#transfeminist theory

[agendercryptidlev]

[ID: Meme that reads "I bring a sort of "The Patriarchy was defined by Cis Feminists and the Definition Should be Updated To Better Represent the Lived Experiences of Trans and Intersex People" Vibe to Transfeminist Theory that Radfems don't really like" the background is a photo of a man with a backwards baseball cap looking into the distance while standing outside /end ID]

[taliabhattwrites]

The best one in every trilogy is the fourth installment, right?

[intersexcat-tboy]

Benevolent sexism is still sexism.

If you think placing women on pedestals is feminism or suggesting all women are victims who need protection from men, that's benevolent sexism, not feminism.

If you think abuse is inherently less abusive, less harmful, painful, serious, anything of that sort because a woman is perpetrating it, you've fallen for benevolent sexism.

[damnesdelamer]

Leslie Feinberg

I collected some of the works of one of our greatest comrades and warriors:

Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come

Stone Butch Blues

Transgender Warriors: Making History From Joan Of Arc To Dennis Rodman

Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink Or Blue

Rainbow Solidarity In Defense Of Cuba

Remember, our first duty is to be educated, so arm yourselves with the best information. We have always existed, and we always will. And in each generation, we must remember those who came before us, and become the warriors that ze fought to equip. Stay strong, stay proud, and solidarity forever.

[aroanthy]

trying to write something about how much i hate the ‘misandry in utena/the utena fandom’ crowd but it feels kind of redundant to me. i think i just don’t consider people who use the word ‘misandry’ serious people. i do however feel an obligation to occasionally make my position clear on that front, because im aware i tougapost and some people love to bring that guy up as the misandry in the utena fandom poster boy. which is so fucking stupid because touga is not victimised by ‘misandry’, touga is victimised by homophobic violence which is wrapped up in misogynistic violence, both of which are the cogs in the machine we call patriarchy. touga is not affected by misogyny in the same way that anthy is, that’s one of the key takeaways you can get from their being foils, and i don’t really like the whole ‘oh patriarchy hurts men too’ stuff because it neglects the fact that men reap so many material benefits from what some people deem ‘harm’ to them (emotional repression being the big one. it’s not great but when you’re the privileged party and gain power from it, who cares? it’s like the inverse of kozue trying to use sexuality to gain power: she can’t do that). but touga is a shitty dysfunctional person who has been shaped by violence and in turn perpetuated violence, and his character excels, imho, at examining how patriarchy functions and attempts to homogenise life’s many complexities. same deal as nanami really. they just play different roles in this gender essentialist nightmare that crunches out any grit. and you can extend that idea to all rgu characters but i am who i am and that is a kiryuu siblings enjoyer

[qweerhet]

i do also want to make a general PSA: the language of "failed men" and "failed women" as distinct gender categories referring to classes of people who have breached gender norms in a way that irrevocably disrupts their access to gender, particularly (but not exclusively) through transitioning or identifying with the "other" gender? that language has been in use in queer theory since at least the 90s.

it's so well-established that i cannot even begin to track down the initial coinage with a quick trip through google scholar. i'm finding publications in well-respected journals using the terminology dating back to the 90s just by scanning the first page of results. if you see someone claiming that transmisogynistic tumblr users made it up in 2023 to find a new way to sneakily call transfems men, they're just wrong, and in the worst case scenario, they're actively lying. if you have a fundamental problem with commonly-used basic transfeminist and queer theory terminology, take it up with the fucking university of chicago or something, idk, anything other than trying to convince 16-year-old trans people on tumblr dot edu that Big Transgender Blogging is intentionally lying to them about commonly accepted transfeminist theory.

[pansyboybloom]

i think every trans person, but especially fellow trans men, need to search out transfeminist theory, and transfeminist theory written by trans women, and especially by trans women of color. and on top of that, reading memoirs from these women, from all types and walks of life. reading from the mouths of these women, hearing feminism woven and rebuilt and reworked through their life experiences, their thoughts and understandings on and with womanhood, and their unique relationships to transness, is life-changing both in how i view my sisters, what kind of ally i am, how i view my own transness, and yes, how i view my own masculinity and malehood! don't limit yourself-- there is so much out there to learn and so many ladies to learn from, and it will make you both a better brother to them and a better man to everyone.

[7vyntheefaerie]

been thinking a lot abt how the woes of lesbian longing on social media have gotten caught up in the thralls of ytness. to elaborate, i would say most lesbians experience alienation on the basis of queer attraction (& gender fuckery for some of us) which boils down to misogyny + lesbiphobia. this manifests through faulty community networks or — ostracism +/mistreatment from family, friends, romance, work relationships, and other support systems which is “punishment”(read: part of the oppression designed and assigned by the cisheterosexual-patriarchal regime)for decentering men.

but, i would also say: while most-all lesbians experience longing (of irl community, friends, lovrs, familial-like ties. xpression of desire, increased opportunities for romance, friendship, presentation & expression free of homophobic+transphobic ridicule, etc), some of us also experience disillusionment with our relationship to belonging in lesbian spaces bc our diasporic ties to race, religion, (dis)ability, transness and their simultaneous socio-political affect. the ways our experiences of oppression interlock into a form that taints our ability to enjoy lesbian spaces is smthn that needs regular attention. like dressing and checking on a fresh wound.

i say allat 2 say, my experience of longing is so distant from the longing that has been popularized on social media. specifically, lesbian yearning 2. my loneliness is far more lonely.

i long for my family 2 love my queerness as much as they love their blackness bc they are inherently related, to never be separated. i long for disability conscious lovers that don’t shame me for where i “lack” due to physical disabilities. i long for a lesbian social media experience that talks more abt fatness, transness, and lesbianism. i wish i had more fat femmes and fat studs + butches in my life. i wish i could be acquainted with that familiarity yt lesbians have in their unity, belonging. i wish lesbians from where im from weren’t terfs that attempt to separate transness from the black lesbian experience. i wish my race didn’t erase my nonbinary gender. i wish my nonbinary transmascness didn't erase my femmeness.

i wish my access to care was not reliant on belonging.

(tagging posts like this ‘genderfckd rants’)

[gremlingirlsmell]

why in the name of Fuck are there transfems joining the war on transmisogyny, on the side of transmisogyny

[identitty-dickruption]

What is revealed is a tension between being trans and being labeled disabled. Disability is both potentially a means to be cured and also something to be avoided. As such, this notion of “defectiveness” permeates trans discourses, often overlapping with medical discourses about transness. As a Trans Woman who is disabled, I have often thought about the ways in which trans as an identity category does and does not relate to disability. I have noticed this ableism in trans communities firsthand and the inability of much of trans discourse to account for this relationship and the possibility of being trans and disabled. To this end, Alexandre Baril and Catriona Leblanc (2015) make a vital critique, “1) trans studies assumes an able-bodied trans identity; and 2) disability studies assumes cis* disabled identity (that is, without ‘voluntary’ transition)” (31). This division often makes it difficult to not only have experiences of being a trans disabled person recognized, but also inhibits the potential to build coalitions and alliances between trans and disabled activisms.

Timmons (2020), Towards a Trans Feminist Disability Studies

[transfeminism-s]

For those who want to read my posts on WordPress here is my first mini article !

[taliabhattwrites]

'The Transsexual Empire' is a work of pseudoscholarship that contradicts itself frequently, undermines its own premises, and relies upon a fundamentally Catholic ontology to make its transmisogynistic arguments. It is trivial to dissect ... and yet.

[venusianphase]

ok i'm doing it i'm gonna read whipping girl

[communistkenobi]

Would you be willing to dunk on speak more on mainstream feminist theory you're reading? And/or share some of the non-juvenile feminist theory you've read?

(Note: I will try to link to open access versions of articles as much as possible, but some of them are paywalled. if the links dont work just type the titles into google and add pdf at the end, i found them all that way)

If there’s any one singular issue with mainstream feminist thought that can be generalized to "The Problem With Mainstream Feminism" (and by mainstream I mean white, cishet, bourgeois feminism, the “canonical feminism” that is taught in western universities) it’s that gender is treated as something that can stand by itself, by which I mean, “gender” is a complete unit of analysis from which to understand social inequality. You can “add” race, class, ability, national origin, religion, sexuality, and so on to your analysis (each likewise treated as full, discrete categories of the social world), but that gender itself provides a comprehensive (or at the very least “good enough”) view of a given social problem. (RW Connell, who wrote the canonical text Masculinities (1995) and is one of the feminist scholars who coined/popularized the term hegemonic masculinity, is a fantastic example of this.)

Black feminists have for many decades pointed out how fucking ridiculous this is, especially vis a vis race and class, because Black women do not experience misogyny and racism as two discrete forms of oppression in their lives, they are inextricably linked. The separation of gender and race is not merely an analytical error on the part of white feminists - it is a continuation of the long white supremacist tradition of bounding gender in exclusively white terms. Patricia Hill Collins in Black Feminist Thought (2000) engages with this via a speech by Sojourner Truth, the most famous line from her speech being “ain’t I a woman?” as she describes all the aspects of womanhood she experiences but is still denied the position of woman by white women because she is Black. Lugones in Coloniality of Gender (2008) likewise brings up the example of segregationist movements in the USAmerican South, where towns would put up banners saying things like “Protect Southern Women” as a rationale for segregation, making it very clear who they viewed as women. Sylvia Wynter in 1492: A New World View likewise points out that colonized women and men were treated like cattle by Spanish colonizers in South America, often counted in population measures as "heads of Indian men and women," as in heads of cattle. They were treated as colonial resources, not as gendered subjects capable of rational thought.

To treat the category of “woman” as something that stands by itself is a white supremacist understanding of gender, because “woman” always just means white woman - the fact that white is left implied is part of white supremacy, because who is granted subjecthood, the ability to be seen as human and therefore a gendered subject, is a function of race (see Quijano, 2000). Crenshaw (1991) operationalizes this through the term intersectionality, pointing out that law treats gender and race as separate social sites of discrimination, and the practical effect of this is that Black women have limited/no legal recourse when they face discrimination because they experience it as misogynoir, as the multiplicative effect of their position as Black women, not as sexism on the one hand and racism on the other.

Transfeminist theory has further problematized the category of gender by pointing out that "woman" always just means cis woman (and more often than not also means heterosexual woman). The most famous of these critiques comes from Judith Butler - I’m less familiar with their work, but there is a great example in the beginning of Bodies That Matter (1993) where they demonstrate that personhood itself is a gendered social position. They ask (and I’m paraphrasing) “when does a fetus stop becoming an ‘it’? When its gender is declared by a doctor or nurse via ultrasound.” Sex assignment is not merely a social practice of patriarchal division, it is the medium through which the human subject is created (and recall that gender is fundamentally racialized & race is fundamentally gendered, which I will come back to).

And the work of transfeminists demonstrate this by showing transgender people are treated as non-human, non-citizens. Heath Fogg Davis in Sex-Classification Policies as Transgender Discrimination (2014) recounts the story of an African American transgender woman in Pennsylvania being denied use of public transit, because her bus pass had an F gender marker on it (as all buss passes in the state required gender markers until 2013) and the bus driver refused her service because she “didn’t look like a woman.” She was denied access to transit again when she got her marker changed to M, as she “didn’t look like a man.” Transgender people are thus denied access to basic public services by being constructed as “administratively impossible” - gender markers are a component of citizenship because they appear on all citizenship documents, as well as a variety of civil and public documents (such as a bus pass). Gender markers, even when changed by trans people (an arduous, difficult process in most places on earth, if not outright impossible), are seen as fraudulent & used as a basis to deny us citizenship rights. Toby Beauchamp in Going Stealth: Transgender Politics & US Surveillance Practices (2019) talks about anti-trans bathroom bills as a form of citizenship denial to trans people - anti-trans bathroom laws are impossible to actually enforce because nobody is doing genital inspections of everyone who enters bathrooms (and genitals are not proof of transgenderism!), but that’s actually not the point. The point of these bills is to embolden members of the cissexual public to deputize themselves on behalf of the state to police access to public space, directing their cissexual gaze towards anyone who “looks transgender.” Beauchamp points out that transvestigators don’t need to be accurate most of the time, because again, the point is terrorizing transgender people out of public life. He connects this with racial segregation, and argues that we shouldn’t view gender segregation as “a new form of” racial segregation (this is a duplication of white supremacist feminism) but a continuation of it, because public access is a citizenship right and citizenship is fundamentally racially mediated (see Glenn's (2002) Unequal Freedom)

Susan Stryker & Nikki Sullivan further drives this home in The King’s Member, The Queen’s Body, where they explain the history of the crime of mayhem. Originating in feudal Europe (I don’t remember off the dome the exact time/place so forgive the generalization lol), mayhem is the crime of self-mutilation for the purposes of avoiding military conscription, but what is interesting is that its not actually legally treated as “self” mutilation, but a mutilation of the state and its capacity to exercise its own power. They link the concept of mayhem to the contemporary hysteria around transgender people receiving bottom surgery - we are not in fact self mutilating, we are mutilating the state’s ability to reproduce its own population by permanently destroying (in the eyes of the cissexual public) our capacity to form the foundational social unit of the nuclear family. Our bodies are not our own, they are a component of the state. Situating this in the context of reproductive rights makes this even clearer. Abortion access is not actually about the individual, it is the state mediating its own reproductive capacity via the restriction of abortion (premised on the cissexual logic of binary reproductive capacity systematized through sex assignment). Returning to Hill Collins, she points out that in the US, white cis women are restricted access to abortion while Black and Indigenous cis women are routinely forcibly sterilized, their children aborted, and pumped with birth control by the state. This is not a contradiction or point of “hypocrisy” on the part of conservatives, this is a fully comprehensive plan of white supremacist population management.

To treat "gender" as its own category, as much of mainstream feminism does (see Acker (1990) and England (2010) for two hilarious examples of this, both widely cited feminists), is to forward a white supremacist notion of gender. That white supremacy is fundamentally cissexual and heterosexual is not an accident - it is a central organizing logic that allows for the systematization of the fear of declining white birthrates (the conspiracy of "white genocide" is illegible without the base belief that there are two kinds of bodies, one that gets pregnant and one that does the impregnating, and that these two types of bodies are universal sources of evidence of the superiority of men over women - and im using those terms in the most loaded possible sense).

I realize that most of these readings are US centric, which is an unfortunate limitation of my own education. I have been really trying to branch into literature outside the Global North, but doctoral degree constraints + time constraints + my own research requires continual engagement with it. I also realize that most of the transfeminist readings I've cited are by white scholars! This is a continual systemic problem in academic literature and I'm not exempt from it, even as I sit here and lay out the problem. Which is to say, this is nowhere near the final word on this subject, and having to devote so much time to reading mainstream feminist theory as someone who is in western academia is part of my own limited education + perspective on this topic

[spacelazarwolf]

trans men and trans masculine people don’t need to be “taught how to navigate transfeminist spaces” bc those spaces are also our spaces. we created them alongside other trans people. we wrote a lot of transfeminist theory. the reason you don’t see our contributions is because of erasure, and the reason you don’t respect our contributions is because of the radical feminist gender essentialism y’all refuse to let go of.

[ramenheim]

Wild that you didn't even check your posts before answering this, but okay. My /tone/ is not going to get nicer, so you'll just have to address the /actual content/ of my writing while ignoring the /rudeness/.

In teal you waffle between acknowledging that specific trans communities both deserve and do not deserve to talk about how the misogyny+transphobia of other ppl Uniquely Intersect to affect themselves— an experience that depends on the incongruence between how their body was perceived at birth (xfm) & how society(+the law) at large perceives their gender *now* [the categories being (cis/passing)Man ; (cis/passing)Woman ; & ThingThatIsWrong (any number of derogatory terms)]. Since only perisex cishet men are meant to wield patriarchal privilege within the hegemonic definition of a Real Man— categorically all trans+intersex ppl are excluded whether we consider it 'fair' or not (or whether we 'pass as men' or not). So there is no reason transmisogyny would exist as the only possible intersecting expression of transphobia to be 'worthy' of being discussed with a name, since all trans genders & intersex variations explicitly transgress against their Assigned Patriarchal Hierarchy and are punished in-line with what it decides You Should Be.

In yellow you literally did the exact thing you're saying "you never said". Trans men would not BE trans if they were not also men— the transphobia directly at trans men SPECIFICALLY hinges on their sexual anatomy being 'inferior' in the eyes of patriarchy & unworthy of Maleness, and therefore are all female interlopers + 'corruptors of the male category' (while also being male interlopers + 'traitors to the female cause'). Transandrophobia*(virilmisia/etc.) is still the intersection of misogyny+transphobia bc the ACTUAL WORLD WE LIVE IN overwhelmingly does not see eg.)Pregnant Men as Real Men & having queer & trans-friendly spaces chomping at the bit to find ~Males~ they can abuse 'for not being women (enough)' has routinely hurt every single trans person who did not Pass as 'feminine enough to be trustworthy' regardless of their gender. It is radfem poison & this site is steeped in it.

In red you expose that, no, you have NOT been keeping up with discussions of antiblackness & intersectionality; bc the antiblack racism that Black men experience is in fact held to be **specifically because they are men who are Black** & their specific experiences with racism can not be disentangled from their gender. Misogynoir (& transmisogynoir) were coined BECAUSE discussions of antiblack racism treated cis Black men's experience as the default 'Just Racism' (whether Black women experienced it or not) and the antiblackness that targeted black women *specifically* was being dismissed as Divisive (which was the exact same thing they heard from white feminists whenever they brought up misogyny that was uniquely directed at them) and not worthy of name or discussion (by EITHER group they *allegedly* had to support them— see: transmisogynoir needing to be coined in direct response to transfeminists doing white feminism 2.0).

The rest of your post is not better thought out or particularly compassionate to trans ppl's actual lived experiences irl, frankly. Saying "idk the ~implied~ etymological vibes are bad [bc you erroneously think you can seperate out the andro from the trans; by fundementally misunderstanding what an Intersection is] and also anyways it shouldn't even need a word to gather under [thereby silencing trans masc community discussions & contributing both to furthering transmasc erasure AND reinforcing the anti-feminist bias of treating 'male experiences' as the neutral default & not its own thing] what is this, oppression olympics?? [dismissing+trivializing discussions as just 'Divisive ID Politics' that are already covered under Other Bigotries]" is significantly more insidious than you realize; and I'm not greeting that mentality with ~kind platitudes~.

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TL;DR – ONLY PERISEX CISHET MEN ARE THE STRUCTURAL BENEFACTORS OF PATRIARCHY.

STOP PENALIZING TRANS PPL FOR THEIR ""PERCEIVED ADJACENCY TO MALENESS""/""PERCEIVED DISTANCE FROM FEMININITY""— NO ONE HERE BENEFITS FROM BEING TRANS ONCE IT'S KNOWN THAT'S WHAT THEY ARE.

* R E A D * BLACK GENDER THEORY *BEFORE* USING ITS TERMINOLOGY.

* THIS POST IS NOT ABOUT TRANSFEMINIST THEORY *

I'd like to remind you that "Man" should not be treated as the Default Human Identity— all men have an Intersectional identity inclusive of their gender; that they aren't women/etc. doesn't mean their gender doesn't factor into how oppression axes impact them.

You seem like you missed out on the Masculinities section of Intersectional Feminism— you should fix that before misinforming people on what intersectionality (as a tool for feminist analysis) is used for by claiming that Privileged Positions (white/cis/male/etc.) are somehow not their own "Intersectional Identities" bc they "aren't oppressed".

i very much don’t think that men are non-oppressed? i know that men are oppressed by the patriarchy, in ways that are subtle and often overlooked. men as a whole are oppressed on a societal scale, because the patriarchy oppresses all that are in it. men who are in some way marginalized— queer, non-white, neurodivergent, physically disabled, etc— will have to face this oppression in tandem with the other identity (or identities) for which they are marginalized. this is a fact, and not one i have ever tried to deny?

please don’t put words in my mouth like that. also, in the future, if you disagree with me on a subject, just say that and approach me in good faith. when you come into people’s inboxes with accusations like this (especially on anon), you’re just going to make them want to go on the defensive. i’m not one to get in online arguments, especially not over topics that i explicitly stated i dislike discussing, but being this aggressive with people isn’t going to get you far if you want them to actually hear what you have to say.