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"my profile" stamp: https://www.tumblr.com/gwenydwenyy

It’s intended as ironic of course, as deliberate camp. The musical is intended as a parody of old sci-fi and horror movies, mixed with a camp drag aesthetic inspired by the contemporary glam rock movement. The mad scientist villains in the movies being parodied were often queer-coded, and vaguely effeminate.

So to parody that, Frank-n-Furter goes far beyond the queer-coding, and is outrageously effeminate and evil. He rapes people, kills them with an axe and serves them for dinner and force-fems them to take part in his climactic stage show. He is a Frankenstein parody, who literally makes an artificial man in order to fuck him (a joke about Frankenstein I’ve seen on tumblr). And does it all while wearing stockings, a bustier and heavy make-up. He is deliberately the ultimate evil man in a dress trope, referencing Psycho and all effeminate mad scientists in media.

That Frank-N-Furter isn’t explicitly a trans woman doesn’t matter. The musical deliberately blurs the line. The line “I’m just a sweet transvestite, from Transsexual, Transylvania” is like a perfect encapsulation of how horror movies treat transfemininity. “Men in dresses” (transvestites) trans women (transsexual) and a symbol of predatory horror movie villainy (Transylvania) are all conflated, making a pun of out how they all begin with “trans”.

Of course, it’s intended to be ironic. It’s a parody of queer-coded villainy in old horror movies by turning it up to eleven, so that you can’t take it seriously. The whole movie has this drag show camp aesthetic that it celebrates, and the supposed representatives of heteronormativity, Brad and Janet are turned in the end. Frank-N-Furter becomes a symbol of a hedonistic queer liberation “Give yourself over to absolute pleasure.. Don’t dream it, be it.”

This is the clear intent of Rocky Horror, and it’s how it became a “queer classic”. Does it work? I’ll admit that I enjoy the movie version. The glam rock aesthetic is fun, the songs are catchy, and they keep coming at a quick pace. A lot of it is admittedly that I love the old horror and sci-fi movies it’s parodying, so my cultural touchstones are similar. I’m the kind of person to get a thrill out of knowing that Frank-N-Furter at one point uses the exact same prop that Peter Cushing used in the second Hammer Frankenstein movie.

That is a different question however from how well it succeeds at subverting the transmisogynistic tropes it handles. Even in the most sympathetic possible account of the musical, it’s doing the equivalent of handling live grenades. Is it the creators tropes to subvert in the first place? Is it the fans?

Let’s talk about Rocky Horror’s creator, Richard O’Brien. He is certainly a weird and contradictory person, he identifies as a third gender and “70% male and 30% female“, and is using estrogen. So arguably he is a transfem enby and thus transmisogyny-affected. But he’s also a transmisogynist who doesn’t believe trans women are “real women”.( I would like to know what exact percentage of “female” as a transfem person turns you into a bad fake trans woman.)

Of course the important thing about O’Brien is that he is rich. He is in a vastly different class position than the majority of transfems. So while he may be taking estrogen and living as a third gender, he is simultaneously isolated by his own wealth from the effects of the transmisogyny he bolsters in the media (see Caitlyn Jenner for another example of a wealthy transfem doing the same thing).

And O’Brien is rich because Rocky Horror is a huge success. The stage show has seen tons of productions, the original ran for 7 years in the West End, and the movie is a slow but certain money maker, with probably the longest theatrical run out of any movie in history. He is swimming in residuals.

This raises the more interesting question of Rocky Horror’s position in the wider culture, and it’s status as “queer media”. It’s a movie which is just not passively watched but celebrated and performed by its fandom. People show up in cosplay to showings, “shadow casts” perform while the movie plays. And of course the original stage musical is still performed.

So we have to ask ourselves, what are people performing? And who is performing it? And I’ve already answered the former question earlier. Rocky Horror is largely an ironic performance of transmisogyny. And the fact is, the majority of people doing that performance are not the main targets of transmisogyny. They are largely TME cishet, queer and trans people. It’s “ironic” transmisogyny to be sure, I think most fans of Rocky Horror who have any understanding of what it is doing view Frank-N-Furter as the true hero of the show. But is it really their thing to be ironic about? Are transmisogyny-exempt people really the people who should reclaim with irony and camp transmisogynistic tropes in horror media? I don’t think so, and that’s why there is so much resentment about Rocky Horror from transfems. And it’s creator doesn’t help, because while he’s arguably transfem, he also spreads transmisogyny in the media.

It illustrates a lot of things, for example how imprecise “queer” is as a description of people. It’s an umbrella term, and does group together people who have much in common. But it also erases the material differences within the community. Queer people aren’t all equally oppressed.

So Rocky Horror status as queer media, as a campy celebration of queerness and parody of anti-queer tropes in genre films is kinda grating. Because it enables TME queer people to perform and celebrate Rocky Horror, because they are queer and it’s about “queerness”, when there are specifically transmisogynistic tropes parodied in the musical. It isn’t really their place to do so.

It appropriates specific transmisogynistic tropes in the media by thoughtlessly subsuming it into the general anti-queerness which it is part of.

Of course there are transfems who got to explore their gender at Rocky Horror showings. But I think the reason they did that is because mtf crossdressing is accepted as part of a camp ironic performance in such a context. It makes it feel safer to perform femininity in public, because you can backtrack and say it’s purely ironic. That’s no different from the comedy crossdressing in American Halloween parties, and I think we can all agree those are often transmisogynistic.

And of course, Rocky Horror is an example of how cis men can perform femininity, and get celebrated for it in mainstream society, while escaping the effects of transmisogyny that transfems experience, and in fact often furthering that transmisogyny. It’s often a (negative) performance of transfemininity, in which actual transfems play no part and are mocked.

Tim Curry is a very good example. He made his career from playing Frank-N-Furter, and he probably couldn’t have done that if he was actually transfem, and not just crossdressing for an ironic performance on stage and screen. Like I don’t have anything against him in particular, quite the opposite, he’s one of my favourite actors, love him in everything from Clue to Muppet Treasure Island to Gabriel Knight. My objection is to the patriarchal and transmisogynistic system that favors cishet men like him.

Speaking of crossdressing on stage, the drag culture which Rocky Horror is inspired by of course has a complex history. It’s deeply rooted in both African-American and queer culture, and transfems have played major roles in drag. But Rocky Horror is if anything even an appropriation of drag culture. It represents drag’s commercialization and recuperation into the mainstream. It took drag out of the gay bars being raided by the police and onto the more respectable West End stage, making a lot of money in the process.

Rocky Horror beyond any qualities it has as a stage and film musical, due to its popularity represents a lot of complex issues. It’s important to queer culture, but it also represents the commercialization and recuperation of queer drag into the cishet mainstream. And within the queer community, it is a shining example of how TME queers can appropriate specifically transfem struggles as their own. It shows how cis men can gain wealth and fame performing transmisogynistic caricatures (even if they are ironic and don’t mean it).

hi so this is a really old ask, i tried to answer it a while ago but it got eaten by tumblr, i only recently found a version of it buried in my drafts, so im answering now. I have no idea if anon still follows me or even uses tumblr, but i really hope this will be helpful to some

im going to have to approach this carefully because theres a lot of loaded rhetoric here, not necessarily intentionally on your part but its present, and its overflowing from the original ask.

let me try and break it down a bit.

so firstly lets start with "the first 20-whatever years of your life". this is simply factually untrue regardless of if you buy into the rest of it. I started socially transitioning very young all things considered, i wont give a specifics for privacy but my processes of transition started around 14 and i had ran away from home to live as a woman by 18.

this may seem petty or like a small mistake on anons part, but its really not. this number of 20-whatever was almost certainly picked due to my bio saying im in my 20s, the anon assuming i must've lived as a boy until just recently, without much more thought at all. people like anon see trans women as perpetually new to womanhood, early in transition, and this is far from a simple mistake, its policy. they want to keep trans women from transitioning, and if we do, they want to kill us. the view of any trans girl or woman as new to it all is a key piece that makes their ideology tick, they cannot comprehend a child that may be trans, despite many studies pointing towards gender identity forming at a very young age. and again, when they do comprehend this, they become exceedingly violent, you only need look at the rhetoric surrounding children and trans people recently to know what im talking about.

secondly, the portion on being taught that im biologically and intellectually superior:

this part is extremely nuanced to describe accurately so i may need to return to it to do it justice, but the short version is that I was not taught that I, jingerpi, am superior to women, I was taught that Boys, that Men, are, as a class, superior to Girls and Women as a class. while yes, for a time it seemed i was to be put in that class of boys/men, there was never any illusions about this being something specific to me, individually. in fact, most of the things i learned about myself individually were that i am weak, and inferior. i had multiple older siblings who all put me to shame, all of my peers were higher achievers and more physically capable. I was even called slurs and told the typical things about not being a real man or being too effeminate. i distinctly remember arguing against a boy when we were around 10-12 or so, that boys aren't stronger than girls of the same age, that often girls are stronger, in part due to puberty starting younger for girls. the differences in adults to exist sure, but they're also largely specialized, and are not universal traits about womens ontological weakness.

of course, this is personal experience, but that is my point, i was never told i specifically am stronger than women* (more on this later), i was taught implicitly about the patriarchal relationships between genders, as all children are, even cis girls. I call this patriarchal socialization, rather than male/female socialization, because everyone receives it to some extent, even cis women are perfectly capable of being misogynists, the real difference is where you see your role in it all, and how society treats you.

speaking of society, lets move on for now and come back to the socialization aspect later, because there is certainly more to it and i dont want you to think that is the totality of my view, but we need more context to fully understand the issue.

so thirdly, the section about being given automatic access to everything i need to succeed and independently make all the money i need to for the rest of my life, as well as that little note about a career path making more money the more men are involved in it.

this is just another blatant untruth. the wage gap for trans women is far worse for trans women than it even is for cis women. anon is straight up lying

ive posted this graphic before but its actually far more damning than it appears, while even this places trans women well below average and indeed below cis women according to most metrics, its only looking at trans women who had full time jobs

and this isnt a small issue either, because unemployement rates for trans women are (at least) twice that of the general population, somewhere between 15-30% of us go without employment. and of those who do have work, 44% are underemployed, compared to about 30% of women generally being under-or-unemployed, more trans women are under and we're 4 times as likely to have household income under 10k. source for the above information. this isnt cherrypicked either, some sources estimate the umeployment rates for women are 3-5x higher than the general population, going as high as 30% for total unemployment, before even adding on the 30.8% underemployment from before (44% of 70% is 30.8%), which would bring the final number to a whopping 60.8% of trans women under-or-unemployed. I picked this first source because it was clear and concise.

as for that bit about gaming and computer science, i have to say this really bothers me, because it relies on a popular stereotype to pass of transphobia uncritically. while some might challenge the stereotype itself, i think thats missing the point of this assertion. so firstly, about the stereotype, that is what this is, theres no data provided here that trans women are disproportionately working in computer science, but ill address it more and get to the anecdotes in a moment. I think the important thing to keep in mind is that it isn't the presence or absence in a field that makes someone a woman or not, we have to look at how they're treated within that field. if a cis woman went into computer science, you would not say she has male privilege, you would say she's brave and achieving her dreams, you would know she faces discrimination in the workforce. I wont bother with the statistics here because its so obvious and you can google it yourself, but trans women face many many hurdles and discriminations within the workforce, yes even (especially) in computer science. I mean all you really have to do to see this is look at the earlier income statistics and this is extremely clear. Why does being in a male dominated field seem to you to be evidence of secret maleness? is it because its as a demographic of women rather than an individual woman? Well, if thats the case, do you think Asian women are male socialized because they're significantly more likely to go into STEM, an area of 3/5ths men, than their white counterparts? no, of course you dont (and if you do, you're racist). this is ridiculous, this scrutiny is being unequally applied due to transmisogyny, and the concern presented here is false pretense for sharing that bigotry.

so to get to the stereotype itself, something like 48% of gamers are women, the idea that gaming is a male thing is just misinformation which only considers people who play on PCs to be "true gamers" or whatever, even then, the proportion of PC gamers is still about 35/65ish, not nearly as big a gap as many think. the field of computer science, was also started by women. Ada lovelace is widely considered the mother of computing, and the first calculators were literally women doing math themselves. while yes, the field has become more male dominated, the idea that this correlates causally with people engaging in it as being male is ridiculous. you're saying that because a lot of fish in this pond are goldfish, these fish that look just like mosquito fish must secretly be goldfish, because thats whats usually in the pond. its like saying a rectangle is a square because you noticed squares are rectangles. its a total logical error, just because the association goes one way doesn't mean it goes the other.

and again, you've provided no evidence that this disproportionate engagement is even real, anything more than yet another stereotype of a minority. in my experience, most trans women work far more in the service industry. whether that's retail, some general customer service job, sex work, or otherwise, and people who see trans women as all having high income computer science jobs only think so because they're not friends with poor people, and particularly not poor trans women, so their sample is incredibly biased. I myself have studied computer science, but I have never worked in the field. most of my jobs have been in customer service, with some being in education, again, a very feminized field and labor force.

that said, if we look at it anecdotally, yeah, ive seen trans girls be more interested in computer science than other women ive known, not by a ton mind you, ive met plenty of cis women in computer science too, and its a biased sample, because i myself am interested in computers because my siblings were, and i talk more to other trans people, because im trans, but putting that aside, and putting aside the hypervisibility that may lead someone to think representative stats are "over representative" ("theres a suspicious number of women in this movie", etc), lets just throw all that out and assume for the sake of argument that trans women are disproportionately interested in computers. lets think for a moment if we can explain this with anything other than "male socialization" okay? how about the freedom of gender expression and anonymity the internet allows? how about the fact that we're continually harassed when we go outside? how about the fact that we're not allowed into womens spaces? We're barred from child care and adoption, We cant even use the bathrooms for crying out loud, how about the fact that we're banned form participating in sports? did you know these gender segregations also apply to chess? I used to play chess, I'm registered with FIDE, but I'm trans and FIDE requires a formal two year processes to change your gender, for chess (though it doesn't apply to trans men lol). Do you see what I'm getting at, though? Trans women are pushed out of every sport, every hobby, every field, etc. the only place we can find solace is on the internet. I would be dead if i didnt connect with other trans girls through social media and messaging apps. I spent my early years roleplaying in minecraft for gender euphoria (40-45% of minecrafts playerbase are women btw, for another datapoint for you). so in the end, do you think its possible that if this correlation does exist it could be explained by any number of cultural differences just like it is for other demographics of women? Even explained by our own oppression? Or is it just because we're secretly men in some metaphysical way?

again, if this were any other group, you would be celebrating us entering into the field, happy to see us challenging the assumptions, but you're not, you're trying to use it to slander us as a demographic, because you don't think we're really women, we just identify that way.

I also just really dislike the erasure of women from computer science, something these talking points contribute to directly, while claiming to be working in feminism's name (how ironic). women have contributed vast amounts to computer science, and any of us who do so despite sexism should be applauded, not misgendered. you're calling a girl a boy because she wears blue, and claiming to be the progressive one, when you're the one implying that colors have innate gender. (though yes they have socially defined genders, you need to see girls fighting against that as such, instead of saying actually their affinity for blue is telling of their internalized sexism, or some such nonsense, theres nothing sexist about liking computers, or the color blue).

okay, so moving on now

fourth, still about society's treatment, the section about "never having to fear being raped [pregnant] or stalked by dangerous men"

this part is reactionary drivel that knows nothing of my experiences, again, its simply factually wrong. I was raped, as a child, repeatedly. while yes, I cant get pregnant, i didnt even know how pregnancy happened at the time it started i was so young, that didn't make it any less terrifying. its incredibly hubristic to downplay rape like this to pwn a trans woman, especially considering we experience it at such high rates. i also know pretty confidently that they wouldn't make this same argument against a cis woman who is infertile, cis women being unable to bear children is a tragedy, but when its a trans woman, they see it as a burden lifted, regardless of whether or not we personally want children or mourn our inability. there are also still plenty of medical risks associated with rape, and i was not in a situation to get care for any of them.

its also laughably wrong to say that i never feared being stalked by a man. I've been stalked multiple times, two times of particular note, once with a coworker who consistently compared himself to the joker and said he would kill people for me and many many other things which i dont want to get into, and another, who abused his job to gain access to private information about me and the people i was living with, tracking down countless people even tangentially associated to those i lived or worked with, to call or show up at their door unannounced, eventually finding where i lived, once showing up at the house i was staying at waiting for us to arrive home to try and confront me on the spot. i distinctly remember hiding in the garage fearing for my life while the use of guns was being discussed by the property owners to deter him. thank god for the owners who let me stay with them by the way, they saved my life on more than one occasion and mean the world to me. again, i wont give a specific age, but both of these stalking incidents were before i was even 20, with the rapes being well before i even know what being transgender was. this is to say nothing of the countless other ways i was harassed or belittled throughout my adolescence in distinctly feminized ways.

so now that we've addressed most of the big claims here, let's return to the socialization issue. I said earlier that I think we're all socialized to believe in patriarchal ideas, regardless of assigned gender, and that our position within society is far more important. however, I think sometimes it even goes beyond this. while there's no single unified theory, in many ways trans women are women, or girls at least, before we "come out", and before we even have words to describe our experiences. I have a personal anecdote about that.

when my siblings and I were younger, we learned from one of our cousins how to snap in an atypical way from our cousin, where you move your hand and then stop it and let your index finger fall against your middle finger making a noise, you can do this repeatedly to have a little miniature clap, a motion sometimes accompanied in pop culture by the phrase "dammnn". after a while of most of us doing this as a habit when bored or when wanting to make a noise, our parents told our sisters, and only our sisters, to stop snapping like this because it wasn't lady-like. despite being about 8-11, not knowing I was trans, I stopped doing this motion too, because I didn't want to be unladylike.

I could go on for a long time telling many stories, all the classic things you hear about acting like a girl beforehand, putting on skirts, internalizing what I was told women were supposed to be, etc, but that would be something of beating a dead horse. as you've no doubt heard it all before.

that said, I know a lot of this is more than simply me being treated strangely in ways that would be worse if I were ""female socialized"" because I have my sister's as comparison. my path in life is much closer to theirs, and in fact worse in many ways, than it is to my brothers. my sister also worked in education, we were both harassed by the same teacher who later went to jail for sex with minors, even our parents seemed to know there was something off about us, giving us special rules which our brothers didn't have to follow. I also know it's not possible to teach children about patriarchy without using comparison, if you want a boy to know he's superior to women, you have to use comparative language, or at least implications. you teach boys and girls all these ideas about the roles of boys and girls, we all understand the role the others are put into because we're taught it as part of understanding our own role in society. when someone amab starts to see themselves as a woman, they already know what kinds of expectations that comes with, and if not they'll be violently forced to learn extremely quickly. it's disingenuous to say there's this massive split in how we're socialized as if we don't all learn about both sides of the coin.

that said, earlier I put an asterisk on this, and that is because there was one time in particular where I was told my role in absolute terms, not just relative terms. generally, when I was told things about my role in society, it was comparative, and even in this situation it was, but here it was much more explicit, I was explicitly labeled as a boy and told firmly that this was the role I was to play out, and had those ideas intentionally enforced on me. That I specifically was superior to women.

do you know when this was? what situation led to these ideas being put on me? this so called "socialization"?

Conversion therapy.

I was sent to conversion therapy many times across 3 years and two "therapists". they tried to tell me that I should behave in particular ways, that I deserved certain things from women, and that I should be attracted to certain things about women. this was forceful, I never had a choice in the matter, and it was extremely distressing. conversion therapy has a long record of emotional abuse and it's been shown repeatedly to not only be ineffective, but traumatizing. in fact, I'm quivering violently as I type this even thinking back on it.

when you treat girls like boys, there isn't a "psychological benefit". it is trauma. there is a reason trans people face such high suicide rates, and why transition and social support are the two biggest indicators of a more mentally stable life for trans women. being treated as boys or men is not a privilege for us, it's violence. it gets us killed, and it's enforced through violence. like by putting us in conversion therapy, where we're tormented psychologically and sometimes physically, or mens prisons, where we're systemically raped.

I faced this violence in other ways too, but I don't care to get into it. this was by far the strongest way I was ever affirmed as a boy, though, and it was awful. I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. Im not usually one to put too much stock in psychiatry, but I am diagnosed with PTSD, and many aspects of it are due to this experience.

if you want to read more about patriarchal socialization, the details that go on there in more depth, feel free to search my blog for it, Tumblr willing you should see a few posts where I discuss it in more depth, but this ultimately is what we're talking about. we're all taught our roles in society, but when we're forced violently to perform one specific role, it's really not so nice. and it's certainly not a "privilege" like the original anon was trying to argue, it really is so ridiculous to argue this form of oppression which is shown to have dire consequences for us is somehow a privilege.

so, wrapping up here. I hope you can see why we don't take this rhetoric seriously, and how it's clearly a transmisogynistic anon. this isn't a good faith thing they've come in with trying to understand, this topic is never brought up out of genuine concern, it's brought up to dismiss our oppression in public while they abuse us in private. they don't want us to have terms for our struggle or to see ourselves as women, it makes them extremely angry, because it challenges their position in society and their worldview.

again, theres not really a single explanation of transgender-ness that is so dominant as to exclude other perspectives, but this one provided here isn't a genuine recounting of trans women's experience, it is harassment. so excuse us if we're not too fond of the idea of "male socialization", when it's reason for existence is a cudgel against trans women. socialization is not an unchanging mass that taints you invisibly, and in fact it can be a very violent and upsetting process. it's extremely arrogant to suggest that what trans women go through is a privilege. I won't say no trans girl is ever socialized to think boyish or misogynistic things, I myself used to believe I was male socialized, because that's what I was told and I believed them, but really I don't think it's that straightforward. because you know who else often holds misogynistic or boyish beliefs? cis women. there really is no clean line like people propose. and the few places where society is divided strictly into gender, like boarding schools or prisons, trans women are feminized and used as sex toys for the boys there, and being sent there in the first place is typically done so knowing this, as an act of violence against us.

women are allowed to like boyish things, have interests that are generally considered for boys, and this doesn't stop just because the woman in question is trans, it doesn't make her any less of a woman, and it just doesn't make sense to say this is because of her socialization, if anything, many trans girls go very far in the opposite direction into liking far fewer masculine(ized) things than they may "naturally", because its so often used against us and often a source of dysphoria. this too gets us hate, though. when we rightfully understand our role in society as women, and hyper scrutinized women at that, we often perform a very specific type of femininity that we're expected to, to try and please society, just as many cis women do, but we're attacked for this as well, saying that we're following a man's idea of womanhood, or that we're stereotyping femininity. this is also ridiculous, they simply don't want trans women to do anything at all, so if we act feminine or masculine, we're attacked for being fake women. yes, some of us perform a man's idea of femininity, but its not our view of womanhood, its the views of patriarchy we're forced to respond to, and again, cis women do the same thing. what is the oppression of women if not being forced into roles determined for us by men? obviously it's more than gender presentation, but as I've shown above, we get the poor wages, and we get the other stuff too, we get the harassment, we get the medical discrimination, we get the forced sterilization (more so than most cis women), we experience misogyny and operate in the world as women.

so I hope you can see why most of us don't find male socialization an accurate term for our experiences. we're all socialized under patriarchy, and for women it's often a violent process, but that includes trans women, too.

Uber is a fucking shell game of a company designed to leech investor capital and output bootleg cabs.

Nvidia posted a profit in 2023 of $4.37 billion. This is like someone stealing less than a penny from me.

And they lock this kid in a prison hospital for LIFE?

Demand AFAB-only policies be banned, and any person promoting that discriminatory segregation too. Insist on your space being explicitly inclusive of trans women and nonbinary TMA people within each and every women’s, lesbian, and queer space, resource, and housing.

Risk your own place there; Don’t just turn away when you see the literal discriminatory segregation. Don’t just assume or pretend your queer space isn’t affected by insidious transmisogyny. Talk directly to the queer leadership and don’t listen to excuses and exceptions.

Trans women, nonbinary transfems, and all other TMA people are counting on you using your privilege to demand inclusivity where you already have it.

Like are we deadass??? We're okay with racists using black people's art?? We're okay with racists changing the original context of the song?? We're all okay with racists taking a black mans song out of context on juneteenth?!?!?!?

I often see the argument that TME/TMA is a ""false binary"". I get it- as someone who is both intersex and nonbinary, i don't like binaries either!

But this isn't the ""false binary"" you think it is (language which you (collectively) stole from intersex people talking about AGAB). TME/TMA are not identities, they don't mean "transmasc and transfem", and they don't "reduce people to their bodies", the most common misunderstandings i see. These terms ONLY describe your relationship to a particular kind of oppression, and they are both incredibly nuanced and include a lot more people than you think. Let's break it down:

TME: "Transmisogyny Exempt". This term just means you are not the PRIMARY TARGET of transmisogyny. This doesn't mean you LITERALLY have never experienced misdirected transmisogyny before (another point of confusion i see often), but that you are not the INTENDED target of it. This would include almost all people- cis men, cis women, trans men, and nonbinary people who were assigned female at birth, were raised with the expectations of femininity, and underwent feminizing puberty the first time.

TMA: "Transmisogyny Affected". This just means you are the PRIMARY TARGET of transmisogyny. This term is much more specific and includes less people- trans women, transfems, and a lot of nonbinary people who were assigned male at birth, raised with the expectation of masculinity, and underwent masculinizing puberty the first time. Anyone who had to transition AWAY from masculinity.

Now, things DO get more complex with intersex people, that's just true- a lot of us have ambiguous bodies and/or are neither AFAB nor AMAB, had this designation changed early in childhood, or do not look/were not raised in ways consistent with their original gender assignment (hence why AGAB language is unhelpful). This is how i recommend my fellow intersex people understand whether or not they're TMA, and i actually think it applies just about the same to most nonbinary people, so you should evaluate this for yourself:

If you are being faced with transmisogynistic violence, or being excluded from something due to the assumption that you are a trans woman, can you tell them you are not a trans woman, or say or do something to prove you aren't (such as showing them evidence of your AGAB)?

Can you accurately call yourself transfeminine, or a trans woman? Do you have to transition to be viewed as a woman, or fem? Have you previously lived for a long while as a man/masc/boy or otherwise non-woman in a way that would strip you of your safety or right to present as feminine?

Is the transmisogyny truly directed at you, or is it assuming something that isn't true about you or your body?

Would someone else be less safe in this situation?

and yet far far too many TMEs seem to think we are naive to the challenges of womanhood, that we are taken aback by them and regret opening ourselves up to them. the trans women I know embrace womanhood fully, difficulties and all. transfeminism is a movement of women planting our flags within womanhood and fighting misogyny. we are not keeping one foot in some exit door in case the going gets too tough. we are taking an active role in combatting the forces that oppress us as women