Sideblog For Gender Posts

TMA = trans women, transfeminine nonbinary people.

Both categories include women and nonbinary people

Both categories include people with penises, and people with vaginas, and people with ambiguous genitals.

Both categories include intersex people.

TME includes cis and trans men.

I'm going to hold your hand as I say this to you. Those same expectations are placed on trans men. Trans men are also expected to be mothers and wives. Trans men also face misogyny and are harmed by it, in the same ways cisgender women are.

It reads like a lot of people think of trans men as Cis Dudes With Pussies when the vast majority of trans men are living (or have lived) many of the same experiences as cis women, and should be included in these conversations.

but this is why i need everyone to be more aware of anti-transmasculinity. because this is the foundational presumption cis feminists have been making about trans men & transmascs since they heard of the concept. trans men&mascs, as trans people, have been excluded from feminism since feminism began, and unfortunately that includes the majority of transfeminism as well. it shouldn't be shocking that on a site with a large population of trans people, a lot of trans people relate to posts about misogyny, and a lot of trans people who grew up being classed as girls and women and having those expectations forced onto them are trans men&mascs. and i'm sure a lot of them also do not think that to be a woman is to want to fulfill patriarchal stereotypes, but rather they are desperate to actually have their lived experiences as trans men affected profoundly by the patriarchal role of daughterwifemother to be recognized and verbalized.

So this is a good thing to know about for future reference. I don't think that is a good thing to do.

But I am begging y'all to realize I do not know jack shit about the majority of people I reblog from. I do not know these people, I am not picking them on purpose. Most of the posts I reblog come across my dash and that is how I find them. "Uncritically reblogging from" a stranger! You clearly know who this person is in detail but I do not because I have literally never heard of her. I did not find her posts or her blog to post about isff, I barely ever post about isff, I saw the post from someone I follow. I do not keep up with niche tumblr personality drama! I do not know these people!

and then you find out that the Reasons were actually Excuses and being mean was the entire point.

Listen to me: I genuinely, wholeheartedly, with my entire being hope that anyone and everyone who wants the ability to give birth is someday able to make that dream a reality. When that day comes, I will genuinely be ecstatic for everyone who's able to have that procedure they've been waiting so long for. When transandrophobes say this to me, I imagine they must think this is something I'm opposed to, but I'm not! If having the ability to give birth or menstruate would be gender-affirming for you, then I'd really like nothing more than for you to get that ability. Truly. And I don't say this to be like, "then you can finally understand my pain!" Like, no, I want trans people to get whatever gender-affirming care would make them the happiest. I understand that the pain is worth it when it makes you the truest, most actualized version of yourself. When that day comes and if I'm still alive, genuinely come abduct me in my sleep and just take my uterus. Steal my womb. My eggs are all yours. I'll be first in line to donate all this shit I don't need or want.

But the thing is, right? We aren't bringing it up to be mean. When we bring up the fact that a lot of us still have gynecological needs, or that many of us are still capable of getting pregnant, or that not all of us can get gender-affirming care, let alone healthcare that's still typically seen as being "only for women," it's not because we want trans fems and trans women to feel bad. We were accused of not having it as bad as trans fems, of having systemic privilege comparable or equal to pericis men, and we're providing examples of how that's just not true. That's all.

And maybe it's hard to hear, if the ability to menstruate or give birth is desirable to you, that we'd prefer not to have it, or that it causes problems for us. We aren't saying anyone is bad for wanting what we don't. All we're saying is that it's one of the ways in which we absolutely don't have male privilege. Especially those of us who don't pass or are staying closeted for our own safety.

But I think that's not really why there's pushback against this. It just can't be refuted that trans mascs and trans men are not cis men. We're men or possess masculinity, yes, but we're not cis men. And, as far as a patriarchal society is concerned, men who are not cis aren't men at all. We won't be treated like pericis men by most unless we pass well enough. Even then, the second we're outed, that all collapses.

Society at large still sees me as a woman. A lot of people who themselves are transgender still see me as a woman, too. I feel like trans mascs are held to a weird standard where no amount of gender performance in any direction is enough. If we present too masculine, we're "scary," but if we're not masculine enough, we must not want it that badly or we're "misgendering" ourselves for nefarious purposes.

malgendering is a form of transphobia wherein a transphobic person uses their victim's correct gender to harass or demean them. it is meant to be the inverse of misgendering, where a transphobe uses the victim's incorrect gender to harass or demean them.

misgendering towards trans women can be as simple as "youre a man." but malgendering is more insidious, like someone saying "you really are a girl" when she makes a mistake in order to insult her intelligence. the phrase "you really are a girl" is positive when removed from the context of the trans woman making a mistake and the transphobe's sarcastic tone that implies shes stupid in an misogynistic way.

if a trans man does something like standing up for himself against an unfair situation or asks for better accommodations/treatment, and a transphobe wants to use that to imply he is selfish and entitled, they might say "trans men really are men" which again, is a true statement on its own. but in the context of the situation, its clear the transphobe is using the stereotypical worst qualities of men to insult and undermine someone's very identity.

malgendering can be any severity of harm, just like misgendering. my mom slipping up in the first months of my transition and accidentally calling me "she", and a bigot shouting "YOURE A WOMAN YOULL NEVER BE A MAN" at me are both examples of misgendering, but one is much worse than the other and its the same with malgendering. being told "trans men are the men of the trans community" as an insult is annoying and rude but not a big deal. however, right now ICE is torturing trans men in concentration camps by forcing them to do pointless and grueling labor. and when they become exhausted, theyre told "I thought you were a man. if youre really a man this should be easy for you" these are both examples of malgendering. one is a microaggression, the other is literal torture.

Malgendering is the action of maliciously burdening a trans person with the stereotypes about their true gender, with the intent of making living as said gender seem less favorable.

saying these things to a trans person with the knowledge that theyre trans has an underlying implication: "you wouldn't be bad if you weren't trans". when you tell a trans men that all men should die and you hate all men, youre telling him "you wouldnt be evil if you detransitioned. everyone would be kind to you if you were still a girl" and same with trans women: "you would be smarter and respected if you weren't a woman. I wouldnt harass you if you were still a man."

from Abortion attempts without clinical supervision among transgender, nonbinary and gender-expansive people in the United States by Moseson et al (2021).

In 2020 this study on cis women in the US found that 1.4% had ever attempted a self-managed abortion. This study from 2024 found that before the 2022 decision that struck down Roe vs Wade, 2.4% to 3.3% of cis women had ever self managed an abortion, and after 2022 that rose to 10.1%.

God, I wish people would pay this more attention. There's been massive attacks on both abortion/birth control and gender affirming care at the same time by the same people. You think the overlap would be obvious. You'd think it would be too obvious for people to not talk about how scary this is for trans people who can get pregnant, how this is the perfect example of how anti-trans violence is an inherent part of patriarchy & misogyny. And fucking yet!!!!!!

There's even the fact that the executive order defining sex as male and female and immutable, defined male and female as "a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces [gametes]." They worked "legal personhood starts at conception" into the executive order targeting trans people and no one talked about it. One must ask why we (and I mean both trans/queer people and self-identified feminists at large) are so goddamn allergic to talking about issues that affect trans people who can get pregnant! What is it about this group that makes it so we aren't compelling enough victims for anybody who claims to care about intersectionality to give a shit about!

there is an ideal feminist subject (the thin white middle-class pretty gender-conforming-but-not-too-feminine cis perisex woman). this ideal feminist subject is who much of mainstream feminism has been build around protecting, supporting, defending, and theorizing on her experiences. she isn't real; she's an idea, a trope, a story used to ground feminism in a certain story. feminism uses a lot of stories in order to develop and communicate certain ideas & webs of ideas, which allow us to see the world differently, realize the different options we have to react to our experiences in the world, and connect with others to support one another and act collectively.

people who wish to engage in feminism narrate their experiences through feminist stories. this can be very useful, as it allows people to make sense of their experiences in a way that can actually empower them: there is an important difference between telling the story of "i got pregnant as a teen because i was a dumb slut, and i disappointed everyone" and telling the story of "i got pregnant as a teen because our sex ed was worthless and i didn't have a good understanding of consent and my boyfriend felt like he owned my body, and my community betrayed me because they held misogynistic beliefs about my body and my role in society."

but there are a lot of people who could seriously benefit from being able to apply those feminist stories to themselves, who cannot, because they struggle to narrate themselves as the feminist subject. this not only limits their ability to make sense of their experiences in an empowering way, but also has real material impacts. the ideal feminist subject is also the ideal feminist victim of domestic abuse, the ideal feminist survivor of date rape, the ideal feminist victim of the gender pay gap, the ideal feminist recipient of feminist support. if you can't fit yourself into these stories defined by the ideal feminist subject, you are far less likely to have your suffering recognized as real or urgent. resources that you may desperately need will not recognize you as a potential client. feminist movements to fight for social change will not consider how society needs to change for you to not suffer needlessly.

so many people re-narrate their experiences in order to present themselves as, in some vital way, close enough to the ideal feminist subject to count. people can take different tactics, but one of the most popular is emphasizing one's womanhood in order to counter-act the distance caused by being fat, non-white, lower-class, not conventionally attractive, gender non-conforming, trans or intersex. the narrative used often goes that feminism is for women, I am a woman, therefore feminism should include me. this isn't always successful, but it is one of the most influential, because feminism is centered around gender, it is most concerned with thinking about gender and people as gendered subjects. with all the words i listed above as describing the ideal feminist subject, the final word is not an adjective but a noun: "woman." the ideal feminist subject has many traits, but she is a woman.

trans women narrate themselves very similarly to other marginalized women, emphasizing that their identity as women is what allows them to step into the role of the feminist subject and use those stories and be integrated into feminism at large. trans women in particular can struggle with this process because "cis" (and "perisex") are fundamentally gendered (and sexed) terms, making them part of the same category as "woman," and so it is extremely hard to separate the ideal feminist subject's womanhood from her cisness and her perisexuality. we can see this in how, traditionally, these terms were not used at all; a woman was presumed to be a cis and perisex woman, so much so that "cis" and "perisex" didn't exist as defined concepts. transphobic feminists zero in on this to argue against trans women's inclusion. but, in popular strains of trans-inclusive feminism, gender identity is re-imagined as the location of womanhood (as opposed to the cis-perisex "female" body), which helps to de-couple cisness and perisexuality from womanhood.

but this is where feminism continually fails transmasculine and nonbinary people, and where transfeminism has continually disappointed. even if cisness and perisexuality are de-coupled from womanhood, they are still working behind the scenes to define it. you don't have to check those specific boxes, but you need to pass the vibe checks.

a trans man is systemically oppressed on the basis of gender, affected by misogyny and transphobia, and in need of the support and resources offered by feminism. but if the ideal feminist subject is, fundamentally, a woman, then he must narrate himself as a woman. and, crucially, even transfeminism rarely meaningfully questions the frameworks of oppositional sexism and exorsexism which define womanhood around being the opposite of, and excluding of, manhood. nonbinary people, even if they aren't men, are similarly excluded. even if someone identifies as a woman in some way, they can only re-narrate their experiences effectively if they downplay the parts of themself that aren't "woman." this also affects many trans women who, for a variety of reasons, are not comfortable or able or willing to re-narrate their experiences on the basis that their womanhood is just like cis women's.

and, even worse: the violence and misogyny experienced by trans men, by nonbinary people, by many other kinds of trans and GNC people, is fundamentally tied to their rejection of cis womanhood. yet they must try to narrate these experiences with misogyny as being fundamentally born from existing as a woman-as-defined-by-cisness. this creates an intolerable paradox which was well-explained by C. Jacob Hale in his 2009 essay "Tracing a Ghostly Memory in My Throat: Reflections on Ftm Feminist Voice and Agency":

Those of us who are dislocated from already given gender categories, both normative and nonnormative ones, are dislocated in that we cannot fully inhabit any of them. We place ourselves and are placed by others in the margins of any number of gender categories, never close to the paradigmatic core of any but also never falling fully outside all. [...] I do not fit the paradigms of any already given gender categories. I flit about the margins of each of these categories. Since some of these categories share unions with one another, I flit through overlapping border zones constituted by the margins of several gender categories. Flitting about the margins is not a refusal to own my location, nor is it valorization of gender play or gender fluidity. Flitting is a type of movement proper to ghosts: creatures abjected from full social existence who, instead, have only partial, limited social existence. For reasons as personal, various, and idiosyncratic as the personal, various, and idiosyncratic connections border zone inhabitants draw between our embodiments, self-identifications, and subjectivities, already given discourses offer us little else than indefinite sequences of indiscriminate erasure. Already given discourses may elide the specificities of those with firm locations within already given categories, but not to the same degree that they elide the specificities of the dislocated. Those of us who live in border zones constituted by the overlapping margins of categories do so because our embodiments and our subjectivities are abjected from social ontology: we cannot fit ourselves into extant categories without denying, erasing, or otherwise abjecting personally significant aspects of ourselves. The price of committing such violence against ourselves is too great, though our only other option is also very costly for the dislocated have fallen through the cracks in the structure of the gendered world. Having slipped off all the handholds we have ever tried to grasp, we have fallen between the cracks of language and life. Unintelligible to ourselves and to others, we are driven to search for new category terms, since category terms are the signal-flags of social ontology, and we desperately long to reenter the world.

this is the source of trans in-fighting within feminism. some trans men desperately try to use the idea of a "female body" to narrate themselves as a feminist subject and downplay gender identity (which will inevitably be used by cis-feminists to ignore their transmasculinity entirely, leaving them vulnerable to all kinds of abuse), while some trans women use woman-identity and downplay the body. nonbinary people, too, engage in this. the core issue here is that all trans people, in order to re-narrate themselves to get closer to the ideal feminist subject, must downplay their transness. transness implies the inter-mixing of different gendered experiencs, different sexed bodies. it implies the blurring and crumbling of a solid, objective, unifying identity as females or as women. so the trans community is pulled in various different directions, tearing us apart as we try to cut off different pieces of ourselves to justify to cis women why we deserve whatever scraps of allyship they are willing to give us.

ok. wage gap

source

like. come on now