opinist

1) His character doesn’t exist in Homer’s Odyssey and was taken from Virgil’s Aeneid and given to him instead of giving him an actual character in the Odyssey. If someone were to visit the original source material, his role will not even be there.

2) He is essentially the dead wife of the plot, and is also one of the youngest characters. He haunts the narrative, which is a pretty common role given to women so as to not actually write them into the plot, but please do keep telling me that there is absolutely no transphobic or misogynistic biases towards why Elliot Page was specifically selected to play Sinon.

3) He still only gets a combined amount of about five minutes of screentime, and considering this is the most notable role he’s recieved since coming out 5+ years ago… I don’t think this is proof that transitioning has benefited his career. Every time Elliot Page is even mentioned by name, the internet goes on a horrifically transphobic crusade for months until he’s forced back into obscurity. His acting career has objectively tanked since coming out.

4) Elliot Page has already worked with Chrisopher Nolan and was given a (noteably) bigger role in Inception pre-transition. Christopher Nolan did not “wait” for Elliot Page to transition (whatever the fuck that means), the two already knew each other from previous projects.

like, the OP of one particular post that went around got mad at people in the notes for calling them out, talking about how they were just trying to use this as an example to talk about misogynistic writing and "see, you derailed this post about how women are treated to talk about a man!" but its more than just an ill decision on their part.

people are so eager to make the joke that Page transitioned as is now getting better roles, regardless of whether or not its true. people are eager because its a joke that paints such a clear, pointed image of how cis women are affected by misogyny. its the same reason people love "if men could get pregnant..." jokes and sayings even when they are supposedly trans-inclusive. its the same reason that gender studies classes motherfucking love talking about how binary trans men and women in office jobs lose or gain male privilege, because it reduces trans experiences to a vehicle to illustrate cis women's oppression and cis men's privilege.

Like. Clearly you have not tried to pay the bills on book sales.

We definitely need to reform the copyright system so they actually protect small creators instead of Disney, but a state of total anarchy has never yet been demonstrated to protect the vulnerable. In the absence of regulation, the strong oppress the weak. Bad regulation only helps them oppress the weak more, but no regulation is not the answer.

"you thought you would ever get to be an ordinary woman? that you would ever get to look like the average woman and to be treated like the average woman, instead of being pushed outside society into a highly stigmatized "not a real woman" box and be constantly punished for it? that only the conservatives hate you for wanting to be seen as an unremarkable woman, but the woke people will at least support you in this? well too bad, we have an ideology of our own according to which you MUST grow out your beard and live your life entirely outside of unremarkable womanhood, as some kind of rebel martyr, you are never ever ever allowed to be just simply a girl. and if you fail to conform to this expectation of ours, if you do remove the traits of your body and your style that makes you suffer but that makes you look, in our own eyes, as a cool gender outcast rebel instead of just a boring girl, then we will call you misogynistic and the cause of everything bad about gender roles (yet we would never attack a cis woman for just looking like a boring average woman, as we quietly acknowledge that she has all the right to do so, the way you will never have it). People who do not suffer dysphoria in the same way that you do will laugh at you, and will try to push you out of trans support networks".

do I think the hierarchy in either way makes sense? no, of course, let everybody just be who they are. But pretending that the argument above does not exist, and that the only conceivable reason for a trans woman to want to look like a boring ordinary average woman would be [checks notes] white supremacism (as if normie trans women of color would not exist) is very unfair.

I get that people are treading on each others toes here and being very sensitive about things in understandable ways, there are competing access needs, but we should at least not make the situation worse.

I certainly did not say that there is anything wrong with being a binary trans woman. I do not think binary trans women become better people if they act like they're not binary. I have never said so.

Maybe you know more about the context of those screenshots and the OP was quoting someone who did so the context was clear.

However, I do not have the context.

I am replying to the idea that a binary trans woman is a "gigastacy" specifically.

"Stacy" is a term that comes from incel vernacular. "Giga" in this context just means "a lot of" (literally "one billion"), but is very often used by the same people to mean "very very" or "the epitome of."

"The most Stacy."

But what IS Stacy?

"Stacy" is incel language for a conventionally attractive woman, the kind of woman incels (falsely) think all men everywhere want most.

So so far we have

"Binary trans women are the most conventionally attractive women."

Which, I mean... okay I guess? It can't be literally true for everyone everywhere, as binary trans women, like any women, vary in how they match up to conventional beauty standards, or even whether they care.

But as you point out, reassuring yourself that you're conventionally attractive is something a LOT of women do, and they're not always trying to imply anyone else is inferior, just to feel better. And trans women have extra reason to do this as they're culturally deemed ugly and weird looking a lot.

So that part's cool. I wouldn't go off at a cis woman for thinking guys fall at her feet either. Gotcha gotcha.

But there's more to Stacy than looking like Barbie.

Stacy is assumed to be vapid, unintelligent, and driven only by an endless unslakeable thirst for sex with Chad, a man who is "giga" conventionally attractive in a way that mirrors her own attractiveness.

Stacy is wonderful to have sex with, the ultimate desirable woman, but she is not a pleasant person or a good partner. She is stuck up and imperious, paradoxically so because she is, in fact, extremely cruel, judgmental, and stupid.

So "binary trans women are gigastacys" yields:

"Binary trans women are the most conventionally attractive, stupid, status-obsessed women."

That's not something I think anyone should be calling herself, and I agree with the other posters that you'd only call yourself that if you're so pickled by 4chan and adjacent that you buy into some really hateful complementarian conservative bullshit.

Ah, okay. Yeah, if “binary trans women are gigastacys who mog the rest of society” just means “binary trans women are really cool” or even “binary trans women are cooler than everyone else,” it wouldn’t bug me. I mean I don’t love it when people say “I’m cooler than you” if it’s not obviously sarcasm but that’s not a hill I’d ever die on.

I took it to mean something more specific because it didn’t just say binary trans women are cool, it specifically said that gender conforming trans women are MORE TRANSGRESSIVE than visibly GNC people.

And I think that IS a conservative dog whistle.

It’s a thing the right says to make traditionalism appeal to the kind of young people who would ordinarily reject it as stuffy or stifling.

“Actually, the weirdo liberal hippies won. Us trads are the REAL rebels.”

Do I think the OPs of those posts were tradwives?

No, but I think they were borrowing tradwife rhetoric, whether knowingly or not. (Sometimes not is actually the goal! Recruitment and radicalization are things.)

And tradwife rhetoric?

and they removed the trans part and went: "no, women don't have to worry about being seen as predatory when interacting with people, either you are lying about that or you are not really a woman"

you would rightfully be pissed off

Get followed into bathrooms? Called slurs in public? Catcalled? Sexually harassed? Banned from doctors offices? Banned from sports? Stalked?

This is simply misdirected transmisogyny. If they knew you were AFAB they'd leave you alone.

Get raped? Forced pregnancy? Abortion bans? Medical mistreatment? Childhood trauma? Be ignored and dismissed when speaking?

This is all just because of default misogyny that affects cis women worse.

Be told you have to be strong and you exist to protect others? No one believes you speaking out about sexual assault because men are supposed to want that? Myths about testosterone being a poison that makes people violent? Jokes about hate all men?

This is just individualized missandry. There's nothing systemic causing people to attack men and masculinity, shut up you sound like a mra. Don't you know men are privileged.

Someone says something like:

"Trans women are often viewed by society as being predatory men and this stereotype is incredibly harmful to trans women"

This is reasonable and true, it is backed by the material realities and experiences of trans women.

But what if someone responded with:

"Remove the word "trans" from this sentence and it sounds incredibly stupid! Women (cis women) aren't viewed by society as predators! Any trans woman who says she's been viewed as a predator for being a woman must not understand how the world works!"

We can agree that this is a ridiculous argument that ignores the reality of being a trans women in favor of projecting a cis-hetero-patriarchal view of gender onto trans women, while invalidating those who don't fit that framework.

RUDE AND MEAN

I know this screenshot is from a post from a couple of months ago but I want to put it in its own post because it’s so demonstrative of the kind of backwards reasoning these people use when it comes to trans issues.

When I say that both transmasculinity itself and transmasculine oppression are epistemologically neutered, this is exactly what I mean. Inequivocable proof of transmascs being unambiguously targeted for their transmasculinity (in this case, trans men of color being essentially tortured in ICE camps) is still inadmissible, because all this news proves is that a transfeminine person would have it worse. There is a rhetorical sleight of hand at play that substitutes the real, named transmascs in the story - specific and individual human people who relayed their own experiences in details firsthand - with entirely hypothetical transfeminine people not in the story at all. The transfem that the tagger imagined in their head for the sole purpose of dismissing anti-transmasculine violence becomes the real person, while the real and named transmascs melt into a mist and become purely hypothetical.

The nature of inhabiting transmasculinity in a world of history-long transmasculine epistemicide is that you are never taken as yourself, in your full living human body, with its discrete characteristics (whatever they may be), its history, its traumas, its unique positionality: you are never read as yourself because your ‘self’ is inherently illegible. Instead you’re like a text in an unknown language that others try to interpret comparing you to know quantities (even aberrant ones) and always finding you lacking in some way - less beautiful, less strong, less virtuous, less meaningful, less interesting, less valuable - because you are being graded on a system that is not just built without you, but rather built around your absence.

To make an example: Often I speak of the ways that growing up as a member of the female social sexgender class has shaped me in the person I am, and specifically the behaviors I have been trained and coerced into in order to escape additional punitive violence (on top of the regular violence being seen as a girl/woman gets you just to keep you subdued into the underclass). I have been taught to walk a certain way, stand and sit a certain way, to make way for people that register as men, to shrink myself around them, to fawn, to smile, to modulate my voice to sound submissive and placating, to defer to them, to apologize for speaking in the first place, to wrap my speech in conditionals and justifications, to make a show of doubting myself even when I’m sure of what I’m saying. This behavior is impossible to completely unlearn while living in a body perceived by others as female, because every step out of line is answered by a retaliation equal in proportion. You people would know about this if any of you listened to cis women. transitioning does not remove this behavior, certainly not instantaneously, and on top of that, having this heavily feminine-coded behavior and speech patterns while appearing even ‘imperfectly’ or ‘somewhat’ male is also grounds for punishment, more or less severe. You would think the people who talk all day of transmisogyny would be able to see this.

Now if I speak of this, I sometimes receive this response: but what about when you pass? When you look and sound and move exactly as a normative cis man does, won’t you have the space and opportunity to unlearn this behavior completely? will you still be claiming that your upbringing has shaped you so, ‘clinging’ to your AGAB? And that certainly sounds like a good argument, if you don’t notice the sleight of hand. If you ignore the fact that it is being told to me, a specific individual trans man with a specific history and body. I am 30 years old. I have been medically transitioning from a while. I do not look like a cis man or a cis woman or a transfeminine person - I look transmasculine. As of now, this much-discussed ‘male passing privilege’ has not reached me even remotely.

Now, because there is no cultural notion of what transmasculinity is or looks like, I am usually read as a medically aberrant and gender non conforming cis woman. At times I’m also read as a gender non conforming, queer, very young cis man, while some other times I’m read as transfeminine. In a few extreme cases where I do my best to ‘girlmode’ out of necessity I can even read as a quasi-normative cis woman, albeit an extremely quirky one. But I am never, ever read as a normative cis man. That has genuinely never happened to me. It is very possible that, due to a mix of my individual medical circumstances, my desires for my own body, and my sexuality and aesthetics, I may never happen. I may never move through the world as a normative (and straight) cis man on a regular basis. I cannot know that for sure because I have a hopefully long life ahead of me, but I certainly wouldn’t discount it as a possibility.

And still, to the person posing the argument of “what about when you pass”, my lived reality for my entire 30 years of life, which will continue to be my lived reality for the short and medium term future, is superseded by the specter of the entirely hypothetical, very possibly forever-inexistent, normative cis-passing straight-passing stealth masculine man they have summoned in their own mind to dismiss the real, present, firsthand testimony of my own lived experience. Their ‘headcanon’ of what I could one day turn into becomes more real than the living, breathing person I am.