kick me like a stray

1. You really don't learn, do you?

2. I am transfem with three transfem wives; we're all agreed that I'm doing the right thing.

3. Transfem moots, sound off; love yall, you're amazing and gorgeous and beautiful <3

4. Articles About Trans Men

inaccessibility to safety, inability to reach out https://prismreports.org/2019/08/09/there-is-a-hidden-epidemic-of-violence-against-transmasculine-people/

-uses FORGE as a source

-mentions how many trans men were raised as women as have faced misogyny in their lives

-trans men have less resources and are more likely to rely on an abusive partner

-spaces that claim to be trans friendly

often are only to trans women

-these spaces cater towards

‘mending’ abusive and violent

relationships in these spaces

trans men facing more violence then shown https://www.advocate.com/commentary/2015/07/23/op-ed-trans-men-experience-far-more-violence-most-people-assume#toggle-gdpr

“FORGE, the nonprofit I direct policy and programs for, conducted a national study in 2011 that was approved by the Morehouse College School of Medicine Institutional Review Board and funded by the Office for Victims of Crime. Our survery was answered by 1,005 trans people.”



-good statistics

-mentions how violence can cause suicidal thoughts and attempts

-becomes an ad for FORGE towards the end

Jamison Green https://xtramagazine.com/culture/books/jamison-green-trans-visibility-263476

nex benedict was a trans man https://www.advocate.com/news/nex-benedict-transgender-vigil-friends#toggle-gdpr

sex assigned at birth rates of committing suicide https://www.statista.com/statistics/1377568/us-trans-suicide-rate-by-sex/

2015 US trans survey https://transequality.org/sites/default/files/docs/usts/USTS-Full-Report-Dec17.pdf

-nonbinary people face the most sexual assault

-51% of trans men face sexual assault (209)

Xandon Gulley’s experience in prison https://www.intomore.com/culture/a-cry-for-help-from-an-incarcerated-trans-man-in-texas/

Xandon Gulley is a trans man in a female prison in texas, he is often denied his testosterone shots by medical and prison staff, is given improper hygiene products that lead to poor health, and has been repeatedly beaten and abused while in prison.

trans masculine experiences in the american prison system https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/strip-searches-trauma-isolation-trans-men-describe-life-bars-rcna6490

Trans men at Stonewall

https://www.npr.org/2022/05/16/1098786259/hugh-ryan-queer-history-womens-house-of-detention

“For men, the prisons try to make you a good citizen. But for women, the prison tries to make you a good woman — and that's a very different thing.”

https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.7241017

https://countingourselves.nz/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Counting-Ourselves_Report-Dec-19-Online.pdf

https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article-abstract/142/4/e20174218/76767/Transgender-Adolescent-Suicide-Behavior?redirectedFrom=fulltext?autologincheck=redirected

https://www.nsvrc.org/sites/default/files/2021-04/2015data-brief508.pdf

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7427218/

https://hellobeautiful.com/3004172/medical-racism-i-was-denied-treatment-at-my-obgyn-because-i-am-a-black-transman/

bell hooks wrote Feminism Is for Everybody specifically as a short, accessible primer to explain feminist theory without complicated academic language, & you can read it here or watch someone read it aloud here! and you should! at minimum i think everyone should read/listen to this book. if you want to go deeper with hooks, also check out Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center.

i also recommend (although these are varying degrees of accessible & skew US-centric; also, every text can and should be read critically! its good for everyone! critical engagement is an act of mutual respect and encouragement!):

Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation by Sophie Lewis

Black Feminist Thought by Patricia Hill Collins

"Radical Feminism and Feminist Radicalism" by Ellen Willis

Women, Race and Class by Angela Y. Davis

Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism by Zillah R. Eisenstein

The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan

Feminist Theory: The Intellectual Traditions (4th ed.) by Josephine Donovan*

"Wages Against Housework" by Silvia Federici

"Of the 94 studies, nearly all (90 studies [96%]) included transgender women, whereas 49% (46 studies) included transgender men, and 37% (35 studies) included nonbinary adults"

This is epistemic transmasculine and nonbinary erasure.

I am watching people get anons that are self evidently written by TERFs, 4channers and a number of people who likely do not engage with our spaces outside of discourse, and blindly blaming other trans people/communities as a whole. Watching them insist that that's just how our brothers and sisters treat each other, so they've earned slurs and harassment in return. Eye for an eye, but you earn it by even having eyes to see that a blade was swung at all.

I was vaguely openly queer, as in, I hadn't told my parents I was trans yet but I had an online girlfriend when I was 14 that they knew about, I was publicly identifying as pan, and was involved in my high school GSA, etc. and I needed a private space outside of school and the internet where I could process my traumas while being out as trans. As such it was really important to me that I had a queer or queer friendly therapist. Now that was hard to come by in Indiana even in the 2010's (especially bc a lot of the ones advertised were covert conversion therapists) but we did finally find one that took our insurance. A middle aged, married cis lesbian, who advertised as having experience with trans clients*.

I didn't know this until my early 20's when my mom and I were reconciling her poor reaction to my eventual public coming out as trans at 18, but my therapist was very convinced that I was not trans when I came out to her. She shared the fact that I told her I was trans to my parents and explicitly told all four of them she doubted me in her sessions with them about me.

I'm thinking about this all because the anniversary of my dad's passing was recently and I've been doing a lot of reflecting on my conflicting feelings about the ways he treated me as a teen (that was part of why I was in therapy, and why my parents were having sessions with my therapist without me). Then the memory of a day where he took me to Barnes & Noble and made me pick out several fashion magazines because "he thought I needed to be more feminine" came to mind and it clicked.

My therapist probably told him to do that.

It always struck me as very odd that my dad did that because while he was always kind of a "girl dad" with me growing up, he was also the first parent to fully embrace me when I publicly came out and never had any issue with my general lack of femininity when I was younger - in fact he often encouraged it and was very progressive about my upbringing... Until I started seeing my therapist and suddenly he was very concerned about me being a young woman and not being "feminine enough".

If that isn't a perfect example of transandrophobia, anti-trans masculinity, the gendered correction young people perceived as young women experience when exploring our genders/gender expression, and the private violence cis queer adults in positions of power can inflict on trans youth - particularly that adult cis women can inflict upon trans masculine youth, I don't know what is.

Non-transmascs and non-trans men, full stop, do not get to have an opinion on whether or not transandrophobia/transmisandry/anti-transmasculinity is real. Stop giving them reasons and sources as to "why" it is. If they were actually interested to know, they would have found the evidence for it already, but they are actively choosing not to because they want to remain ignorant to our realities so their hatred of transmascs and trans men seems justified. That, or--of course--they think our abuse is actually completely fine because they're sadists who feed off of our pain.

Trans women and non-transmasc nonbinary people are not capable of judging how we talk about our own experiences because they still don't know what it's specifically like to be us, and cis people ESPECIALLY do not get to have an opinion. Stop giving people the privilege of your attention when they just want to vent their hatred on men on you.