Overly Angry 1950s Pianist

A transmasc drag queen made a call-out post about how a newly-out local trans woman is a sexual predator. (The sexual offence was that, 6 years ago, before she came out, she was at a drag show with the drag queen (who was her friend at the time) and joked that the drag queen's makeup looked a bit like semen.) The trans woman spiralled, got drunk, got hit by a car, and is currently in hospital.

A newly-out trans woman and a trans man met at a local trans support group. They decided to meet up again at a local pub. She apparently asked questions about his transition that he considered invasive, and in a voice that was too loud and risked outing him to other people in the venue. She now faces being banned from the support group.

The only trans woman who volunteers to run that support group is being kicked off the team by the trans man who is in charge of it. The reason is that she once told the guy in charge to "stop talking" when he was giving her several instructions at once, and also that a different transmasc volunteer has said they find her "creepy" and don't want to be alone with her.

All three trans women are autistic, isolated, and don't have much practice with irl socialising. Maybe they're a little bit loud, maybe a little bit abrasive, maybe they misjudge the appropriateness of sexual comment to a friend at a drag show, maybe they're too keen to make a new friend that they get excitable and speak too loud and ask too many questions, maybe they get overstimulated by being told too many instructions and need you to stop for a second to give them space.

Maybe their behaviour that you consider weird and unsettling is actually a trauma response to a childhood and adolescence of isolation and bullying.

And you know what the funny thing is? I have been sexually harassed at a drag show by the drag queen in (1), who was performing and making sexual jokes about various people in the audience. I have been in a public place with the trans man in (2) while he asked me loud invasive questions about my HRT regimen and about child abuse I suffered. And I have been misgendered and deadnamed repeatedly by the trans man in (3).

And do you know what I did about any of these things? Nothing, beyond saying "Hey, I'd appreciate if you don't do that next time 👍 No hard feelings 🙂". Because, not only am I aware that people make mistakes, and I consider trans men and transmascs a vulnerable demographic and it would be a totally unjust overreaction from me to attempt to socially isolate them for these offences.

But also, I don't have the social power to do anything about these things anyway, even if I wanted to. My normal response to experiencing even serious abuse at a queer event is to simply stop attending it, isolating myself, and perhaps telling a few close friends about it. Because I already know that my complaints will not be taken seriously.

I've had to call attention to this in the most convoluted way, going out of my way to thank them profusely for their efforts, positive emojis etc etc, pointing out bits I specifically liked, and only then drawing attention to the issue with this one question. I have to point it out as if it's a minor issue, I have to pretend it was an understandable mistake, I have to let them save face by saying "I'm sure you didn't mean it that way". I have to suggest an alternative to give them an easy fix where they don't have to think. Then I have to thank them again and end the message on a high.

Then I have to patiently listen to their nonsensical excuses, and thank them again for changing the text of their quiz. Then write another appeasing message that characterises their transmisogyny as understandable.

And after all this shit I have had to do because a non-transfem wrote some transmisogynistic nonsense, it is me who is left riddled with anxiety. Because every time I call out something like this, even if I am as meek about it as possible, I am rolling the dice as to whether I will end up being smeared as an unreasonable bully and kicked out of this group (which might be a blessing honestly atp).

For example, when I was 13 I went on a French exchange where I stayed with the family of French kid in Lyon. The usual pattern of these things is that the French kid arranges a hangout with one of their own friends who also has an exchange student. Then the two French kids spend the hangout together, while you have a forced lengthy one-on-one hangout with a totally random kid from your own school (I did quite a few exchanges, and this kind of thing always happened at some point).

Anyway, I went to this hangout not knowing who I would have to spend the day with, and when I got there I was horrified to discover that it was one of the group of about 6 people who had been bullying me recently. They had been spreading rumours about me being creepy, harassing and even assaulting me in the corridors, etc etc.

I should probably explain what the "creepy" thing referred to. I had a friend from the schoolbus, we were the only two in our yeargroup on the bus so we became friends although we basically never saw eachother at school. He was much more popular than me. Every Friday he would try to get me to go to the cinema with his friends, it was a weekly thing for them. I normally said no because I knew my mother would be mad if I did something like that without asking her permission, and I didn't have a phone back then. But after several weeks of having to turn down this invite, I finally asked my mother in advance if I could go. She wasn't happy, but I pleaded and she eventually said I could go just this one time.

So on Friday I found my friend and said that I was finally going to join him that evening. It turned out that for once he couldn't go, he had other plans that week, but it was OK because everyone else was still going and I could go with them. So, bearing in mind that my mother had said I could go this week only, I ended up tagging along with this group to the cinema, without my friend. And I didn't have a great time tbh, as I've said I do badly in group settings and I ended up hardly speaking.

The next week, the rumours started going round that I had "stalked" these people to the cinema, that I had "creeped" along behind them uninvited, that they had tried to shake me off but I wouldn't leave them alone. I kept trying to explain how I had actually been invited by someone who wasn't there, but I couldn't get the words out before someone was again calling me a "creep". And one of the guys involved in calling me a "creep" was the guy I would have to spend a whole day alone with in France.

I was really worried that it would just be a long day of intense bullying, but I was surprised when we had a really nice time together. We talked a lot, we had a lot of interests in common, I even explained to him about why I had followed the group to the cinema and he said it made sense and apologised for the bullying. At the end of that day I thought not only had I made a new friend, but also the bullying (or at least this specific bullying) would be over.

So I was surprised when I got back to school that, not only did the bullying continue, but the guy I had spent the day with in France was still one of the ringleaders of it. He was still calling me creepy, and telling people I was a stalker, and I never got any time alone with him to ask why.

In the 20 or so years since, this is a pattern that has cropped up again and again. Someone treats me really awfully and unfairly when there is an audience, but when we're alone it's like they're a completely different person. I am always myself in a group or alone, the only difference is that in a group I find it much harder to find space to speak. The content of my speech, though, is the same: I will not say something about someone in a group that I wouldn't say if we were alone. So I really struggled to accept that, for the vast majority of people, unlike me, they are performing for the group.

Group social activities are a game, but a game where you can win or lose the very real tokens of social power. An effeminate autistic "boy" is a very valuable tool if you want to gain social power, because abusing someone like that is basically a victimless crime. You gain in social status and you risk nothing. But if you are one-on-one with that "boy", it's much easier to treat "him" like a person, because no one who matters will know about it.

Somehow, in group settings, I always end up being the one who is marginalised, the one who rarely speaks and is always spoken over, even by people with whom I've had one-on-one conversations about always being spoken over, conversations that often end with them saying they will try to step in and help next time it happens. No one goes out of their way to let me speak, it is always more socially beneficial for them to not do that.

Of course that's occurred to me, I'm not an idiot, and it's the default assumption that occurs to any bullied kid: people are treating me like this because I am doing something wrong. Even if all I am doing wrong is going to an event that I've been invited to many times.

It actually takes a long time to come to the realisation that, if your mere existence seems to make people uncomfortable, that's actually a problem with them, not you. It's not a crime to be an effeminate autistic boy, as a Gender Critical you are supposed to believe that effeminacy in boys is totally fine and not at all a moral problem. It's only when that "boy" claims the mantle of "girl" that you are supposed to object to it, and the post your referring to is set long before I did that. You're not supposed to admit that you think the oppression of effeminate boys is good and fair and understandable, that's supposed to be something you are politically opposed to. Are you sure you understand the ideology to which you have committed yourself?

Like, well done, you've nailed how transmisogyny manifests a lot of the time, in snap instinctive revulsion based not on our actual behaviour but rather on our appearance, voice, mannerisms, etc.

It's actually kind-of refreshing to be faced with someone who isn't saying "trans women aren't especially marginalised" but rather "trans women are especially marginalised, but that's good because they're freaks". It's moved from a dispute about the severity of oppression, to one about whether oppression is good or not, and that's a dispute where the right and wrong sides are trivial to identify.

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.

In addition, that word is not used to refer to they/them users who were "AFAB" in general, it's specifically a reference to a type of non-binary person with whom we are all familiar, who weaponises their AGAB because (whether consciously or subconsciously) they know it confers privileges in queer spaces.

People with weird and nasty kinks and fantasies are simply not a danger to children unless they're in childcare, parents, camp counselors, teachers, or religious authorities. Let me repeat it for clarity: a trans woman who calls her girlfriend "little sis" is completely harmless to children relative to your average parent. A trans woman with a diaper fetish is far less sexually predatory than your average local politician. There is no abuse without power.