kaleidoscopelady

It is a term that is pretty much always used with transfems in mind. Even though 99% of "AMAB" people are cis men and 100% of cis men were "AMAB", the term does not convey "cis men plus some other tiny groups included on a technicality", but rather specifically focuses your attention on the alleged similarities between cis men and transfems.

For instance, a phrase like "men's attitudes towards women" hints that men are generally misogynistic, whereas "AMAB attitudes towards women" suggests that transfems specifically are no different from cis men in their misogyny. The act of co-categorisation is in itself a political position.

The explanation is that it is not "womanhood" whose boundaries are so harshly policed, but a smaller category of "women worth protecting". That is, trans women are treated as women (held to impossible beauty standards, sexualised, talked over, underpaid, etc etc) even while they are denied the protections that "women worth protecting" are able to access, protections that include the right to name your own oppression by calling yourself what you are: a woman.

It is actually very easy to become a woman (in the sense of the social class). All it takes is for an average cis man to sincerely wear "women's clothes" one time (i.e. not as part of a performance), and he will be experience a whole load of misogyny for an age thereafter. You have to be a cis man with an incredibly high social status to get away with this. It's correspondingly very hard to become a man (the social class) after you have been in the class of "woman", it will take many months and demonstations of his commitment to manhood for the man who wore "women's clothes" one time to fully return there.

Similarly, if a someone who is viewed as an average cis man suddenly comes out as a woman, she will find two things happen pretty much simultaneously. First, she immediately becomes a (particularly marginalised) woman: she will instantly be subject to sexually invasive questions, will instantly incur the scorn of people who had previously liked her, will have her clothing criticised, her work disparaged, etc etc. And second, as a consequence of now being a woman, she will find that her sincere statements about herself are immediately discredited and contradicted: "No, you're not a woman" will be a common response. She would've been taken more seriously if she had come out as being from Alpha Centauri, because she would then at least still be a man, and to be a woman who is not "worth protecting" is to be denied the right to speak on your own inner life. It is a great irony that the contradiction, "No, you're not a woman," is the very thing that demonstrates that you are one.

Black women, South Asian women, Arab women, fat women, autistic women, gay women, working-class women, sex workers, and many other groups of women have found themselves denied access to the category of "women worth protecting" in various cultures and at various times. Trans women happen to be on the frontline of this fight right now in much of Europe and North America.

in the process of transitioning, i changed my legal name and gender to a masc name and male, and i currently can't afford to change them back. i have some noticeable effects of testosterone like a lower voice and facial hair that i shave regularly, but on the whole, i'm read as a cis woman everywhere i go.

however, because of my legal documents, i regularly end up in situations where people assume i am a trans woman and make things difficult for me. when people see things like my id, passport, etc. (usually these are people at work or in medical contexts) and assume i am a trans woman, i experience the following things:

people asking invasive questions about my genitals and sex life at the workplace

people assigning me more physically strenuous or unpleasant tasks than those assigned to other cis women

people suddenly finding it difficult to use my correct name and pronouns even if i introduced myself to them as a cis woman

people refusing to use my correct name and/or misgendering me on things like work schedules and other publicly visible documents and systems

people talking about me behind my back and generally creating a hostile social dynamic that isolates and others me in the workplace

all of these microaggressions are extremely uncomfortable to deal with and have caused me a lot of mental distress that makes it hard for me to function.

HOWEVER! i am still not the primary target of transmisogyny! my asab is essentially a get-out-of-jail-free card. there are aspects of transmisogyny that i will never have to deal with. if i am arrested, i will never have to worry about v-coding. i will never have to deal with the medical and financial hoops trans women have to jump through in order to access transition care. i do not have to worry about passing. i do not have to worry about the social ramifications of being someone who comes out as a trans woman. there's more beyond that, too, that's just a few examples.

that's not even acknowledging the fact that people who learn my backstory simply look at my situation in a completely different and much more sympathetic light than the way they view trans women! to conservatives, i look like a poor booboogirl who was misled into transition but thankfully made it out. i'm pitied and infantilized even though i have not experienced and will not ever experience the level of danger that trans women experience on the daily.

i am tme! if i get hit with stray transmisogyny bullets, it doesn't change the fact that there is another woman getting hit with them intentionally and at full force, and i still hold significantly more privilege than that woman. i still held this privilege when people read me as a trans man!

it's bonkers to me that anybody would try to deny that trans women are uniquely targeted and marginalized. even though i am in a social position where i am frequently assumed to be a trans woman, there are so, so many aspects of oppression and violence that i know i will not experience.

not everyone is pan

me: "I don't give a shit who you're attracted to but you don't have to go up to minorities and announce that you find them unfuckable"

the hard part is opening up, relaxing, being tender and letting tenderness come to you

the hard part is noting the ways that the rhetoric that binds you finds its way even into the beliefs of those close to you, and knowing that there is a wall between you that means you will always be a loaded gun to them

the hard part is noticing how these walls don't exist between yourself and other trans women, because the footing is equal. it's wondering whether this ease of trust and closeness with other trans women is how it feels all the time for other people. it's wondering what it's like on the other side, where you don't only ever feel truly safe among people from 0.5% of the world population

the distinction, though, is that the trans women I have been treated poorly by have been deeply, obsessively concerned with their capacity to harm, to a degree that is not healthy

they have been women who were taught they were dangerous, and who don't know how to hold someone gently without feeling like they are digging their claws through their loved one's skin

they have been women who apologize routinely, for everything, because everything they ever do feels like an act of violence to them

this kind of obsession with your own capacity to harm does not let you see your loved ones clearly. it does not let you develop healthy relationships. it can drive you to break your loved ones' hearts as you push them away so that you can't hurt them anymore. it's an obsession that obscures the truth of the love you receive, that isolates, that kills

I observe degrees of this in myself and in virtually every trans woman I meet, and I've developed the phrase "you apologize for the sun shining" to respond to women who apologize for wanting to exist around me, for wanting to be known, for wanting to be seen and heard and loved and understood and treated like humans