Arra-Tech

Looking at the material evidence, it is plainly apparent that trans women are women proper - we are forced into the same spheres of labor as other women within our classes. Most of us are trapped in low-wage (often highly feminized) work, or are forced out of the formal legal economy and into sex work, long-term unemployment and begging just to afford food, and so on. As with cis women, a small number of us (mostly limited to the imperial core) are professionals who can access higher education, well-paying jobs, and so on. We can see plainly that, when all other factors are equal, trans women make markedly less money through employment than do cis women, cis men, and also trans men, which is consistent with and easily explained by our real existence as a type of specially-exploited woman, the same way a Black woman will typically make less than a white woman, a periphery woman less than an imperial core woman, and so on. We are just another kind of woman with an added layer of special exploitation, and one which is not incompatible with any other such layer.

On the other hand, we can look at the way we are spoken of and commonly regarded in normal social life. It seems plainly apparent that many people, maybe even most people, do indeed regard us as a third sex even if they would not use that term. Cis women, for the most part, do not get they/themmed incessantly the same way we do when someone is aware of our trans status. We're totally unwelcome in sexed spaces (bathrooms, changing rooms, etc), on a bio-physical level we are regarded as alien or as if we function completely differently from a cis woman or a cis man (despite HRT making us bio-physically extremely similar to cis women, and extremely different from cis men. The vast majority of trans women are either on HRT or desire to be on it). Even bourgeois trans women, take for instance the US politician Sarah McBride, are regarded with so much distaste and hatred by other bourgeois women. A phenomenon I've observed repeatedly in my own life is that when in public, strangers will consistently and exclusively address me as female, as a woman, with she/her, up until I have to share my ID (as part of getting a job, to access medical care, to buy alcohol, etc) - I have been unable to get the sex marker on my ID changed, and as soon as a stranger notices that, it's immediately apparent that I instantly become something "other" to them, something unknown and foreign and scary, and they don't really know what to do about it and usually refer to me very minimally or with they/them for the remaining duration of the interaction. There are countless other such phenomena we can raise to provide evidence for the fact that we seem to be regarded as a third sex, but I'll end there.

What's happening here? On a material level, trans women are simply women proper, but on an ideological level, trans women seem to be widely understood as a third sex. Much to the distaste of those attempting to carry out a metaphysical analysis, this is a contradictory state of affairs - the reality as it exists within the financial statistics and within the medical journals and in a visit with a client is distinct from the reality that exists within people's heads, in the realm of the ideal. We can attempt to pick one side or the other and say that it is the truth of transfeminine existence, but I see this as a mistake. Rather, I think it is much more coherent to regard the true nature of transfeminine existence as this contradiction, as the class of people who are truly women on every material level but who are also widely regarded as something separate from and foreign to womanhood even at the same time as those same people regarding us as such produce the conditions that create our special-exploitation as just another underclass of women.

For the most part, this is not done with conscious intent, but rather, it's the natural cross product of the general conditions of capitalism and class society, the current ideological and material formation of patriarchy, and the specific neuroses non-transmisogynized people hold about trans women in the context of these greater systems.

The same way the proletariat is defined by its contradiction with the bourgeoisie rather than as something with independent existence, our nature as trans women is defined by contradiction to both men and cis women on a material level but also on an ideological level the very concept of a "cis" woman - the idea that women are not a socially constructed category but are instead something natural, immutable, in possession of existence separate from class society and patriarchy in particular. Or, to put it another way, trans women are defined as the class of women violating the perfect Platonic forms of patriarchy as people imagine them.

they've molded the theory into an extraordinarily powerful weapon by asserting that even people who literally change the sexgender class they belong to cannot do anything to change the shape the patriarchy has attempted to beat them into

you spend the first x years of your life with your environment attempting to shape you, and then, like clay hardening, you're stuck in that shape forever. if you were not taught confidence, you can never learn it. if you were not taught humility, you can never learn it. if you were taught ideas that harm you, you can never unlearn them

if you truly buy into this version of the theory constructed as a prison cell for trans women, you're putting yourself in the cell too, aren't you? how can you believe in feminism at all if you conceive of yourself as forever stuck in the shape of a helpless doormat? if not even a trans person can do anything to leave the cell you've constructed, surely you have even less hope of it

no, obviously you can and will change and break out of the shape the patriarchy attempts to beat you into, and trans people and feminists have been proving that throughout history

Do I miss some foods I can't eat anymore without getting sick? Sure, but that's not what really bothers me. What bothers me is being excluded from a huge portion of human social life of which food is a crucial component. What bothers me is the stress and social stigma of trying to figure out what I can safely eat. What bothers me is the amount of extra work and cost that is required of me to identify, obtain, and prepare safe foods. What bothers me is people treating my needs like a nuisance, as though I chose to be like this - as though their brief inconvenience to check an ingredients list is unreasonable, when I deal with this every day of my life forever.

I don't miss the food that much. I miss not having to worry about what I eat. I miss freedom. I miss when trying new foods and new restaurants was fun instead of a minefield. I miss not having to plan my entire life around the need for safe foods.

You have to actually ACTIVELY unlearn all that shit. You can actually be trans AND hold TERF and racist beliefs, it is in fact very easy.

this is idea is particularly useful with regard to transmascs. we should all be mature enough to bluntly acknowledge that presenting as more masculine conveys privilege, but of course trans men are not afforded the same degree of privilege that cis men are. frustration with this + leftover cismisogyny bullshit = confidently asserting corrective rape, reproductive rights, etc as transmasc-specific issues.

even though reality very obviously works the opposite way, people believe that we are somehow transcending gender-based structural violence. and so they have to cut us down, often by asserting (overtly or covertly) that we are men and thus inherently responsible for the violence that we're supposedly escaping.

you can talk about v-coding, murder rates, wage gaps, etc til you're blue in the face and a shocking amount of people will just fail to absorb it.

they're trying to undercut the reality of our social position for personal, emotional reasons. a rational argument (or even just basic observations about society) will never satisfy that feeling and so they're easily ignored.

A disabled white man sees a disabled black man making positivity posts for disabled black people. He feels insecure because he's not included, so he asks the disabled black man if it's okay to be a disabled white man. The black man would probably get frustrated by this. He might even roll his eyes or playfully tell him no, it's not okay to be white. Even though they are both disabled, it's easy to understand why this interaction was not ableist.

A trans man sees a trans woman making positivity posts for trans women. He feels insecure because he's not included, so he asks the trans woman if it's okay to be a trans man. She gets frustrated. She probably rolls her eyes. She playfully tells him no, it's not okay to be a man. It should be easy to see why there's no issue with this interaction.

I get that the less oppressed person is being annoying here and should be keeping their left-outedness to themselves, but it is still kind of a shitty joke. If you feel justified in making that joke then that's your call but I don't see how one could argue it's not mean spirited.

It may not be transphobic but that is a deeply invalidating thing to say to a trans person that it's not okay to be who they are. I'm not gonna say it's oppression but it isn't kind.

Like, if a cis man asked me if it was okay to be a cis man, I'd probably tell him it's not okay to be cis even if I don't actually feel that way-- because even if he is genuinely feeling insecure in his cisness, why would it be my job to make him feel better? Because I'm trans? Because the idea of my existence is what threatens his right to exist as a cis person?

I feel like that's the message that trans men give off when we* ask them if it's okay to be men. Not "Hey I'm a fellow trans person that wants my gender affirmed" but "You need to tell me right now that you're not a threat to me or I'm going to cry and throw up."

So are those kind of jokes a bit mean? Maybe. But I personally think it's way more mean for someone to go out of their way and beg someone that they oppress to tell them that it's okay for them to be an oppressor.

90% of the volunteers were wealthy retired neurotypical cishet white women. That meant that for basically every call these people received there was a pre-existing power dynamic where the caller was well below the call-handler, and the call was consequently handled totally paternalistically, never with any sense that the volunteer might actually have something to learn from the caller. The similarity to the typical patient-GP/PCP dynamic was really striking.

Most of the callers were prisoners, homeless, or people who had recently stopped taking anti-psychotic meds. I think many of the volunteers enjoyed the feeling of the power dynamic that was obvious in these calls. If you spend most of your social time with people of the same high social class as you, I guess you might find it refreshing to encounter people who remind you that you've actually done well out of life, only from a safe distance and through a phone ofc.

We also got a lot of trans callers. Hearing how the volunteers talked to these callers was a really radicalising experience. "Why do you think you're a woman?" "Why do you think you enjoy wearing women's clothing?" "Is there a sexual component to it? Maybe something that happened in your childhood?" "What do the other girls at school think about you calling yourself a boy?", plus the obvious constant misgendering and pronoun "mix-ups", saying, "Oh sorry, miss, your voice sounds like a man's so it's confusing."

People would say this stuff during training too, and the people training us would say it was correct. It's not like they were letting their bigotry cause them to deviate from policy, bigotry was the policy. I remember there was one senior volunteer who was a retired cis lesbian police officer, and I asked her about handling trans callers and she just repeated back all the same bigoted nonsense everyone else thought (at the time I put that down to her being a cop, not being aware back then that being a cis lesbian is no guarantee at all of an absence of transphobic views.)

It didn't take long for me to start getting reprimanded for having too much empathy for the callers. I was an unusual volunteer in that I had actually been in the same position as a lot of the callers. I was trans (albeit not out yet), I was frequently suicidal, I had been on anti-depressants (incredibly I was the only volunteer out of around 150 with that experience), I had experienced CSA and domestic abuse, I had lived through times when I had a zero bank balance, I had eaten food out of a bin because I had no money, I had been heavily addicted to alcohol and nicotine.

It meant I normally had some commonality with all the callers that I could use to make sure I was talking to them in the way I would've wanted to be talked to, i.e. as an equal. I would actually let the caller direct the conversation rather than directing it myself (which was the policy), I would show genuine interest in their story, I wouldn't tell them to hurry up because there were other callers with "real problems". After a while, I couldn't handle it and I just left, not because of the stress of dealing with the callers, but the stress of dealing with the other volunteers.