I know the birth assignments of most of the people in this thread. My question is, why do you feel that you need to know them? That information is exceedingly personal. None of us are particularly secretive about it, but, for some of us, those birth assignments aren’t helpful at all.
Allow me to give an example. You point out that I, as the OP, did not specify whether I experience transmisogyny.
I’d like to ask that question of you. Do you think I experience transmisogyny?
Let me tell you about myself, before you answer.
I was born with a penis and testicles. I have been on feminizing hormones for decades. I have had surgery on my genitals, to create a binary-conforming vagina. I will remain on feminizing HRT for the rest of my life, because the alternative is a level of crushing dysphoria that I can’t hope to bear. Even with all of this hormonal intervention, only most people perceive me as a woman when I’m on the street. Enough of them have decided I’m a man in drag to spit slurs, to throw trash, to physically attack me. I have been the target of transmisogynistic violence since I was born.
Do you think I should plaster the phrase “TME” on my sidebar, and lead people to make assumptions about my body and my life that are patently false?
Because, when I was born, doctors saw that my penis was too small, that my testicles were internal, that instead of a scrotum I had a labia and a shallow vaginal opening. And they decided that I was female, quite arbitrarily. Every one of those medical and surgical procedures I describe above was forced on me, either in infancy or childhood.
The terms “transfeminine” and “transmasculine” are
to me. The ideal that I am desperately trying to move towards, the directionality of my transness, is not to claim or reclaim male or female identity, it is to
reclaim the body that was stolen from me.
If anything, I am “trans-intersex.”
And I’m sorry to drop such intense, personal, medical information on you. You probably didn’t realize what you were asking for. But, you aren’t just asking “are they callous TMEs rooting around where they don’t belong, or tragic transfems who are harming themselves and need to be rescued?” You are asking for a lifetime of medical, familial, and sexual abuse to be laid bare so that you can weigh and measure every trauma that others have expereinced, and decide whether or not we are allowed to speak on a subject that affects our entire lives.
And while you may be satisfied with passive aggressive reminders that we kept our personal information personal, other people are far worse. People can and will punish others for refusing to divulge personal, medical information. Campaigns of harassment, incitement to violence, attempts to get people fired from their places of work, expelled from their places of study, excommunicated from their places of worship.
All for not wanting to share some of the most personal information we have.
And, I’m sure that’s not what you want, when you ask for people’s TME status. But, your intent doesn’t change the effects.
Intent only determines how harshly an perpetrator is punished. It doesn’t change whether or not a victim was harmed. That goes for small things, like this post. It also goes for larger things, like violence and murder.
Being the intended target of a life-destroying campaign of violence and being the misdirected target of a campaign of life-destroying violence, still makes you the victim of a life-destroying campaign of violence.
And all of this is only one half of the flaw in your position.
The other half is the idea that all trans women and transfeminine people share some deep, essential characteristic with each other, that no one else can ever experience or understand.
That kind of universal claim is impossible. Even among straight, white trans women living in the US, everything from the availability of doctors, the age of transition, the intention to transition at all, the amount of money, the natural build of the body and face, where they decide to work, who they decide to live with, and dozens of other factors can have immense, indescirable impacts on how two trans women move through the world, on how they identify and how they exist.
To say, then, that a 23 year old wealthy, white, straight, western trans woman who transitioned socially as a toddler, who has had the best surgical and medical treatment money can buy, who lives in a progressive area of the country, etc, shares some essential trait and experience with a poor, south-east asian hijra living under the dual thumbs of poverty and colonialism, whose transition is wholly social and based on a gender role that white westerners can’t even understand? To say that they both share an essential truth with a 75 year old Cuban who has lived through regime changes and raised a family and through it all, never came out, certainly never transitioned, and is called every day “he” and “grandfather,” and if he ever suffered from those words has long since grown to accept them. And to say all three of them share this essential truth of their experiences, and that no one “like me” could ever understand of have a similar experience?
It’s a faulty argument. It makes no sense. It simultaneously condenses all transfeminine lives into a single template, and then declares anything outside that template, “other.” This kind of false dichotomy is quite literally anathema to intersectional thinking, and it helps to reinforce, rather than dismantle, hierarchies and social roles that harm people.
I’m sure you will draw whatever conclusions you want, from this post. But, I hope that you will begin to realize the shaky foundation that asking people to reveal their personal information online as a litmus test really is built upon.
