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TIL “precocious” and “apricot” are cognates

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wait where are all the trans guys

Historical-anthropological research, especially the work taking place before the 21st century or outside the West, tends to focus entirely on transfeminized groups. So when reading these works it’s pretty natural to ask — wait, where are all the trans guys? This is a reasonable question with a few clear answers; this post is something quick I can point people to.

The central condition of transfeminized groups' absorption into feminist activism has been to accept a kind of symmetry with select TME groups through the understanding of trans femininity as "gender variance." Under this framework, transfeminized groups' social position can be understood as a consequence of gender variance and some abstract violation of cis norms; this was proposed by people like Susan Stryker and Emi Koyama [1], among others, and continues to structure trans inclusion today. It also fails when considering several basic aspects of these groups:

Transfeminized groups are associated with hyperspecific labor practices, most frequently sex work, but also hair styling, drag, makeup artistry, acting, and other forms of 'gender work.'

Metropolitan transfeminized groups appear in the archive as highly clustered and active groups connected with, but usually intensely split from, the masculine men they fucked.

Transfeminized groups become a kind of 'third gender' on an epistemic level; they are Known to wider society before and after “coming out” in a way that USAmerican transmasculinity has only recently vaguely approached.

Transfeminized groups are heavily clustered in labor practice, social organization, and epistemic position, although this is not universal -- certain strains of USAmerican transfemininity have become a bit more labor-agnostic in the last two decades, not-so-coincidentally alongside more general currents of gender-labor liberation. The messy strains of trans male identity recovered from the archive and from current practice tend to lack labor, social, and epistemic coherence. As Aaron Devor notes in FTM, his 1997 history of FTM men, trans men in the 20th century tended to transition out of cities and into the countryside, finding low-profile places they could exist in. These practices, and the earlier "female husband" practices described by Jen Manion, relied on the labor-agnostic nature of transitioned manhood in order to disappear from public life. Transfeminized groups, on the other hand, are categorically restricted from the main form of economic life historically available to women -- marriage. Their labor practices are heavily constrained and have almost always revolved around some form of 'gender work:' as Susan Stryker put it, you need to get people to pay you for being a trans woman. Transmasculinity pushes away feminized restrictions on labor; trans femininity is labor.

Because transfeminized identities are so often labor-identities, and because their specific brand of 'gender work' and hormonal/silicone/surgical embodiment usually requires both specialized training and community support, nearly every metropolitan center in the world developed highly centralized transfeminized groups over the course of the 20th century [2]. As Ochoa notes, this visibility is partially due to epistemic visibility (everyone knows what a trans is), partially due to group structure (people work and train each other), and partially due to the selectively visible demands of finding clients. Fledglings come in with a way of being that is always already visible to society, but changing the body to match and learning how to fully enact and slowly contest the third-gender labor-identity they've been given takes a lot of community support.

So as labor-identities, transfeminized groups tend to a level of labor/community/epistemic coherence that has no clear counterpart. The news archives we have of trans men (as seen in Manion) position them as singular and easily absorbed back into the female gestalt; the cisgender feminist/gayguy/AIDS researchers that form the bulk of historical-anthropological work saw them as unnecessary to their grand theories of gender; the communities themselves have been materially fractured and, for the groups that rise out of lesbian-feminist activism, only partially committed to their own existence. The result of all this is that there is no clear equivalent to the "transfeminized groups" of Jules-Gill Peterson; there is no symmetry to trannydom, and while additional work to unearth trans manhood in the archive remains extremely valuable, sometimes the necessary level of label-coherence and social existence just isn't there.

[1] Stryker, "My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage," Emi Koyama, "The Transfeminist Manifesto" [2] As seen in Namaste, Invisible Lives, Prieur, "Mema's House, Mexico City," Kulick, "Travesti," Newton, "Mother Camp," Ochoa, "Queen for a Day," Hegarty, "The Made-Up State," and plenty more. Most of these works came out in the late 80s and 90s due to a combination of the feminist "third gender" craze, the burgeoning field of masculinity studies, and AIDS.

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Liverpool : Liverpudlian :: High School : High Schudlian

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The Company of Strangers (Cynthia Scott, 1990)

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nice

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i had the idea for this comic as soon as i woke up and i spent the rest of the day drawing it. happy pride month

if you couldn't tell this is my first time drawing spike

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ok so i am gonna paraphrase and compile some stuff from a conversation me and alessa and bec had abt this

part of the issue with the complicated issue of chasers is that most of the ways that chasers are discussed or addressed tend to delineate tmes who are attracted to/date/fuck trans women into two boxes: chasers and nonchasers. even the lowerkey ones are generally sorted into a secretly chaser category. but in reality, there’s no neat line where cultural fetishization ends and personal relationships completely entirely free of some aspects of those ideas and dynamics start. cuz at the end of the day, this is not a matter of behavior, it is an unavoidable phenomenon that results from the oppressive power dynamic between tmes and tmas; transfems are not societally considered to be whole people, we are considered to be sexual objects and tools for other people's enrichment, pleasure, and subjectivity enhancement; meanwhile, we are simultaneously considered to be incapable of goodness to the degree where we poison the personhood of anyone who loves us or engages with us as a fellow human. thus, in any gendered paradigm we are sought after by tmes for the purposes of fulfilling sexual desires, using us for social climbing or scapegoating, or for turning us into theoretical analogy for other phenomena, but without the privilege of being publicly and intimately affiliated with the real humans; we are simultaneously consistently recursively abjected by the tme component of any group. a common experience for a trans woman is to be kept around, but at arms length, as a resource, not as a companion, to exist only when needed, and only until her usefulness in a given setting is exhausted.

chaserdom is not a kind of person that creates this paradigm, it is a function of this paradigm that can be utilized by anyone with gendered power over us (aka tmes), regardless of whether they care for us or see us as humans equal to them. most people on some level know this whether they can directly articulate it or not; it is a very common experience to be approached by tme partners for reassurance that they are not chasers/fetishists. and that's the thing: prioritizing trans women in your life to the point where you want to have a transfem partner actually does involves a fair bit of "preferring" trans women because it is pushing back against a mountain of expectations of the opposite! which brings us to the final component of this: there is no consistent intrinsic difference between a "chaser"'s and a "nonchaser"'s attraction to a transfem! when tmes ask for this kind of reassurance, what they really want (regardless of whether or not they know it) is the assurance that they are innocent of the ability to weaponize/inhabit the paradigm of the chaser against the transfem they love. and the reality is they never are.

i want to call this a kind of fundamental misunderstanding of what a chaser is, but i think that on some level most people are aware of this, whether they can articulate it or not. but framing chaserdom as a behavior or inherent kind of attraction is still a very common line of reasoning, which can lead to absurd or insane takes when combined with the reality of there being no hard delineation of attraction, such as the hilariously common kind of scolding towards trans women expressing attraction to other trans women decrying the manner of their attraction as chasery (whether by talking down to transfems "honestly" but paternalistically, or by gleefully and transparently pretending that this t4t attraction is something coming from nontransfems - remember all those posts about how "girldick" is a chaser phrase despite it being coined by and almost exclusively used by transfems? lmao), betraying either incredible delusion about how chaserdom even works (it's a power imbalance you fuckin idiots, not the aesthetic window dressing!), or just a fresh coat of paint on the classic old idea that transfem sexuality is inherently predatory. usually both, lbr. another stupid result of this worldview is the paranoid scolding of trans women expressing any kind of fondness for chasers (or for loved ones they are affectionately calling chasers as a joke. or for halimede. jfc how fucking condescending can you get.) and the ascribing of some kind of naivety upon them, insisting that ohhh these poor girls just don't know that what they want will hurt them or that they are so used to being fucked over that they don't care....and like not to be rude but trans women are not naive idiots and you are not the smartest person in the room who alone can see the truth. i even see other transfems pull these kinds of shit sometimes and it is extremely annoying at a minimum. at some point, you need to recognize that the reason that so many trans girls make so many chaser jokes about tme bitches who love them and that some of the tme bitches who love them play along with these jokes is because they are well aware of this paradigm and are riffing on it. and if you have a problem with that, you need to just get over it, because it is the opposite of a big deal.

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had a bad low blood pressure moment last night and messily asked my partner for saltines and water before realizing i should probably ask for the Blood Pressure Medication I Need To Take. while they went to go grab it though i still had water and crackers so in a daze i took a swig of water but didnt swallow and then tried to cram 2 saltines in my mouth. full of water. in bed. with mouth full of water

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*stroking the moon’s craters* who hurt you…

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A 708 GB composite image of the moon.

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I literally cannot take anything lance armstrong says about trans people ever seriously for obvious reasons but also because there's a museum somewhat near my house in the scottish borders which is a museum to clan armstrong, who were famous border reivers, i.e. people who would go across the scottish-english border and dismember people for their cattle and whatnot + at this museum they have portraits of all of these famous armstrongs, most of whom spent their entire lives turning half the population of cumbria into mincemeat, up in a hall, from which only 1 person's portrait has been removed for poor conduct that shamed the family. can u guess whose

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A newborn baby girl will have to go through life with the wrong sex on her birth certificate after a registrar’s error, which her parents have been told they cannot change. Grace Bingham and her partner, Ewan Murray, were excited to register their first child at the Sutton-in-Ashfield Registration Office in Nottinghamshire last week. But, after nights of broken sleep, they failed to notice the registrar had written the wrong sex on the birth certificate until after it had been submitted. “We were horrified but assumed that, as we saw the mistake just a few seconds after it had happened, correcting it would be an easy matter,” said Murray. “But although the registrar apologised for her mistake – and the area manager also apologised – it turns out that birth certificates can’t be changed.”

this article is interesting because it demonstrates that cis people can very easily apply structural thinking to sex assignment - this couple immediately identifies that their daughter, having mistakenly been assigned male at birth by the registrar, will have administrative problems in employment, education, travel, and so on. they pretty adeptly identify the foundational role that sex assignment plays in the administrative and civil functions of a state, and how incorrect sex markers effectively produce a ‘rational’ reason for discrimination within these administrative and civil arenas:

The General Register Office (GRO), which is responsible for administering all civil registration in England and Wales, and the Home Office have both confirmed that Lilah’s birth certificate cannot be reissued, although an amendment can be made in the margin of the original document. But Bingham said this is not enough. “People reading a birth certificate might easily miss a tiny note in the margin – which means that Lilah could be regarded as male when she applies for school, her passport, for jobs – for everything that she needs a full birth certificate for.”

And given that this was published in The Guardian, this article makes zero mention as to why it’s impossible for this couple to receive an updated birth certificate with correct information (something the author notes was possible to do a year ago), but the reason is obviously transphobia. 

Now one might ask why there’s no exception for cis people whose birth certificates were recorded incorrectly at birth, but this reveals the instability of cissexualism. How would you determine who is a cis person with a mistaken birth certificate, versus a trans person who wants to change their mistaken sex assignment record? Sure, you could say well, this is an infant, of course she’s “really” “biologically” female (something the parents argue in the article as grounds for having their child’s birth certificate re-issued), but 1) that certainly can’t be argued for in all cases, 2) 'biological sex' is understood by medical doctors as alterable through hormones and surgery, which trans people are often required to undergo in order to change their records, and 3) binary sex assignment is already imprecise and discretionary, particularly if infants have sex characteristics that don’t conform to binary F/M assignment standards (which is part of how the category of intersex emerges, framing this failure to conform to state census categories as a biological defect - and in fact, many intersex people do not discover they are intersex until the onset of puberty or later, at which point they are even less in luck if they want to change their sex assignment - and if they don’t, if they are cis but have sex characteristics that do not conform to cis standards, they will be discriminated against anyway). 

Even setting aside the issue of transgender and intersex people for a moment, states fuck up all the time in administration! you've probably either experienced this directly or know someone who's had some kind of record fucked up by the government at some point in their life. If you get married they could fuck up changing your last name, fuck up your disability status, record your social insurance number wrong, print the wrong address on your driver’s license, fail to acknowledge you as a dependent when filing taxes, incorrectly mark you as having graduated when you’re still a student, fuck up your immigration paperwork, record your name wrong during immigration, etc etc into infinity, and this is not even getting into errors that occur when different levels of government pass information between one another. This level of administrative rigidity is purely to punish people who fail to perform cissexualism correctly, and in the case of this couple's child, the administrative error of the state is imputed to them as a personal failure that she and her parents will now have to deal with for the rest of their lives. 

I think the ultimate analysis is not that transphobia will become less precise and hit more "wrong" targets as it expands its reach, but that this is the exact same operational logic as all other liberal state measures - if you encounter a systemic issue, it’s your fault for not avoiding it, fuck you, go away. You’re poor because you’re lazy, you’re unhoused because you’re lazy, you’re disabled because you’re lazy, and your daughter is now administratively transsexual because you’re lazy. In this case, we don’t even need to assume the intentions of the state - they outright say it:

The family complained to the GRO but was told the mistake was their responsibility and could not be fully rectified. “The duty to ensure that information recorded in any particular entry is true is the responsibility of the person providing the information and not of the registrar general or the registrar recording the birth,” the GRO said.

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Zabłudów Synagogue. Built in the 17th century, Poland. The wooden synagogue was burned in 1941 by the Nazis.