#transfem nonbinary person who had a “wrong” opinion about who gets to use the word transfem

[frogeyedape]

So, wow on the AFAB identifying as transfem discourse.

It's ironic how one of the objectors is like "yes I'm transfem but not a woman" is freaking out over a not-woman AFAB person using transfem too. Like...how is saying "I'm not a woman and I'm transfem" in any way saying "transfem means not fully a woman"? Transfem is inclusive of any trans people who self-identify as transfem, whether they're a transwoman who is a binary woman or a transwoman who is fluidly a nonbinary woman and nonbinary man or a transman who transes masculinity by making it more feminine or whatever

Being trans isn't about *what* your AGAB was. It's about whether your AGAB *changed*

The "trans" part's etymology: "word-forming element meaning "across, beyond, through, on the other side of; go beyond," from Latin trans (prep.) "across, over, beyond," perhaps originally present participle of a verb *trare-, meaning "to cross," from PIE *tra-, variant of root *tere- (2) "cross over, pass through, overcome" " from:

So say I'm AFAB. Assigned "girl." And what does girl mean? "A girl/woman can do/be anything" was a popular encouraging slogan in my youth, but it battled against all the misogyny of the time that put "girl" and "woman" in very tidy, small boxes. If I was assigned small-box-girl at birth and later stepped out of that box, across its boundary, might I not be transing my gender just a little? Still, I wasn't identifying as trans when I was a girl. I didn't know the word. [Tldr: i wasn't trans then cuz I didn't identify as trans then. Merely stepping outside of the small defining boxes of gender does not necessarily a trans person make.]

I was later Assigned Tomboy (hello secret 3rd cis gender where they still consider you a girl but like bad at being a girl)--Assigned Tomboy After Birth, shall we say ATAB? Does tomboy have one singular definition that encompasses all tomboys' experiences while excluding every non-tomboys' experiences? Is there a neat and tidy tomboy box that so many tomboys fall out of? I didn't fit in that concept either. [Tldr: my assigned gender changed before I even really started to grapple with what my actual gender identity was. Ain't that fucked? And no, I wasn't trans yet then, either]

I grew up, tried to step into the shoes of Woman, the adult version of my young Girl and Tomboy selves, and found Woman to be null and void. That's not me. And yet to be called Girl still when I am an adult is infuriating. I am not a child. Do not infantilize me. I am not now a girl. I am also not a woman. [Tldr: I was an AFAB person self identifying as not a woman. Still hadn't quite cottoned on to being trans, but it was definitely a part of the journey]

I rejected womanhood, studied gender and sex and bimodal distributions and decided fuck the binary and yeah fuck bimodal too, there's more than 2 ends the genders are spread between. [Tldr: I was officially calling myself trans. Just trans.]

My gender is largely null (agender), but also fluid (it irks me when I try on transfem clothing that my friends who think of me as not-a-woman see as kowtowing to cis feminity when I'm wearing a dress not as a cis woman but as a trans person who is acting unusually transfem--or, it's not unusual, I like pretty dresses, they just don't see it as much so they freak out. Just. I'm wearing the damn dress in a trans way, ok). I'm generally more masc leaning--butchy vibes without actually being butch. But I'm transfem sometimes, or just a little bit all the time, too. How is it transmisogyny to recognize the transness of my expressed femininity?

But I honestly think that's not the point of the objection. The objection is (using quotes here to represent speech, not actual direct quotes) "AFAB person calling themself transfem is transmisogyny because this not-woman is saying transfem [meaning transwoman] means 'not fully a woman.'" But. Transfem=/=transwoman. But the transfem [meaning transwoman] interpretation is like, beneath the conscious level of awareness, because it only applies to transfem *sometimes,* and the objector just...isn't seeing that. And is understandably upset at a perceived injustice. But like. It's pretty clear that there's a logical disconnect. And I think it's the implicit distinct definitions of transfem[feminine in a trans way but not necessarily a woman vs transfem[meaning transwoman] at work.

And I'd talk to the person directly but they've been receiving both well meaning and distinctly unfriendly feedback already and I don't want to add to the dogpile. I think we basically agree, even if the terminology is getting in the way: transfem belongs to trans people identifying as transfem, regardless of their current gender or AGAB. Trans that femininity! Yes!

[gynoidgearhead]

I feel old.

At the risk of confirming that I have finally shriveled up into a moldy crouton who represents an impediment to progress: It’s absolutely freaking me out to realize I’m going to have to navigate a version of the LGBTQIA community and discourse where there are people involved who are young enough to have completely missed a lot of the things that inform my positions about transgender issues. (Context here if you want it.)

I privately rolled my eyes at Natalie Wynn (of ContraPoints) for saying on Twitter that she sympathized more with “old school transsexuals” than trans women younger than herself, because she felt excluded when people were explicitly asking for pronouns instead of attempting to gender her correctly without asking. That was, I thought, ridiculous - gendering somebody correctly at a glance is a minefield, especially once you start to factor in nonbinary people; and accommodating people who couldn’t fit under that paradigm was, I thought (and still think), worth giving up a little hit of personal gender euphoria and vanity-stroking.

But... fuck. She’s only five years older than me. I am older now than I was when I started this blog by a wider margin. I’m a whole-ass decade older than some of the people dipping their feet into The Discourse on this site.

And today, I finally learned what Wynn meant on a more visceral and complete level, and I’ve felt it. I have stared into the void, and the void has stared back.

And I hate myself for it, because I know that it means I am now a Problem.

There are trans kids alive today whose first exposure to the idea of transgender people wasn’t through crass jokes. This is a good thing.

There are trans kids alive today who didn’t have to watch (or hear about) trans women getting dragged out onto Jerry Springer, to be publicly humiliated and sometimes even embroiled into physical fights. This is a good thing.

There are trans kids alive today who grew up with a more holistic and inclusive version of the internet, who have had access to information about transgender-related topics without having to go to dodgy websites. This is a good thing.

There are trans kids today for whom positive transgender role models have been present on television since they were pre-teens. This is a good thing.

There are trans kids alive today who had immediately supportive parents and who even may have begun transition before puberty. This is a good thing!

I am none of those things. That makes me sad, but I never thought of any of those things as alienating me from younger people. Today I finally found the one that I think does, and I don’t know how to deal:

There are trans kids alive today who have had access to online trans communities since they were old enough to go on the internet, and have thus been subjected to the griping of older trans women and transfem people about the ways public opinion and the media used to vilify trans women and transfem people specifically (before trans men were even on the media’s radar, really), but who missed the entire cultural backdrop from which that griping was born in the first place. This is... I don’t know, just a thing that has happened.

On one hand, the trauma that older trans people have had to live through is absolutely real. Past events are absolutely real, and there are things that younger people can and should learn from history. I know my understanding of queer culture has been deeply enriched by learning about the history of the movement. If I have things to say about my lived experiences, why shouldn’t I?

On the other... how long are communities really obligated to support backwards compatibility? At what point are older queer people like me just making our trauma into the next generation’s problem? I can’t even begin to count the number of times I thought to myself about an older queer person, “please just move on and accept that things are different now, that this is the cost of progress”. I thought that about people as young as Natalie Wynn. I’ve thought that about a lot of people I’ve run into on this site. Was I wrong to think that about them, or are younger people right to think that about me?

This post brought to you by the word “transandrophobia”.

I initially rolled my eyes at hearing that coinage: “‘Transmisogyny’ exists to describe the intersection of misogyny and transphobia,” I thought to myself. “The term ‘transandrophobia’ posits the idea of misandry as a dominant cultural force,” I thought to myself. (”They even missed the opportunity to just call it ‘transmisandry’,” I thought to myself.)

“‘Transmisogyny’ exists because trans women and transfem people have unique problems to deal with, and those problems just aren’t applicable to trans men and transmasc people and don’t even really have counterparts,” I thought to myself, not accounting for the possibility that the situation could have changed, that those problems that were breathtakingly obvious to me might mostly be footnotes today (I’m still not convinced that that’s the case, but I at least owed it to other people to stop and consider the possibility), and that new problems might have developed that need to be talked about, which means sometimes new language is needed.

So I learned something today. I’m not sure if I like what it says about me, and it makes me feel closer than ever to irrelevance and the dustbin of history, but I have to suck that up and deal with it like the adult that I am. I owe humility to future generations. I’ll be damned if I turn into the old coot who spends too much time scolding people who are mercifully young enough not to have felt the same wounds I did, let alone to the point of inflicting them myself.