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the category winners at THE JELLICLE BALL

+ BONUS: category speed round!

Pearls for tears 🌊

I love women too much to ever willingly inject the warped ideas of masculine superiority from cis men into my own experience of being a man.

The fact that so many of my fellow trans brothers and transmasc siblings have absorbed these toxic ideals as legitimate reasons to validate their own identity while casting out trans women and femmes is mind boggling to me.

And then on top of that, having the audacity to use the fact that we just happen to be born with vaginas to simultaneously claim ‘victimhood’ over trans women which only reinforces cisheteronormative gender norms that buys into the idea that anyone born with a penis is ‘inherently’ bad and evil is… so antithetical to the POINT of being a trans man, who is capable of reinventing a new kind of masculinity without the influence of cis male toxicity.

I’m not interested in using the genitalia I was born with as an excuse to tell my trans sisters that they don’t ‘know’ what misogyny is like when the same hand that holds them down is the same one that strangles our entire community for the sin of self-determination.

It just feels like a lot of adult trans men I encounter are not actually interested in growing into their manhood, in a mature and nuanced way. Like, I make it a point to NOT emulate cis masculinity and learn from THEIR social mistakes by actively treating people with basic human decency and respect while maintaining a level of respect for myself as well.

It feels more like they’re trying to manufacture a division between themselves and trans women and transfemmes in an attempt to validate their own identity as men…yet also, finding a foothold in perpetual victimhood by falling into TERF bioessentialist talking points that literally NEGATE their existence as MEN.

It’s beyond sad to me that so many young trans men are careening backwards into the ‘littol soft bean trans man’ ideas of the 2010s instead of us making real progress towards a new, adult version of ourselves that can handle women, especially trans women, expressing their hatred towards men without acting like we are specifically being targeted by that statement and crumbling over it like fragile cis men do.

THEM BEING HYPERVISIBLE IS NOT A ‘PRIVILEGE’ WHEN IT COMES AT THE EXPENSE OF THEIR OWN LIVES!

As trans men (MEN), the issues we face are completely based in transphobia and the denial of our existence as men who are not cis. I’m tired of hearing the shit that’s been going around about us being targeted because we are ‘naive lost women’.

Stop repeating this shit and accept your own experience in manhood. Stop parroting TERF bioessentialist talking points where ‘penis = dangerous tool’ and ‘vagina = perpetual victim’.

I am a man who happens to be transgender. I understand misogyny because I was perceived as a girl/woman growing up but that was NOT who I WAS (or am) and it would be wrong of me to claim manhood while trying to avoid any accountability in parroting patriarchal values as a MAN in a patriarchal society.