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#racialized transmisogyny – @taliabhattwrites on Tumblr
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Talia Bhatt Writes

@taliabhattwrites / taliabhattwrites.tumblr.com

The official Tumblr for Talia Bhatt, writer of romance, science fiction, transfeminist theory ... rather a lot of things, really.
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Babe, wake up, new 'Trans/Rad/Fem' just dropped

This week, I'd like to present a short, concise treatment of an important distinction in how different people experience transphobia, and in doing so formalize some terminology that I believe is useful to define.

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My critique of cultural anthropology and academic transmisogyny, "The Third Sex", will be published in a few days. Here's the introduction.

This Machine Builds Fascists

Consider a mechanism whose sole function is to classify all inputs it receives as one of two categories: One and Zero. The inputs, it must be said, vary greatly in temperament, expression, embodiment, internality, and so on, but that isn’t as much of a hurdle for the machine as it seems. It has been programmed with a few simple lines of code that enable it to differentiate between Ones and Zeroes within acceptable margins of tolerance. Ones tend to look and behave like this, Zeroes tend to be like that. These truisms are crude, simplistic, and even reductive, true, but they work. As such, the machine chugs on, happily reducing complex inputs to a blunt binary classification, its delivery-day code having been deemed “good enough”.

Of course, there is still the matter of how the machine should behave when its schema fails, when it is presented with inputs that do indeed prove to be too ambiguous to easily classify. For however high the correlation between traits, sometimes a specimen that simply defies easy categorization will confound its decision-making, often enough to pose a problem. Does the code need to be updated? Almost certainly, but legacy code is a stubborn thing, mired in dependencies and versioning faff, deeply resistant to the most perfunctory of edits. Too many now rely on this iteration of the machine, on this particular instantiation of its logic, and it is almost universally agreed that any changes are best handled downstream—at least, among those with the power to change it.

The machine and its users are thus forced to consider: In the case of an “error”, a “mistake”, so to speak, is it better to classify something as a One or a Zero?

Well, that’s an easy enough decision. The Ones, you see, are quite important, are believed to play a rather critical role in the affairs the machine oversees. The Zeroes … sure, they’re certainly important too, in their own way, in the way everything worth categorizing is—but the Ones! It’s really all about the Ones. You can’t quite go around just calling anything a One, you have to be certain.

So the module is attached and business proceeds without interruption. The machine spits out Ones and Zeroes like it’s supposed to, like it always has and supposedly always will, a binary system choosing between two options. Yet, anyone who knows a little too much about its inner workings is perfectly aware that the machine’s neat bifurcation isn’t all that neat. Truthfully, the machine has three outputs: One, Zero (with a degree of confidence), and “NULL”. It’s just that the exceptions are caught and sorted into the Zero-category, because that method of handling the machine’s limitations still keeps things running smoothly. It’s not much of an issue at all, and there’s no real need to examine the machine any further.

No need to pay attention to the way its NULL exceptions keep rising in volume.

No need to examine it for any shortcomings, oversights … or any weaknesses.

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"Racism is inherent to transmisogyny"

So, are white trans women affected by racism?

This is not a gotcha. I've seen a lot of people on here attempt to discuss racism and (trans)misogyny as co-constitutive, but people never show their work. If racism is in fact inseparable from transmisogyny, is everyone who suffers transmisogyny a victim of racism?

If cis women of color are subject to transmisogyny, is there no distinction between cis and trans women of color, either within or outside the West?

How does the inseparability of racism and transmisogyny operate in global south cultures where imperialism has shaped their history and economy, yes, but the extant regime is not one where white people are a present or meaningful demographic?

I know people mean well, but if you're going to make broad, sweeping statements about these topics, you need to be able to think through your arguments, realize what conclusions you are implicitly promulgating, and reason out whether what you're saying makes sense and matches up with history and empirical reality.

Because I've had experience both with Western and non-Western patriarchies, and I'm fairly sure in that regard, I am a minority on this site.

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