memories to comfort me, where all ghosts meet

Plurality is a model that serves to explain an individuals³ personal experience of themselves and of the world. It is broad enough to encompass any and all experiences of personal "multitude", from the system with an official medical diagnosis of DID with rigid and consistent dissociative amnesia, to the average blurry median system with some dissociative amnesia, to the individual who has conversations with internal voices, to tulpamancy, and beyond.

This model is best understood as analogous to being transgender. An individuals personal gender identity is shaped by every single social interaction they've ever had since birth to the day they die, complicated by factors like class, race, age, culture, their upbringing, their sex -- and if you ascribe to this portion of Serano's theory, their subconscious sex -- and innumerable more. There are no two individuals with identical gender identities, in just the same way that no two systems could possibly be identical.

An individual's gender and an individual's system are alike in this way: neither are a physical thing that can be held. They can only be made manifest in the world through the actions of the individual. They, in only the way an idea can exist within one's consciousness, are changing constantly, at the speed of thought, and through nearly untraceable paths as the individual interacts the world around them and their own thoughts.

The problem with the idealist¹ conception of gender is that it conflates an individual's personal gender -- this impossibly nuanced and ever changing concept -- with their position within Gender as a system. Gender as a system is the structure of transmisogyny, the social categories of Man and Woman, the pay gap, and conversion therapy. The terminology TMA and TME refers to material social relations⁴ that dictate the way you move through society, not an individual's gender identity.

This is why we say that the category TMA is created by transmisogyny. Nobody is "born" TMA or TME, it is through the structures of transmisogyny that this category is created -- composed of those who transmisogyny is "designed" to punish. It is a specific fail state of Gender that consists primarily of transgender women and transfeminine people.

I say primarily because of the exact question you pose. If a system is composed of one trans woman and one man, the question of "is this system TMA" would only consider the individual's relationship to Gender, not their specific gender identity/identities.

This is the utility of the TMA/TME distinction: it allows analysis of Gender as a structure to near completely ignore the considerations of personal identity -- almost always a fruitless task -- and focus exclusively on the material social relations that dictate our lives.

Personally though, I actually find the TMA/TME distinction to be a bit limited in scope. Although it has its utility, I find a much better answer to this question and others like it in the Gender Ternary analysis by @egregore-engine. The ternary between Power, Not Power, and the Subaltern is more effective at explaining this specific nuance as it completely sidesteps the question of personal gender identity. However, both models can be used to come to the same conclusion:

Regardless of an individuals personal gender identity, when they are marked as transfeminine (or more broadly, as in the Gender Ternary, subaltern) in one way or another, they are acceptable targets for violence.

Footnotes

1. When I say "the ideal" and "the material", I am referring to the philosophical concepts in dialectical materialism.

For a very quick and significantly simplified primer, the "ideal" refers to ideas, and in dialectical materialism is considered as part of "consciousness", whereas the "material" refers to material conditions (actual things, including social relations, and the relationships you have to those things) and is referred to as matter. Dialectical materialism holds that:

The relationship between matter and consciousness is dialectical [note: dialectical simply means "in a relationship, mutually impacting each other]. In this relationship, matter comes first, and matter is the source of consciousness; it decides consciousness. However, consciousness is not totally passive, it can impact back to matter through the practical activities of human beings.

(Nguyen, 2023)

2. For a brief introduction to the concept of markedness, I think @strawhatsufi's post on the concept is a good starting place. In this context I am taking the linguist concept and expanding it to physical markers (I am not the first to do this, I am sure). The most salient example of this in the imperial core is race, to state the obvious, dark skin is racially marked. There is no inherent meaning to the colour of one's skin, but there is a exceptionally strong social meaning. This goes true for gender as well; everything has a gendered marking, from clothes like skirts and pants, to physical characteristics like stubble and breasts, to legal concepts like ASAB and partners in marriage ("man and wife"). However many of these gendered markings is accessible in that context is how society sorts you within Gender in that moment and determines what violence is acceptable to perform against you.

3. I want to be clear about my use of "individual" in this context. Although we might be tempted to use the term to delineate between different alters, it is much more useful for an "individual" to refer to the single social unit of a "person" -- a single body. This is not to dismiss the individuality of alters, but instead to recognize that a system only has one body to interact with the world. Alters may choose to use the body in different, contradictory ways, but a single body can only act a single way in a single moment.

4. Although to some it may sound contradictory, social relations are material in nature. Your lease is a social relation that is soundly material, just the same way your position within Gender is a material social relation. But as a reminder, a lease can end, and your position within Gender can change.

Sources