A Polite Melody

The kid was picked up by an ambulance 30 minutes later.

Now as an adult working in security I get SO MANY folks- upper-middle aged mostly- coming to me to 'rat out' people they think are faking it.

I was once sent into a bathroom because a client demanded that the "fucker won't get out, so go drag them out"- I was NEVER going to do that, so I did a wellness check instead. You know who it was? A person recently released from the hospital after a car accident. They had a hole in their skull and major hearing loss. They couldn't answer the owner because they couldn't HEAR the owner.

Another time about a homeless man who got around town by kicking the ground from his wheelchair. "You know he doesn't actually need that thing, his legs work fine, it's just for pity points"- Oh, so he's not paralyzed, his wheelchair is performative? Funny story Dale, I actually know that guy, he was backed over by a truck and has chronic pain from his shattered pelvis. But sure, let's make him stand up and walk everywhere so nobody feels too bad for him and tries to help him or something.

"She doesn't need that scooter, I've seen her get out of it."

"Look how fat he is, because he just rides around and refuses to get up."

"She doesn't really need that cane- she comes here without it all the time"

Whether that be through a feminist lens regarding manhood or masculinity only through the analysis of cis patriarchal hierarchy, and/or an uncritical repetition of gendered norms produced by such a system.

So what ends up happening when a transgender man explains he is disempowered, and disempowered specifically in relationship to being a man and how the ideas (just like this) attached to it effect him, the only conclusion they can come to is that he must be implying he isn't a man, that he is misgendering himself or undermining his identity, or that he is weak and failing to live up to it- or that he is lying.

The complicated marginalization of trans manhood as manhood is so radically contradictory to the patriarchal values of power which men are expected to fulfill, and so contradictory to the intensely cis-normative approach to feminism and gendered oppression, that his experiences end up in a placeless void of compounded invalidation. Although coming from the very same place.

Enough that to even have acknowledgment for his experience of gendered oppression, his identity as a man must be severed from the very context of its existence. Just transgender, just a generic, unspecific transphobia. Denying the specific modality which produced the reality of his transgender existence. Cutting his social experience into pieces, either cutting out the manhood, or cutting out the weakness.

This continues on his invisibility, furthering the doubt of the validity of his own reality. Feeding into the inevitability that his struggle will go unnoticed and uncared for, and will not receive the attention needed to help him, or to change these things.

Ironically and integrally, all of this enabling his marginalization specifically because- well because he is a man.

-All trans people are whichever gender their attacker can use to hate and denigrate them most effectively, and face similar and overlapping (never opposite) forms of discrimination

-Transmisogyny and transandrophobia are both unique ASPECTS of this discrimination that CAN be experienced by any trans person (bc bigotry is stored in the bigot), but are most OFTEN used against people perceived as transfemine and transmasculine respectively

-There are unique experiences and ways these forms of oppression intertwine with general forms of misogyny and the oppression of men seen as not performing the Correct Masculinity (non-white cis straight and able bodied masc people). These unique forms of oppression need language and description and to be talked about in order to articulate and fight against them, HOWEVER, they are not and never will be the OPPOSITE or "better version" of what the trans person perceived as the Other End of that spectrum of oppression is battling. They have LARGE overlaps of who is touched by them and in what circumstances, of how they hold people away from jobs or places in society, and of how they are used to punish us for being the Wrong Genders in the Wrong Way.

-Intersex, nonbinary, agender, two-spirit, and many people presenting as a butch woman or a femme man are especially often affected by any and ALL forms of transphobia. When you start separating people into identity groups by the TYPES of discrimination they can face, rather than their CLAIMED identities, you are inevitably cutting out everyone on the borders and overlap of that type of discrimination while also presenting a false "us v them," "TMA vs those Others," dichotomy that is NOT useful. This method sorts other people by the assumptions of the speaker and their experiences rather than the identity they claim, erases everyone & their experiences in the grey in-between and overlaps, and fails to articulate anything about the oppression faced that the original conversations don't already cover. It also leans into the idea that anyone can be EXEMPT from a type of bigotry, which again fails to take into account that the assumptions of who you are and should be are stored IN THE BIGOT - for an example, look at the transmisogyny facing cis women (especially black women) who look "too masculine" in sports.

-Trans people all face both unique and overlapping forms of discrimination, all of which are manifestations of a mixture of racism sexism classism and transphobia, and all of which have more in common with other forms of trans and gender discrimination than they have discrete, separate, or "opposite" experiences of oppression. There is no core of trans people experiencing something incomprehensibly, radically different than another by gender presentation in the USA. We are all in this together, we are all suffering attacks from many of the same places people and institutions, and it does us FAR more good as a community to recognize what we have in common (IE trans women being banned from sports in similar ways to the trans men being banned from many for the last several decades) than arguing over who has it worse, who has it better in an active genocide, and who is "exempt" from oppression.

istg if some of you werent trans you'd be terfs your view of gender is just as fucking strict. you're not doing anything for transfems nor the greater queer community. do transfems and trans women deal with more problems compared to the rest of the community? absolutely yes!! should discussing transfem specific issues be brushed off as just "infighting"? absolutely no!! but tearing down our tmasc brothers is doing nothing to help. trans men ALSO experience misogyny and a lot fucking of it.

call out bad behavior when you see it. uplift those who are good to you and hold accountable those who aren't. they want us all DEAD, doesn't matter which way. do not let more division take place in our community, especially in a time like this. especially towards transfems and transmascs, trans women and trans men.

intersectionality. intersectionality.

You should be extremely suspicious of any movement attempting to paint any part of society or history as simple. In any direction. For any reason.

are u guys hearing this

It tends to be backed by the position that trans people need to “put in the effort to appear as their gender” else they aren’t really their stated gender. It almost always gets down to, “you’re not actually living your life as a man.”

And that’s where you see it’s all truscum essentialism bullshit. What about how I go about my life needs to change now that I’ve started putting testosterone in my body? Why does it need to change? (What even is “living more like a man?”) The answer is that there have been some changes that I’ve needed to adapt to, but that I’ve been living my life pretty much exactly as before because I’m just being myself. If I like the way I dress, why does that need to change now? If I “act feminine”, so what? I’m being me, and that’s what matters.

And it’s unfortunate that a lot of this rhetoric comes from people who have had to work extremely hard to present themselves in a certain way to be taken seriously enough to be able to medically transition in the past. It’s a manifestation of the “I had to go through x, so now anyone else has to go through x.” Trans people of the past had to perform their genders to a level most cis people aren’t even required to in order to have accessed transition, and they continue to push for this standard themselves. The other group who gloms onto this are often people who have a lot of dysphoria and, if in a position like mine, would start presenting a lot differently than I have been now that I’ve started my transition journey. And they look at me and see someone getting what they want and “not even trying” because I’m not getting the results out of it that they want, because I still look feminine in my style though T has changed my body, and that’s not what they would want.

If a trans man weren’t a man, he wouldn’t be trans.

His claiming of man as his gender is the exact thing he is being oppressed for.

This is how intersectionality as a framework is supposed to be used to look at this, not, “man doesn’t add another oppressive force.”

And before I get, “but if man doesn’t add an oppressive force, how can the oppression be intersectional. Isn’t that just transphobia now?”

That’s still a huge misunderstanding of intersectionality, and I’m not sure I’m going to be able to be the one to help here.

But simply, the best try I have, is that the patriarchy and sexism still create something else which oppresses trans men that isn’t “just transphobia”. It targets them specifically for claiming manhood, as well as for anatomy they may have been born with as trans men which society uses to see them as being not men, and social knowledge of them “having been a woman”…

Manhood doesn’t add protection for trans men except in the extreme circumstance of being absolutely stealth (as in you’ve managed to have a life where no one you have to interact with for the rest of your life will ever be able to figure out that you’re trans, and you’ve cut off anyone who knew you pre-transition).

And it fascinates me that people like to claim that non-passingness means that trans men will be seen as precious little girl flowers who are cherished. Because often we have mixed sex characteristics. And intersex people and trans women talk extensively about how having mixed sex characteristics is dangerous. But we’re never thought of as having mixed sex characteristics, only as perfectly stealth or pre-everything. And why is it that stealthing privilege is considered for trans men, but not trans women?

Oh, because women are oppressed anyway so they can’t be safe really? Okay then why are pre-everything trans men so safe? If a person who is assumed a woman is actually a trans man, that’s someone who will be treated as harmless and beautiful, and if that person assumed to be a woman is actually a trans woman, that someone will still be at the mercy of misogynists? How does that work? Are we really doing a fucking “they can always tell”?

Or maybe it’s that a trans man can state that he’s a man and the oppression would stop? I can tell you that the opposite is true; that asserting you’re a man when someone has assumed you’re a woman and is mistreating you for that, only gets you treated worse. And again, why is this something only available to trans men? Can people not lie to try to be safer? Is that not what stealthing and closeting are to a degree?