#transmisogyny differently even alongside how intersexism affects us

[dreamyintersexouppy]

idk my gender as intersex person is definitely complicated but it's not just a stand in for layers of transness. i think if when i felt like a boy someone called me an MTFTM id punch them in the jaw cuz that's so unbelievably reductive and cruel. i don't need to steal labels from trans people and contort them without respect to their original context just to describe how being intersex affects my identity. in fact i think it would be good if there was actual intersex theory cuz my real issues aren't whose trauma am i co-opting so i can have a pretty word in my bio, my real issue is my chronicly painful periods, how damaged my immune system has gotten because of the surgery i got at birth still affecting me, finding doctors who can even begin to try and help me instead of just shrugging and telling me to suffer, no word stolen from transfeminist theorists can help me with that and no tme intersex person has ever helped me with it either when they're using themselves as a rhetorical prop to utterly erase me from the conversation as an intersex transfem

[recreationaldivorce]

i think "transmisogyny affected" and "transmisogyny exempt" are unfortunate terms bc they basically do invite tme* (*using the terms tma/tme in this post bc they're widely-understood shorthands for "camab trans person" and "not a camab trans person") people to go "well i'm transmisogyny affected because i got mistaken for a trans woman once" - because they aren't incorrect that that is an instance of transmisogyny affecting them, it's just that tma/tme doesn't literally refer to whether or not transmisogyny has any effect on your personal life obviously and i don't think anyone who uses the terms tma/tme believe that transmisogyny has no effect on people who aren't camab trans people.

i also don't think that involving "intention"/the idea of "misdirected" oppression resolves this issue because i don't think "misdirected" oppression is a thing; that implies lack of intent on behalf of eg a harasser or an institution with reactionary policies. if a homophobe calls a cishet person a faggot, that's intentional. they intended to call that person a faggot. if they then find out that their target is actually cisgender and heterosexual they're not going to go "oh sorry my bad, you're not a faggot after all". yet nobody denies that faggot is specifically a homophobic and/or transmisogynistic slur even though it does (quite frequently in fact) get intentionally used against cishet people. similarly when transmisogynistic policies affect gnc cis women, intersex cis women, racialised cis women, etc, these are not accidents; tme people who are victimised by transmisogynistic policies are also additional intended victims alongside the camab trans people those policies are intended to target.

similarly i don't think it's correct to say that transmisogyny only incidentally affects tme people. tme people who are likely to be mistaken for trans women put active effort every day into not being mistaken for trans women because they know it will result in violence against them; that's something that affects all their social interactions every day. i don't think you can draw political distinctions based on a quantitative difference of how much a given oppression affects you—i mean, then you have the obvious issue of where do you draw the line, at what point do you experience an adequate quantity of oppression to be categorised as "affected". the difference between being what's termed tma and what's termed tme is not quantitative, but qualitative.

the main point that's poorly communicated with tma/tme language is that it's not for categorising the experiences of individual specific people based on how often they get called slurs in public. it's identifying a group of people who are the subject of transmisogyny, which is a system of oppression that rhetorically and structurally targets camab trans people. like all the news articles fearmongering about women with penises are obviously not talking about cis women with penises; they are talking about trans women's penises, even though this "culture war" shit does indeed "affect" cis women with penises too. obviously all systems of oppression affect everyone because systems of oppression are social totalities, but that doesn't mean they don't have social groups (not the same as aggregates of individuals) stratefied into oppressors and oppressed.

so, what, are we to replace tma/tme with "STM"/"NSTM" ("subject of transmisogyny"/"not subject of transmisogyny")? no, probably not—tma/tme are widely-understood enough terms for what they refer to & it'd be a bit silly to start a campaign to replace them with something more descriptive on the basis of pedantry really. i just think it's kind of unfortunate how they're named in a way that very loudly invites bad faith derailing of conversations into a completely irrelevant argument about who's "affected" by an oppression (everyone, obviously), and also baits tma people into arguing that actually tme people are completely unaffected by transmisogyny, which presumably most of them don't actually think.

[momma-mogai-sphinx]

Can intersex AFAB people be transfem? I thought transfem meant AMAB + not cis + choose the label to describe themselves, but I saw something that said that intersex AFAB people can be transfem. Please correct me if anything I said was transmisogynistic, I want to learn!

(From here)

“How do I know if I’m TME?”

If you’re not a transfem, you’re most likely TME. If you’re cisgender, a trans man or transmasculine person, or a nonbinary person who does not identify or partly identify with womanhood (-alignment) or a feminine gender, you’re TME. Most AFAB people, regardless of gender, are TME, but we’ll discuss the exceptions in a moment.

“What does ‘transfem’ mean?”

“Transfem” is short for “transfeminine,” and, for our purposes, transfeminine usually describes someone who was assigned male at birth but identifies (possibly non-exclusively) with womanhood or nonbinary femininity. The few exceptions to this rule can include some AFAB intersex and utrinquegender people whose experiences have a great deal of overlap with trans women’s*. In the context of transmisogyny, “transfem” is typically synonymous with “non-TME” and is used as another way to say “someone affected by systemic transmisogyny.”

*However, I want to make note that I personally feel AFAB people in this situation should at least consider using a different term to describe their experiences before settling for “transfem,” as 1) even in cases like these, there are still many differences between the experiences of AMAB and AFAB transfems, 2) “transfeminine” carries certain connotations that could cause more confusion in the long run, and 3) alternate terminology has been created for these specific cases, such as “adfeminine,” “sensfeminine,” or “x-reclaiming.” Additionally, “utrinquegender” — while it can be used alongside “transfeminine” — was actually coined as an alternative to “cis” and “trans” for those who don’t feel like they fit that dichotomy, and that original definition should be respected.