$115/$190 raised

Venmo: AGIEF

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your identity, your dignity and your worth as a woman have absolutely nothing to do with how or why abusive people lash out at you. the insidious narrative that survivors should feel special on some level for having been worthy of their abuse is battered wife rhetoric. it's the perpetrator-system of violence grooming you to accept, and even shamefully yearn for, violence it always intended to inflict. and women are so often complicit in repeating the narrative back to each other. sometimes it's very well meaning and springs up out of the solidarity of shared experience, trying to reclaim power from situations where power was wielded against you, but sometimes it's lana del rey sadgirl coquette I need a man who'll slap me around so I know he cares. sometimes it's eating disorders and self harm. the twinning of femininity and female worthiness with suffering, associating the scars of misogynistic violence with acceptance of one's femininity by somebody who hates you, is profoundly unhealthy and profoundly unfair.

bottom line: trans women have never needed to be identifiable by their abusers at a glance to be subject to misogynistic violence. they have never even needed to be out. remember the early days of the internet when online culture was so outspokenly misogynistic as a baseline that most women just never disclosed their gender, never went on mic, never posted pictures? would anyone ever seriously argue that women weren't subject to misogynistic abuse online until they broke anonymity? and that being the case, would it ever ever seem appropriate to hear someone had been doxxed or sexually harassed for disclosing her gender and respond "heh, proves you really are a woman"?

DOG

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dog dog dog

Last week I was at a meetup where I was the only transfem. I checked the groupchat when I arrived and there was a message from the organiser: "We have a newcomer called X, can you look out for him if you get there first?" I located X, introduced myself, sent a message to the chat say, "I have located X," and continued to talk to him until the organiser arrived. When the organiser arrived, she was not happy with me. It turned out my phone had autocorrected, "I have located X," to, "I had located X," which the organiser interpreted as me passive aggressively telling her that I had already done the thing she was asking about. Her conclusion: I was unreasonable and aggressive in responding to her reasonable request. My explaining what had happened didn't convince her otherwise.

A different occasion last week: in a local trans groupchat, a trans man sent a link to a drag event happening in our town. A few people said they were already going, some said they might go. Then a trans woman replied saying, "Thanks, but I don't really like drag." Her tone was immediately called into question. Her words were assumed to communicate: "I think you are a terrible person if you like drag," even though she never said that. Several non-transfems who had never even heard that drag might not be universally-beloved by everyone were upset to discover that fact. A trans woman simply saying she didn't like this thing became A Big Deal.

Meanwhile, at a different event again, a trans man told a group that he was straight and attracted to women, but he wouldn't feel comfortable bringing home an "AMAB woman" (yes he actually said that). It was quickly brushed over, and after he had left even trans women tried to defend him by saying "he probably didnt realise people would be offended" etc etc. In contrast to the examples above, he is not even aware that anyone was upset by what he said, never mind worrying about what consequences he might face.

Someone reblogged my week-old critique of Devon Price. They said I was wrong to describe Price's transition as [something I never even said]. They said I was ignoring Price's non-binary identity, all while they used the wrong pronouns for Price throughout. They implied I thought non-binary people were not trans, and then they came up with a nonsensincal analogy which positioned me as a biphobic lesbian and then they reprimanded me for being biphobic (a crime committed only by their own fictional version of me that they made up).

But their username was green, so I thought (stupidly) I should give them the benefit of the doubt and not instantly block like I usually would someone like that. I went to their blog to see what kind of person this was.

I found a vaguepost about me where they called me "binary trans". OK, great, the person who misgendered Devon Price while defending it is also misgendering me based on something they made up in their own head. I've been non-binary for over a decade, I've talked about being non-binary on here before, I have "they" in my bio. It's not surprising that people refuse to allow transfems to be genuinely non-binary while vigorously defending a non-transfem's right to be so (in fact, that is exactly what my post about Price was talking about), but it is annoying that someone with a green username is doing it.

Then, in a later post, they describe my committment to not misgendering Price as "passive-aggressive". They say it's worse for me to be scrupulous about recognising non-binary identity if i "misrepresent nonbinary existence to this degree".

So, to summarise, they:

Pretended a trans woman said things she didn't.

Misgendered both her and the person they were defending.

Made up a story about a trans woman and got mad at her.

Called a trans woman "aggressive" for the crime of...using someone's correct pronouns.