positive force

For the record, I'm not trying to argue about who belongs in which community here, and it seems like a lot of the trans guys that spend time arguing about this have recently come out and been ostracized as a result, which is a relatable motivation. The arguments that they employ, though, whether they draw on an innate afab-ness or socialization, are not coherent positions on sex-gender and the patriarchy, they are appeals to the status quo. Which is to say, they aren't necessarily the bio-essentialist credos they appear to be. They are simply different ways of saying "I was always part of this community, I still am, and always will be, no matter what". Which is an argument about the social realm. It is like it is and will be like it always has been.

The reason a certain type of trans guy on this site can tell a trans woman that he will always be more of a woman than her while in the same breath accusing her of gender essentialism is that the first assertion is about the social realm, while the second concerns some sort of conceptual mode of being within a community (fucking Butler...).

Anyway, turning that kind of reasoning on trans women gets ugly real quick, and not just because no matter how pseudo-intellectual it gets dressed up as, as male socialization or amab-ness, it's always just screeching about how you will always be a man. No, what is much more vicious is that it asserts "I was always a part of the female women afab peoples and consequently, haven't you always been surrounded and accepted by men? don't you dare deny it" - when the vast majority of trans women are the most socially isolated and marginalized people on this earth. But that's what you get from an appeal to the status quo: a reinforcement of pre-existing conditions, and in this case, a reinforcement of marginalization, a carrying over of the marginalization that comes from being unwilling and unable to be a man into apparent non-men-centric spaces (lol).

So what about the random trans woman that is completely socially integrated? Well first off, and I don't know if you've heard of this, but cis women in general are much more likely to be accepting of trans women than cis men, like I have personally encountered at least one teen trans girl who seemed to be completely integrated into her own group of girlfriends, so the assumption that any trans woman with a social life must be one surrounded by guys is premature; and secondly, even when that is the case... well, as everybody knows, any woman with male friends immediately loses her woman card.

Genderless fashion icon and actress Huitzili Espinosa wears a trans flag-inspired dress for Trans Day of Visibility in Mexico City

👗 Henryjimenz on IG | Model

Dress by Vicmucio

like obviously it's very important to support the people being discriminated against in places but it's really really tiring when you've been barred from a place and people's main thought is "we should let you back into this place that is obviously willing to discriminate against you" and not "maybe we should stop supporting this place that has discriminated against people".

CWs: Rape, fetishization, impregnation by assault, dehumanization, transmisogynistic degendering, misappropriating the language of racial justice, objectification, and worst of all, "infighting". I'm going to do something stupid---post about transfeminism on Tumblr again. The following is transcribed from two Bluesky threads:

I have a story.

About how "transfeminists reinvented the gender binary". About how "every trans person is subject to transmisogyny". About how "we're all faggots, deviants, perverts, so why demand specificity?" It begins with a transmasc individual saying "chicks with dicks" isn't offensive.

See, this individual identified as a chick with a dick. Or a man with a vag, depending. They revealed a lot about themselves over the course of the argument with a trans women. They were 19, married, a parent, and never availed of any transition care. They didn't consider this term dehumanizing.

When the trans woman they were arguing with told them that they didn't have the authority to deem whether a term fetishizing her was dehumanizing or not, they got very nasty. Trans women did not have any special claim over 'chick with dick', and to say so was to practically misgender them.

So justified, they talked about how trans women *are* just a sexual identity, a kink identity, and we did not have any special authority over transphobia or transmisogyny. Unlike them, who experienced real oppression. This is where they strongly implied that they had been impregnated by assault.

That's deeply traumatic, and violent, and something no trans woman will experience. So therefore, of course, we have no epistemic authority over misogyny. Or transphobia. Or sexual assault, and fetishization. Our suffering is always going to be a subset of "real" misogyny, see. Because no wombs.

This individual is young, and they do not know they are a TERF. Trans identity, to them, is a mask, a way to "escape being gendered". Oppression to them is intrinsically linked to reproductive exploitation, which is synonymous with misogyny, and trans women don't experience that. We costume.

Every time I hear someone say that "we've reinvented the gender binary", I sigh deeply. We never needed to reinvent it. Trans women, in the midst of the most queervoid-y of spaces, have always keenly been aware that our claims of oppression and experiencing misogyny are rarely believed.

You can say this was a young individual---but where are they going to learn better? Who is going to tell them that trans women's oppression isn't a costume, isn't a stigma for a kink, is more than just a mask we put on? That we are, meaningfully, women? Even without the wombs?

The gender binary is already there. The queervoided social spaces always cease to be queervoided when a tranny walks in, because these spaces recognize true trans people yearning to be free from (re)gendering and oppression, and "male pretenders who want to be gender I wish to escape, the freaks".

I am not the one who made the gender binary important. I am not the one who tolerated TERFs in my spaces, who encouraged the uncritical adoption of naturalized sex split from gender, and promoted a model of misogyny intrinsically tied to reproductive injustice.

I am the one who is offal.

Trans women are women who cannot be reproductive exploited, and we are too tainted to be allowed to be men ever again. So we are trash. Even to queervoids, because their "beyond the binary" ends at the threshold of a tranny demanding respect.

You think you are beyond sex? You think you have eliminated the need to divine what kind of gendered violence an individual is subject to?

I don't believe you.

I don't believe you, because I have seen gendervoids enact this violence on trannies, time and time again.

I don't believe you are beyond gender.

[Red, in a different post]:

I don't believe you are beyond gender.

I don't believe you are beyond gender.

YOU MARK ME AND MINE IN THE SAME WAY THE CIS DO, IN THE SAME WAY OUR MOST DEDICATED EXTERMINATIONIST FOES DO, AND YOU HAVE THE SHEER, UNREPENTANT, UTTER GALL TO PRETEND YOU ARE IN ANY WAY MORE ENLIGHTENED THAN THE GUTTER OF THE PATRIARCHY YOU EMERGED FROM?

You are not beyond gender.

Fuck your pronouns. You treat a tranny like this, your gender is fucking "sexist". Piss on your "gender abolition". It's worth nothing.

I will, in fact, be even blunter:

Trans women are not trying to say transmisogyny is "the worst oppression". We gave up on trying to stress the severity of it a long time ago. We are, at this point, trying to communicate that we *are oppressed at all*, to people who refuse to believe it.

I have seen fifty-year old men pull out the "I was a woman longer than you, tranny" card. I've seen people of every identity and experience go "I'll always be more of a woman than you, tranny, and don't you fucking forget it." Trans women are surveilled, scrutinized, targeted, and not believed.

The most gender-enlightened of us all refuse to deign to recognize trans women as meaningfully impacted by misogyny, as anything but second-class citizens of womanhood and feminism, as meaningfully oppressed because we are woman-gendered, sure, maybe, but we are not FEMALE.

And we notice that.

Then when we notice that even fellow trans people are more willing to self-regender to talk over us than BELIEVE US ABOUT OUR OWN LIVES AND OPPRESSION, or GRANT US THE PRIVILEGE OF SPEAKING AS THEIR EQUALS IN THE STRUGGLE AGAINST PATRIARCHY, we are called "divisive".

Fuck that.

Hear me, here and now: You will get nowhere but a singularity of a "gender-enlightened" movement collapsing in on itself because for all the yearning for a post-gender existence, no one is willing to grant the tranny the dignity of womanhood, to admit that she, too, suffers AS a woman.

If you want to tie the core of misogynistic oppression to reproduction and deem transness as nothing more than "gender-play", fine. I wish you luck.

CONTENT WARNINGS FROM OP STILL APPLY.

I have frankly stopped caring who the most oppressed is, because I have found that marginalized communities cannot help but argue this endlessly in anti-solidarity ways. Especially since the ways in which we (as gender-marginalized communities) are all oppressed is so deeply interwoven and interlinked. You cannot understand transphobia, homophobia, or any of its intersections with other marginalizations without understanding the root of how misogyny, male-supremacy, and a patriarchal society operate.

However.

However, when transfems talk about how we are oppressed in unique ways that others do not necessarily experience (more on this in a minute), we are shut down in ways that aren't explicitly called out as "Oppression Olympics" or "divisive rhetoric" or "infighting" because it just makes sense to people that of course trans women, the non-gestational offal-women we are, don't experience as acute or severe misogynistic violence as those who have been saddled with the burden of reproductive injustice!

This is a point of fracture that is well-trod and yet not recognized as sex-essentialist, as 'TERF rhetoric' that is designed to make you dismiss transmisogyny and feel more aligned with transmisogynists than with your fellow trans people.

X screenshot very related.

And here's the thing ... my most-seen post on here is about my essay The Third Sex, an essay a lot of you have likely heard of, if you're familiar with my account at all, but perhaps not read.

The conclusion of that essay is, quite literally, that third-sexing, degendering, the discarding of sexual-chattel who are deemed 'defective', affects trans women most harshly, but it's a phenomenon that applies to all gender-marginalized individuals to different degrees. I talk about the treatment of infertile women in India, about lesbophobia experienced by non-transfem lesbians, and cite an essay by Dworkin (yes, that Dworkin) to show that even cis feminists have talked about this phenomenon, just in less concise terms.

I am, ultimately, of the mind that we should be a radinclu gendervoid gestalt in our struggle against patriarchy.

But it's not going to happen for as long as your refrain is "you will never understand the true pain of being a wombyn, tranny."

And if you don't realize who talks like that. If you don't actually understand misogyny, leave alone transmisogyny, and what its roots are.

Gendervoid as used here does not refer to a specific trans identity or cluster of identities, but instead a specific attitude towards understanding gender in trans communities.

The attitude of gendevoids can be summarised as a dismissal of the possibility of gender-based marginalization within trans spaces. It basically amounts to "because we're all trans, we're enlightened and have moved past that, it's a cis people problem"

The issue described here is that this unspoken attitude is itself a mechanism to ENABLE the gender dynamics it claims to reject, by silencing people who point out that there's a gender basis for their exclusion from the Gendervoid.

The fundamental problem is that the gendervoid ends up defaulting to bioessentialist notions of sex, and analysing the positionalities of trans people purely in a cissexist framework.

It's your life to live. Don't let anyone stand in the way of being your authentic self! 🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈

Rad feminism is a specific ideology, with specific political goals.

Even the most militant transfem separatist is theorizing about a safe space for transfems that does not currently exist- Transfems as a political group do not hold the power to create such a space and the fight currently is for transfem inclusion in spaces that currently violently exclude us- and to compare that movement with Terfs, a political ideology that actively seeks and exerts constant political pressure to exclude trans people from the safe spaces that have already been constructed, One that is succeeding and actively influencing policy, is an obvious spit in the face of transfems.

The transradfem is a transmisogynist construct first and always.

Transmisogynists, and the general public do not take transfems seriously- They do not take transmisogyny to the be the violent oppression it is- and the typical person's response to transfems bringing it up is take the position that said transfem is complaining about minor issues in an attempt to center herself.

it is so plain to the trans women that are being constructed as privileged entitled members of the community with an outsized need to make it about themselves that that is what is happening- and the denial of that pattern is a reinforcement of the behavior in transmisogynists.

I won't pretend that there aren't transfems being rude- transfems being condescending and bitchy- transfems discussing and theorizing about transmisogyny in ways that exclude and do not cater to transmascs. Why are they not allowed that? Why the fuck do you have a problem with transfems focusing on their own issues???

TME people constantly misunderstand what that (tme) means, what transmisogyny is, and assert they face it too- Correctly asserting that they are not 100% exempt from Transmisogyny- and taking it to the logical end, that that incidental transmisogyny they face is the same as the systematic and structural transmisogyny Transfems face.

I don't have to know exactly what they experienced to know that they are uneducated and have an incomplete and dismissive construct of what Transmisogyny is- just based on the way they speak about it. That is a completely reasonable assertion, and one that is fair for all transfems to make.

Be honest. have you done explicit direct work to both acknowledge and address your transmisogynist bias? if not you can consider yourself uneducated and your opinions of transmisogyny are beyond meaningless, they in fact will be biased and bigoted. always.

[large text: idea that intersex people are rare is intersexism]

intersex people get routinely mutilated after birth, put on non-consensual hormonal "therapy" later in life, our medical history may be altered or hidden from us, doctors often lie straight in our faces to not tell us our diagnoses or push us to "consent" on "treatment" by fearmongering or witholding information about this treatment, the official definitions of intersexness are constantly narrowing to exclude as many variations as possible.

we aren't naturally rare, we are made rare, and then this "rareness" is used as excuse to not include us anywhere. to not address our discrimination. to not think about our experiences.

💖butches who take estrogen 💖

💖Butches who use she/her pronouns exclusively 💖

💖Butches who voice train💖

💖Butches who get laser hair removal/electrolysis💖

💖Butches who get breast augmentation 💖

💖Butches who get facial feminization surgery 💖

💖Butches who get orchi💖

💖Butches who get vaginoplasty💖

💖Transfem butches in who do none/any/all of the above.💖