TME and TMA as intersexist terms: as written by an intersex transfem
I’ve had a few different people in my inbox asking me why I view these terms the way I do. In particular, why I claim it’s intersexist. So, I thought I’d lay out a few examples, so everyone can understand where I’m coming from.
Imagine an intersex woman. She was assigned female at birth by her doctors, and was able to go about her childhood as a woman with no inclination that anything was amiss. Sure, she didn’t experience certain parts of puberty, but puberty was different for everyone, right?
But, later in life, she learns she has Turner syndrome. This is an intersex condition where a woman has only one X chromosome, rather than the usual two.
Soon after she learns this, she finds that laws are being made to attempt to keep trans women out of women’s spaces (often specifically sports) which use chromosomes as a defining factor of womanhood.
Would this intersex person be considered “transmisogyny affected”? She has been raised as a cisgender woman with no problems regarding being ‘clocked’, but she is also a direct target of transmisogynistic laws. She lies in a gray area.
Now, let’s go to another intersex person. Imagine an intersex man with PAIS. AIS is an intersex condition where babies are born with testes and XY chromosomes, but their body is immune to or can’t respond to androgens (which includes testosterone). Intersex people with partial AIS (PAIS) may have more ambiguous genitals, but, once they hit puberty, they begin to look “less” ambiguous, in a way that conflicts with their gender identity.
This intersex person identifies as a man, and he was assigned male at birth. However, his body does not produce testosterone, and he went through a feminizing puberty. To the average eye, he appears to be a woman now because of this.
Would this intersex person be considered “transmisogyny affected?” He was assigned male at birth, and now appears to be a woman, much like many transfems. However, if many saw how he looks now, stating that he is a male, they would probably clock him as transmasc. He was raised as a boy until puberty, and then faced astrozcization from his peers when he began a puberty that feminized him. What he was facing was a form of intersexism where transmisogyny was playing a huge part. Does his childhood matter? Can one become TME over time, when they were TMA as a child? Again, he lies in a gray area, where the answer is not quite so simple.
What about the “opposite”, per se — an intersex woman who had a masculinizing puberty? She has aromatase deficiency, which means that many ‘male’ hormones (which would usually be converted to ‘female’ hormones) would remain unconverted. She identifies as a woman, and was identified as a female at birth and was raised, until puberty, as a female. But now, she would be clocked as a trans woman upon looking at her. What does that make her? Is it different from the previous example? How and why? This intersex person also lies in a gray area. How she should be described with these terms is not clear.
And keep in mind, these are all relatively simple examples. All of the examples I listed self-identify as cisgender. But there are intersex people who are trans in any direction you can imagine.
If that last example identified as a trans woman, because she is now clocked as one, would you be able to say she’s wrong for that? What about if she identified as transmasculine, because of her experience with puberty? What if she’s multigender, bigender or genderfluid, and says she’s both transmasc and transfem because of her complicated experiences? Would that make her a TMA transmasculine person? But I thought that transmascs were all TME? That’s how it’s so often framed, anyway.
The reason why these questions are so difficult to answer is because these terms were not made with intersex people in mind. Very real intersex transfems were pushed to the wayside in favor of centering the perisex view of transgenderism. Intersex people are nothing but an inconvenient little afterthought, annoying perisex people with their demand for “inclusion” and “consideration”. (As per usual.)
You cannot simply make a new gender binary and say, “No, really, this time everyone fits into these two categories! Forcing people to confine themselves to these two rigid labels which are shown as opposites, and as never interacting, will definitely include everyone this time!!” No matter what the contents of the new binary is, it’s not going to work, because sex and gender alike are too complicated for that. There will always be people in the gray area.
You may say, “cis and transgender create a similar intersexist binary,” which is true. However, there are labels which account for this, such as ipsogender and cistrans. There are no such things within the TME/TMA framework. You may say, “TME/TMA isn’t an identity, it’s a political framework for talking about oppression,” to which I respond, “You understand how that’s worse, right?” Your political frameworks have to account for nuance, especially as it relates to other, similarly-oppressed people. Period. You may protest, “But TME/TMA describes the targets of transmisogyny, not those who are accidentally caught up in it!” But that’s not what the terms themselves say. It says “AFFECTED”. Also, in a post-Imane Khelif panic world, I don’t know how you’re still able to lie to yourself and say that intersex people are not an intentional target of transmisogyny. You may ask, “How are we supposed to talk about transmisogyny without these terms?” Well, by using the term “transmisogyny”. Also, “people who do not identify as transfem” and “transfem people” both work just fine. Maybe even “transfem people and some intersex people”, if you really want to flag yourself as an ally! There’s no need for a fancy acronym.
This isn’t even getting into the fact that these terms, for all intents and purposes, seem to have been popularized by and associated with the Baeddelism movement around 2017, which was essentially “Radical Feminism 2: We’re Trans Women, So It’s Fine!” This movement is known for chronic villainization of trans men and non-binary people who aren’t transfem. (They act like this with cis people too, but noticeably less so than they do with non-transfem trans people. How curious.) Think along the lines of how regular radfems treat all men (and who they deem to be men) as inherently morally disgusting scum who deserve to be attacked.
Methinks that maybe these terms aren’t the neutral, fact-based descriptors of oppression that many people nowadays tout them to be, considering that.
So, yeah. “Transmisogyny exempt” and “transmisogyny affected” as terms: not even once. Listen to intersex people, stop trying to make sex and gender into binaries, and for the love of God, stop drinking the queer seperationist koolaid!
