Gag

Sylvia Rivera (holding the banner), and Marsha P. Johnson (with cooler) of the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR.) at the Christopher Street Liberation Day, Gay Pride Parade, NYC (24 June 1973). Photographer Leonard Fink. Reprinted, by permission, from the National History Archive of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center.

For historical context: Sylvia Rivera was talking about the radical Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) group that she and Marsha P. Johnson founded together in 1970. Together, they ran the S.T.A.R. House, where they pooled every last penny they had to provide a home for young street queens (mostly sex workers, mostly people of color). By the time of this speech (1973) their (gay) landlord had evicted the original STAR House, and they were struggling to keep it going at a new location and desperately needed the LGBTQ+ community to step it up with financial support.

That's what she's talking about when she says "I've been trying to get up here all day for your gay brothers and your gay sisters in jail that write me every motherfucking week and ask for your help!" She's condemning the white gay cis monied audience before her for turning their backs on the trans and gay people in NYC suffering the most. She's saying that despite the fact STAR had almost nothing, and faced the worst violence from the state, that they were still fighting to help the trans AND cis unhoused and incarcerated people of color left behind by the most privileged. And still the Gay Pride organizers didn't want to let her onstage to ask people to actually help gay and trans people stay alive.

Despite her pain and rage at the cruelty of this supposed community, she ends with the invitation: "Come and see people at STAR House on Twelfth Street, the people that are trying to do something for all of us, and not men and women that belong to our white middle class club."

Strictly speaking cis woman TWERFs and trans man TWERFs can both weaponise AGAB against trans women, but like. a cis TWERF would just call it "bio sex" or something, so with that in mind the focus lies on trans man or TME nonbinary TWERFs.

When a TWERF like this weaponises AGAB, this materialises in one of two ways, as anon has noted:

"Trans women are dangerous because they are AMAB"; or

"Trans men are more oppressed because we are AFAB"

You'll note that the throughline here is reducing all trans people to their AGAB. This, obviously, is just a parroting of TWERF rhetoric but pretending like AGAB is more valid use here than "sex" (frankly, I would argue the use of AGAB is more insidious than just using "sex", because sex can fucking change. AGAB language is more beneficial for TWERFism than fucking "biological female" could ever be. I digress.)

So, with that out of the way: Reducing a trans person to their AGAB is the same act in both cases, but the rhetoric is still different between the two groups, right?

I would say there's still no meaningful difference. The key words in the above two statements are "dangerous" and "oppressed," which begs the question: Dangerous to whom? Oppressed by whom?

AGAB is a binary system. It's based on false pretenses, but it is a binary in function.

The only possible answers to those questions are the other side of the binary.

"Trans women are dangerous and oppressive to trans men, because they are AMAB and we are AFAB."

It's one ideology. One tactic.

A trans man who states his AFAB-ness makes his position more defensible than a trans woman is explicitly degendering himself and implicitly degendering that trans woman.

A trans man who says our AMAB-ness makes trans women less acceptable in women's spaces is explicitly degendering us and implicitly degendering himself in the process.

A section of Miss Major's Wikipedia page.

A trans sex worker named Puppy over 50 years ago getting murdered inspiring her to act more deliberately and collectively for the safety of trans sex workers. "...the start of her activism...."

Stonewall became the epicenter of rebellion because it was one of the few queer bars that let trans women in.

The article also touches on how drag balls were originally created by trans women for trans women.

The entire subculture was appropriated by cis gay men in the late 60's who then barred trans women from participating.

The "queer culture" that so many tme people are eager to preserve is a culture of our exclusion. They're eager to take the art we create, the movements we start, they're glad to have us fight for their rights, and then kick us to the curb while saying it's "not the time" for our rights to be defended. They sing the praises of women like Miss Major while attending "afab only" events. They talk about how awful the abuse of trans sex workers is in "afab only" support groups. They cry about the plight of homeless "trans people" while sleeping in "afab only" shelters.

They love to talk about all the good Miss Major, and many other trans women, have done while actively contributing to our exclusion and oppression. Its very clear that they do not love women like Miss Major.

We are the Omelas Children of the queer world. Their gains are built on our suffering.

You know what IS an important issue? Getting called a fucking birthday boy. They get all hands on deck about it. They will write VERY long posts about how important it is you not use it, and that anyone who does must be punished as severely as possible

There's only one explanation. The lives of trans women are so worthless to them, so fucking disposable, that a trans man getting invalidated is actually more important to them. That's how these people, who demand we view them as family and allies, who think we should be ready to die for them, view us.

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.

Not only is it the most banal bullshit lacking any sense of introspection or understanding about the moment we are in regarding feminism or gender politics, it is also just usually posted by a transandrophobia truther type.

A good illustration for how ridiculous these posts are is to just drop the word "trans" from it. So the post becomes "men and women should just get along," which we obviously understand as a patently absurd and ineffectual sentiment that is asks for no considerations of oppressive systems and is just saying that the oppressor and oppressed should simply make equal concessions to eachother. But somehow the word "trans" equalizes any difference between the given women and men because they are gleefully under this belief that trans women and men truly are "equally oppressed," a la the transmisogynistic adage of "we're all faggots in the eyes of the state" - the most favored and highest simplification of the intricacies of intersectionality.

usually transmisogynistic

even when talking about something like art, and even if not done in an explicitly transmisogynistic manner, self-evidently derivative and i've yet to see somewhere where it didn't become instantly less interesting than the original concept

have you ever had a single original thought