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.

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.

*grabbing young queer people by the shoulders* listen to me. radical feminism is inherently transphobic. you cannot rehabilitate it or reclaim it or make it trans inclusive, I don't care what the people on twitter who claim to be authorities on queerness say. the foundation of radical feminism is nothing but bio and gender essentialism and biphobia and aphobia and anti-kink rhetoric and intersexism and yes, misogyny. it does not offer a future, not for bi people, aroace people, sex workers, not for kinksters, or intersex people, cis women, or trans people regardless of gender and you should care about those people. it will never result in queer liberation because it is an ideology of exclusion and hatred. you gain nothing by buying into the idea that half the population is evil by birth or by transition. you gain nothing by acting like women are perpetual victims who can't think for themselves and are tainted by their association with men. being a man or being attracted to them is not a sin. if we truly want to stand a chance of dismantling the patriarchy we actually NEED men on our side especially marginalized men. they are our allies.

the problem with terfs is not just transphobia, it never was, the radical feminism is also so unbelievably harmful. you cannot save it and it will not save you, stop drawing lines between queer people and join hands with them instead. remove people who are actually harmful, not innocent people who happen to have the wrong sexuality or gender or job. we get there together or we don't get there at all. we need each other now more than ever. do not listen to those who seek to divide us even if they are queer. we all deserve so much better than the hell radical feminism pretends is a liberated future.

I do not blame anyone who fell prey to this rhetoric, I know it feels good to have a common enemy and lash out at those you think are siding with them however they do it, but men, especially marginalized men, are not your enemies. and it's never too late to realize that and change for the better.

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?

Ever growing collection demonstrating that TME is frequently used to be synonymous with "transmasc" or "afab trans people" rather than all people who are supposedly TME.

TME/TMA seem like pretty BS terms, especially when applied to groups without regard to individuals or circumstances. Just as trans women can face hate as a "man" and as a woman, trans men can face hate as a "woman" and as a man. Hate doesn't care about the self identification of the hated. It just hates.

More importantly, we can't end hate of people groups by hating people groups. If you have a problem with an ideology or a behavior, hate on that, not on the group you believe it somehow exclusively and uniformly applies to. That is just bigotry.

Groups like "trans mascs" or "trans femmes" are not monolithic or homogenous. On top of that, a person's treatment is subject to variation, based on who they are interacting with and context. Hell, some can't even avoid getting mistaken for the other group!

If you want trans liberation, you need trans solidarity, end of story. Call out bad behaviors, sure, but don't going thinking, or claiming, that they magically belong to all members of a certain group, even if you've seen it a lot from members of that group.

For those who see discussions like this and think "claims of transandrophobia are just transmisogyny in disguise," I welcome you to learn about intersectionality and then to read OP's excellent pinned post defining what it means by these things. He has literally done all the work for you and it only asks you to read and think.

literally nobody is transmisogyny exempt. it's a form of bigotry whose essence is to pressure _everyone_ into their assigned gender roles and punish them for any deviation. thats just how it works!!! its ugly and bad and NOBODY IS EXEMPT

I'd like to talk for a bit about the genre of post that's like "sure you're a boygirl fagdyke genderfreak but do you respect [trans identity]?" I think these sorts of posts do address a lot of important points, such as:

Sometimes the [trans identity] is specifically relevant to the identities referenced, such as people who will do surface level acceptance of "boygirls" but then call multigender people problematic for using "contradictory" terms like male lesbian, or asking "are you normal about intersex people?" to point out the prevalent intersexism in the multigender community.

But if the [trans identity] or intersex identity being asked about isn't related to multigender community issues, it seems a little strange to consistently single out labels like boygirl and fagdyke that tend to be used by multigender people in these posts. All kinds of trans people can be transphobic about other trans identities. All kinds of trans people are capable of fighting for their own acceptance but not anyone else's. But these posts are pretty frequently just about boygirl fagdykes.

It reminds me of posts about a "theyfab named Sock being transmisogynistic." Are there transmisogynistic FTX nonbinary people? Yes, no one is immune from perpetuating transmisogyny. But these types of posts are still exorsexist.

Similarly, though I'm not saying the pattern of "sure you're a boygirl fagdyke genderfreak but do you respect [trans identity]" is necessarily exorsexist or transmultiphobic, since like I said they do address important points, some of which actually are multigender community issues. But people do use those types of posts to be really transmultiphobic and exorsexist, but in an "acceptable" way, because the boygirls are transphobic so it's okay to hate them.

Some examples in the notes of this sort of post asking 'are you normal about trans women?":

This assumes that multigender identities are only an online thing, only a young person thing, that all multigender people look cis in real life, that no multigender person has experienced real transphobia.

Again, this assumes that no multigender person "looks like a freak" for their gender, that they never struggle with transphobia offline. And straight up saying they have a "huge issue" with girlboy genders.

Multigender labels aren't "performative titles," they're our genders. This person is just straight up admitting they think our genders are fake, that they're only "titles" and not real fucking identities.

"I tend to Not like multigender people" okay so we're just saying the quiet part out loud now

By all means, keep talking about intracommunity transphobia. It's important. But don't throw multigender people under the bus to do so.

I don’t know why so many people in the tags of me reblogging the ‘is it okay to suggest to a man who seems kind of eggy that he might be a trans woman’ poll are so quick to jump to “it’s never okay to tell someone they are a trans woman!” No sorry that’s a lie. I know exactly why they keep doing this.

The poll asked if it’s okay to suggest to a man that he might be transgender. It didn’t say “tell” it didn’t say “force” it didn’t say “coerce” or “harass,” it said SUGGEST.

You were perfectly capable of understanding the difference between suggesting and telling for all the other polls, so why did your mind change for this one?

What we’ve all been pointing out is that they did a poll of this exact question but with every other major queer identity and for every single one of them the “I’m not a [gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans man, nonbinary] but I think [yes/no]” options, the “yes” option was way higher than the no. Whereas for trans women the poll was sitting at “no” as the majority for a while and now “yes” is only a slight bit higher.

Think about why that is for a second.

You, person who feels the need to write an essay in the tags about how it’s only okay with specific circumstances or how it’s not okay unless some theoretical condition is fulfilled, think for a second, and don’t lie to yourself, if you would’ve wrote tags about that on any of the other polls.

If you are one of the many people whose immediate reaction to the poll was to think of all the ways that trans woman would be in the wrong for a suggestion, seriously think about why that is.

The mere suggestion that a man might be a trans woman is so offensive to you, but none of the other ones were. I know you people don’t bother listening anything we say about transmisogyny but could you, just for a moment, consider that maybe, just maybe, we might not just be hysterical trannies making things up for some sort of oppression Olympics

truly obnoxious when people don't like the material reality of the patriarchy and just, like, make up a patriarchy in their head that only harms people who have the Innate Ontological Womanhood Attribute. ackshually the patriarchy is a special magical force that can tell if you have the Secret Woman Gene and target you from birth even before you yourself know you are a woman, but still manages to never create any classes of people seen as men who are targeted by the patriarchy. if you experience transmisogyny it's because the patriarchy can tell you're truly a woman and is punishing you for it!

like i guess that's morbidly gender-affirming for some of us, but it's an absolutely batshit analysis of material conditions. like the patriarchy absolutely has to maintain the existence of classes of failed men who are degendered & disprivileged under manhood in order to exist, and the natural outcome of this is drawing stark distinctions between men & women and punishing anyone who steps out of those strict categories. the person whose father abuses them for having an effeminate lisp as a toddler and wanting to wear skirts is very likely to become a trans woman, but not guaranteed, and they still experienced patriarchal violence (in particular a transmisogynistic expression of patriarchy) if they end up identifying as agender or a crossdresser instead. this is like. transfeminism 101.

If anyone wants to be shitty about this you can go through me first.

I hate that people call it transphobic to align this way, because, truthfully? What I see as transphobic is the insinuation that a flat chest and/or a penis is antithetical to femininity or womanhood. If you can't accept cis women that feel more comfortable with a flat chest, or having a penis, or whatever other instance of gender nonconformity you're gonna be shitty about, then not only is that real fucked up, but you're also a hair's breath from transmisogyny.

OP is absolutely right. People should be allowed to do whatever they want with their own bodies if it isn't harming anyone. That's just what bodily autonomy *is*.

Transphobia is an interesting term, because one of the core principals it revolves around is the destruction of bodily autonomy. So if you don't believe people like OP deserve that right to bodily autonomy, you're essentially stating that you only care about the fundamental bigotry that transphobia runs on if it has the "trans" prefix attached to it.

Leave people like OP alone.

When are we gonna get to the point where we stop looking for an "acceptable" queer target to bully? Cause this happened with bi people, then trans people, then pan people, then ace people, then aro people, then poly people, so on, so forth, and im sick of it.

I'm a non-op binary transgender man. I have a vagina! Given all the money in the world, I would still have a vagina. I'm a binary man who likes having a vagina. It's not a fetish, it's just a male vagina. Sometimes men have vaginas. Sometimes men *want* to have vaginas, and they are still men. Sometimes women *want* to have a penis, and they are still women. People should have access to whatever gender-affirming care that damn well pleases them.

This might be a hot take but also if it was a fetish, I don't think that should matter in the slightest. It's not like having a fetish is a big boogeyman that makes someone wrong. You can be trans or cis or kinky or vanilla or whatever about gender and it doesn't matter.

Bodily autonomy !!! Yes !

there is no path through which gatekeeping to keep people away from things like this helps us, so. go for it.

if ur gonna send me transphobic anon hate at least get the suicide rate dogwhistle right, ur right wing besties aren't gonna care about "43%"

"Fact is, nobody in the real world cares about you." begging you to do 5 seconds of research before you send random people hate mail

the ask in question is actively thanking matt mullenweg (ceo of tumblr) for standing up against trans people with the currently ongoing banwave against transfems by the way. just in case you were wondering what kind of impact you have and what far right transphobes are taking away from your recent tirades, @photomatt. (if you want to see what they said for yourself you can go check recent reports by me and actually do something about them to show you actually give a shit about transphobia).

this is your impact, matt (it appears i am now unable to tag him in posts), you did this.

the "queerest place on the internet", folks.

also just so it's been said, i've been getting actively harassed basically the entire time i've been here, but that's kind of "normal" if you're a big trans creator with opinions so i dealt with it just fine, but it has genuinely never been as awful as the last few days since matt's meltdown, he has actively made harassment on this site worse.

(also i posted about the 'fun' asks on twitter because there it's still possible to tag him in posts)

@staff

while i get where this comes from and it’s true to an extent, i reeeaaaally don’t like how people try to explain “trans men don’t [necessarily] have male privilege” with things like “some trans men don’t pass”.

like sure that’s the most obvious example (someone who is seen as a woman won’t have the privilege that comes with being seen a man) but you’re still acting like being a passing trans man is just a free opt-in to male privilege which is………kinda the issue.

not to distract from the point, but "passing privilege" as a concept is fundamentally broken & it's very transparent when people who otherwise get that will then turn around and try to slap it over trans men's mouths with a fresh coat of pop-feminism-pink so they don't have to think too hard about what we're actually saying.

if you can understand why the idea that pre-transition, non-transitioning, and non-passing trans women do not have male privilege, you can understand why trans men don't, either.

Hiding a part of yourself in order to gain (highly conditional!) access to privilege is not the same as having access to that privilege as a class.

Trans men are not offered male privilege as a class; some of us are able to access male privilege, sometimes, under the right conditions. If our trans status is revealed, we lose that access and risk outrage and violence for having "tricked" cis people into thinking we're "real men".

If trans women who do not pass/are perceived by others as cis men are revealed to be trans women, they, too, will lose access to the male privilege they may have had conditional access to previously. Some trans women can access it, under the right conditions, but they as a class are not granted male privilege.

And I think that maybe if you have to give so much up- connections to your family and previous life/identity, access to certain healthcare, etc.- and risk so much in order to gain access to privilege that will evaporate the moment you're "discovered", I personally would not consider that "privilege". I'd call that incidental.

Something that's a little tangential to this post but often I feel gets forgotten in this sort of discussion - you can manage okay without privilege! Like, you can be a woman and be fine! You can be a mixed black transgender asexual disabled poor immigrant in a war-torn third world country and still be happy, because happiness is a state of mind / life, not a social status. Medieval peasants, in between dying of plague and being lashed to death by their cruel landlords, danced, sang, cooked tasty dishes, got married, had children and decorated their homes. Privilege does not determine your quality of life, only contributes to it.

(I think "quality of life" is a misleading and generally ableist concept anyway, but that's another topic)

You can also be all those things (including medieval peasant) and be in a position of power over someone (including someone more privileged than you), and abuse this position of power, because privilege is a systemic concept - it reflects on lives of individuals, consistently over large numbers, but it doesn't determine each individual one.

"I know a guy and he's okay" is not an argument against the existence of privilege / in favor of that guy having it.

"I'm more miserable than my neighbour" is not an argument etc etc.

Lots of people manage to not be chronically suicidally depressed and miserably unhappy despite all kinds of social marginalization!

(I would say how much privilege impacts someone's life depends largely on the people they have in their life - are they sexist, queerphobic, ableist, just plain assholes, etc. But that, too, is another topic)

I love this for so many reasons!

I'm both trans and intersex. Not just intersex by technicality either.

I was born with both male and female primary sexual characteristics, it affects me every day. Chronic pain, discrimination from doctors, you name it. My life is a constant attempt at convincing the world that my body genuinely does not fit the binary of male and female.

I was still assigned male despite this, so most of my life has been shaped by that, most of my trauma around my gender comes from being trans. But still despite that, I identify closer with my intersex identity.

I do that because even within the trans community there is little understanding or respect for intersex people, we're often made to fit a perisex trans understanding of sex and gender, and that's frustrating.

This means that I primarily fight for intersex rights, even more so with how most of the world refuses to acknowledge our existence even in this age of better understanding of trans people.

I simply have to with how the world works.

But...

The fight for intersex rights and the fight for trans rights is essentially the same. It's a fight to not be limited by the majority, a fight not to be forced to conform to the status quo rejecting out nature.

It's as unnatural to force a trans person to comform to their AGAB as it is to force an intersex person to undergo surgery or forced HRT.

Both are violations of our individuality and our bodily autonomy, both are entirely fueled by a refusal to understand or adapt to reality.

The reality is that trans people are the gender they claim to be, and that intersex people don't have to be clearly male or female to be complete people.

This is why transphobes will ALWAYS be at odds with intersex people

To any terf or otherwise transphobe out there:

You're not our friend, you're not on our side. And you'll never be speaking for us when you try to put down trans people.

You'll always be our enemy, you'll always be our oppressor, and ultimately, you'll be left in the dust. Being nothing nothing but a villain in the grand scheme of human history, just like all other bigots before you. You can claim to be right all you want, but in the end. Life proves you wrong. You can't fight that forever.

what you have to understand about kink at pride discourse and the reason people discuss it alongside discussions of transmisogyny and things like drag queen bans is that trans women are seen as sexually perverse, deviant, and engaging in fetish simply by existing as a woman in public, and your arguments of "no kink at pride because of the children" is the exact reasoning given behind banning public displays of transfemininity

btw reblog this