I Love Trans Men

have you noticed that it's "trans men are men" and "trans women are women" but "nonbinary people are valid?"

have you noticed that it's "love trans women" and "love trans men" but "respect nonbinary people?"

have you noticed it's "brothers" and "sisters" but not "siblings?"

have you noticed that it's "transfem" and "transmasc" but not transneutral, transandrogynous, or otherwise?

have you noticed that nonbinary characters are sorted into "masc" and "fem" but not allowed to be anything in-between or outside?

have you noticed that it's "lesbian" and "gay" but not cenelian, or enbian, or gai, or strayt, or any other nonbinary-focused attraction label?

have you noticed that it's "yaoi" or "yuri" but any nonbinary equivalents are jokes?

have you noticed that everything is this or that?

have you noticed the binary?

have you noticed?

have you noticed?

have you noticed?

first, it turns every trans man in a queer space into a potential threat. not because of anything he did, but because the category "man" has been collapsed into "danger" so completely that people stop asking questions once they've filed you there. you transitioned, so now you're on the other side of the glass. you're the thing people lock the door against. congratulations on your privilege, apparently.

second — and this is the part that makes me want to put my phone through a wall — it erases the fact that a huge number of trans men were on the receiving end of male violence before they ever came out. and during. and after. the same queer spaces that treat you like a predator will also talk over you when you try to say that you were preyed upon, because that doesn't fit the framework they built. if you're a man now, your victimhood is inconvenient. it complicates the clean binary of who hurts and who gets hurt, and a lot of people would rather keep that binary intact than sit with the mess.

so you get this impossible position where you are simultaneously too dangerous to be trusted in women's and femme spaces and too privileged to claim you were ever harmed in them. both of those things cannot be true, but they get applied to the same person in the same conversation and nobody blinks.

and i want to be really clear about what i'm not saying. i'm not saying trans men don't benefit from being read as men in certain contexts. i'm not saying misogyny stops being a thing that exists. i'm not saying that transmasculine people are incapable of being harmful — anyone is capable of being harmful, that's not a gendered trait, that's a human one. what i am saying is that the current framework a lot of queer spaces use to talk about masculinity does not have room for a person who was assaulted by men, who developed a fear of men so severe that proximity to them makes his skin crawl, and who then gets treated as the threat when he walks into the room. that's not privilege analysis. that's just not looking at him.

trans men are not a monolith. some of us pass completely and navigate the world with all the social ease that comes with being read as a cis man. some of us don't pass at all and eat the specific kind of violence that comes from being visibly trans in public. most of us are somewhere in between on any given day depending on what we're wearing and whether we opened our mouths. privilege is not a light switch. it is not something that flipped the day you started testosterone. and even for the ones who do pass — passing does not retroactively undo what happened to you before you did.

the profiling and the erasure aren't separate problems. they're the same problem wearing two hats. if you refuse to see trans men as people who can be vulnerable, you will always see them as people who are only capable of causing harm. and if you only see them as capable of causing harm, you will never ask what was done to them. it's a closed loop, and it keeps itself running by making sure nobody looks too closely at the people caught inside it.

So, if any trans men are being told about this, it’s not true!! Smoking will not change your voice, at least not until you’re about forty years down the line and you’ve already irreparably destroyed your lungs and throat and mouth and pretty much every other organ in your body. When you hear heavy smokers with deeper, scratchier voices it is literally because their vocal cords have been ruined. This is not a passive effect of smoking, it is a very very damaging one!

It’s simply not worth it! There will be no meaningful changes except terrible ones. Voice training will do a lot more for you than cigarettes will, I promise that the people urging you to start smoking as a voice training method do not have your best interests at heart!

(And you know what, this also goes for not eating due to the idea that starving yourself will decrease your chest size. Like with smoking, there will be no meaningful changes except terrible ones. Your body is worth so much more than that and there will always be healthier alternatives!)

(Btw, afaik smoking only has this effect on estrogen from HRT. Estrogen that AFAB bodies produce naturally is not affected, so smoking is still bad for trans men)

I actually used to follow ISFF on an old account and early on with this one.

I liked that she was so transfem positive, especially in a time where I didn't really know many other trans women in my life.

I thought she was funny.

One post was the scene from the PS1 FF7 where Aerith and Cloud are outside Don Corneo's mansion and Aerith tells Cloud he should dress up as a woman to sneak in and her text box was replaced with "I have a suggestion..." I thought was really funny. Cause yeah, Aerith was awful quick to jump to that suggestion.

I was also going through a bit of a difficult time with some trans men in my life and her remarks on trans men and how trans women are treated as a whole felt like they were validating my feelings and frustrations. It stoked my frustrations with cis people, with being a trans person, with being a trans woman in particular.

It made me more confrontational with other people, I was starting arguments, cutting people off in ways I hadn't before. Truth be told, it made me insufferable. I even had some blow-up with a coworker because she made some comment akin to "welcome to womanhood" over something I said. Which admittedly, was shitty and patronizing, but I had a more knee-jerk reaction which ended up starting a fight. Normally I'm more more sensible about picking my battles and starting a spat like this with a coworker is a dumb move because I loved my job and I gotta go to work to pay for my needs and it's not like my coworker was going away any time soon for the same reason. I just needlessly started a bitterness that didn't need to exist when I just could have vented to my friends about it and moved on.

But her positions kept getting more and more extreme, being more pushy about getting men and boys on HRT, being more vitriolic towards trans men as a whole. Then she started the whole TME/TMA discussion which felt like gender essentialism with extra steps the way she talked about it.

Then there was the pedophile apologia. That was the final straw. I read that post and it sent chills up my spine. It was one of the worst possible battles for a trans woman in particular to fight because it would just give terfs ammo for turning people who are neutral towards trans people against us. Yes there are, in fact, people who are neutral about trans people who just see us as regular people, I know cause I work with them every single day. I felt betrayed, heartbroken even, by someone I actually found some comfort in and as a result I distanced myself from her, her group, her behavior.

And you know what?

My life got better.

I became more patient, less confrontational, I patched things up with the trans men in my life and they are some of my biggest supporters and best friends. They are the most ride or die people in my life these days. I have better, healthier relationships with other trans women, I'm less confrontational with cis people, and I became less obsessed with my own misery as a trans woman. I started letting go of shit easier and now, I actually have done way more to persuade cis people into being more open-minded about trans people as whole by being more easy going and not getting on my soap box to talk about my misery to anyone who looks my direction.

I say this because I think a lot of other trans women support her for the same reason. She does an excellent job of making you feel validated. Making you feel seen. Acknowledging your pain and your frustrations.

All of which is good in small doses but the prescribed solution led me to cut myself off from other people, to see anyone but other trans women as my enemy and to wallow in my own misery because all I could see was oppression all around me.

And that’s the insidious part. It wasn't just that her takes were wrong about trans men or kids, it was that she had perfected a pipeline from 'You are hurting' to 'Burn it all down.' She gave me the language to turn my very real, very justified pain into a weapon that I was pointing at the wrong people. It was just a very loud, very angry fog. The clarity came when I stepped out of it and realized my community was a whole lot bigger, and kinder, than she wanted me to believe.

Cis people still say dumb, patronizing things. Transphobia still exists. But I finally realized that ISFF wasn't teaching me how to survive it but rather she was teaching me how to drown in it.

like if you are marginalized it is in your own self-interest to interrogate and deconstruct the cultural narratives that position you as subnormal. this is what starts a lot of queer people on wanting to reform the world into something more compassionate and egalitarian.

Misogyny is not just prejudice experienced by a woman. It is not simply something that happens TO a woman. It has nothing to do with the woman. It’s about the misogynist.

Bigotry is not determined or defined by the target of that bigotry. The bigotry is stored in the bigot.

Misogynists will be misogynistic towards any person they associate with femininity, including cisgender men.

When a misogynist cis man tears another man down for liking something he thinks is girly, he is still being misogynistic.

A cis male coach telling his cis male student he runs like a girl is being misogynistic.

A cis woman punishing her son for wanting a “girl” toy or policing her boyfriend’s hygiene habits and interests for anything she considers emasculating, is being misogynistic!

When a woman gets in a car accident and is injured more severely because the safety testing on that car was only done using crash test dummies and models based on men, she’s experiencing misogyny.

When the medication she takes for her injuries doesn’t work right or has unexpected side effects because it was only tested on men, she’s experiencing misogyny.

When the tools she uses at work that are the wrong shape for her hands, and the jumpsuit that’s part of her uniform which she has to take off completely to use the bathroom, and all the spaces she moves through and everything within them are designed with the assumption that an average male body is the only body that matters— she is experiencing misogyny.

Misogyny is the belief that women are inherently inferior, and the systems and institutions built around that belief. It can be experienced by anyone, and anyone is capable of having misogynistic beliefs and doing misogynistic things.

Bigotry is not about the target. It’s about the bigot, and what the bigot believes, and the way those bigoted beliefs have shaped our world.

I don’t care what race gender or sexuality you are, you were raised with racist, sexist, homophobic beliefs. Because it’s literally impossible not to be.

I dont think I have ever let it affect my care. I hope I never have, and its my responsibility to keep interrogating my judgements and decisions towards my patients to make sure I never do.

It's the same brand of transphobic garbage as "OK, but if you're going to be a man, you have to cut your hair short and only wear dark clothes and never use effeminate gestures!"

-the idea that women are less capable of abuse than men is an extension of the idea that women are weaker than men.

-the refusal to acknowledge men's mental health and emotions as valid things worthy of support comes from the idea that emotions are inherently feminine in nature and having them is, again, a sign of weakness.

-the treatment of men as generic and expendable and women as special contributes to the idea that women should have less representation because we already "have enough" and "don't need more" and we gotta "even the playing field" or some dumb shit, so any need or want for more attention, regardless of reason, is attributed to "pointless attention-seeking".

-all of this puts trans men in an even more uncomfortable position, because either they're made an exception (because they ~aren't really men~ you see) or they're viewed as self-hating misogynists because why else would you "choose" to be the Trash Gender (tm)?

-the idea that men are inherently terrible only serves to excuse men for being terrible. because, hey, they can't help it, so why bother trying, right? part of holding men accountable for their awful actions is believing they can in fact be better.

-the reason "not all men" is so frustrating to hear is because it's often used in poor faith to derail much needed conversations about toxic masculinity and how it manifests, not because the phrase itself is untrue.

-continuing from the trans men thing, misandry can and does make it harder for trans men to come out, for fear of the aforementioned responses.