem community between elders who usually just want to stealth out--who look down on baby transes and cringe and don't help us, or even if they do talk to us and help, there is still a very clear line denominating their actual friends and community that we never get to cross into--and the rest of us who openly embrace being queer and not assimilating all the way. But, frankly? Most trans fems I've met are the most welcoming and least gatekeeping folks on the planet. Most are that latter, queerer camp. And we operate exactly the way that we should: we let anyone safe into our inner world, even if that safe person happens to be a man. And some of us STILL see that backfire. And so even we can't be completely carefree. But we can always learn and grow and get better and better at what we actually identify as red and green flags.

wait where are all the trans guys

Historical-anthropological research, especially the work taking place before the 21st century or outside the West, tends to focus entirely on transfeminized groups. So when reading these works it’s pretty natural to ask — wait, where are all the trans guys? This is a reasonable question with a few clear answers; this post is something quick I can point people to.

The central condition of transfeminized groups' absorption into feminist activism has been to accept a kind of symmetry with select TME groups through the understanding of trans femininity as "gender variance." Under this framework, transfeminized groups' social position can be understood as a consequence of gender variance and some abstract violation of cis norms; this was proposed by people like Susan Stryker and Emi Koyama [1], among others, and continues to structure trans inclusion today. It also fails when considering several basic aspects of these groups:

Transfeminized groups are associated with hyperspecific labor practices, most frequently sex work, but also hair styling, drag, makeup artistry, acting, and other forms of 'gender work.'

Metropolitan transfeminized groups appear in the archive as highly clustered and active groups connected with, but usually intensely split from, the masculine men they fucked.

Transfeminized groups become a kind of 'third gender' on an epistemic level; they are Known to wider society before and after “coming out” in a way that USAmerican transmasculinity has only recently vaguely approached.

Transfeminized groups are heavily clustered in labor practice, social organization, and epistemic position, although this is not universal -- certain strains of USAmerican transfemininity have become a bit more labor-agnostic in the last two decades, not-so-coincidentally alongside more general currents of gender-labor liberation. The messy strains of trans male identity recovered from the archive and from current practice tend to lack labor, social, and epistemic coherence. As Aaron Devor notes in FTM, his 1997 history of FTM men, trans men in the 20th century tended to transition out of cities and into the countryside, finding low-profile places they could exist in. These practices, and the earlier "female husband" practices described by Jen Manion, relied on the labor-agnostic nature of transitioned manhood in order to disappear from public life. Transfeminized groups, on the other hand, are categorically restricted from the main form of economic life historically available to women -- marriage. Their labor practices are heavily constrained and have almost always revolved around some form of 'gender work:' as Susan Stryker put it, you need to get people to pay you for being a trans woman. Transmasculinity pushes away feminized restrictions on labor; trans femininity is labor.

Because transfeminized identities are so often labor-identities, and because their specific brand of 'gender work' and hormonal/silicone/surgical embodiment usually requires both specialized training and community support, nearly every metropolitan center in the world developed highly centralized transfeminized groups over the course of the 20th century [2]. As Ochoa notes, this visibility is partially due to epistemic visibility (everyone knows what a trans is), partially due to group structure (people work and train each other), and partially due to the selectively visible demands of finding clients. Fledglings come in with a way of being that is always already visible to society, but changing the body to match and learning how to fully enact and slowly contest the third-gender labor-identity they've been given takes a lot of community support.

So as labor-identities, transfeminized groups tend to a level of labor/community/epistemic coherence that has no clear counterpart. The news archives we have of trans men (as seen in Manion) position them as singular and easily absorbed back into the female gestalt; the cisgender feminist/gayguy/AIDS researchers that form the bulk of historical-anthropological work saw them as unnecessary to their grand theories of gender; the communities themselves have been materially fractured and, for the groups that rise out of lesbian-feminist activism, only partially committed to their own existence. The result of all this is that there is no clear equivalent to the "transfeminized groups" of Jules-Gill Peterson; there is no symmetry to trannydom, and while additional work to unearth trans manhood in the archive remains extremely valuable, sometimes the necessary level of label-coherence and social existence just isn't there.

[1] Stryker, "My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage," Emi Koyama, "The Transfeminist Manifesto" [2] As seen in Namaste, Invisible Lives, Prieur, "Mema's House, Mexico City," Kulick, "Travesti," Newton, "Mother Camp," Ochoa, "Queen for a Day," Hegarty, "The Made-Up State," and plenty more. Most of these works came out in the late 80s and 90s due to a combination of the feminist "third gender" craze, the burgeoning field of masculinity studies, and AIDS.

[plaidos]

Transphobia has rapidly increased ever since Trump took office and gave tacit, then explicit support of it. The start of the current wave of bathroom bans and public existence bans ("drag bans") occured under trump. Did Biden do anything to prevent these in the slightest? No. Pretending that Trump won't actively encourage more of them and pass national legislation to make hrt harder to access is just as stupid as pretending Kamala being elected would have stopped the wave

actually, the start of the “current wave” of bathrooms bans started with Obama’s administration. anything is an outlier when you cherrypick data :p

anyway, i’ve never said that Trump “won’t actively encourage more of them” like you don’t need to invent things that i haven’t said fudjfufj

anyway like. sorry, no, transphobia has not skyrocketed under Trump like sorry i have been out the closet for now over ten years and there has been a total bipartisan increase in transphobia. the first trans congresswoman just said she doesn’t care if she’s banned from using the women’s bathrooms (throwing the rest of us under the bus). if you think that the increase of Transphobia is because of the Trump administration youre bonkers & not paying attention. if anything, Trump has only started focusing on anti trans legislation because of how much it a bipartisan issue it has become. outside of the military ban he wasn’t really particularly anti trans the first time, people pointed out as early as 2021 that the dude *pivoted* to anti-trans stuff *after losing*. like he was always transphobic (he’s a politician they literally all are) but it literally was not a part of his platform until it became the hot topic issue ACROSS THE POLITICAL SPECTRUM.

Biden & Harris don’t support trans people & never have. any & all support they have provided to us (which is bordering on none) is just the carrot to get us to vote. we’ve already seen that the Dems are prepared to give us the stick and throw us under the bus regardless of whether they win or lose.

It is not pro-republican to criticise the democrats’ platform & campaign, and if you can’t understand that, you should stay out of grown up conversations about politics.

[ammoknightsofficial]

While the abject hostility to storytelling, mind bogglingly forthcoming bigotry, the valuing of shipping above all else, and general severe tone deafness is not at all a new invention by the Mouthwashing fandom - nor is the visibility or severity of all of these things - I deeply, sincerely hope that the criticism that the spotlight being put on the Mouthwashing fandom for this stuff can maybe pave a sturdy path towards the criticism of fandom as a whole, and shipping culture as well.

For many years, people have been acting as though fandom + shipping culture are fun, wholesome, welcoming for everyone, and entirely devoid of negative politics. That is why it has been defended viciously and endlessly from even the most minor of criticism. The reality is that it has always been deeply hostile to marginalized people. Misogyny isn’t new to fandom. Rape apologia isn’t new to fandom. Ableism isn’t new to fandom. Homophobia isn’t new to fandom. Transphobia isn’t new to fandom. Racism isn’t new to fandom. They’ve been overbearing, oppressive forces in fandom and shipping culture for decades - no matter how hard people want to try to say that fandom is for the marginalized, it has literally always been overtly and covertly hostile to the existence of every single minority group.

I’m glad I’m seeing people actually talk about it for once. Often, when you open these kinds of discussions, people will shut you down or chase you off social media entirely. Do not stop talking. Because no, we shouldn’t be seeing wholesome AUs of a rape victim being forced to carry her rapist’s baby to term and happily raising it. No, we shouldn’t be seeing people say that a canonical male rapist is a trans woman, or is a closeted gay man who would have been “fixed by sodomy”. No, we shouldn’t be seeing cutesy art and videos about a disabled man being given talking button mats made for literal dogs in lieu of an actual AAC device. You’re right, this shit is fucked up… And it’s even worse that plenty of fandom members in different communities got away scot free with doing similar or worse things. We should be talking about this. We should be talking about how fandoms generally protect this kind of behavior. And we should start throwing hands at this behavior more and more often.

Fandoms are never going to be “fun for everyone”, nor are they going to be welcoming to the marginalized, until we start making an effort to deconstruct the way it further marginalizes people, and recognize when fan content goes beyond the realm of “harmless fun”.

Remember: Just because it’s free doesn’t mean it’s above criticism.

[genderqueerdykes]

genuine question about some identities

why do you think theres so much hate for people who are afab/amab and are also trans women/men, those who are cistrans and multigender people?

ive noticed that when you tell certain queer people you'd think wouldn't be exclusionist that your gender is funky and you're trans bc of it, they begin to use your assigned sex and your biology against you because "you can't be a trans woman if you have a uterus, ur just feminine".

its the same argument as conservatives make it. why is there so much hate?

ppl don't acknowledge my individual genders but instead see how they work alongside each other. ppl don't see me as a trans woman when my gender is woman but will acknowledge me as a trans man because of my sex traits.

these are some very important questions to ask, i appreciate you for sending this ask

i honestly think more people are becoming indoctrinated into transmedicalist and gender critical thinking without realizing it, and it's becoming dangerous. people want to inherently label an afab transfem and/or an amab transmasc as liars, people who are spitting in the faces of others, and shouldn't be a part of our community. other people make assumptions about others' experiences based on their own and don't understand that there is an entire world outside of their perspective, and that world is full of experiences they have no hope of understanding, but can simply accept.

i've gotten a lot of questions about whether afab trans women and amab trans men can exist, it's definitely a hot button issue right now, and i agree with you. if you ask me, afab trans women and amab trans men deserve to have a platform to speak from. if someone genuinely believes their identity is trans no matter what their AGAB is- who the hell am i to stop them? it's important for afab trans women and amab trans men to not speak over their other siblings and try to speak for what it's like to be intersex or an amab trans woman/afab trans man. but that doesn't mean that these people can't exist- they deserve the right to talk about their experience, because it exists alongside the experiences of amab trans women and afab trans men. they're not fighting with each other, they're unique experiences that belong under the same umbrella.

at the end of the day, someone standing there being an afab trans woman, an amab trans man, or a cistrans person is not hurting anyone. the identity itself will hurt no one. ignorance about what other trans people experience is dangerous, and so is speaking over others, but these identities in and of themselves are not harming anyone. it is very possible to go "i don't understand how that works, but if that is how they identify, then i will respect that."

between people becoming indoctrinated into radical feminism and people who are proudly adopting gender critical politics, there is a schism in our communities that don't need to be there. people think they need to "weed out the fakes" in order for us to be accepted by cishet society, which is just not how any of this works. we can't cast aside the queers who are "too weird" or "not really queer" in order to try to make the rest of the community look legitimate

this community has always been here for people whose identities don't line up with the cisheteronormative binary. it doesn't matter what someone's AGAB is- i mean, isn't that the point of the trans community? are we not the "i don't give a shit about your AGAB, i want to know who you really are" community? it's become honestly scary to see how focused the queer community has become on AGAB. people are utterly obsessed with trying to figure out the AGABs of strangers in order to deny them access to queer spaces or kick them out of spaces they rightfully belong in

and it bothers me deeply that people police the identities of multigender people beyond belief. it's like having 1 trans identity is okay but if you dare to have more than one, you're not really queer or whatever. cistrans people, multigender people who are cis, trans wo/men who consider both their manhood and womanhood trans no matter what their AGAB is, transfemmasc/transmascfem people... these identities belong and yet people proudly and gladly wake up every day to do conservatives' jobs for them.

whenever you police another queer person's identity, no matter what your intention is, good, bad or something else- you are doing conservatives' jobs for them. you are not preserving our community. you are not keeping identities sacred or safe or whatever the hell. you're gladly sucking up to our oppressors and spreading their propaganda. it's disturbing how people don't realize this

thank you for taking the time to send this ask, i agree with you 100%. this behavior has gotten out of control and it's time for people to wake the fuck up and realize they've been indoctrinated into transmedicalism, radical feminism, and being gender critical. this isn't the "right" way to behave. it's antithetical to the very foundations of the queer community.

[velvetvexations]

Having a bit of a friendly laugh re: the nb anon who said they wished they could hang out with more trans women and maybe some of them could teach them to do makeup because it reminded me of something.

I'm a trans man, I transitioned a decade ago after presenting like a moderately femme cis woman for most of my adult life. My wife, who I have been married to for almost 20 years now, started transitioning a year ago. More than one person has responded to the revelation that we are both trans with some variation on "that's so cute, you got ten years of looking to her as an example of how men act,* and now you can use all of those years of experience to teach her how to do makeup and skin care!"

And I'm just sitting here baffled, because even when I thought I was cis, my skin was nice because I had unproblematic, predictable skin that I kept in good shape by 1) washing my face, 2) moisturizing a couple times a week if I remembered to and, the funniest aspect of this, 3) I rarely wore makeup because I was absolutely dogshit at applying it to my own face, which means no scrubbing half my skin off trying to frequently remove makeup. For real, I was just terrible at it! One of the few times I made an effort my wife's crumbly old British grandfather told me I like like a racoon and he was rude but he was also CORRECT.

Not sure I was going with this, something something gendered expectations are apparently so ingrained with cis people that people I have known my entire life have forgotten that I was terrible at being a girl when I thought I was one in favour of some idea of what I must have been like when I was in that role, even though they were there for it to observe otherwise.

* also laughing at the idea that I learned anything about being or acting like a man from my wife, who has always been a gentle sweetheart who never bought into any of that "stuff you need to do to Be A Man" shit, even before she was questioning her gender. When people suggest this I get to watch them get really uncomfortable really quickly when I suggest that I was the "man" of the relationship from day one even if neither of us knew we were trans, because if they think about it for even a second, they realize that I am right.

This is a great example of how male/female socialization, simply in terms of being treated a certain way in a manner that does not imply it had an impact on who you are as a person, exists but is not universal and is not meant to be a summery of everyone's lived experiences.

[captain-crackship]

[dennisboobs]

i think everyone on sunnytwt needs to be sat down so i can explain to them what basic human empathy is. and then maybe i put them in a blender until they agree to write meta about the characters instead of whether or not charlie day got facial reconstruction surgery.

[fratricideknight]

a/b/o is a hot, slash-enabling romance trope TO YOU. to me, it's dystopian body horror.

[wanderingandfound]

Second time in about 48 hours that I have gone into the search mines to bring out a specific pride flag for my blog only to be met with either long or thoughtless posts about how x flag is the most inferior or y flag is the most superior while shitting on other flag designs. Like, I am all for making as many flags as you want — the more the merrier no monopolies here. I would just like for people to keep in mind:

Which communities (including geographical and cultural!!!) specific flags come from and why they were created.

You do not need to be represented by every single stripe for the flag to be applicable to you.

If a flag is featuring a specific identity there's probably a reason for that, I don't care if it's ugly.

Please cite sources and inspiration! Flags represent communities and usually come from community involvement and influence.

Seriously unless a flag was made purposefully to demean or alienate others it's probably fine. You don't have to use it or prefer it and you can be annoyed with it but it doesn't mean it's the end of the world.

[timeisacephalopod]

The way conservatives frame being trans as some kind of "social contagion" while literally calling for the erasure of all trans people from public spaces is wild because who the fuck decides to Be Gender because it's so cool politicians are telling you you shouldn't exist on the news?? Like the idea that trans people are deciding to be trans because it's a social media trend akin to the cinnamon challenge or the fuckin ice bucket challenge is an absolutely bonkers argument to make in the middle of "these people shouldn't exist" speeches. Surely at least one of these brainless lumps have taken a half a moment to consider how something could even become a "social contagion" when they're personally railing against the existence of these Very Cool People??

Plus, you know, implying whole swaths of people are too stupid to figure out their own damn genders is uh, deeply insulting to suggest just because they're confused about how being trans works.

[hecksupremechips]

Girl help I keep thinking about freaking persona 4

[mx-paint]

stupid comments on TikTok will really have you thinking about how everything is by chance

[neverendingford]

.

[kkoffin]

an abused wife of the 1700s who’s birthed 16 children and has not been allowed to leave the house for the last 7 years will write in her diary “i am cursed to be a woman. i wish i were a man, so i could be free, and i wouldn’t always be pregnant, aching, and i could explore, see the world, and learn. why did god forsake me with this body?” and you’ll search her name on tumblr and get “he was such a transmasc legend!! trans people have always existed! proof is right here! he suffered because he wanted to transition so bad 😔 this is why gender transition must be a human right, and deadnaming should be illegal. stupid TERFs, complaining about sex-based oppression. that doesn’t even exist.”

[wis-art]

I think it's crazy how Trans misogyny is not exclusive to trans women, this is not a post downplaying how we are the biggest victims of this by a vast overwhelming majority, it's a post talking about how people of color are often masculanized and their features are often seen as less feminine and how that REALLY affects everybody. I'm speaking as a white trans woman, repeating what my black Trans boyfriend has told me about his experience. Back in the day when he still identified as a woman he, has been targeted and harassed by people who hate Trans women; calling him a "dumb ugly tranny", refusing to recognize him as a woman, which obviously at the time really fucking sucked. He is AFAB and my point here is this. Trans women like me, white trans women will never have to deal with having my racial features hypermasculanized, but a black Trans girl? She is the biggest victim in all of this, and it is heart breaking and something I never see talked about on this website. The level of oppression, "gender denial" Trans black women face is scary and it is something always overlooked and dismissed. Trans black women are virtually invisible in our society, art and face the worst oppression. Black lives are beautiful. And worth caring for and protecting, and talking about like any other life. I obviously can never understand or face the same kind of oppression, but you know what I can do. I can say that I love you and care about you and I want you to live and go out there and be yourself. Without you we would not be where we are today, and our queer rights in large part are brought to us by the black women who fought for us. I can support black people and listen to black people and try to understand the biases I picked up over the years of being raised in white supremacist society. Please if you are black it is so important that you exist and it is so important that you create. Put yourself out there, make things, make yourself visible, even if people pretend you don't exist. Please make it all about you.

[socialistexan]

Regardless of how you feel about Sarah McBride and her response to the unhinged way bigots are reacting to her both on The Hill and in the public (Twitter is a fucking cesspool). It's proof that respectability politics is dead and I would argue has never been alive or at least in any way effective.

Sarah McBride is one the most respectable and mainstream trans women on this planet. She plays by all their rules. Her politics are as down the middle neoliberal of American politics as it gets. Her opinions are uncontroversial to the majority of Americans (including her staunch support for Israel, something I know leftists, myself included, don't want to hear, but it's true). Her affect is calm and collected. Her ability to pass and he effort in things like voice training is evident.

She has done everything possible to make cis people comfortable with her existence.

And they still fucking hate her guts.

She's basically the Pete Buttigieg of trans women. And just like with former Mayor Pete, she's being denigrated constantly by the worst people and her silence or turning the other cheek has done nothing to help these people see her humanity, because they never will.

Like Kwame Ture said, In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience.

You can't make a human appeal to someone who doesn't respect your humanity. You can't get respect from someone who will never respect you.

All you're doing is setting yourself up to be a helpless martyr who liberals can pity when you're dead. We have to fight while we're still here. My one goal is to be an actual trans elder, to show the world we are here, we have always been here, and we will always be here. I can't do that if I just lay down and accept my fate.

You don't respect your way out of bigotry. The most you will ever get is "you're one of the good ones"