Aremo Shitai Koremo Shitai Onna no Ko ni Mietatte

Late night thought but I think the thing that really ties it together for me on transandrophobia/anti transmasculinity stuff is how quickly people will turn on a transfem if they side with transmascs. Like I’ve seen people in real time try to find any way to take a transfems ‘status’ as transfem away when they say they agree with us, saying that they’re not “transfem enough”, accusing them of secretly being transmasc, trying to find any past take that would invalidate them, or just flat out say they’re lying about being transfem. Like these people immediately fall back on transmisogyny if a transfem sides with us, despite accusing us of being the transmisogynistic ones, which kinda comes back to my assumption that these people just want to silence any trans people that don’t agree with them

I've had this in my drafts in awhile but I think now is the time to reblog it because of this recent addition to my pinned wall of things transandrophobes say about me:

Like, look at that lmao. She hates to do it, but alas, I'm simply so awful she has no choice.

And this isn't about revoking my transfemininity card, but it sure did make me stare at my screen in genuine shock, because holy shit I didn't expect it:

The full line is actually "pickme begging to be beaten to death with hammers" and like. Wowwie zowwie! That's kinna fucked up! That's so fucking weird and gross! They are literally fantasizing about me being hate crimed because it would validate their "non-transfems will always betray you" nonsense.

The fact that people on this hellsite can’t seem to comprehend that minorities can be antisemitic is nuts.

Many people on this site seem to think minorities are incapable of any kind of bigotry. Especially if the minority person doesn't fit within American standards of whiteness.

something i’ve noticed that has developed in leftist philosophy over the years is the idea that someone who’s marginalized can’t do harm. they have this idea that someone who experiences structural oppression is disempowered and therefore doesn’t have enough power to actually cause harm to anyone. i agree with a lot of theories around structural oppression and marginalization but many lefties warp it and take it to the extreme as a way of ensuring they will never be held accountable for their actions.

additionally, they also love butchering crenshaw’s intersectionality theory and cherry picking the parts of the theory which allow them to never have to reflect on their own actions.

It's just repackaged noble savage.

Social privilege does not make you any more immune to weapons or physical violence (or even verbal and emotional violence really). And yes, that counts as harm.

It's the same false binary "oppressed/oppressor" mentality that gets used all the time to erase oppression men face.

If men are oppressors, they can't be oppressed, regardless of the individual situation.

Men aren't oppressed for being men, though. They're oppressed for being non-white, LGBTQ+, a certain age, disabled, poor, for following a religion, or for being an immigrant. Men are not oppressed specifically for being men.

What "oppression" men claim to face, is either the result of the white supremacist, capitalist, and patriarchal system they created and uphold, or they're complaining they can't get dates (or just laid) because they get their relationship advice from podcasts run by incels, sexual predators, and domestic abusers.

Also feminism is part of the reason certain issues men face (i.e. high suicide risks and sexual assault), but rather than support feminism, men choose to oppose feminism. Because men's egos are dependent on being centered in everything (including topics that don't concern them), and feminism doesn't do that.

Thank you for providing an example of the objectively wrong argument terrible people keep making to try and silence men from talking about their oppression! You can fuck off now.

OK got some sleep let's break down why this argument is not only objectively wrong but anti-feminist.

There is oppression non-white men face that is different from how non-white women are oppressed. Same with literally every other group you mentioned. Saying that "Black men are not oppressed for being men just for being Black" is treating men's experience as the default. Centering men's experience like this is the reason why Black women had to create the term misogynoir to talk about the oppression they experience as Black women. Misogynoir is a useful term, but there still should be a term for Black men as well simply because the oppression Black men face is not the baseline oppression Black people face, it is how people are oppressed when they are Black and men.

And then of course the radfem followup: imply that even minority men are not really oppressed and any who claim to be are MRAs, incels, or abusers. It's not enough to just say that men don't deserve a word to describe their oppression, she just had to follow it up with a more explicit attempt to silence any man talking about systemic oppression they face by linking them to hate groups.

This is the binary worldview that all men are oppressors and therefore cannot be oppressed, and radfem's can't help but make it clear they believe this simplistic nonsense even if it directly contradicts stuff they just said admitting that there are men being oppressed. The proof this is the same binary mindset as the rest of the thread was talking about is the mirror belief that women being oppressed means they can't be oppressors which was made clear with the erasure of all the white supremacist, capitalist women out there.

Hey friendly reminder that any discourse which attempts to establish one oppressed minority as having "privilege" over another oppressed minority is inherently beneath your consideration.

Also the person making the argument is 100% someone who believes that they're allowed to be shitty to anyone who "has privilege" over them because it's "punching up".

Did you know that you can believe systemic misandry on its own isn't real while also believing marginalized men are in fact oppressed in a unique way due to their manhood intersecting with their marginalized status... woa.. waow.. wow... and.. maybe they should have words for that..

Not to mention. Not allowing marginalized men to have words for specific kinds of bigotry they face further perpetuates the patriarchal idea that male experiences are 'the default'.

For those who aren't aware, TME/TMA language works a lot like nonBlack & associated terms.

NonBlack is a term that was created to specifically focus on how antiBlackness has such a foothold on the entire world that no matter where you go, the more Black you are, the less rights, the less respect and the less power you have in general.

NonBlack, as a term, has been protested for a lot of reasons. We're not the only ones who experience racism, other people have dark skin too even if they aren't Black, people of other races can "experience" antiBlackness too, etc, etc.

But the point is that Black people are the ones who have to deal with antiBlackness day in-day out, with the knowledge that it is meant to target us for nothing more than our race.

Yes, other people have dark skin and yes, other people can be mistaken for being Black. But do they constantly have to deal with being The Targets of antiBlackness, on political, social and structural levels?

No, and there needs to be language to talk about that.

Especially since the biggest part of being nonBlack is that even if you are mistaken for being Black, you still have racial power over people who are Black. You still have the beloved trump card of saying "But I am not Black."

TME/TMA language works the same way. Yes, you may run into people who mistake you for being their targets.

Yes, you may be targeted using transmisogynistic language but you also still have power you can leverage over TMA people and you still do not have the burden of dealing with transmisogyny constantly knowing you are the target.

Do you have to like the language? No. Do you have to respect the way and language oppressed people have chosen to speak about their oppression? Yes. Yes, you do.

This has been a Certified Sex Ed Post.

If you add transmisogynistic things to this post, or get weird about antiBlackness, I will block you! Feel free to ask questions though, as always.

Except in practice the way I keep seeing it used is like if "nonblack" was wielded against Hispanic people to say they don't experience racism at all and have white privilege.

If that's actually how you use transmisogyny exempt and transmisogyny affected that's great, but I'll be real, you'd be the first. How I actually keep seeing it used is as the new language of TIRFs (trans inclusive radical feminism).

also, "nonblack" isn't phrased as "antiblackness exempt". Like imagine if a demographic of PoC that people can easily confuse for mixed black was called "antiblackness exempt". Can you fucking imagine

No two women have the same experience. All feminism is founded not on actual essential unity, but on political coalition and affirmation of shared political needs and goals.

Race, culture, class, birth assignment, religion, and countless other factors mean all women experience womanhood differently. Excluding trans women because we have a different life experience misses the point that all women have different life experiences. This idea isn’t even new, its not even specific to trans women, its literally the point Crenshaw and Collins and Mohanty and countless other woc and third world feminists have been making for decades now.

also applies to the trans men vs trans women discourse. Please stop yall're making yourselves sound stupid

the transandrophobia discourse is fucking stupid and bigoted and the same old exclusionary hat we've seen over and over again

but what really gets me about it is how STUPID it is?? i mean, no, i haven't experienced EXACTLY what any other trans person has experienced, but the idea that trans men and women don't have BASICALLY the same experiences is insane. the differences between me and a trans woman are imo about the same as, say, a non-op and a post-op trans person. or a trans person deep in a red state and a trans person that lives in new york. honestly i think either of those differences actually matters MORE for shared experiences. i've spoken to lots of trans people of various gender configurations and SOMEHOW we all know wtf is going on with the others.

also im not going to argue about this if you think trans men are significantly privileged then just block me now man. and also get off the internet and interact with real society, which hates all of us pretty equally.

like yall really think men are from mars and women are from venus. we're not different species, we can fucking figure out "hm...the way i feel when i put on a masc shirt....MAY be the way you feel when you wear a dress.......EUREKA"

and as for anything that isnt about your squishy personal feelings, but social structures and oppression and all that. like i said, you need to get out of your echo chamber and talk to real flesh-and-blood trans people across the socioeconomic spectrum, and you'll see that we actually all have basically the same shit going on.

less angry talk, but i would actually posit that trans people of all genders are not "socialized" as men OR women. we are ALL treated as "failed" genders. thats why we arent supposed to go in the public restroom that matches our presentation OR our agab, because both "Men" and "Women" are categories that society bestows on people, but only so long as they Do It Right*. you also see people of color, fat people, gay people, and disabled people getting slammed for "failing" to be their Correct Gender, and when that happens, you don't get assigned to the other category, you just fall out of the rankings entirely and into the category of "freak."

*im not saying that's ALL that "manhood" and "womanhood" are, but it is how society treats those categories. they can be revoked at any time

i think this is the crux of the issue tbh. people go "well society doesn't think you're a woman, so they must think you're a man!"

but. that's not how it works. we're all just Freaks to them. freaking around, completely failing at being Good Upstanding Men OR Women.

*trying to explain TMA & TME to a conservative* ok so you know the terms "veteran" and "civilian?"

she said, swinging at at least two hornet's nests

the ability of TME people to show up in the notes of any post about transmisogyny and proudly say "hi! i don't know what this means, and instead of seeking more info i've decided to loudly declare that i don't know what this means like i'm proud of it and consider it funny" is simply astounding

like if they don't know what it means how do they all know to congregate on the post and buzz their ignorance like fucking moths to a porch light. it's some kinda instinct. truly one of nature's miracles

the simple statement "i don't know what these terms mean because it's never been important in my life to know them" is itself a declaration and demonstration of the very privilege the terms exist to describe. it's like poetry: a performative speech act that enacts & confirms the existence of transmisogyny by denying all knowledge of it

Hi! These two words commit a category error and ignore the actual reality of how transmisogyny works in favor of an artificial distinction with no useful practical purpose whatsoever except infighting!

thinking about how the whole "trans men literally can't experience misogyny bc men can't experience misogyny" thing has done fucking catastrophic harm to feminism as a movement in recent years

like not only does it harm trans men & a lot of other transmascs by just outright denying a major form of oppression we experience and framing us as somehow on equal footing to cis men socio-politically- silencing us on multiple levels and making it genuinely impossible to get certain issues addressed- but I quite literally mean it does a fucking wild amount of damage to feminist theory and the movement as a whole, too.

the whole idea behind it is to basically decouple oppression from lived experiences, isolate individual forms of oppression, and instead ascribe all oppression to stratified individual identities. it's like, advanced victim blaming + systemic gaslighting + systemic isolation.

I have seen self-described feminists enact the most basic, lame-ass, run-of-the-mill misogyny against trans men/transmascs and just, like, deny it could possibly be misogyny because the target isn't a woman. shit Buzzfeed was putting out milquetoast articles about in 2014.

the effect of this is that people just stop considering certain aspects of misogyny to be part of the system of misogyny. if it's not misogyny when it's not done to a woman, issues like bodyshaming and rape culture- widely understood to be society-wide cultural and systemic problems that needed to be fought in order to make progress for feminism ten years ago- are whittled down into just a couple of flavors of "being mean to women".

which means feminism ceases to be a movement about addressing society-wide cultural and systemic problems that hinge on patriarchal views of women, and impact society as a whole... and becomes instead a movement about Not Being Mean To Women.

I'm just going to grab this addition from another thread because it's also super important.

Look I'll be real as an Old Dude who is pretty repelled by the turns feminism and discussions of queerness and gender have taken over the last 20 years: a lot of this is driven by the idea that we have some immutable Gender Essence which either corresponds to our body or doesn't and may or may not be correctly guessed at birth by the people around us. Which is like... Gender essentialism, but for the soul or some weird shit, whereby I have Always Been A Man even for the more than two decades that I did not know trans men existed (don't grow up in small towns in the 1980s, y'all) and even for the couple of decades after that when I assumed that of course I hated my body, all women hate their bodies under patriarchy!

Alas, the world does not respond to some secret Gender Essence, it responds to the body it sees before it and tries to beat the occupant into compliance with Acceptable Gender Roles according to the secondary sex characteristics you get stuck with, which meant I spent 44 years trying to woman in varying ways, getting beaten down when I did it in the ways that made me most comfortable, which is to say the most butch ways, and also getting infantilized and paid less and told at any moment a desperate longing to be pregnant would overcome me.

And now I can go stealth if I need to and I finally don't loathe my body because it turns out the problem wasn't too many airbrushed magazine ads (look I told you I'm old) but goddamned dysphoria. And to add insult to the 44 years of devastating, disabling depression, people keep coming along and telling me I *never* experienced misogyny and I was *never* a woman and I need them to go tell it to their therapist if me naming my experience makes them uncomfortable but *I know who I was for all those years and I know what I experienced*.

What's also fun in that "how much more remote can I get before I totally divest from society" way is that I do not know a single cis woman, not even the ones who care about me, who will refer to me as a man unless she's either trying to invalidate my experiences or shut me up. Isn't that a mind fuck?