while people are discussing how misogyny shapes girl's bodies from childhood, we should especially consider how transmisogyny shapes transfems' bodies, all the dehumanisation we're subjected to on top of misogynistic standards. It's not just a coincidence that transfems are so often chronically ill and disabled from a young age.
From as soon as we learn to talk we're told our wants and opinions don't matter. When our self-expression is deemed off-limits, it's natural that food choices, experiences of pain & sickness, passions and aspirations cannot be our own either. Basic medical care is held over us in exchange for compliance. We're told our sicknesses aren't real. Exercise and fitness are used as a cudgel to coerce us into proving our masculinity. School sports and extracurricular sports are basically used as sexgendered hazing rituals, sexual & physical & medical abuse enforced by teachers, parents and same-age peers alike. Our relationship to domestic labour is that we're taught that domestic labour is how women prove they are women, so we take up that role aggressively as the only means of feminine expression we're permitted, but without ever being rewarded with recognition as women. And everyone else around us gleefully accepts the way we overwork ourselves to the bone. Medical transition is completely out of the question for most of us, so you'll very commonly hear how we tried to completely starve ourselves during puberty to prevent our body from growing, the only bodily autonomy we can afford. And what little choice we do have for medical transition is basically doctors subjecting us to years of puberty blocker monotherapy, widely known to cause lifelong chronic health issues, just to prove that we're really actually trans. Then once we pass that trial they continue underdosing us anyway.
And through that whole process we're horribly aware of the way that society talks about us, how the entire landscape of entertainment treats us as a punchline, how the news playing everywhere calls for our erasure, how laws shift to delay your medical transition another year every year, how grown adults will write fantasies about hunting down and dismembering us, and will actually coordinate harassment and assault circles to target us, how the police & parents & teachers & any authorities won't do anything to protect us against that, instead preferring to enthusiastically call you by your deadname over your grave. They all want us dead. And so we play the part. We hide, we shrink ourselves, recluse into the corners of society to find solace. Dissociate from our already neglected bodies. Hope that a safety net will divine itself upon us by chance when we have no control over the forces dictating our lives. And kill ourselves if it never comes.
That's only really covering the socially acceptable ways that we're physically transmisogynised. All the things that parents and society can pull while still calling themselves "inclusive", "supporting", "good parents". All the ways that are entirely protected by law. But we're not protected by the law anyways, we're seen as acceptable targets. If we're unlucky enough to be birthed by bigots, then we might be forcibly starved, shaved and bleached and lacerated, have our bones beaten and broken and reshaped, murdered, disowned and dumped on the side of the highway, kidnapped into evangelical torture camps or military service... The list of horrific things I've heard done to my sisters are truly endless
2087
tangentwithtanner
andulkaphoto
