真鳥

When you refuse to accept that and try to deny it exists, you're literally doing the exact same "we're all faggots in the eyes of the state" bullshit that you see so many transmascs do in order to deny that they have male privilege. It's just "all lives matter" ideology all the way down.

Transmascs having male privilege doesn't erase the discimination they face for being trans. And white trans people having white privilege doesn't erase the discrimination we face for being trans.

Acknowledging this doesn't harm you in any way. It doesn't invalidate your experiences with discrimination or anything.

More than one thing can be true at once.

So here's your reminder that representation matters. Sharing thoughts matters. Reframing your experience and outlook on your body and needs matters. Showing those who need accommodations or have insecurities about their needs that they are/it's not seen as a burden and these things can be crafted into part of the joy and experience fucking matters.

but what would i, a humble disabled internet whore, know about it.

also transandrophobia does not exist in any meaningful way and has no place in discussions about intersexism. but for some mysterious reason y'all seem to talk about transandrophobia in posts about intersexism A LOT while avoiding bringing transmisogyny into the conversation.

“But it’s confusing!” If you take the time to educate yourself it’ll no longer be confusing. Otherwise you’re just gonna have to learn to be ok with being confused.

“But it’s weird!” You probably do weird things all the time. Everyone does weird things sometimes. Life goes on.

“But it scares me!” Is it hurting you? No? You’ll be fine. Being scared and being harmed are not always the same thing. Learn to tell the difference and then act accordingly.

"But it makes me uncomfortable!" The world is an uncomfortable place and complete strangers are not required to fix that for you. Learning to endure harmless discomfort is a life skill for existing in public.

"But I don't like it!" There's plenty of things in the world and not all of them are fun or enjoyable or For You. This applies to everyone and we all have to deal with that in a mature fashion.

Superficially it seems totally analogous to trans womanhood itself. There is an identity ("woman"/"transfem") whose boundaries are policed on the basis of AGAB, and part of the project of queerness is to break those boundaries. "AFAB transfem" advocates can't understand why a trans woman who has had to fight against transphobic cis women saying "you can't be a woman if you weren't AFAB" would herself turn around and say "you can't be a transfem if you weren't AMAB". It seems totally hypocritical to them.

I think a lot of non-transfems mistakenly believe that transfems are able to exempt ourselves from misogyny by bringing up our AGAB. They imagine that, if some guy assumes I'm a cis woman and sexually harasses me, I can reveal my AGAB and he will say, "Oh, I am terribly sorry sir, I will treat you like a normal man from now on, because I am a transphobe who doesn't believe in gender identity but only the primacy of biol*gical sex," or whatever. They think the reason I don't say that is because I want to be treated like a woman and not like a man. But that is not what would happen: if I revealed my AGAB to this sexual harasser he would step up the sexual harassment, the level of misogyny I face would actually increase, and he would also be much more likely to get physically violent too, he would start to be transmisogynistic as well as regular misogynstic. I cannot exempt myself from misogyny at all, because misogyny is not something that misogynists dole out on the basis of AGAB, misogyny is not "AFAB oppression", it's a denigration of femaleness and femininity in a very broad sense. Even a cis man who wears "women's clothing" will face some amount of misogyny, and he will only be able to exempt himself from that by asserting that he was wearing those clothes insincerely, such as a comedy actor on stage, or a man at a stag/bachelor/bucks party. That is to say, your assigned sex is no defense when the criticism is of your sincere expression of womanhood, because misogyny is not about assigned sex.

Now imagine an alternate scenario where an "AFAB transfem" is presumed to be a trans woman by some guy who then starts chucking transmisogynistic abuse at her. She can reveal her AGAB and his abuse of her will actually reduce. His criticism will likely switch from calling her a T-slur, to saying she's an idiot for presenting in a manner that might be mistaken for a T-slur. Whatever clothes, make-up, hair, etc that made him read her as a T-slur immediately stop being disgusting to him when he discovers her AGAB. This is what it means to be able to exempt yourself from transmisogyny.

My very first post on this blog was a screenshot of a Reddit comment where a transmasc non-binary person said they discovered that the reason no one talked to them at first when they started a new school is because they were mistaken for a trans girl. The comment implied that this misapprehension was cleared up, and subsequently people spoke to them again. That is exemption in action. Unlike misogyny, transmisogyny is specifically about AGAB, because it is entirely about the direction of our transition being a supposedly disgusting and shameful one.

The largest dam removal in U.S. history. So successful that the salmon that haven’t run freely in the river for literally over a century came back the next year. Not steady progress over a decade as expected, the very next salmon run they came home. No one alive saw salmon in that river outside the hatcheries kept by native’s tribes and the Department of Fish And Wildlife scientists desperately trying to save them. One of the activists who helped bring the suit spoke of their dying grandmother making them promise to bring the fish home, and they didn’t know how that was possible, but they spent decades doing it.

The legal basis for successfully suing the power company who owned the dams was Indigenous treaty rights to eat the fish. Eating the fish was the one thing in a century that succeeded in being a clear and legally binding right that superseded the desires of white capital and industry. I have been going to the public interest environmental law conference off and on for 20 years where a lot of organizing for Undam The Klamath happened. I’ve heard updates about every legal tact they tried as they happened, and they tried everything.

There are healthy, thriving salmon, trout, and lamprey in a rewilding and recovering Klamath River right now as a direct result of Indigenous people eating them. Of their legally binding right to eat them. They sure as fuck care more about those fish than any white vegan ever could. They are salmon people that the Creator sent Salmon to feed, while charging the People with protecting and stewarding them. It’s not possible to learn about salmon and trout in the Pacific Northwest without learning this, and it’s unambiguously racist to dismiss this symbiotic relationship.

The white vegans are trying to get all hunting and fishing banned in Oregon, and that’s quite possibly the single most catastrophic thing that could be done to the animals here because we killed off all the major predators of creatures like deer and without anything hunting them their numbers will explode, eat all the vegetation, destroy the ecosystem, and then die along with everything else in that failing ecosystem. Controlled hunting of deer is vitally necessary for the deer to survive. This is something Native people know, but patronizing racist savior-complex white people refuse to listen to.

I have a whole collection of Oregon’s Public Broadcasting’s documentaries about Klamath River or the larger story of fish and people in the region. If you watch nothing else, watch Klamath Dams Are Coming Out, First Salmon Ceremony, After The Dams, and First Decent (Native made). It could not be clearer that the salmon are being protected and nourished by the people who eat them, and that stewardship is a massive part of their creation myths. But it contradicts political vegan dogma so they don’t listen.