women (including trans and/or queer women) have the capacity to be misogynistic towards trans men. we are being treated as if we are little girls on this app. the word "transmisogyny" is something i see a lot more than the word "transphobia" recently. while it's okay and encouraged to talk about transmisogyny, i feel like trans men are being excluded for no reason on many posts. experiences that are actually had by all/most trans people are said to be exclusive to trans women. so then we try for transandrophobia and get shut down because trans men can't be oppressed, apparently. usually, i try to educate myself and listen as much as possible, but it's been monthssssss of this on tumblr. i feel like i'm being spoon-fed lessons on my own oppression, and i can't get down from the high chair...
but sure, shinigami eyes loves trans people... it just endorses people who want trans men/mascs to kill themselves! thats not transphobic! (heavy sarcasm)
'The number of trans men getting killed is so low so clearly trans male murder is not as bad of an issue as trans women murder'
'So trans men aren't getting reported as being killed?
'Exactly!'
'So are they alive?'
'...? '
'Because if they're not being killed/targeted at the same rate as trans women then there should be more of them?'
'...'
'...there are less recorded alive trans men aren't there?'
Laws being written: we are going to start dropping rocks on biological women if they wear pants and on anyone with a penis if they wear a dress
Leftists on Tumblr dot org: this could only be talking about trans women. It doesn't say men anywhere in that text. If they were targeting trans men, the government that thinks all trans people are delusional pedophiles would SAY trans men. Now stop donating to trans charities they dont help because I said so.
i think words like transandrophobia and transmisogyny are useful in theory, but in practice they drive division and end up harmful to the wider trans struggle. (explanation in simple words at the bottom)
i think it can be useful to have words to describe different flavors of discrimination we face depending on how we are percieved by society. the problem occurs when these words stop being treated as descriptors, and instead get used as labels.
i'm sure you've seen the TMA/TME discourse. TMA = transmisogyny affected, TME = transmisogyny exempt. in practice, these terms are used as "trans women and fems" (TMA) and "everyone else who is trans" (TME). there's a few problems i have with this.
first, as a transneutral person, i would be labeled TME. but the group of drunk dudes who chased me down screaming that i'll never be a real woman, they don't care about that. they see me, a trans person, they assign their own interpretation to my gender presentation, and decide to intimidate me based on their interpretation. i have faced transmisogyny many times, despite some tumblr users insisting i am exempt from it.
second, it puts people back into a rigid binary. as a nonbinary person, i'm well aware of how restrictive and oppressive binaries are, and this one is not any different. even if it's repackaged as trans-friendly, it still denies many people the entirety of their experience and only allows a little, specific part of it.
and third, i simply do not think that any of us in this community are exempt from transmisogyny. in my experience the difference between experiencing transmisogyny or transandrophobia is what the other person percieves me as. if you really wanted to call someone exempt, make it cis people - but also keep in mind that not all of them are. think GNC people, butches, drag queens, the list goes on. i find it difficult to call these people exempt, even if they aren't trans. and i acknowledge that if you're read most of the time as your binary gender (as in you pass, but i strongly dislike that word), you will face much more of one flavor of opression than the other. but taking the experience of only binary trans people who are read as their gender and calling it universal is incredibly exorsexist. most of us will have experienced both.
all these flavors of discrimination, transmisogyny, transandrophobia, even exorsexism and intersexism, it all stems from the same narrow bioessentialist understanding of sex and gender as strictly binary.
in conclusion, i think words like transmisogyny and transandrophobia can be useful to describe experiences with different flavors of anti-trans bigotry. however some people have started treating them as a strict binary of affected-exempt, and that is not rooted in reality or helpful. i'm inclined to say at this point, these terms create infighting instead of being helpful, and make us forget that the root cause of all the discrimination we face is the same.
explanation in simple words: transandrophobia (discrimination against masculine transness) and transmisogyny (discrimination against feminine transness) can be useful words to describe own experiences. but some people use these words to divide trans community into boxes. i think that is not good. it makes us forget we all want to fight transphobia. makes us fight each other instead, and that is not helpful.
"Privilege to be feminine" genuinely just sounds like bitterness and jealousy that our bodies inherently have traits that they covet that they think we are "wasting". Which would be transphobic as fuck if trans mascs did it to trans femmes, so idk why it's seen as acceptable to trans femmes to say that kind of stuff to trans mascs other than this misguided idea that somehow "choosing femininity" is inherently a more radical gender to be. Like when TERFs decided the most radical sexuality to have was political lebnianism.
You know. As though your gender and sexuality are things you get much of a choice in.
Transandrophobes need to start telling us where our privilege is instead of just telling us that we have it.
Like, actually, we don't have it. Nobody told us where to pick it up from-- is it at some kind of kiosk, or what??
Y’know how trans women have identified a phenomenon where, even though they are women and may have known themselves to be women for quite a while, accepting cis women will treat them as though they are guests to womanhood, like lesser women, or like they’re new to it, or as though they could not possibly already know what it’s like being a woman?
Some trans people do that at trans men with transness. Trans men aren’t lesser trans or guests in transness who don’t understand what it’s like to be trans.
yknow whats funny though
i never quite connected with mulan growing up
i always connected more to ariel... which i mean she is kinda more of a story of transition now that i think about it
she has dysmorophia/dysphoria(?) over not having human legs and being a human, she even collects things of humans so she can pretend to be one, and once shes been outed to triton he tries to destroy her connection to things that bring her euphoria
and then when she finally does "transition" to be a human, shes robbed of her voice, basically becoming almost invisible to the people she does care about
i think ariels story is definitely one that a lot of trans men/mascs could relate to, and i know i sure did
How about Idgaf if Man is a meaningful intersection bc I'm a transman and black and that intersection is fucking hard and should be heard out when I speak on it how about that how about we don't break the word trans men into little ppueces since you guys are so focused on that all other intersection seemed to be just SWEPT out the door with you people
So much pointless LGBT+ discourse could be avoided if people just stopped assuming they knew everything about the oppression OTHER identities face.
For example, if you’re nonbinary, you can absolutely talk about the struggles you’ve dealt with as a nonbinary person, and speak of the issues your community is dealing with. But if you’re not transfem, it’s not your place to comment on how transfem issues compare to your own.
And if you’re a trans woman, you should absolutely not be talking about how trans men “have it easier” or what transitioning is like for them, because you fundamentally don’t know! You’re not a trans man!
And it goes both ways- trans men shouldn’t speak on trans women’s issues! Binary trans people shouldn’t claim to know what it’s like to be nonbinary!
It even hearkens back to older varieties of discourse, like ace discourse. You saw non-ace people talking about what THEY thought being ace was like, because they believed that being LGBT+ themselves made them the arbiters of oppression.
Or hell, gay men claiming that lesbians had it sooo easy compared to what they went through! Like, man, how the hell would you know, you're not a lesbian!
Just. Stop! Stop talking about the assumed experiences of other people! Being one flavor of queer doesn’t mean you’re the expert on ALL queer oppression! LISTEN to other people, stop talking over them!
I think if people accepted this, 90% of stupid online identity discourse would vanish overnight.
That's because a certain contingent of these folks think that tranny is a term only trans women get to claim since, apparently, trans mascs are never the victim of this word (they say, while calling us shit like trannyboy as if adding the word boy to it makes it not the same word)
just straight up mask off transandrophobia. this post was made by a cisgender woman
Discoursing quarantine sideblog to save my followers on main from seeing it quite so frequently.
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