Post-Op Former Dickgirl*

It’s well intended, but ultimately, the idea of having people self identify as TME upholds the notion that there are essential and universal qualities that all AMAB trans people have, and that any other trans person, regardless of body, identity, race, ability, or other factors, can truly experience.

It’s great as a sort of approximate descriptor for large groups! But it fundamentally fails as a granular, personal identity, because the experiences a white, femme trans woman has, and the experiences a  black, butch cis woman has, are going to intersect a lot, because they’re both oriented around policing the masculinity or femininity of a given person.

One need only look so far as the career of Caster Semenya and the subsequent impacts had on almost entirely cisgender female athletes of colour, to see how quickly trying to assign people into hard-line social categories with no crossover falls apart.

“Your experience of transphobia isn’t as bad as it could be because you’re not experiencing the transmisogyny trans women face”.

“I’m in second place, unlike trans women whose suffering earns them the gold medal in oppression.”

Also like. We have ASKED tme ppl to disclaim whether or not theyre tme. Bc its important to know bc if ur a transfem and you see someone say smthn transmisogynistc, you wanna know how to approach that person. If theyre tme they might not recognize HOW theyre being transmisogynistic, but if theyre transfem then the conversation dynamic is gonna be very different (less “educational moment” and “more are you ok?”)

Besides, its NOT a personal identity, in some ways its a LACK of one. It’s literally the same as putting that ur white neurotypical and able-bodied in ur bio, but you don’t see people complainin abt THAT. Funny thing is that the big difference between white and tme is that tme is only about a person not experiencing a specific form of oppression. White is considered a race when its really the lack of having a race imposed on you (like how characters of color are seen as political or forced diversity or w/e. White is the “default”). But you’d never consider tme to be a gender. That’s what makes it such a good term- it doesn’t give away agab or personal identity, it just makes it clear that you don’t have a particular experience so you navigate certain conversations differently than the people who do.

Also I’d just like to point out that no one in this thread (sage, op, something) has made it explicitly clear whether or not theyre tme, but if youre not that makes this conversation very different.

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

meaningless

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.

People who are perceived as transfeminine in society, whether they actually identify as transfeminine internally, are subject to immense violence that takes identifiable patterns in each transfeminine person's culture. That is to say, in simpler terms: people who are transfeminized by society experience patterns of transmisogyny as a result.

But, this truth carries with it many others. "People who are transfeminized" does not map 1:1 onto "people who were raised in the familiar-to-me cultural assumption of a male identity, who later turned out to have a similarly familiar-to-me feminine or female identity." Even those definitions are so narrow despite my best efforts to generalize. But that's the thing.

It's a much broader world than that.

And it's hardly your fault that you haven't had the chance to see these perspectives before. The combination of how difficult the internet is to navigate these days, plus how utterly and terribly ephemeral all of these spaces are. So easily banned or deleted. This post itself is a relic with only 49 reblogs, these 7 years later.

This alone would be enough. Yet there are so many other barriers too, no doubt countless of which prevented you from having this opportunity before. Or, prevented you from taking it.

But what you are doing now, is taking the opportunity.

Occult endometriosis or ectopic Müllerian epithelial tissue growth may occur in transgender women taking feminizing gender-affirming hormone therapy.

In perisex people AMAB, endometriosis is an extremely rare (but it can still happen, and SOMEBODY has to have it) response to estrogen therapy (due to prostate cancer albeit but I'm 100% sure it can happen from estrogen as Trans HRT). True, there were under 20 reported cases as of when the article was written but the number is likely to be higher because doctors already are terrible about endo in people AFAB so naturally they would also dismiss the prospect of it in those AMAB as it is much rarer

I don’t believe that you’re stupid enough to not understand this. I know you know it would be wrong to claim you have fibromyalgia or EDS or asthma or seizures or fucking whatever that you don’t have and try to get sympathy and resources that you don’t need.

Plenty of cis women act the exact same way about trans women having hormonal menstrual cycles, insisting that its impossible and everyone who claims they do is lying or mistaking IBS symptoms, and that its stolen valor to claim that its possible. And yet it is possible. The body does not care about maintaining very clear distinctions between sexes for the sake of making political points more black-and-white. Men in pink collar jobs earn less than men in blue collar jobs. That doesn't mean that the devaluing of pink collar jobs isn't misogynistic, or that people seen as women aren't primarily being affected.

I did read one of the studies listed in that article, which is both a case report and a literature review. They surgically removed a mass from a man's abdomen and that is how they diagnosed it as endometriosis. That seems... pretty credible to me?

Gross exam of the mass in the operating room revealed a central cystic cavity with cloudy brown fluid. Further, the results from immunological stains performed by pathology revealed a highly unexpected diagnosis with an immunoprofile consistent with endometriosis. The H&E stain (Figure 2) displayed a layer of endometrial epithelium with underlying stroma. The cells lining the cystic mass stained strongly positive for CK7 (Figure 3(c)) and estrogen receptors (Figure 3(a)). CD10 stains were positive (Figure 3(e)) and CD15 staining was focally positive (Figure 3(d)) in the underlying stromal-like tissue. GATA-3 stain was negative. The patient was discharged on postoperative day two. In a two-week followup appointment, he had complete resolution of abdominal pain. [...] A comprehensive review of risk factors, location, immunohistochemistry, and outcome of prior documented cases of endometriosis in males has been accomplished for comparison (Table 1). Most of the cases involve increased estrogen in men with liver cirrhosis [2, 6] or prostate cancer treated with long-term estrogen therapy [1, 3, 5, 7–9, 11, 13, 15]. Although this patient did not have the aforementioned risk factors, it is possible that his obesity with a BMI of 35.7 caused increased systemic estrogen levels. In the case reported by Zamecnik and Hostakova, the only identifiable risk factor was obesity as well [14]. Several studies have identified a clear, positive association between increased obesity in men and increased estrogen production [17]. This phenomenon is likely associated with increased aromatization activity of adipose tissue, overexpression of proinflammatory cytokines, insulin resistance, and hyperactivation of insulin-like growth factor pathways [17]. In relation to male endometriosis, it could be theorized that this increase in aromatization could provide pathologically elevated estrogen levels to drive the growth of endometriosis from remnant embryological cells in a male.

& Its notable to me that they use such definite language, because PCOS/PMOS is also believed to occur in people assigned male without uteri/ovaries, but from what I've seen that hasn't been treated by the medical community as a definite reality (i.e that article says "PCOS might affect men" even while saying brothers of women with PMOS have symptoms suggestive of it). So even if there are only 20 cases, that these are treated as sure cases of endometriosis is telling to me. And why would they lie or overemphasize certainty about this, when there's no gain I can imagine by doing so?

Once again, everything you've said about the profound impact of misogyny on people with endometriosis can be true and important and real, and perisex men can have it. These do not contradict each in other in any way, a person assigned male claiming to have endometriosis does not mean you are not allowed to talk about any of that or that it doesn't genuinely affect people or that it isn't misogynistic or anything at all.

If your advocacy for people with endometriosis, people who menstruate, people with uteri, is so easily hampered by the reality that sometimes things which impact us also impact people with penises and testicles and no uteri or vagina, I think that's a weak spot for you in your ability to advocate on these issues. I see no reason why this being a reality should impact your ability to talk about these things in any way. If someone claimed that they are a perisex person assigned male with endometriosis and so the misogyny doesn't matter, or that because people assigned male can have endometriosis it means you aren't allowed to talk about the things you've discussed above, they are wrong.

So when I say this, I do not mean it blithely or without consideration.

How the actual fuck are we unironically ignoring that having uterine tissue in your "otherwise AMAB" body would make you intersex automatically anyway?

To say that someone who has been proven to have uterine-like tissues growing in their body is "not intersex" because they were otherwise AMAB, had androgenizing puberty, etc is... pretty fundamentally missing the reality of what defines intersex people as a class. It's not just a bunch of scattershot diagnoses. It's specifically the ones that cause us to be seen as breaking gendered binaries by existing.

So, OP, I have to ask you. Why do you just? Hate intersex people that much?

Or are you one of those extremists who likes to carve exceptions in our community? Because this happens every 10 years, and it's the exact same thing every time, like clockwork. ~oh hypospadius isn't intersex; PMOS isn't intersex! You can't know what it's really like to be intersex~

Well I know.

I know what it's like to be the hermaphrodite who got mutilated so badly that it can't orgasm and can barely piss just so it would look pretty to a plastic surgeon worried about its future husband. I know what it's like to live in pain every single day from the reality of my underlying condition, too, not just the way I was mangled to hide it.

And you know what's interesting?

So do the people AMAB who are suffering from a notoriously under-diagnosed, under-researched disease whose causes are famously unknown but appear to be tied to estrogen dominance.

The fact that you think our AMAB siblings, many of them women, are somehow more likely to be taken serious when seeking a diagnosis that would by definition render them intersex is laughable at best.

The fact that you think it benefits us as intersex people to start gatekeeping diagnosis even further in response?

Well.

That's hard to justify with simple ignorance. That borders on anti-intersex malice.

See, it's already almost impossible for intersex people to get a diagnosis of anything other than symptoms. Gynecomastia "isn't really intersex" because it's a symptom, and doctors have every motivation in the world to bury the cause. Many of them even think they're being kind to hide something so "shameful" from us.

for a lot of people, questioning if you are intersex means treating your own body like a specimen. it means reading medical papers that treat people like you like specimens. you have to examine your own body and scrutinize it, often multiple times, often inciting discomfort or pain in yourself to study it. you read medical explainers for parents that gender you every which way and talk about what's needed to "fix" bodies like yours to make it normal. you may have to make medical appointments to get exams that may be invasive, triggering, and ultimately might not even help or end with you being gaslit about your experiences.

so take some time to remember that you are a person. treat your body with softness and humanity. take a nice bath. wrap yourself in some blankets. touch your body, including your genitals, gently and loving and without any intention of making it all make sense. your body doesn't need to make sense! to anyone! it can just be and be loved!

[pt: no one can produce both sperm and egg? Think again]

Well, for what could have been the first undeniable documented case, we'd need to think of a world without intersex mutilation to grasp this historically denied reality. We would envision a man, unmutilated, peacefully living as a chimera

But instead, in 1998, we heard about an ovary from his absorbed sister that was removed from within him at just over a year old.

I had hypothesized about the possibility of such occurrences, discussing with others how it may be possible, albeit exceedingly rare. This case serves as an example of what could have been an earlier groundbreaking discovery of one individual maturing into the ability to produce both sperm and eggs. Advancements are commonly hindered by societal biases and bigotry, which slow down genuine discovery and understanding of human complexity.

coercive intersex (medical) interventions (CIMI/CII)

[pt: coercive intersex (medical) interventions (CIMI/CII)]

a term for medical procedures or "treatments" which were pushed or forced on intersex people (or their caregivers) without proper time to make their own decision, gain informed consent, or discuss other options.

examples may include surgeries (including "medically necessary" surgeries) where other options were not presented to the patient, IGM, providing hormone replacement therapy (HRT) without discussing alternative HRT options, gonadectomy without the patients full consent, recommendations for cosmetic medical changes such as laser hair removal, etc.

-there are enormous problems with exploitation in the porn industry that harm and endanger the people within it, and that harm is carried out mostly against women and minorities

-this is Bad

-however the last century of passing laws against pornography hasn't actually helped any of those problems, and what sex workers tend to advocate for is the legitimization of their labor, so that they can then access the same protections and regulations that people in other industries can access

-for instance football players, miners, roofers, and warehouse workers are also exploited and endangered by their professions, have to work long hours, and can end up traumatized and disabled by unregulated and unsafe working conditions. these people are used up and thrown away by powerful bosses they can't individually challenge.

-however because these industries are not de facto illegal to participate in, when these people form unions and demand better working conditions, they can at least fight for their rights.

-sex workers, who engage in heavily stigmatized work that's also often illegal, have little recourse to demand better treatment.

-even if you don't like porn, and especially if you don't like porn, if you care about the women who are exploited in pornography, you need to advocate for the legality of pornography.

-the more illegal the porn industry is, the less safe and fair it is, and people will still be working in it, no matter how illegal it is.

-again: the porn industry should be regulated like any other industry and subject to laws guaranteeing fair compensation for labor, safe working conditions, and legal resources for workers suffering exploitation and abuse.

-once it is legal to do sex work, then women can bring charges against the men who have broken their contracts and abused them.

(Full disclosure that OP is a perisex trans man in the UK. I'd also like to point out for credential reasons I'm an academic queer historian currently studying for a postgraduate degree on historical queer terminology).

[Content warning for discussions of historical transphobia and intersexism in this post. It is also a long post. For much of the post I'm talking about perisex trans experiences when I use the term trans, but recognise that there are also intersex trans people]

I've seen a post recently where a perisex trans person was talking about how their (US) doctor removed references to their transness from their medical record and instead put something along the lines of "hormone disorder" (read: intersex) for the safety of that transgender person. I come from the UK where we don't have the insurance system like the US has - but presumably the doctor did this so their trans patient could continue to access HRT without being flagged up as trans.

The notes of that post were really varied, but one thing kept coming up from intersex people, namely that it was inappropriate for a perisex transgender person to recieve this designation (note: it's unknown if the person specifically assked for this) for safety reasons on a few grounds. E.g. that being designated intersex on medical papers won't necessarily make someone safer, or might make them even less safe. And (rightly) brings up how much intersexism is ignored in the queer community and society in general. To be absolutely 100% clear I don't think in a majority of cases, being labelled intersex incorrectly by your doctor (whether you asked for it or the doctor attempted to do this to "protect" you) is going to help you avoid discrimination or problems. I do think that the intersex people in the notes of that post were right in pointing out that in these times, this is not necessarily the most ideal solution for that perisex trans person.

However, I'm familiar with a lot of trans history in which perisex trans people have had to claim to be intersex to avoid very real persecution, with some success. There are examples of this with individuals from the 18th to the 20th centuries that I'm aware of - and possibly many more.

Part of the problem is that transgender people and intersex people have been, at various points, considered one and the same by the medical establishment and society. Often, both of the above groups were grouped under and referred to by the h-slur (which is primarily associated with intersex people, but sometimes applied to other groups conflated with intersexuality). Transness was historically incorrectly posited to be an intersex variation which happened entirely in the brain (a presupposition which is obviously wrong in the modern day, but this viewpoint prevailed until the late 1960s).

There's three historical trans men I know of who were either presumed intersex or consciously presented themselves as intersex to avoid discrimination. There's likely examples of trans women doing the same, but I'm most familiar with transmasc history.

James Barry was an Irish trans man born in 1789 and lived his life as a man until his death, after which point he requested that his body be buried without inspection in the clothes he died in. This was disregarded by the charwoman who came to attend to his body, who attempted to tell Barry's superiors in the military that he was, in her view, "actually a woman". She had tried to tell Major D. R. McKinnon, who issued Barry's death certificate. But he wouldn't listen to her, instead, he speculated that Barry was intersex instead (note: we have no evidence which points towards this being the case):

(Cw for historical intersexism)

"Amongst other things she said Dr Barry was a female & that I was a pretty doctor not to know this & that she would not like to be attended by me. I informed her that it was none of my business whether Dr Barry was a male or a female – that I thought it as likely he might be neither, viz. an imperfectly developed man... my own impression was that Dr Barry was a [h-slur]"

- Major McKinnon, in a letter

In this case the presupposition of being intersex was done post-mortem, but to me, McKinnon's position that Barry must have been intersex when it was revealed he wasn't a perisex cis man like he thought seems to stem from wishful thinking that he wasn't mistaken about Barry's agab for years and that the only reason he didn't twig Barry was not a perisex cis man was because he must have been intersex. Meaning, to McKinnon at least, it was perfectly acceptable to have not noticed anything unusual about Barry as his physician. Obviously, McKinnon's viewpoints are directly informed by both intersexism and transphobia - and it is not to say *at all* that intersexuality was better recieved than possible transness in this period (both intersexuality and transess were severely frowned upon) - but that on an individual level, McKinnon would have preferred a scenario where Barry was intersex rather than transgender (to use our modern terms) because to him he could justify his ignorance of Barry's agab as being a result of Barry being intersex. If McKinnon viewed Barry as not intersex he would have considered himself to have been tricked or deceived by Barry, which was unfathomable and shameful to most well-to-do British people of the period. In Barry's case - him being presumed intersex post-mortem (when he was likely perisex) spared his memory from being tarnished further. The British Army certainly felt perturbed enough to attempt to seal away his records for the next 100 years to prevent scandal.

Society does not value non-perisex or non-cisgender individuals in this world. Both trans and intersex people are routinely targeted by horrific amounts of bigotry. But that's on a societal level. On an individual level, it's a bit different. You may get a bigot who doesn't really care about intersex people, because they believe that it's just something that happens that can't be helped (with the caveat that they endorse IGM). But that same person may vehemently hate trans people because to them, transness "can be helped" (I.e. they may view being trans as a choice). The same can occur the other way around- a bigot may tolerate trans people if they're transitioning to "correct" themselves, but doesn't tolerate intersex people because they believe the political identity of intersex is invalid and they believe intersex people to be "disordered". Does this make sense? I hope I'm managing to be be clear in that depending on the individual, passing as trans or as intersex might be useful if a certain individual is against one but not the other. It's entirely circumstantial.

To give two more examples of historical perisex trans men, Andrea's Bruce, a Swedish trans man, was born in 1808. His family were tolerant of his masculinity to a degree and he was able to live as a man. In order for the family to justify their "daughter" living as a man, they took him to a doctor and had him declared intersex (note: they used the h-slur in those times). So that fron that point onwards, Bruce's masculinity was not seen as masculinity on a "woman" but as a result of being intersex, which made it more permissible to some (emphasis on *some*). Again, there is a heady mix of transphobia and intersexism at play, but like with Barry's case, the presumption of being intersex spared him from transphobia and harassment he might have experienced without the false diagnosis to back him up. But it goes without saying this did then open him up to intersexism, too.

A final example I know of is Baronet Ewan Forbes of Craigievar, born in 1912. He was a Scottish trans man known for his previously hidden court case in which his right to male primogenture (for the right to inherit the baronetcy) was challenged by his cousin, because Forbes was not a cisgender man. Forbes had transitioned as a young man in Weimar Germany, leaving just as the Nazis began to crack down on queer communities there. By 1952, he was able to re-register his birth as male and marry his wife. A lot of string pulling went on to enable this. His cousin's challenge threatened not only to remove Forbes' right to the baronetcy, but also to make his marriage void (since, if Forbes was declared a woman his marriage to his wife would be illegal) and Forbes' profession as a male doctor would be ended. In 1965 he was able to win his cousin's lawsuit by the skin of his teeth after convincing the judges he was intersex (being a doctor, Forbes was uniquely positioned to argue convincingly he was). Being declared intersex instead of trans was the only way to prevent his life from crumbling down around him. It bears repeating that this in no way suggests intersex people had it easier back then - or that it was safer to be intersex than trans. That's not the case at all. But to some individuals, passing as intersex was the only way to avoid transphobic discrimination.

It's also something that occurs in other queer identities. E.g. I'm bisexual and in some situations, just saying I'm gay is easier than saying I'm bisexual because some people are fine with monosexual gay men and lesbians, but are less fine with bisexual people (see: biphobia and the AIDS crisis). Notwithstanding that I consider myself both gay and bisexual, sometimes passing as a monosexual gay man is preferable to being openly a bisexual man. Not a 1:1 to the trans/intersex relationship I'm talking about in this post, but hopefully you get my point. I can also envision other members of the queer community needing to pass as a gender/sexuality they're not for safety reasons. While I don't know any any examples (if you know any please tell me) but if an intersex person needed to pass as trans in order to avoid intersexism, I'd be 100% fine with that. It'd be correct of me to point out that this would theoretically open them up to transphobia, but if the benefits of avoiding intersexism outweigh the potential risks of transphobia, then I trust that individual to make that judgment for themself.

The point of this post really is that I don't see much discussion of the historical relationship (and conflation) between the trans and intersex communities, which is a real shame because we share so much history. The dearth of trans-intersex discussions and lack of knowledge of our shared history means that people aren't aware of how and why historical trans people had to pass as intersex sometimes (and presumably vice versa, depending on the situation).

Which leads me to wanting to make this post because I feel that some of the arguments against perisex trans people asking for their documents to say "hormone disorder" (or any other medical euphemism for an intersex condition) ignore of the ways in which the trans and intersex communities have long had an intertwined history and should have a strong allyship between them. Some of the backlash against perisex trans people considering this has been unsympathetic to the perisex trans people who feel terrified at the rise in transphobia occurring globally. Like I said at the beginning of this post - I agree doing so would open up said trans people to intersexism and not necessarily save them from all bigotry, but might possibly save them from a big chunk of transphobia. But I do feel some of the responses from intersex people on the post I'm talking about were a bit knee-jerk and while I wouldn't go far as to say were transphobic, they were at the very least a bit dismissive of the reasons why trans people might have been considering doing the action in the first place.

So, to conclude, this leaves me with a few things.

If other members of the queer community can be trusted to know themselves and their needs best if they conclude that passing as a different gender/sexuality might make them safer (even if that brings a risk of experiencing a different kind of bigotry) - then why can't we trust trans people to do the same with (in often very limited senses) passing as intersex? If you wouldn't condemn a bisexual person for passing as gay to avoid biphobia (notwithstanding the risk of homophobia), why would you condemn a trans person for passing as intersex to avoid transphobia (e.g. potential loss of HRT) (notwithstanding risk of intersexism)?

If you believe trans people are the only group who should not pass as another group for safety, why do you believe that? /gq. As I've said, I think it'd be perfectly fine for an intersex person to pass as trans for safety from intersexism if they deemed it necessary (I'd trust their assessment of the situation). If you believe this is fine but the reverse isn't, why is that? /gq.

Additionally, if you believe that trans people should never pass as intersex for any reason (notwithstanding all the reasons I've listed where it has been the only thing shielding a trans person from transphobia) - in what way should we perceive historical trans people who have done so for safety (or had the term intersex retroactively applied to spare the feelings of bigots)? People like Barry, Bruce and Forbes? How should we perceive such people if the practice of trans people passing as intersex for safety is condemned? Do we condemn them also? Or do we take a measured approach and understand that the nuances of their situation (and indeed the situations of many living trans people) demand an unsatisfactory means to a legitimate end? /gq

Genuinely, I ask all of these questions because I want to establish more trans-intersex dialogue about these things and actually explore the ins-and-outs of these situations. I feel like the trans and intersex communities sometimes talk at each other instead of with each other - and I think we have a lot to gain by discussing together on nuanced topics like this! I'm asking in good faith and I really, really hope that has come across. But I'd like to respectfully ask for other trans people and intersex people to weigh in if you'd like. What do you think about any of the issues I've raised here? How do we move forwards as trans and intersex communities together?

But I can say a few things with certainty:

1) You have been lied to.

You refer regularly to the death of trans-intersex dialogue, but that is a blinkered approach, especially for a historian with such a depth of knowledge of western queerness. We are undergoing a period of upheaval that makes every subset of the queer alliance more defensive than usual, but the allyship between trans and intersex people is centuries old and will weather this decade without tarnish. Take heart in that.

2) You have been hurt.

In the past handful of years, and I truly mean the last 3 years or so, there has been a shocking and violent animosity between online social spaces for trans people and online social spaces for intersex people. You have clearly been caught in that crossfire and attacked relentlessly. You are pre-apologizing for things that aren't simply normal and acceptable to ask, but necessary, too.

3) In spite of 1 & 2, you are correct.

There are countless situations in which trans people and intersex people can pass for each other for safety. Indeed, the entire concept of queerness as alliance hinges on the fact that we can grant each other safety that would not be possible alone.

What right do I, as an intersex person, have to look at a trans person in life threatening danger and say, "No, you must put yourself at higher risk if you want me to consider you moral and righteous."

I'm not fucking Immanuel Kant over here.

It would be a violation of my obligations to the rest of the queer community to tell people to fucking die because my words are too sacred to save them.

And the reverse is also true. At this moment, in this part of the world, the danger is lesser for adult trans people who hide behind the label of intersex. But that is not true everywhere, and it has not been true across every time period. There have been times and places where choosing transness was safer, even holier, than being intersex, and in those times and those places we likewise owe it to each other as an alliance to open our arms and protect each other.

The intersex people crying out that trans people should die in ignominy rather than save themselves by using any and all means necessary, are intersex people speaking from a position of shocking privilege.

A position where they have never been faced with immediate death.

And good for them! I'm glad that's true!

But fuck them for ever saying that fighting for your life is immoral and unjust. They deserve a solid kick in the shins at least.

And finally, 4.

4) Queerness exists, as a concept, for the explicit and specific purpose of keeping queer people alive long enough for us to fight for our rights to safety and freedom.

Telling trans people to fucking die rather than update their medical records is fundamentally Fed Behaviour. It's transphobic, it's intersexphobic, and hell man, it's even homophobic.

It's acting in direct opposition to the entire goals of the queer rights movement.

It's shameful.

And I get it, I do. It's a natural defensive behaviour. Queer spaces are notoriously hateful of intersex people, and in light of that, it's easy to read everything perisex queer people do in a negative light.

But it's still telling other queer people to go die because they used the "wrong word" to describe themselves.

But I feel fine with making my own post about the subject, and that subject is:

The Origin of Pan(sexual)

At least, the origin in so far as I lived it. Obviously the term spread for a variety of reasons in a variety of places. This post is a personal testimony of one experience with this political movement, but I think it’s one people need to hear.

Imagine, if you will, The End of the Nineties. I know many of you weren’t there for that (hell, I barely was, I was like apparently eleven at the time of most of this stuff, but I was also being dubiously raised by a rotating assortment of Very Queer People so there’s that at least). 

So any, imagine the era roughly from 1999-2003.

We’ll give you riots until you give us rights was still a rallying call of our people, but the desperate fervour of the AIDS epidemic was beginning to dial down to a more manageable level. New treatments existed, the government wasn’t as out for our blood as before, and the fact of the matter was so many of us were dead and scarred by all that death, burnt out from all that anger. To a certain degree, there was a deep exhaustion in our communities.

Decades of attempted genocide will do that to you.

As well, the systems we had relied on for introducing new queer youth to queer culture has begun to fall apart because there’s just not enough queer elders who are both alive and able to take that task on. Not everywhere, not like there had once been.

Pamphlets and manifestos had always been critical outreach, but now they became some of the only things available, especially in rural and suburban areas where there weren’t large enough populations of queer people to self sustain, or where organizing in a large way was effectively a death sentence in itself. 

Queer groups had always been localized and closed, but now populations were patchy enough that state and national networking through mailing lists were rising to prominence out of necessity.

And with this, there was increased exposure to each other’s different definitions of queer. 

One of the terms that, it turned out, was the least uniformly established was bisexual. There were basically two ways “bi” was used in those days. In some circles, it meant “neither gay nor straight.” If it was analyzed at all, it was generally decided to be a catchall term for anyone else who showed up, a very broad umbrella. For the most part, it just meant “whoever I like.”

And in many other places “bi” meant two. 

It meant men and women. It meant “real” men and women, that is to say, cis ones. 

But the 90s had also given prominence to this previously undefined group of gender nonconforming people who had previously just sort of shrugged when asked their gender. There was a new word on the block, and that word was genderqueer.

The 90s had also given prominence to transsexual/transgender people and began to impress upon the populace that trans women weren’t Super Ultra Gays, but were in fact their own group of people with unique experiences. (Trans men, I am sure you have heard by now, were basically invisible at this point in time: either they were classed as hard butch, or they were stealth and had no association with queerness).

It’s worth noting that the 90s also gave prominence to the inclusion of intersex people, but that’s a subject I’m less well versed in (unfortunately). I never met another intersex person- to my knowledge- during that formative period of my life, and if I did I wouldn’t have known or understood what it meant anyway.

So, as the nineties drew to a close and all these previously indeterminate groups started becoming more well known and more recognized and more seen at all, there was inevitable conflict. 

There were bi people who had never even heard of transness and who were revolted by it in the way cis people always are. There were bi people who had never heard of genderqueerness and insisted that genderqueers were really men/women based on their sex organs. 

There were also bi people who learned, to their alarm, that according to these complete strangers halfway across the country their own identity literally excluded themselves. Or their partners. Or just people they had never even met but still recognized the inherent humanity of.

And worse, that definition of Real Men and Real Women was getting more and more well known as networking continued to expand. 

It was easy for cis gay and lesbian people to understand and include in queer literature that was even then dominated by gay voices, but more importantly, it was easy for Straight people to understand and pass around in their own dangerous and damning ways. 

Especially in places where queer community was patchy and inconsistent, often with gaps where people were dead or had fled, the national scale information was the best thing many of us had.

That meant “bi means 2″ became the dominant interpretation pretty quickly.

So, there were basically two responses to that.

The first was to reclaim and redefine bisexual.

That movement is the one, I think, that has been the most consistent. 

It has also had varying levels of success, given that every year or so we have another rousing round of “well actually, bi means 2 or more.” But by 2016, most people seem to either naturally understand that bi includes trans people, or are open to learning that fact quite quickly.

The second response to the corruption of bi was to break ties with a word that was rapidly being used as a way to seriously hurt people, and make something new. Something that would be self defined rather than reclaimed from medical studies, and that would be clearer and more transparent even in its basic design.

That was basically how pansexual rose to prominence. (Some people say pansexual as a term existed even into the 80s, but I have seen no evidence or firsthand accounts of it before the 90s. Certainly if it did exist in the 80s, then this political context is why it became a Big Deal rather than staying a niche concept).

And, that’s part of why, today, pansexual remains its own unique identity.

Even though at this point bisexual has mostly been cleansed of the horrible debacle that was binarism-and-transphobia-in-the-90s, pansexuality literally is a separate political group from bisexuality. The identity fractured off and became its own unique culture and label.

The old claim that “bi is transphobic” is nonsense today, but that claim came from a very real historical problem. 

The pansexual identity spread as a way to try to combat that problem- and there are people on this very website who will attest to the fact that in the 90s and 00s knowing someone was pan rather than bi was fairly similar to seeing someone wearing a “trans ally” pin today: it marked the potential for a safer relationship.

Whether pansexuality is still “necessary” today, when bisexual is more often accepted as meaning 2+, is irrelevant.

Men are always, inherently, the oppressors and aggressors, continually trying to speak over and dismiss the needs of women.

Women are always, unilaterally, the oppressed, hurt, and spoken-over.

The patriarchy (defined as "men oppressing women") is THE primary source of oppression, and while other forms may exist, none can ever be as powerful. Patriarchal oppression always trumps.

In the most visible form of TERF-ness, we combine this with "trans women are men, and trans men are women," to get

Trans women are the oppressors and aggressors, continually trying to prioritize themselves over cis women.

Trans men are victims of the patriarchy and should be forced to detransition to save them from themselves.

Being trans is far less of a factor in oppression than being a "man" (because, again, patriarchy trumps all) therefore cis women are, unilaterally, more oppressed than trans women.

But the thing is, you get fun stuff when you take the exact same base TERF principles above, but instead combine them with "trans women are women, and trans men are men".

Because then you get:

Trans men are, inherently, the oppressors and aggressors, continually trying to speak over trans women and prioritize their own whims over the needs of trans women. (And those of cis women.)

Trans women are automatically, inherently, always more oppressed than trans men, because the oppression of being a woman (who is trans) is far more weighty than the oppression of being trans in general. (Or disabled, or indigenous, or in an intensely bigoted region...)

Not only that, since men-over-women is the most powerful factor in oppression, we could possibly further conclude that a trans man is automatically the oppressor in any interaction with a cis woman. (Because, again, while within genders a trans woman may be more oppressed than a cis woman, and a trans man may be more oppressed than a cis man, the trans-ness is not as important as the Patriarchy, so trans men are still 'over' cis women.) For this reason, we should probably exclude trans men from safe spaces.

But regardless, trans men definitely must, in any interaction with a trans woman, be the oppressor, aggressor, and speaker-over-er, because men are, always, the oppressors, etc.

No. I'm putting my foot down. If you're going to be the Gay Police and try to define other folks' identities for them, well, then, the queer community has a protocol on what to do with cops.