#your axis of marginalization does not excuse your bigotry

[auressea]

the gatekeepers in our lives...

just spent HALF an HOUR 'chatting' on the phone with the Accounts Receivable manager who handles my payment-plan at the pharmacy.

learned a lot about her! 👀 she said "where I come from in East Asia" as a lead up to a very Conservative Political Opinion. I had to specifically ask her 'where from', because East Asia is SO LARGE.. yannow.. She's been in Canada for over 15 years and originally came from Hong Kong. She has the social and political opinions of a Boomer from Edmonton.

she spewed a bunch of mindlessly bigoted rhetoric about "how we're all the same!" and no one should be treated better than anyone else..

and why would the City of Richmond spend all those tax payer $$ to repeatedly repaint the Rainbow Crosswalk after it got destroyed? "Just give it up already!" "LGBT people aren't special" "everyone's entitled to their opinion!" clearly we could just give that tax-payer money to people who really need it.

She controls my access to credit and payment plans at my pharmacy

So- I gently and in a round-about-way, gave her examples of invisible privilege that many of us have. How the IDEAL is that we all ARE equal- but that it's not actually TRUE in practice.

I used my Whiteness to frame this idea- (to explain structural racism to an Asian-Canadian woman!) and then used my government enforced poverty to show her an example of the casual ablesim I suffer from.

and she was.. AWAKE for a moment. Hopefully I'll be allowed to keep my payment plan..?

[auressea]

"I think we literally get taught that you are only worthy if you’re beautiful; that there are no other pathways to worth besides desirability. This is where magnificence comes in to me. That feels like — I needed a word other than "beautiful." Magnificence comes out of our struggle. Give yourself permission and cultivate it and embrace it, rather than always literally wearing the mask."

“If we didn’t live in an ableist society, we would recognize that our bodies are all different and have different capacities.”

[cardentist]

the transmisandry “debate” and the attitude towards trans men is so transparently a retreading of literally every exclusionary movement of the last few decades and Yet it’s being perpetrated and tolerated by what otherwise should be inclusionist spaces because it’s once again being pointed at a more “acceptable” target

like, on some level I understand the gut reaction, the term itself is associated with a lot of negativity and “mens rights activists” and the like have made the idea of men specifically facing oppression for being men at best laughable and at worst a red flag for violent misogyny. it’s one of those things that a lot of people in left leaning spaces take for granted as being true across the board, something they don’t need to think about or examine. and to be clear “they” included me for quite some time, I do understand where the feeling comes from

but it’s not about oppression for being men, it’s oppression for being trans men, it’s transmisandry for the same reason that transmisogyny is transmisogyny. it’s a term specifically meant to cast a net over the broad array of experiences that people have specifically as trans men to give them an outlet to both examine their experiences in relation to the wider community of trans men and to specifically seek and give reassurance and solidarity to each other. 

the bigger problem with this argument is that many people will resort to denying what I’ve just said in order to reject the proposed term, whether it’s something they’d actually believe once they examined the situation in earnest or not. because people act as though acknowledging that trans men face oppression for being trans men will open up the floodgates leading to cis straight white men convincing people that they’re oppressed for being men. so trans men Can’t be oppressed for being trans men because trans men are men and men aren’t oppressed.

so leading from this line of thought what you’ll generally see is the argument that what trans men experience is “just” transphobia, and if you press the issue or bring up a personal example you’ll almost as commonly get that anything else is “just” “misdirected” misogyny. and just, there’s so So much to unpack there that I’m almost tempted to just leave it where it is, but ignoring the issue won’t make it go away and I wouldn’t be writing this post if I didn’t want the issue to change.

the point with, I think, the least baggage is one that I’ve already touched upon, that being that the experiences of trans men and trans women are just naturally going to be different from each other and it’s useful for both parties to have language to talk specifically about their experiences, in the same way that it’s useful to examine the differences between the experiences of binary and nonbinary trans people. it doesn’t matter who you think has it “worse” because this isn’t a competition to see who’s oppressed enough to Deserve having their experiences heard. the urge for trans men to make a term to describe their experiences isn’t some way to try to argue that they’re more oppressed, it’s born from the inherent need to be understood and to see that other people exist in the way that you have. it’s the solidarity that brought the trans community together in the first place

a point leading off of that with probably significantly more baggage is the idea that queer and lgbt+ spaces are a contest to measure your oppression in the first place. don’t get me wrong, it Is useful to recognize different axis’ of oppression, to recognize larger patterns of violence faced by specific groups of people at a disproportionate rate. it helps us, as an entire community, identify the most vulnerable groups of people so we can lean into helping them on both a systemic and individual level, so we can see whose voices need to be boosted so they can be heard both in and out of the community. and moreover having these numbers and experiences together can help people outside of the community see that it’s is a problem as well. 

however, the issue comes in when perceived theoretical oppression is used as a social capital to decide who is and is not allowed to be heard. I’m sure I’ve already lost the ace exclusionists ages ago by now, so that’s a perfect example. at it’s most extreme ace exclusionism is blatant bigotry and hatred justified with the excuse that they’re protecting the queer and lgbt+ community from privileged invaders, and even when in it’s milder form ace exclusionism is powered by the idea that asexual people don’t face oppression. marginalized people are denied resources, solidarity, safe spaces, and voices because they’re painted as not being oppressed or not being oppressed Enough. this wouldn’t be able to happen if your worth as a member of the lgbt+ community wasn’t measured by how oppressed your particular minority group is, if it didn’t have the sway that it has. creating a power structure in any way at all leaves people with the ability to exploit that structure, and the specific one that’s emerged within the queer community and leftist spaces in general allows people to exploit it while hiding it as moral, while hiding that they’re causing any pain at all. it’s the same frame of mind that’s made bullying cool in activist spaces 

another reason why this hierarchy tends to fail on an individual level is, of course, that the level of oppression that an entire group faces does not dictate someone’s lived experiences, which is an idea that goes both ways. the argument over whether or not asexuals are oppressed is ultimately a meaningless distraction from the lived experiences of asexual people. it is a Fact that asexuals face higher levels of rape and sexual assault than straight people, you can deny that what they’re facing counts as oppression specifically but what does that matter? there are people who are suffering and that suffering can be lessened by allowing those people into our community, shouldn’t that be enough? likewise, comparing the suffering of individual people as if they were the same as the suffering of their respective groups combined is absolutely absurd. someone who is murdered for being a trans man isn’t less dead than someone who was murdered for being a trans woman. a trans woman isn’t Guaranteed to have lived a harder life than any and every other trans man just because of a difference in statistics, and the same can be said for literally every other member of the lgbt+ and queer communities. other community members aren’t concepts, they aren’t numbers, they’re people with unique lives and sorrows and joy. neither you or I or anyone else is the culmination of our respective or joint communities and some people need to learn how to act like it.

again, there is Meaning in seeing how our oppression is different, it’s not inherently wrong, but creating a framework where it can be used to paint a group of people as both lesser within the community and less deserving of help is creating a framework that can more than readily be abused. and because it positions the abused as privileged it creates a situation where the abuser can justify it to themselves. you use another minority as an outlet for the pain you feel under the weight of the same system that hurts them while denying their pain.

but to pull the conversation back to trans men specifically, lets examine lived experiences for a while longer. “misdirected misogyny” and “just misogyny” are both employed commonly in exclusionist spaces to deny that either someone’s oppression happened to them for the reason they say it did or to deny that their oppression is their own, and often times it’s both. for instance, the claim that ‘asexual people may face higher rates of sexual assault but That’s just because of misogyny (and/or misdirected homophobia)’ is used to deny that what asexual people face is oppression for being asexual. if you can’t deny that an assault victim was assaulted without either violating your own moral code or the moral code of the community you’ve surrounded yourself with then denying the cause of their assault is a more socially acceptable way of depriving them of the resources they need to address that assault. their pain wasn’t their own, it belongs to someone else, someone who’s Really oppressed.

in the context of trans men the argument is, of course, that they’re men. if they just so happen to face misogyny then it’s because they were mistakenly perceived as women. this works a convenient socially acceptable way to deny the lived experiences of a group you want to silence both in the ways that I’ve already illustrated And with the added bonus woke points of doing so while affirming someone’s gender identity in the process.

again, I want to reiterate, even if it were objectively true that all trans men face transphobia and misogyny totally separately, like a picky toddler that doesn’t want their peas anywhere near their mashed potatoes, that is ultimately an insufficient framework when talking about individual lives. there’s literally nothing wrong with trans men wanting to talk about their lived experiences with other trans men in the context of them Being trans men. being black isn’t inherently a part of the trans experience but being black Does ultimately affect your experiences as a trans person and how they impact you and it’s meaningful to discuss the intersection of those two experiences on an individual level. 

but it just, Isn’t true. this shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone, but trans men were born in bodies that are perceived as being women, misogyny is a Feature to the experiences of trans men inherently. even trans men who are fully transitioned, have full surgery, have all their papers worked out, completely pass, move to a new state and changed their name, and have zero contact with anyone who ever knew them before or during their transition still lived a significant portion of their lives under a system that was misogynistic against them. of course there’s still a spectrum of personal experiences with it, just like there are with cis women and trans women, but to present the misogyny that trans men face as “accidental” is just absurd.  and moreover, most trans men Aren’t the hypothetical Perfect Passing Pete. I’ve identified as trans for seven years now and I frankly don’t have the resources to even begin thinking about transitioning and won’t for what’s looking to be indefinitely, I don’t even begin to come within the ballpark of passing and it Sure Does Show. misogyny is just as present in my life as it would be for a cis woman but the difference is that I’m not supposed to talk about it.  and even barring That there are transitioned trans men who face misogyny specifically because they are trans men, before during and after transition. you could argue that that’s “just” transphobia but you could do the same for transmisogyny. if we can acknowledge that trans women have experiences that specifically come from their status as women who can be wrongly perceived as men then we should all be able to acknowledge that trans men have experiences that specifically come from their status as men who can be wrongly perceived as women and that both the similarities and differences between these experiences are worth talking about. 

another issue with painting it as “just” misogyny that ties pretty heavily into what I was just talking about is the fact that men don’t have the same access to spaces meant to talk about misogyny that women do.  again, this is something that makes sense on a gut level, it’s not like cis men are being catcalled while walking to 7/11. but like, a lot of trans men are. misogyny is a normal facet in the lives of trans men but male voices are perceived as being invaders in spaces meant to talk about misogyny, both in and out of trans specific spaces and conversations

trans men lose a solidarity with women that they do not gain with men. there’s a certain pain and othering that comes with intimately identifying with the experiences of a group of people while being denied that those experiences are yours, of being treated the same way for the same reason but at once being aware that the comfort and understanding being extended isn’t For you and feeling like you’re cheating some part of your sense of self by identifying with it.

part of that is just the growing pains of getting used to existing as a trans person, but that in and of itself doesn’t mean that we aren’t allowed to find a solution. if trans men can’t, aren’t allowed, or don’t want to speak about their experiences in women’s spaces then why not allow them to talk about their experiences together? the fact that we even have to argue over whether or not trans men Deserve to talk about their experiences is sad enough in it’s own right, but even sadder is inclusionists, people who should frankly know better at this point, refusing to stand up for trans men because someone managed to word blatant bigotry in an acceptable way Once Again.