#transmisogyny cw //

[deepseasmetro]

mannnn tmes really will do anything and everything to acknowledge when something is deliberately targeting and will absolutely harm transfems the most. i'm not saying the EO doesn't apply somewhat to intersex people but intersex people are already assigned a binary sex at birth (like the rest of us!) and i really fail to see how the EO really makes things much worse for them aside from a really poor definition of "male" and "female" i guess. but for a transmasc to say This and Only This in the tags of it is just.. so..... like damnnn yeah poor intersex people right? Who cares about the trans women being shaved and forced into male prisons where they will be raped and harmed and maybe even murdered. Come On Guys

[mr-ribbit]

gonna rant again bc im seeing a lot of trans women on my dash having to carry the heavy lifting to argue for their basic respect and a lot of other queer people who want to ??? get mad about that apparently. for the record as usual: im tme, im not speaking for anyone besides myself and my perspectives, but I am trying to reach out to fellow tme people to level with y'all from inside the house.

i thought we all got past the 'calling people gendered terms when theyve asked you to stop' thing in like. 2012. i swear we were allllll on board with not calling women dude anymore, nerfing sir and ma'am, neutralizing collective terms for groups, and all of that was like, during the onceler era. that's how we got off-putting shit like folx into the mix - remember???? why are we here again.

to those who I've seen claiming that they REALLY genuinely don't want to offend anyone, and that theyre trying to understand the dude thing, and they don't want to be seen as transmisogynistic when they aren't: ok. let's talk about it. step one, stop sending that really loaded anon to a trans woman you don't know, and close that in-group hatepost with 100 replies from people name-dropping trans bloggers they don't like. try to open your mind and assume for the duration of this post that I am not cynically trying manipulate thousands of tumblr users into making Bro the next big swear word, but a fellow queer human being who thinks you're all being pretty intentionally obtuse about an upsetting trend in our community

to be clear: this post is about the issue of trans women being called bro, dude, man, etc., particularly in recent tumblr discourse about transmisogyny, and the backlash they face if they get upset about it. this is also maybe moreso about the shitty ass excuses I see tme people make for why they supposedly can't stop doing this.

so let's go through some of the things I've been seeing people say they don't understand, supposedly in earnest, about this issue

"I DIDNT USE DUDE AS A MASCULINE TERM. I CALL EVERYONE BRO. MAN IS A GENDER NEUTRAL TERM"

I'm not actually going to exhaust my list of reasons why dude/bro/man are not strictly neutral, but you should be pretty aware that all words have context. Dude might be seen as neutral in many contexts, sure, but 'woman who is frequently called a man by others' is a situation where the context adds extra meaning to your words, just like calling someone "sweetie" might be neutral in some cases, but if you've got the context of knowing that's your coworker who's half your age, it's a bit less neutral. If you're not capable of reading that context and being tasteful about when you say dude, then you need to at least be ready to respond gracefully when someone asks you to stop. This is the part I'd rather focus on.

"BUT I DIDNT MEAN IT THAT WAY. IM NOT TRANSPHOBIC"

I think you should consider broadening your perspective *beyond* your intention behind the word. people may already understand that you meant the word neutrally and therefore didn't have transmisogynistic intent, but that's not really the entire scope of what people are saying. if that's your only concern, you're just trying to clear your record, not actually listen to what they're saying.

there are lots of words people don't enjoy being called, and in most cases, when they say 'pls don't call me that', people respect that and move on. even if the word isn't a slur, if it hurts someone's feelings, we all as a society have agreed that it's pretty shitty to keep calling them that. if your friend asked you not to call them 'buddy' anymore because their dead grandparent called them that, or something equivalently personal, you'd probably respect that instead of telling them 'but I call everyone buddy!!' right? even if you didn't really understand why it bothered them so much?

there is a prominent tendency for trans women to be denied this privilege, and when they ask not to be called dude or bro, people don't seem to respect this request as much as they would in other situations. when I accidentally use a gendered word and someone tells me they don't like it, I try to respond with something like "my bad, I didn't mean it as misgendering but I can see you were still bothered by it, so I'll try not to keep saying it. sorry!" and most people are willing to accept that. when trans women ask people this favor, a lot of people get VERY defensive, and treat the request as inane or unfair, instead of just apologizing and moving on. this is why people are upset when this happens, and it's why people are calling your actions transmisogynistic

also like you might not be doing this, but a lot of people DO use dude and bro in an intentionally gendered way to make trans women uncomfortable. it's a power play bigots use to talk down to them or otherwise maliciously harass them. do you know what arguments they use to defend that behavior when called out on it? 'oh I call everyone that' 'dude is gender neutral calm down' 'dont overreact its just a word'. by acting like this, youre all just giving credence to those same arguments.

"WELL THEY SHOULDNT GET SO MAD AT ME WHEN I DIDNT MEAN ANY HARM"

they can get as mad as they want!! also, are you sure they're 'mad'? or are they just expressing their feelings about a negative topic to you, and it makes you feel bad, so you have to make them out to be unreasonably emotional? how do you think they should have phrased 'dont call me that' to better spare *your* feelings?

also like, in most cases, these women do not knowww you. if your main response to someone saying you disrespected them is to say "I didnt mean it that way, I meant it in a friendly neutral way", well that's NOT YOUR FRIEND! she has no idea what your opinions are or what you think of her!!! she has no reason to assume you only upset her in a friendly way and not a bad unfriendly way! but she did get upset, and she did the one thing she can do which is *tell you what upset her* and your response is to say "well actually you shouldn't be upset at all"??????

and another thing:

it's not just the issue of using the word 'dude', it's because you're coming off extremely dismissive of women who have asked you to stop doing something that harms them, and because your argument is basically that they just shouldn't be so bothered by it. or that they're stupid, irrational, or otherwise crazy for telling you that it bothered them at all, just because you Technically used a gender neutral word according to Your Rules. be honest, does that seem fair? If people were calling you something that bothered you enough to ask them to stop, and they responded like this, how would it make you feel?

focusing solely on your intent and what the words mean when you use them is the same thing as saying "just get over it". no woman should need to Prove to you that 'dude' is gendered for you to care about what she's saying. the fact that you're asking people to do that sucks and makes you look bad, which is why people are arguing with you and calling you a misogynist.

especially those of you who are only doing this with trans women who are actively arguing with. you're wielding misgendering as a cudgel and we can all see it, grow up please.

[dyspunktional-leviathan]

I don't think they're rooted from it. I think these are just different-case manifestations of the same.

Ok so here are some things Ive heard that contradict

1: All the trans-race people are just white teenage girls

2: Trans-race people are black people feeling uncomfortable In their bodies due to racism

[biracy]

I think it's like. pretty important discursively to realize that "transandrophobia truther" does not describe any coherent sociopolitical framework and you can't write off anyone and everyone as "just radfems, not MRAs" OR "just MRAs, not radfems" because depending on the guy you'll really see examples of both. "I am ontologically incapable of harm due to being a female socialized female afab + trans men will never be seen as men ever by anyone so if you think about it I'm actually the real transmisogyny-affected" is obviously Terf Shit, as scholars say, but you really can't apply that to "everyone hates me for being on T and passing way better than you fags because the woke left hates masculinity too much." It depends the most on whether the guy in question is trying to suck up more to cis women ("butches and transmascs are sisters <3" type shit) or cis men (this like, "dudes rock stop being so mean to our boys let men be masculine I'm just a dude that heckin loves duderinos" type shit). While both types of people will unite under the increasingly vague terminology of "transandrophobia," you really can't conflate the beliefs of "guy who believes in 'sex-based oppression' and is constantly one bad day away from calling trans women Male Predators Who Wield The Oppressive Penis" and "guy who actually just believes misandry is real and that it affects cis men too like Actually."

[am-i-the-asshole-official]

Ok I'll try to keep this brief. Tl;dr, my partner and I want to kick our roommate out but she has nowhere to go and I feel bad.

To add on to that, this person, who I'll call Rescue, came to us when we moved after being kicked out of her old place. She's a friend of a friend. Unfortunately she is also extremely annoying and creepy. Annoying I can *kind of* live with but it's the creepy. Our walls are very thin and she WILL comment on conversations held behind closed doors if she can hear them. Sure she cooks and cleans sometimes, but she'll do it in weird outfits. She's asked to join our polycule out of nowhere when literally nothing has been done to imply our interest in her. But the worst part is, she wants to put up a pool and invite the neighborhood children. We're all queer in a red village (there's literally rebel flags in some places) so add that on top of the supreme liability that would be... My partner got super creeped out by that since he feels something cheese pizza-y might happen if you get me. So we want to kick her out.

Rescue's not on the lease and she barely pays bills. She doesn't have anywhere to go except *maybe* the mutual friend's place and, having been at risk of living on the streets myself, I'm worried. She *does* have a job but she only works maybe once a month. But partner and I have talked all this over and came to the conclusion that she needs to go for the above reasons.

WIBTA?

[agenderakali]

Some mfers on this site: "TERFs DNI stop drinking the TERF kool aid!!" The same mfers: "Of course trans men date/identify as lesbians isn't that kind of a no-brainer?? As AFABs they understand misogyny/womanhood/the lesbian experience so SO intimately. I mean, they were raised as women and socialized as women and dealt with misogynistic oppression in a way that no male-I mean amab-I mean CIS MAN ever could! Like- lesbians dont want to date cis men but... obviously it's different when it comes to trans men. Like... obviously? Do I need to spell it out lol?"

[gremlingirlsmell]

the egg prime directive is transmisogynistic, joking about a cis person you know might be an egg is pretty harmless, and saying otherwise is transmisogynistic. hope this helps

[viciouslyrobotic]

Link to article; https://www.them.us/story/roxanne-tickle-sall-grover-giggle-for-girls-discrimination

I WAS SCROLLING MY INSTA AND AHHHHHH!! WAY TO GO ROXANNE! ALSO AMAZING FOR AUSTRALIAN TRANS FEMS SHE WON THE CASE AGAINST THE DEFUNCT APP "GIGGLE FOR GIRLS"!!!

[olivia-is-not-a-slut]

you can absolutely be mistaken for a trans women and tme. tma does not mean "percieved as a trans woman" it means subject to structural transmisogyny. closeted trans women are more subject to transmisogyny as a structure than any non transfem person who gets mistaken as a trans woman once

Sure! Transwomen absolutely suffer more from transmisogyny! Doesn't mean it can't impact some cis women! Intersectionalism! We're all in this together comrade 💕

[the-owl-tree]

i know it really isn't that shocking with how deeply ingrained transmisogyny is but i guess in a series like beastars which placed so much emphasis on being yourself and finding connections in others (with legoshi even imagining his jojo stand as a rabbit) it is still wild to me they did a man in a dress joke. it just feels so counter intuitive to what the series is about.

[kelvintimeline]

well i care what happens to crowley and aziraphale after the end of season 2 and i don't care about the feelings of those two little radfem bitches so that's a pretty easy choice lmfao

I know this is bait and/or trying to frame GO fans as especially bad (though I have seen this exact sentiment expresesd by GO fans so... idk)

but it should be said:

the victims are not TERFs. we do not know their politics, we do not know much of anything about them besides their age, that they were assaulted, and their general relationship with neil. that's it.

the podcast reached out to these women and they took advantage of the opportunity. scarlett reported her rape in october 2022 and no one listened. k had been living with it for 20 years. they aren't bad people for just wanting to be heard, not when there have been whisper networks about neil for decades. not when he's been glorified in spite of being a missing stair.

you can frame them of being taken advantage of the podcast or colluding with the podcast or whatever you want, that doesn't change what neil has done to them

even the podcast isn't a TERF podcast--it seems to be right wing, there are TERFs on staff, but that doesn't mean it's reporting objectively false information every time. it isn't primarily trans issues or feminism, either. so, you should be aware of framing, fact check when you can, and not use it as a primary source when you can. but bad actors break real news... all of the time. sometimes with an agenda, and sometimes even without one. we have real insight from the victims themselves, in their own voices, on this podcast that really can't be reframed as anything else unless they were literally hacking and cutting audio to form new sentences that the victims never stated.

none of that makes this podcast a good thing but it does mean that this particular series contains primary sources, including proof from gaiman himself, which exists outside of the politics of the people running it.

anyways--

even if the victims were TERFs, that wouldn't make neil less of a rapist

even if they were TERFs, that wouldn't mean they deserved to be raped

neil didn't rape them because they were TERFs (and if he did, that would still be wrong, rape is not a punishment, rape is not judgement, rape is not justice), he raped them because he could and because he wanted them to

so, to not care about these women is to not care that he is a rapist, to not care about other victims (of his but also just in general)

anyways--

TERFs are terrible people. Rapists are also terrible people.

As far as we know, his victims aren't TERFs, but even if they were, that wouldn't mean you should continue to support Neil. Or his art projects and adaptions.

Because... he's still a rapist.

This isn't some pokemon match where we figure out different power levels of "TERF" types and "Rapist" types and see which one is more powerful, where one defeats the other and somehow becomes morally okay.

This is where we think critically about the information we have on hand and then employ basic human empathy. If you are incapable of empathy, learn to fake it. Post haste.

Can't do that? Well, then shut the fuck up. Talk about something else. Be a better person by being less of yourself.

[timeclipsed]

Anon be fr did you really think people wouldn't notice the blatant transmisogyny disguised as "helpful criticism". You're fucking rancid buddy. You better hope I don't ever hear wind of your actual identity

[kornynao]

https://www.womenarehuman.com/feminist-org-reports-shinigami-eyes-made-by-violent-trans-accused-rapist-to-identify-terfs/ The creator of shinigami eyes is a rapist too, unsurprisingly. White trans women are a cancer

yeah this totally isnt biased at all

[biracy]

In general quite fascinating how "boys who liked bionicle are girls now" is called "gender essentialism" by like Radqueer Terfs DNI posters but "the thread of Girlhood Uterus Vulva Trauma connects all (cis) butches and trans men, so that's why I can reblog photos of trans men to my men dni blog in my #dyke tag" isn't. Lmao

[fictionkinfessions]

That late 4/13 kinfession that mentions the Toblerone is referring to an actual irl event where a transfem Homestuck fan found a Toblerone, so it's kind of fucked up to call her a "freak." Positivity towards Johns is fine but you could do it without being a transmisogynist.

They had me in the first half, but I have no idea what the second half had meant. Positivity about au canons is cool but this isn't that. Not at the expense of trans woman.

I'm genuinely sorry for posting that. I'm unaware of the toblerone reference and what it meant, and what context it gave the first sentence. It's been deleted. We don't do that shit here and anon and others can delete their blogs about it.

Connie / mod party cat

[enby-dragoon]

So, I was scrolling through the Transmisogyny tag and found this picture. I tried to let it go, but it's stuck in my head, so I'm gonna talk about why it's stupid.

First:

"Trans + woman = 2 oppression. Trans - men = 0 oppression. Trans women and trans men are opposites."

First, I'm going to assume that the -men part is a typo, because it doesn't really make sense (it's supposed to represent trans men after all). I don't really like to reduce oppression to numbers (since it's more complicated than that), but I'll stick with it for this post.

Trans + woman = 2 oppression makes sense, trans people are oppressed and women are oppressed, that's two oppression.

Now, where it goes wrong is with trans + men = 0 oppression. This assumes (or rather, the creator of this image assumes trans women assume) that being a man cancels out their oppression, that they aren't oppressed.

This obviously isn't true, trans men factually experience oppression by virtue of them being trans, that's one oppression, but they don't experience oppression by virtue of being men (and if you claim that misandry is real, fuck off, i don't have the patience to listen to your bad faith arguments). thus, it should be trans + men = 1 oppression.

We can take this a step further actually, and add another axis of oppression to this little equation. Let's say we're talking about a black trans woman.

That would be black + trans + woman = 3 oppressions.

This person is more oppressed than me as a white trans woman, and thus I hold privilege over her, just as a white trans man holds privilege over me.

(side note, this is why I don't like using numbers for this stuff, because it implies I am the same level of oppressed as a black trans man, and it's much more complicated than that.)

Second:

"Gender/Sex essentialism."

This is... Kinda stupid too. society treats women one way, trans women are women, thus society treats us the same way. Reversed for trans men, society treats them as men. (this is together with transphobia of course, which rather changes how trans people are viewed in larger society, but that's the gist of it.)

Now you might have already noticed two important modifiers here. "Society treats."

These are not traits inherent to gender or sex, but rather ones that emerge from a society which, by and large, does subscribe to gender/sex essentialism.

Tma (Transmisogyny affected) people are not as such because of some innate biological fact, but rather because of how society treats us.

Tme (Transmisogyny exempt) people are not privileged because of some innate biological fact either, but still from how society treats them.

It gets more complicated of course, but this is a rant post on tumblr, so I'm not gonna go into that.

Third:

"Applying ur lived experiences to everyone else."

Not really happening (that I've seen at least, might be a few but they're not common), we're discussing our own oppression and creating words to ease communication of those topics. We're comparing our lived experiences together and talking about the patterns we find, not applying them to anyone else.

Fourth:

"believing people when they talk about THEIR experiences."

I've never really seen this. Not unless we count debunking misogynist ideas like misandry, but that would be stupid. Debunking homophobic idea's isn't ignoring homophobes lived experiences, it's debunking lies and scaremongering.

I'm gonna turn this around and ask: Why do you never believe us when WE speak about our lived experiences? Why do you not believe us when we talk about the oppression we face? Food for thought.

Fifth:

"Actually trans women and trans men are more similar than different, plus nonbinary + intersex experiences experiences make binarist thinking really stupid."

I actually agree with this one to an extent, a trans man will have experiences I'll never have, and I'll have experiences someone who isn't a trans woman will never have, but we are still trans in the end, and that does give us a lot of similarity, despite our other differences.

'Binarist thinking' here exists more to support the straw man that trans women think in binaries, and probably that Tma/Tme is a new binary instead of just explaining a phenomenon that already exists.

Fifth:

"All trans people experience the worst of both binary genders bc we are seen simultaneously as both failed men and failed women."

No.

There are a fair few who see me as a failed man, that's true, but they don't see me as a failed woman. they see me as a freak, a disgusting tranny who should die.

They don't see trans men as failed men either, just failed women.

Society at large does not accept us for who we are, not even as failed, broken versions.

Sixth:

"Transandrophobia is real."

After having this entire discussion, can we really say this honestly?

I'll reiterate for those who missed it at point one.

Transandrophobia isn't real, because androphobia or misandry, or whatever you call it, isn't real.

Transmisogyny isn't just a word for transphobia that trans women experience, it's the intersection between transphobia and misogyny. There is no such intersection for transandrophobia, so it isn't real.

(Sorry if I got some words wrong, english isn't my first language and technical discussion like this trips me up sometimes.)