.

Assaulter: *stops assaulting me to thoroughly read my birth certificate* oh my apologies! When I assaulted you for your gender nonconformity I believed you were a trans woman! I am very educated on trans identity and so I now know that is untrue. Now that I know that you have an f on your birth certificate I will no longer assault you now, because people viewed as cis women are never sexually assaulted for gender nonconformity.

and you know what? even if the issue being discussed WAS transmasculine “invisibility” (that somehow gets extrapolated to mean “everyone ignores trans men”) why in the hell are so many people pretending that “being left alone” is a gracious gift and not a death sentence for marginalized people? and I KNOW the people saying this know that because they are constantly writing about how daring to utter the first syllable of a trans woman’s name who did some fuck shit is violent transfeminine social murder. give us all a break. I know you know “being left alone” is not a gift. The social and societal isolation of groups of marginalized people is bad. Full stop. It’s bad when trans women are forced into isolation and slow death and it’s bad when trans men are forced into isolation and slow death. You won’t convince me this does not happen to any and every “type” of trans person. Social isolation and societal disposability is a problem for all of us. Being made invisible is being rendered dead to the living world. Back to my original point — that’s not the main issue transmasculine people are facing anyways. It’s not invisibility it’s ERASURE.

This is because topless equality has been a basic push from feminists for literally decades, until Radfems and NeoCons bonded over wanting a trans genocide less than a decade ago.

It's literally why the "no tits on tumblr" and other lesser SESTA/FOSTA consequences* like it were so jarring. It set back FORTY. YEARS. OF PROGRESS in the rights of people with breasts or perceived as women to wear the same clothes as people without.

Do not let conservatives lie to you about this. The majority of people in the us and the VAST majority of States recognize the right of people to not wear a damn shirt. It isn't obscenity, it isn't even nudity, it's just something pericis men are allowed that everyone else isn't.

Y'know.

Basic sexual discrimination.

"you don't experience discrimination/bigotry based on your gender, you're a man."

"you couldn't possibly understand how women are objectified, you're a man."

"you don't face medical misogyny, you're a man."

Trans men have been part of the community since the beginning. So every time you say 'trans men cannot be lesbians' or that 'trans men have cis privilege', you are 100% attacking the groups that fought to give you the right to even argue about who 'deserves' more rights in the community.

A lot of the earliest feminist battles were fought over people seen as women presenting more masc than was acceptable to the patriarchal standards they were held to.

Seriously thank you for this. I've read queer history, I know the first documented lesbian was a trans man.

The amount of idiots who say they don't care about or respect that history is depressing. Saying it doesn't matter because it happened before they were born and 'none of that is true today'/'we need to update things because the lgbt is not oppressed anymore' (real responses I've gotten on this).

Okay so. I'm stuck in a dead end retail job that doesn't provide insurance at a business where one of my bosses can't gender me correctly to save her life despite the fact that I haven't had a foot in the closet for over a decade. I pay for all my health care and medications out of pocket and effectively work pay check to pay check. Now you know a trans masc who doesn't have a glowing career and private health insurance.

I know a couple trans fems with well paying jobs who are very accepted and accommodated in their places of work, who have health insurance and had their gender affirming surgeries approved by said insurance. They haven't lived pay check to pay check in years.

I know many other trans people across multiple identity lines who are in similar positions to me working dead end jobs and just scraping by. In fact that's most other trans people I know, regardless of if they're a man, a woman, masc, fem, genderless, genderful, it doesn't matter, we're all kind of in the pits together.

The like 3 gender conforming/stealth trans fems I know are an outlier and frankly shouldn't be counted, but could you imagine if I solely based my perception of how trans fems navigate the world based on their experiences alone? That would be fucked up! So why do the exact same thing with trans mascs?

When the majority of violence and sexual assaults committed against trans people is directed at trans women, that is not transphobia—it is trans-misogyny.

I think it is important to understand that for many trans women, Whipping Girl is formative. It is hard to overstate how important of a work it is to how trans femme people as a whole understand and view the world. With that in mind.

That quote is predicated on a false assumption. The best current data is that violence is directed across trans gender identities fairly equally. That is, trans men and non binary people suffer about as much violence as trans women. However, up until recently almost all studies of violence against trans people have been focused on trans women. Trans men and nonbinary people have been critically under represented and violence against them critically unreported. And yet many trans women continue to assume that trans women are the most targeted gender identity, largely because of an over reliance on a twenty year old manifesto that made a very strong claim based on bad data (which was the best data available at the time).

This is not a Julia Serano hit piece. I think Whipping Girl is fine. But I also think that Whipping Girl is not perfect. There are ideas and statements I personally disagree with. There are ideas and statements in there that are objectively wrong, like the above quote. And there is a least one statement I simply find indefensible.

While trans people on the female-to-male (FTM) spectrum face discrimination for breaking gender norms (i.e., oppositional sexism), their expressions of maleness or masculinity themselves are not targeted for ridicule—to do so would require one to question masculinity itself.

This statement does not line up with what I have observed. I have observed trans men's masculinity being ridiculed, though not in the same way as trans women's femininity is ridiculed. She is wrong. I think this is an ignorant statement made by a trans woman motivated to overlook discrimination because she was pushing a particular narrative and therefore failed to recognize discrimination as it is experienced by another group, assuming that because it is not like the discrimination she experiences it does not exist. I believe this statement is indefensible. It was ignorant then, it is ignorant now.

Again, this is not a hit piece. I don't think she is a bad person, I don't think we need to throw out all of Whipping Girl. Lots of people make mistakes like this, it is an occupational hazard of making these kind of strong theories and statements.

But how many trans women take this statement as gospel and build their understanding of trans masculinity around Julia Serano's dismissive, factually incorrect, and at times even ignorant statements?

And this is Julia Serano's Whipping Girl. One of the most respected trans feminine texts there is. If we should be able to trust any text, it is Whipping Girl.

And that's the point. It is dangerous to view these sorts of texts as objective sources of information. And it's not just trans women and whipping girl, I am just most familiar with texts relating to trans women because I am one.

The queer community has a problem where we view authority figures in the movement as sources of objectively correct information. And when you do this eventually some authority figure you respect is going to say something that's ignorant and wrong and you will adopt that incorrect idea.

So the hrc bases a lot of their claims on identified homicide numbers. Which, of course, introduces massive selective bias. Using a pool of 372 identified trans victims of homicide, the hrc claims that 83% of trans victims of homicide were women.

The problem being that identified victims are not the same as all victims. Especially when you are comparing a known highly visible demographic to demographics known for low visibility.

The discrepancy in those claims is subtle to those who are not trained in data analysis, but it is such a basic and major error as to call into question the ability of the HRC to do effective data analysis at all. It's classic survivorship bias, I'm sure you've seen the story of the WW2 planes with bullet holes, it's that sort of thing.

And it is true that all sources agree that trans women (especially black trans women) are far more often identified. We have more names of murdered trans women than other demographics. You might be forgiven thinking this means trans women suffer the most violence.

But competent data analysis paints a different picture.

Lets look at "Global Burden of Violence Against Transgender and Gender-Diverse Adults: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis".

The first thing you will notice is that this source spends a huge amount of time going into exact methodology, what data was used, the source, what data was not used and why, and how and why it was analyzed in the way it was. This is what competent data analysis looks like. Lets pull some critical quotes from the source:

"Disproportionate violence burdens are experienced by transgender and gender-diverse people who are multiply marginalized.13 For example, transphobia, racism, and classism intersect to compound violence exposure for transgender women of color.14,15 According to the Trans Murder Monitoring project, 94% of the 321 identified transgender and gender-diverse people who were murdered in 2023 were transgender women or transgender feminine people, and the majority were Black, women of color, and engaged in sex work.16 Such disparities suggest the importance of considering intersecting identities in violence research and intervention strategies.13"

You will notice they acknowledge the data on identified victims is almost entirely trans women. What they do not do is suggest that this means trans women are the primary victims of anti trans violence, instead drawing the conclusion that intersecting identities are a key factor. This is important because of the results of the actual data of properly conducted data gathering. Here is their conclusion about violence across trans gender identities: "Our meta-analyses did not show significantly different levels of violence globally among transgender women, transgender men, and nonbinary adults."

"While we would have included homicide, we identified no studies that reported its prevalence." The first part is pretty plain. There is not a statistically significant difference in violence levels between trans identities, according to the data that was collected in a scientific manner.

However, homicide data has been completely neglected to be collected in a scientific manner (likely due to the difficulty of doing so). Instead reports are anecdotal - that is, we identify trans homicide victims after the fact, which means it is entirely based on demographic visibility. The source does suggest that it seems likely that black trans women in particular are disproportional victims of homicide, but no real conclusion can be drawn without further studies.

Given that general violence against trans people seems fairly flat across identity, and that intersectional factors seem to play a critical part in violence against trans people, I would suggest that anecdotally gathered evidence is the source of the discrepancy. Between a demographic known for hyper visibility (trans women), and demographics known for being practically invisible (other trans identities), it draws a very obvious picture of why the anecdotal evidence looks the way it does.

As a side note and purely my own opinion, I think there is a tendency for white trans women to claim the violence experienced by trans women of color, especially black trans women, and report it as general violence against trans women. But the data suggests that race (and class, which are often intertwined) play such a massive role in violence against trans women that I feel it is honestly kind of racist how the trans women community so often glosses over it, if it is even discussed at all. The simple fact is that a white trans woman like myself is much, much less likely to experience violence than a black trans woman, and that is a key part of the discussion.

Getting back to data, there is one more important piece I want to highlight. Specifically, how data has been gathered, and on who.

"Of the 94 studies, nearly all (90 studies [96%]) included transgender women, whereas 49% (46 studies) included transgender men, and 37% (35 studies) included nonbinary adults"

This is a massive discrepancy in visibility. It seems almost laughable that a study would include trans women specifically but not bother with trans men, a staggering display of systematic bias against trans men, and yet it appears that half of available studies that passed the minimum bar of quality to be included in the meta analysis did just that. And nonbinary people have it even worse. It is no wonder that violence against trans demographics other than trans women is less well understood and under reported in anecdotal analysis. Even the people actively looking for violence against trans people are heavily biasing their studies towards discovering violence against trans women.

I could go on for a long, long time breaking down this one meta analysis, but I think you get the point, and in particular how important proper data analysis is. The simple fact of the matter is many "reputable" sources are clearly not conducting proper data analysis when breaking down anti trans violence by demographic and making wildly incorrect claims because of it.

I have one more source I will be brief with. "Gender Identity Disparities in Criminal Victimization: National Crime Victimization Survey, 2017–2018". The critical quote for our purpose:

"Transgender women and men had higher rates of violent victimization (86.1 and 107.5 per 1000 persons, respectively) than did cisgender women (23.7 per 1000 persons; OR = 3.88; 90% CI = 0, 8.55) and cisgender men (19.8 per 1000 persons; OR = 5.98, 90% CI = 2.09, 9.87), but there were no differences between transgender men and women (Δ = 21.4; SE = 68.7; P = .76)."

You will note that the raw data shows higher violence against trans men, but with proper data analysis it is revealed to not be statistically significant. This is something you have to be careful of, there are tools experts use for data analysis that reveal that obvious conclusions from raw numbers are not always correct.

There are more sources out there, but I am not going to bother tracking them down. It was not hard to find these sources, these two major sources I found through simple internet searches on the first page (duck duck go, in my case). I don't know why you had problems, for me it was as simple as searching for something like "trans violence by gender identity" and looking for actual studies that talk about methodology.

The irony of comparing talking about transandrophobia to gamergate when this whole "discourse" started with people inventing reasons to harrass Saint and hacking his side blog to find dirt on him is not lost on me. And all explicitly because they wanted trans men to shut up. The excuses came later

using terms like "lynching" and "social murder" to describe a living, breathing trans woman who got her account banned (which she promptly remade at least 5 fucking times) shouldn't be ignored. it needs to be ACTIVELY CALLED OUT. it needs to be THOROUGHLY UNDERSTOOD why this is unacceptable.

trans people of color matter more than your white feelings. it shouldn't be controversial to say that. and if you're in the USA making statements like this, shame on you too! ICE is knocking down the doors of POC left and right, detaining us, shooting us, and you dare compare the experience of POC to a white trans woman who got banned off a fucking social media site?

and before this is PURPOSEFULLY MISCONSTRUED, trans women of color have also been calling this out just to be ignored by their own communities. it's absolutely appalling. so no, this isn't attack on isff and her orbiters because she's a trans woman. this is an open, constructive criticism who use the suffering of POC as a fucking gotcha and a buzzword instead of acknowledging us and supporting us through the absolute harrowing reality we're living in right now.

Omg y'all are deeply annoying. It’s the desperate need to win the oppression Olympics for me.

Pretending trans men aren’t barred from sports just so you can make a completely fabricated point and silence us is genuinely pathetic.