Someday tma/tme is going to be seen the same way as the phrase gold star lesbian.
I've seen a lot of trans women who use those terms say that we need them to talk about our oppression, that rejecting them is transmisogynistic because tma/tme has stripped it down to the absolute minimum to talk about what people who experience transmisogyny experience. The idea being that if trans women can't use tma/tme or something similar, it is impossible to talk about transmisogyny in any meaningful way.
This shows us something fundamental about how the people who use tma/tme think. In particular, that the only meaningful way to discuss your own oppression, and in particular transmisogyny, is in terms of comparing oppression.
It is a hard mindset to break from and very easy to fall into. It's also an astoundingly prejudice way of thinking. It is one of the major roots of all exclusionist movements within the queer community. When I compare tma/tme to gold star lesbian, I mean that very genuinely. I don't think everyone who uses it is a bad person, but they are getting caught up in something that will end very poorly and be remembered as this incredibly toxic and prejudice thing that grew out of this need to directly compare your oppression to others - or in reality, the wildly inaccurate assumptions you make about how others are oppressed.
And it all seems so reasonable at the start. I get that. I really do. Just like it seemed so reasonable and obvious that lesbians are more oppressed than bi woman, and bi women would never really understand.
I don't think most of the early rad fems were bad people. I think they were trying to come to terms with and explain the problems they were seeing and experiencing and many of them inadvertently fell into prejudice ways of thinking. They tried out ideas and rather than dismiss them when they proved a problem they became attached, dug in.
The same thing is happening now. I don't think the people using tma/tme now are bad people. But they have adopted prejudice patterns of thought, have become attached, and are digging in.
We do not need to compare our oppression to other's oppression to meaningfully talk about transmisogyny. I am begging you to stop. You've got to let go of this or someday, far sooner than you realize, you will be the thing you hate.
There are always a lot of people who say "How dare you! How dare you compare us to people who have hurt us!"
Do you really think that the lesbians of the past who built up radical feminism were not oppressed and excluded? Do you really think they were not the subject of hate and violence?
The reality is that a critical component of the creation of radical feminism and all the damage it has done since is that lesbians were oppressed and excluded and violently so.
The fact that we have groups of people dedicated to hating and oppressing us isn't something that sets us apart from rad fems and terfs. It's something we have in common with them.
