cv/gate

When it comes to specific historical figures whom we have good reason to believe were what we’d consider to be ‘transmasculine’, I believe it is appropriate and necessary to protest revisionism casting them as cis women who did what they did to rebel from patriarchy. Reclaiming them restores us our history and honors their memory both.

However, when it comes to the broader issue of whether certain tendencies, more or less historically documented, should be considered ‘women’s rebellion’ or ‘transmasculinity’, I propose that we should do away with this limited framing entirely. This dualism was not created by transmasculine people but by others wishing to define us (often, define us out of existence). I propose that what today we call ‘transmasculinity’ is and always has been a part of (so-called) ‘women’s’ history, not just because there have always been transmasculine people who were seen and recorded (if they were recorded) as women, but also and especially because the impulses that lead towards transmasculinity are historically, and thus epistemologically, indistinguishable from the impulses leading towards rebellion to patriarchal standards and impositions.

To phrase it another way, there is no way under patriarchy for any woman to enter the historical record while following patriarchal precepts for women’s behavior perfectly and entirely. Any woman whose name we know, any woman who has made it into the patriarchy’s well-guarded archives of history, was a woman that flaunted the oppressive prescriptions for women’s behavior strongly enough to swim against the current and achieve this seemingly impossible victory. Thus, as all ‘women’s history’ is at least to some extent a record of rebellion to patriarchy, transmasculine people have a claim to all of ‘women’s’ history, because a woman being in history in and of itself is an aberration from gendered roles - a gender non conformity, if you will.

many of us are detransitioners or desisters, many of us spent years and years in some local "queer" communities. maybe that's just my bias and a pure coincidence, but when i hear horror stories from those times, trans men are literally never the perpetrators or aggressors in them.

we know how it feels to be so overwhelmed with society standards, misogyny and stereotypes that we would even reach for a rusty blade if it offered to take us out of this whirlpool of despair and hopelessness.

Non-goldstar lesbians are so strong for having experienced the trauma of being with men and kept surviving 💕💕🎉💕

rather than addressing/treating what motivated body dysmorphia, the aim is to sell marketable identities via cosmetic surgery