Sentient Moss

When I first started learning about transfeminist theory, it demanded a lot of genuine effort to confront a lot of socially imposed biases that I'd absorbed without noticing them. It was a lot of reading, a lot of listening, a lot of learning new definitions. New names new theories. And through that process I effectively chose to be dead silent about learning because I didn't want to speak on a subject I wasn't well enough informed about yet. It was months before I started actually talking about what I'd learned.

And the fact of the matter is that it's hard. And being a whiny snotty little thin skinned bastard who doesn't listen to women is the easy way out.

it wasn't until I really started to examine the power dynamics at play between myself/other transfems and TME trans people that it became clear the "unity" I thought I was protecting never meaningfully existed, and that I was just being conflict avoidant and people pleasing

I pointed out a statistic and called for solidarity and a recognition of privilege. how anyone else reacts to that is their choice

and, for the record! a lot of people have actually reacted by going "damn, trans women really are in an especially vulnerable position huh? I'm gonna make sure to keep that in mind when interacting with the trans women in my community"

like, I think it's easy not to realize transmisogyny is a unique force, because our most obvious oppressors are privileged by being cisgender, and so most of us likely come to conceive of our oppression as just transphobia. I know I did for a very long time

but once you take notice of the differences in privilege between us and our brothers, at how effectively they are able to throw us under the bus when it suits them, it becomes obvious that there is more at play. if it were just transphobia then we would be on equal footing with them

It didn’t register for me until recently that my experiences of being forced to strip naked multiple times at the mental hospital to be ‘checked’ when I was 14 was sexual assault, because the people who did it were nurses/doctors who clearly didn’t find me sexually attractive but instead used it as a form of humiliation and control towards children they deemed as ‘unruly’ and ‘uncooperative’ (ie. children who asked to be treated like people). I thought only people who fit into this idea of a child attracted pedo could be child sexual abusers, so I thought my experience didn’t count.

my stepfather would openly sexually harass me and my siblings at dinner while also loving the fantasy of killing pedophiles. whether he personally found our abuse sexually gratifying was frankly irrelevant to whether it traumatized us. whether he would be considered a pedophile or not doesn't change that he committed sexual abuse of children

The "accidentally ally teehee" thing of trans men being mistaken for trans women by transphobes does not, and will never, register to me as "the cis can't tell". It's honestly pretty blatantly a moment of "transphobes see or are explicitly tipped off to a Person Of Gender and immediately default to transmisogyny". And tbh it pisses me off how much transmascs don't see it.

Over and over again, I see bait posts from passing trans men with some approximation of "I'm a trans woman haha" to bait transphobes into tirades about how they'll never be a woman. Followed usually by little teehees about how affirming it was.

It never works in reverse. Not because it's easier to "pass" (a concept that already has little legitimacy) as a man if you're transmasc. The most "passing" trans woman alive could make this post, and they have. It doesn't work because the moment you indicate to someone that you're trans, with no further information, the default is transmisogyny.

May 24th: Murray Foust found dead in Kentucky, missing since April 27th.

May 18th: Eryka Caldwell murdered in Brooklyn.

May 10th: Juniper Blessing murdered at University of Washington.

May 6th: White House releases "counterterrorism strategy", including "transgender ideology" as a domestic threat.