Every transfeminized person is negotiating with their social environment for a way to be allowed to exist. There is no entirely self-directed identity. Every identity responds to external pressures. Within feminist spaces, transfeminized people are expected to demonstrate their proximity to cis womanhood in order to be recognized as political subjects of feminism, regardless of how irrelevant that proximity is to their reality of being "seen as" and "treated as" women (misogynized subjects).
The idea that the social location of femboys can be similar to that of trans women (and that these are overlapping categories) assumes the shape of a threat aimed at the precarious recognition of trans women's womanhood (on which they must often rely to justify being political subjects of feminism) in feminist spaces. If we recognize that the social location of (at the very least a subset of) femboys is that of primary targets of (trans-)misogyny regardless of their identity or how progressive or reactionary their politics (or the politics bound up in the construction of the femboy identity) are, then we run the risk of, in the eyes of our watchful minders, proving ourselves insubordinate to the idea of women's liberation (as still primarily understood through a lens of sex-based oppression).
Our role within feminism often appears to be first and foremost to flatter its primary subjects, cis women, by allowing them to confirm their adherence to progressive values (which they do by recognizing our self-declared womanhood as "valid"). We are tolerated within feminist spaces not necessarily because our liberation is genuinely believed to depend on feminism (which it does) but because excluding us would mark those doing it as intolerant. We are tokens to be seen but not heard. Our contributions are regarded with suspicion, we are guests or interlopers who do not understand what it's like to be misogynized, not really. After all, we are AMABs (men) who "identify as women". If we didn't "identify as women" we would simply be AMABs (men). Our supposed community is eager to demonstrate that this is their understanding by reacting with anger and confusion to our rejection of the idea (which to them seems self-evident) that we are "seen as" and "treated as" men, that our social location is that of men (after all, if having been AFAB is enough to become a target of "sex-based oppression" then surely the corollary is that not having been AFAB results in not being a target of "sex-based oppression". How could we be so obstinate as to deny this?).
When we explicitly recognize that e.g. femboys or drag queens, by failing to adhere to the confines of their assigned/imposed maleness (even if not in terms of nominal identity), are marked for transmisogynization, we are accused of "prioritizng men", "believing in AFAB privilege", "being male supremacists" or any number of similar transgressions.
Trans women whose identities are enmeshed with and shaped by mostly feminist discourses are not the only transfeminized people. Many transfeminized people find the niche in which they are able to exist in contexts which place different demands upon them, create different priorities for them. A sex worker has reason to assume an identity that is conducive to doing sex work. A person existing in a transphobic social context has reason to assume an identity that can exist in such a context. A person to whom "transgender/transsexual" is a colonial imposition tied to medical gatekeeping (and with a class character hostile to them) has reason to assume an identity that rejects being conflated with trans womanhood.
There is not always a clear distinction between "true identity" and "mask". There is no final judgement, no identity that cannot be superseded as a result of its holder being released from fetters they were previously bound by or by coming under new limitations. Every identity, no matter how sincere, can turn into dead tissue. Sometimes a mask becomes your real skin. There is no way to exist without a context imposing its limits. We impose them upon each other as well.
There is not a single transfeminized identity the construction of which is not bound up with transmisogyny. Every transfeminized identity is a tightrope act. "Trans woman" is an identity that responds to a myriad of reactionary pressures. Pressures originating from medical gatekeeping, from colonialism, from considerations regarding identity politics, pressures originating from recalcitrant ideas within feminist discourses seeking to disprove our epistemic authority, pressures to distance ourselves from pornography and fetishism and anime and trauma and immaturity and misogyny and whatever else transmisogynists attempt to attribute our transfemininity to in order to dismiss us.
You understand the game that is being played when people in feminist spaces try to make the idea that we have so much in common with cis men palatable to us: We are supposed to accept that assigned sex determines your social location with regards to "sex-based oppression", gender is simply a personal identity that has no bearing on it - the social location of trans women is that of marginalized men who are oppressed perhaps, but not by misogyny (or "anti-AFAB oppression") like cis women and trans people AFAB are. Because people AFAB are seen as having shared "class interests", it is presumed that the same must be true for people AMAB.
In light of that, let me state the kinds of things that trans women have in common with transfeminized people who are not women or do not consider themselves trans in a way that cannot easily be used as a foot in the door to equate us to our oppressors (cis men): What we have in common is that we are among the primary and intended targets of transmisogyny for transgressing against the imposition of maleness (which does not result in us being "seen as" or "treated as" men, in us occupying the social location of men). That we are misogynized. That we are treated as existing for the benefit of cis men. That we are vulnerable to sexual exploitation, abuse and violence. That we are subject to expulsive dynamics resulting in social isolation and precarity. That we are subject to epistemic marginalization. That our femaleness (or proximity to it) or femininity is given the meaning of deviancy or sexual aggression, which justifies our exclusion from accessing the support/resources we need as a result of our (trans-)misogynization and frames any aggression against us as self-defense. That our transfeminization is used to lay the blame for almost anything done to us at our feet (after all, we "chose" this, we were asking for it). It is things of this nature that we have in common.
If we don't want our transfeminism to assume an increasingly racist, classist character, then it must concern itself with transfeminized people who assume identities in which transmisogynistic ideas are bound up (even when those identities and ideas are weaponized against us).
Here's a quote from andrea dworkin's "Right-Wing Women" (this is not an endorsement of her countless terrible political positions on most topics you could think of, I have no interest in laundering her image and this is not an attempt to do so):
Two elements constitute the discipline of feminism: political, ideological, and strategic confrontation with the sex-class system — with sex hierarchy and sex segregation — and a single standard of human dignity. Abandon either element and the sex-class system is unbreachable, indestructible; feminism loses its rigor, the toughness of its visionary heart; women get swallowed up not only by misogyny but also by antifeminism — facile excuses for exploiting women, metaphysical justifications for abusing women, and shoddy apologies for ignoring the political imperatives of women. One other discipline is essential both to the practice of feminism and to its theoretical integrity: the firm, unsentimental, continuous recognition that women are a class having a common condition. This is not some psychological process of identification with women because women are wonderful; nor is it the insupportable assertion that there are no substantive, treacherous differences among women. This is not a liberal mandate to ignore what is cruel, despicable, or stupid in women, nor is it a mandate to ignore dangerous political ideas or allegiances of women. This does not mean women first, women best, women only. It does mean that the fate of every individual woman — no matter what her politics, character, values, qualities — is tied to the fate of all women whether she likes it or not. On one level, it means that every woman’s fate is tied to the fate of women she dislikes personally. On another level, it means that every woman’s fate is tied to the fate of women whom she politically and morally abhors. For instance, it means that rape jeopardizes communist and fascist women, liberal, conservative, Democratic, or Republican women, racist women and black women, Nazi women and Jewish women, homophobic women and homosexual women. The crimes committed against women because they are women articulate the condition of women. The eradication of these crimes, the transformation of the condition of women, is the purpose of feminism: which means that feminism requires a most rigorous definition of what those crimes are so as to determine what that condition is. This definition cannot be compromised by a selective representation of the sex class based on sentimentality or wishful thinking. This definition cannot exclude prudes or sluts or dykes or mothers or virgins because one does not want to be associated with them. To be a feminist means recognizing that one is associated with all women not as an act of choice but as a matter of fact. The sex-class system creates the fact. When that system is broken, there will be no such fact. Feminists do not create this common condition by making alliances: feminists recognize this common condition because it exists as an intrinsic part of sex oppression. The fundamental knowledge that women are a class having a common condition — that the fate of one woman is tied substantively to the fate of all women — toughens feminist theory and practice. That fundamental knowledge is an almost unbearable test of seriousness. There is no real feminism that does not have at its heart the tempering discipline of sex-class consciousness: knowing that women share a common condition as a class, like it or not.
Dworkin, Andrea. Right-Wing Women. Coward-Mccann, 1982, pp. 220–21.
Obviously I do not believe in "sex-based oppression", nor should you. That isn't to say that I think assigned sex (or imposed gender) doesn't shape the oppression we face, just that it is not an extricable axis of oppression in its own right that neatly divides oppressed from oppressor along the lines of assigned sex. I do however believe that oppression is something that is imposed on us without our assent. We do not need to "identify our way into being oppressed" by saying we are trans women. That we are transmisogynized is a reality we recognize, not one we have to choose. We cannot allow any standard other than the fact that we are oppressed to influence the recognition of our shared oppression. It's our shared oppression that pulls us into relation with each other and nothing else. Our shared self-interest (in that regard) is a result of our shared oppression, not of our similarity, of a shared identity. That doesn't mean we're natural allies, there are many antagonisms between transfeminized people along the lines of race, class, imperial core citizenship etc. which frequently outweigh their shared transmisogynization in shaping their aggregate interests.
Trans women have made note of the fact that we are misogynized/feminized before we claim womanhood as an identity many times. But we must not make the mistake of treating this as quantum-misogyny, misogyny that can only be retroactively recognized as misogyny once we recognize ourselves as women. It is misogyny regardless of how we think of ourselves after it has already occured. We cannot be satisfied with saying "we experienced misogyny because it was inevitable that at some future point we would come to recognize ourselves as women". That we consider ourselves women and that we are misogynized/feminized have the same cause, they are not the same fact. Then we must either say "everyone who is misogynized/feminized is a woman because 'woman' is exclusively a class descriptor and not an identity" which is a pretty egregious idea considering that we don't have to do that and it's needlessly offensive and paternalistic to anyone but people who already consider themselves women - or we recognize that while all women are misogynized/feminized, not all misogynized/feminized people are women (I recommend this).
You cannot say that travestis, for example, are not transmisogynized - because they are some of the most transmisogynized people that exist by any metric you could think of. You also cannot say that all travestis are women if you want to grant them the agency to speak for themselves, which you must. It's simply not the case that all travestis consider themselves women and that's where you must leave it at if you don't want to turn your transfeminism into a chauvinist project. Ascribing womanhood to transfeminized people outside the imperial core who explicitly reject it is as much a colonial endeavor as third-gendering them when they do claim womanhood. You must accept the fact that transfeminized, transmisogynized, TMA people are a somewhat heterogeneous category. That is the utility of terms like these.
To understand the different transfeminisms in the region, it is essential to understand the nuances of different forms of self-identification. For many people interviewed, travesti identity is at the center of transfeminisms. Travesti is a uniquely Latin American identity category with variations in each country. Originally meant as a transphobic slur directed at trans sex workers, the term has been re-appropriated and resignified to name a political identity that asserts the right to self-identify beyond the constraints of gender normativity.
Argentinian activist Lohana Berkins explains: “As travestis, we construct our identity by challenging the meanings that the dominant culture assigns to genitals. Society reads into people’s genitals and forms expectations regarding their identities, skills, social positions, sexuality, and morality. It is assumed that a body with a penis will have a masculine subjectivity, while a body with a vagina have a feminine subjectivity” (Berkins, 2007).
In other words, the use of the term travesti as a political category performs an epistemic insubordination, transforming a concept derived from a biomedical — pathologizing — standpoint into an identity category based on one’s gender identity. Another key aspect of travesti identity is that, since many travesti people do not identify themselves with the term “woman,” it is a non-binary category: “Travestis have a feminine gender identity, but not all travestis recognize themselves as women, and when the term ‘woman’ is used as a synonym of gender, the experiences of many travestis who do not want to be recognized under the term ‘woman’ are excluded. I opt for speaking about ‘woman-isms’ and ‘female-isms’ since we share the experiences of being labeled within what is defined as feminine, but not necessarily within cis-hetero patriarchal molds (Interview with Letícia Nascimento, 2021).
For this reason, travesti must be understood “as a strongly political, ‘sudaca’ identity, which is related to language, to our region, and to an entire genealogy associated with a history of struggle in which our first movements got together in the streets to say ‘this is travesti identity’” (Florencia Guimaraes, 2021).
As stated by María Clara Araújo, travesti “is an identity constructed on Latin American soil, and I think that it is important for us to ensure that we do not translate this term when we speak with European and United States institutions because our experiences as travestis in Cali, Rio de Janeiro, La Paz, Monterrey, or Santo Domingo bring with them aspects that are very much from our locality, from the reality in which we are immersed in Latin America. And what is particular to this reality? The experience of a violence that never ends, of a continual crisis that looks as if it’s never going to end, and we are within that context that has a colonial origin” (María Clara Araújo, 2021).
As with the term travesti, the term cochón is used in Nicaragua, and it does not coincide with the binary idea increasingly attributed to the term “trans.” Cochón, cochona, or cochonx is used to refer to people assigned male at birth, but whose identity and/or gender expression does not follow the traditional norms of masculinity or homosexuality. “Cochón is non-binary because it is attributed to someone who is neither man nor woman, but this term [non-binary] comes from the North.” In addition, cochón is a term that marks intersections with race and colonialism; those who call themselves cochónes/as/xs are Black, poor, or live in marginalized neighborhoods (Interview with Elyla Sinvergüenza).
Cochón is another case of resignification of a slur, turning it into an affirming identity that brings pride beyond the categories proposed by the LGBT acronym, and establishes itself as a political subject in the fight for the rights of gender non-conforming people, particularly those with non-binary feminine and racialized identities. Cochón/a/x also allows those who identify with the term to distance themselves from colonial identity frameworks and categories, and to collectively construct themselves in community spaces. Hence, the term has considerable political potential.
Finally, some people also strategically use the words trans, queer, or non-binary because, although they are colonial and come from the “Global North”, they are politically useful to engage in conversations and build common agendas with transfeminist movements in other countries or regions, but always keeping a critical perspective (Interview with Daniela Núñez; Elyla Sinvergüenza, and Florencia Guimaraes, 2021).
https://sentiido.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Sentiido.-Transfeminisms-in-Latin-America-2022.pdf
It might be amusing to assume the voice of an orientalist anthropologist and talk about the US third sex category of the "faggot", but if you conclude from a quip like that that surely every transfeminized person in the world must actually want to be understood as a (trans) woman, then you have not conducted a thorough enough investigation. The reason you can't simply say e.g. "travestis are women" isn't because some orientalist scholar invites you to imagine the noble savages transfeminized people of Latin America as too enlightened for binary genders - it's because it's a political identity (which has as its name an intentionally reclaimed and resignified slur) that includes both people who are women and people who explicitly reject that identity.
Liberation comes from political action, not identity. Identity politics are only useful insofar as they are conducive to concrete political ends. It does not matter which aesthetic demands an identity satisfies. It does not matter which hollow affirmations are applied to an identity. What matters is recognizing our shared oppression, because that is what we must organize against (if our transfeminism is aiming to have any real world utility at some point). What also matters is that transfeminized people whose self-interest is not shared by all transfeminized people are afforded the right to make demands of our transfeminism as internal minorities.
If we universalize the experiences of one particular subject of transfeminism then we are bound to replicate those failures of previous feminisms which intersectional feminism attempts to tackle.
An excerpt from Kimberlé Crenshaw's "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Anti-discrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics":
When Sojourner Truth rose to speak, many white women urged that she be silenced, fearing that she would divert attention from women's suffrage to emancipation. Truth, once permitted to speak, recounted the horrors of slavery, and its particular impact on Black women:
"Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted and gathered into barns, and no man could head me - and ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man - when I could get it - and bear the lash as well! And ain't I a woman? I have born thirteen children, and seen most of 'em sold into slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me - and ain't I a woman?"
By using her own life to reveal the contradiction between the ideological myths of womanhood and the reality of Black women's experience, Truth's oratory provided a powerful rebuttal to the claim that women were categorically weaker than men. Yet Truth's personal challenge to the coherence of the cult of true womanhood was useful only to the extent that white women were willing to reject the racist attempts to rationalize the contradiction - that because Black women were something less than real women, their experiences had no bearing on true womanhood. Thus, this 19th-century Black feminist challenged not only patriarchy, but she also challenged white feminists wishing to embrace Black women's history to relinquish their vestedness in whiteness.
Contemporary white feminists inherit not the legacy of Truth's challenge to patriarchy but, instead, Truth's challenge to their forbearers. Even today, the difficulty that white women have traditionally experienced in sacrificing racial privilege to strengthen feminism renders them susceptible to Truth's critical question. When feminist theory and politics that claim to reflect women's experience and women's aspirations do not include or speak to Black women, Black women must ask: "Ain't We Women?" If this is so, how can the claims that "women are," "women believe" and "women need" be made when such claims are inapplicable or unresponsive to the needs, interests and experiences of Black women?
The value of feminist theory to Black women is diminished because it evolves from a white racial context that is seldom acknowledged. Not only are women of color in fact overlooked, but their exclusion is reinforced when white women speak for and as women. The authoritative universal voice - usually white male subjectivity masquerading as non-racial, non-gendered objectivity is merely transferred to those who, but for gender, share many of the same cultural, economic and social characteristics. When feminist theory attempts to describe women's experiences through analyzing patriarchy, sexuality, or separate spheres ideology, it often overlooks the role of race. Feminists thus ignore how their own race functions to mitigate some aspects of sexism and, moreover, how it often privileges them over and contributes to the domination of other women. Consequently, feminist theory remains white, and its potential to broaden and deepen its analysis by addressing non-privileged women remains unrealized.
An example of how some feminist theories are narrowly constructed around white women's experiences is found in the separate spheres literature. The critique of how separate spheres ideology shapes and limits women's roles in the home and in public life is a central theme in feminist legal thought. Feminists have attempted to expose and dismantle separate spheres ideology by identifying and criticizing the stereotypes that traditionally have justified the disparate societal roles assigned to men and women. Yet this attempt to debunk ideological justifications for women's subordination offers little insight into the domination of Black women. Because the experiential base upon which many feminist insights are grounded is white, theoretical statements drawn from them are overgeneralized at best, and often wrong. Statements such as "men and women are taught to see men as independent, capable, powerful; men and women are taught to see women as dependent, limited in abilities, and passive", are common within this literature. But this "observation" overlooks the anomalies created by crosscurrents of racism and sexism. Black men and women live in a society that creates sex-based norms and expectations which racism operates simultaneously to deny; Black men are not viewed as powerful, nor are Black women seen as passive. An effort to develop an ideological explanation of gender domination in the Black community should proceed from an understanding of how crosscutting forces establish gender norms and how the conditions of Black subordination wholly frustrate access to these norms. Given this understanding, perhaps we can begin to see why Black women have been dogged by the stereotype of the pathological matriarch or why there have been those in the Black liberation movement who aspire to create institutions and to build traditions that are intentionally patriarchal.
Because ideological and descriptive definitions of patriarchy are usually premised upon white female experiences, feminists and others informed by feminist literature may make the mistake of assuming that since the role of Black women in the family and in other Black institutions does not always resemble the familiar manifestations of patriarchy in the white community, Black women are somehow exempt from patriarchal norms. For example, Black women have traditionally worked outside the home in numbers far exceeding the labor participation rate of white women. An analysis of patriarchy that highlights the history of white women's exclusion from the workplace might permit the inference that Black women have not been burdened by this particular gender-based expectation. Yet the very fact that Black women must work conflicts with norms that women should not, often creating personal, emotional and relationship problems in Black women's lives. Thus, Black women are burdened not only because they often have to take on responsibilities that are not traditionally feminine but, moreover, their assumption of these roles is sometimes interpreted within the Black community as either Black women's failure to live up to such norms or as another manifestation of racism's scourge upon the Black community. This is one of the many aspects of intersectionality that cannot be understood through an analysis of patriarchy rooted in white experience.
Crenshaw, Kimberle () "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics," University of Chicago Legal Forum: Vol. 1989: Iss. 1, Article 8. Available at: http://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/uclf/vol1989/iss1/8
You must not make an identical experience of oppression the criterion for who is and isn't a political subject of transfeminism. A white trans woman from the imperial core who doesn't engage in sex work isn't as at risk of transfemicide (or travesticide) as a racialized transfeminized sex worker in Latin America who may or may not consider herself a woman. A closeted trans woman's experiences are different from an out trans woman's experiences. A transfeminized person who goes stealth as a cis woman has different experiences from a visibly or openly trans one. A Black drag queen who medically transitions (who has to navigate the racism and transmisogyny present in society in general and the drag scene in particular, as well as the misdirected hostility from mainstream trans activism) has an experience of oppression that is probably substantially different from that of a white trans woman in western europe who refuses to transition so as to not jeopardize her upper middle class lifestyle and convinces herself that not transitioning socially or medically is actually the most radical way to be a woman when you think about it (and that transfeminized people who have to navigate a world of actualized, directed transmisogyny and suffer the economic downward mobility and expulsive social dynamics that come with it are regressive conformists).
Shared oppression in one regard does not actually render us into a contiguous class with shared interests, because we are segmented by a number of factors that intersect to create our social location. If we overstate our commonalities, we justify those of us most able to make themselves heard speaking for all of us, to sideline the interests of internal minorities among transfeminized people. If we want any "general" transfeminism at all, it has to be a transfeminism that is based on solidarity. That solidarity must first and foremost be extended from those whose oppression is mitigated by certain factors to those whose oppression is unmitigated. A white trans woman must be a traitor to her interests as a white person in order to be a political ally to a racialized trans woman when their interests are at odds. We cannot rely on sexed/gendered oppression outweighing all other contradictions by chance in order to create a shared destiny (as tends to be presupposed in the radical feminist imagination and rhetoric). Unfortunately feminism must rely on an ethical mandate for its cohesion, which makes for notoriously weak bonds.
For once I will talk about myself.
When I thought I couldn't be a girl because I was embedded in an ideology of naturalized sex categories, I still presented in a way that made lots of people think I was a girl because I wanted to look like a girl and be seen as a girl. I learned about ideas like "gender identity" when I looked into medically transitioning because the idea of growing up to look like a man felt like I was rotting alive. Before I knew transition was a possibility I had resigned myself to taking my life once I couldn't pass as a girl anymore because of my age. I didn't pay attention in school (regrettably) and messed around with adult men since I was 13 because I wasn't going to need an education anyway because I didn't have any doubt that I was going to be dead before it would matter - thinking about the future was unbearable. I starved myself starting at about age 10 because I wanted to limit the effects of puberty as much as possible. That was the horizon of my imagination as a transfeminized child who at some point started understanding herself as a "trap". When I was 14 I read "The Picture of Dorian Gray" and the idea that youth was the only thing that really mattered really resonated with how I was already being led to think about myself. My boyfriend at the time (an adult man) had joked that the reason he was leaving me was because I wasn't small and cute enough anymore to suit his tastes when I no longer had to tiptoe to kiss him. It wasn't a joke to me.
I do hate the concept of the trap or the femboy for how it extols the transient beauty of youth, for how it tells transfeminized adolescents that there is only a tiny timeframe in which they can look like girls and to be satisfied with that brief amount of time and then move on and integrate into society as men. Am I wrong? I don't want transfeminized children who are like I was to see adulthood as the event horizon. Being forced to undergo completely preventable grotesque body horrors while the message being communicated to you is "the fact that your girl(♂)hood is a limited time offer makes it more valuable when you think about it", isn't that cruel? I can't accept it.
I will never hate anyone who identifies with a concept like that for doing so. I just want the spaces they occupy to be saturated with medical information about puberty blockers and HRT. I want those resources to be available to them regardless of their identities and regardless of their reasons for wanting them with no gatekeeping, with as little friction and financial burden as possible. I want these things to be completely destigmatized. I want them to occur without regard for the wishes of parents/guardians or objections of healthcare professionals. I want the (trans-)misogynistic death cult that tells them that only "natural beauty" is valuable to be purged from existence.
(If you, an enlightened feminist, object that they should simply learn to value things about themselves other than their youthful/feminine looks instead of pursuing medical interventions, then I sincerely hope you never had any kind of skincare routine beyond washing your face. And they're not at all wrong to think it is the only thing they are being valued for. The only reason I will ever accept for why someone shouldn't transition is that they don't want to, never that they shouldn't want to, not even in your utopian fantasy.)
I'm a transsexual because I wanted to medically transition and then I did. I'm a woman at least partially because understanding myself as a woman was a requirement for being allowed to medically transition (If you find my saying that surprising, please read Sandy Stone's "The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto"). I'm a woman at least partially because that's how I can explain the fact that I'm misogynized to feminists who wouldn't be able to make sense of it otherwise. I'm not being insincere when I call myself a woman but it describes a social location before anything else, it's a political identity. (It's not like I have a particular wish to be something else either.)
I'm also a trap because (beyond my sentimental attachment to the term) I resent the fact the concept of the "trap" has the stipulation built in that it is for others to decide whether or not it applies to a person, that it is an observer-based classification - a value judgement based on perceived sexual attractiveness, perceived youthfulness and perceived resemblance of a cis girl. I want to deny any would-be appraisers the authority to make that judgement, I'm making it for them. I refuse to grow out of it regardless of how much others may wish to romanticize the idea of fleeting beauty.
The history of the 男の娘 (otokonoko) concept by which the anglophone ideas of "trap" and "femboy" have been heavily influenced (even before the peak of the otokonoko boom, through popular characters like Bridget from "Guilty Gear XX") should probably also be acknowledged, although I can't speak on it with any particular authority (feel free to correct me if you are better informed). It is a relatively recent concept that has its origins in subcultures surrounding commercial properties (manga, anime, games etc.) and is somewhat disconnected from older forms of non-normative gender expression and LGBT subculture. There isn't just a single definition of the term 男の娘 (some contradict each other), it's not generally seen mutually exclusive with trans womanhood, either in fiction (Oozora Hibari, who is universally agreed to be of central importance to the development of the 男の娘 concept, unambiguously self-identifies as a girl in the text) or in reality, and many transfeminized people (including trans women) have been involved in shaping the subculture surrounding the concept.
The term 男の娘 itself is a play on the word 男の子 (otokonoko, "male child" i.e. "boy") wherein the character 子 (ko, "child") is replaced with the character 娘 (ko, meaning "girl" or "daughter"), resulting in a word that is read exactly like "boy" but written to approximately mean "male girl".
Broadly speaking, 男の娘 refers to a person who was assigned male, is by some standard "anatomically male" and also (usually based on the judgement of a third party, e.g. the reader of a work of fiction or an onlooker) cute and apparently female - often regardless of their gender identity. There are obviously transmisogynistic ideas bound up in it and you can point them out (e.g. the naturalization of assigned sex by attributing maleness irrespective of identity), it can be applied in dehumanizing ways, sex workers may be pressured to present themselves as 男の娘 regardless of their actual identities, and giving the assessment of onlookers primacy over internal identity is objectifying - but there is no need to extend your criticism beyond what can be justified or to equate the people who do identify with the term to its underlying ideological assumptions.
Do you not think you are somewhat out of line when you make sweeping statements that assert that 男の娘 are simply stand-ins for trans women when many of the people most directly concerned in this discussion (self-identified 男の娘) complain on their social media accounts about westerners imposing their normative ideas about non-normative gender onto them against their will? (Obviously self-identified 男の娘 are not a monolith and they are not the only people who have a right to participate in that conversation as the term is not only applied to people who are fine it, but this is what I have seen a fair amount of on Japanese twitter. I can't say how representative that is of a general attitude). Do you think Japanese girls and girls(♂) need the guiding hand of a US citizen (the most progressive people) to learn how to do their own gender the correct way? Isn't that way of thinking awfully condescending?
Does my holding on to the label "trap" when it's so obviously, undeniably transmisogynistic make me an insufficiently disciplined transfeminist in your eyes? I don't think it should.
I do not think we should be indulging and reifying the cis feminist impulse to make the recognition of our (trans-)misogynization (and the resulting social location) conditional upon us explaining ourselves as women. I think this dynamic is an important reason for why transfeminized people are not allowed to be non-binary. If we understand distance from (trans) womanhood in terms of personal identities as directly proportional to distance from (trans-)misogynization, then we are failing to account for many of the criteria that actually mark people for (trans-)misogynization - we put the onus on individuals to describe their identity in a way that is congruent with this identity-based conception of social location.
We must draw a distinction between acknowledging that cis women are treated as the default, essentialized political subject of feminism and reproducing this position. Both the idea that misogyny as experienced by cis women accounts for the totality of misogyny and the idea that non-cis women are less misogynized because of their distance from the essential misogynized subject (cis women) are mistakes in thinking. It is correct that we insist on our similarity to cis women (because we are similar and that similarity shapes our oppression), but we mustn't let that similarity become a condition for the misogyny we experience to be recognized as misogyny. The lived experiences of cis women cannot be the benchmark for what is and isn't misogyny. Transfeminized people are primary, intended targets of misogyny for who they actually are (not for who they are "seen as") just as much as cis women are. Their social location is determined by misogyny just as fundamentally as that of cis women is.
Even if you don't come away agreeing with me, thank you for hearing me out.
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