LurksLikeABoss

This is because topless equality has been a basic push from feminists for literally decades, until Radfems and NeoCons bonded over wanting a trans genocide less than a decade ago.

It's literally why the "no tits on tumblr" and other lesser SESTA/FOSTA consequences* like it were so jarring. It set back FORTY. YEARS. OF PROGRESS in the rights of people with breasts or perceived as women to wear the same clothes as people without.

Do not let conservatives lie to you about this. The majority of people in the us and the VAST majority of States recognize the right of people to not wear a damn shirt. It isn't obscenity, it isn't even nudity, it's just something pericis men are allowed that everyone else isn't.

Y'know.

Basic sexual discrimination.

Transunity is a political theory that was actively talked about on Tumblr a couple of years ago, but has since fallen out of the public spotlight. And this is unfortunate, because it could have really improved a lot of the discourse around gender.

There exists a blog under that name ( @transunity ), but it has been inactive for a year. I am not affiliated with that blog anyhow, I never had any personal contacts with its mods, but I want to get their general ideas to circulate again, so I'm trying to bring this back up in a semi organized fashion. My take on transunity is just my take, if you're one of the original coiners, and you disagree, I encourage you to talk about it, because we still have much more in common with each other than different.

GENERAL VIEWS

I believe that one of the fundamental ideas more trans people need to understand is that we're all more or less in the same place in the eyes of the society (when other factors, such as ethnicity or disability, are considered). To be trans is to fail the gender role system, from the point of view of cis people we can no longer be proper men or women. All kinds of trans people regardless of identity are affected by misogyny and misandry (not a type of marginalization by itself, but turns into a vector of oppression when overlapping with a different marginalization), which forms the foundation of transmisogyny, transandrophobia, and exorsexism*. These types of bigotry are not exclusive and unique to specific gender identities either and may be applied to any trans person for as long as it's convenient to the oppressor.

Trans people do not have gendered power over each other, and intra community bigotry is better conceptualized as a form of lateral aggression.

Gender assignment and sex are never strictly binary (especially with inclusion of intersex people, who belong in gender conversations even if they don't identify as trans) and need to be understood as much more fluid and not strictly correlating with one's actual position in life.

WHAT WE NEED TO REDUCE

The following things should be discussed more critically:

- "Powerjacketing" - implying someone has gendered privilege as a means of delegitimizing their words, while in reality they do not have this privilege;

- Malgendering - forcing trans people to choose between being gendered correctly and speaking up about their mistreatment (e.g. questioning trans women's womanhood on the basis of them aggressively defending themselves or trans men's manhood on the basis of them asking for help) or implying there's something wrong with them in a way that reinforces gender stereotypes;

- Assuming that some trans people are exempt from some forms of oppression on the basis of gender assignment/sex (e.g. by calling all trans people who were assigned female "tme"** or claiming trans people who were assigned male are inherently incapable of understanding fear of sexual assault);

- Assuming that oppression of trans people is rooted in gender assignment/sex (such as, calling reproductive oppression "sex based oppression"***);

- Gatekeeping certain identities, such as "transmasc", "transbian", "femboy" as exclusive to any gender assignment/sex;

- Creating a duality out of "transsexual" and "cissexual", where not medically transitioning trans people are assumed to have some kind of a gendered privilege, or to not be trans in any meaningful material way. Various transmed ideas about dysphoria and transition go there too;

- Accusing trans people who take inspiration from each other of appropriation (trans headcanons, kinks, drag culture, etc).

SYMBOL

The following image is the official transunity symbol developed by the original transunity bloggers. Sorry about the glitch effect, I wasn't able to find one without it.

* Transmisogyny, transandrophobia, and exorsexism are not exclusive to specific identities, although they do primarily target traits associated with these identities. They can be conceptualized as bigotry and oppression towards people who are recognized as incorrectly entering respectively womanhood, manhood, and a status beyond gender binary (for the latter no normative form exists****). However, it's not wrong to use them to mean "oppression of trans women" and so forth, for as long as you're not claiming it's exclusive.

** Labels like "tma" and "tme" still may be used, but solely in a self assigned manner. I believe that an individual trans person is capable of evaluating whether they're affected by transmisogyny and in what way, and they should be trusted on this. However, no gender assignment and no current gender identity makes anyone inherently tme.

*** "Sex based oppression" instead of "reproductive oppression" reinforces the idea that people who share a specific body part (e.g. an uterus in context of conversations about abortion) are inherently of the same sex. This type of essentialism is desperately needed by terfs in this discussion, as they're trying to sell the ideas of "sex based oppression" and "sex based privilege" to people they want to recruit in their ideology. Invoking the idea of "sex" as something trans men and some nonbinary people are oppressed through is not the correct way to respond to people who say we don't experience any gendered violence besides "just transphobia", it has shitty implications and helps shitty people.

Thank you for bringing this back into circulation; I have some feelings about it since coming up with and talking about the idea, but like, the core of this to me is that we are necessarily natural allies, that each of us has unique experiences with oppression that all reinforce each other, and that none of us can achieve liberation without addressing the entire system.

Trans oppression is a tree with many branches, and we can't kill the tree by chopping off one branch- or even just a few. We have to fell the whole damn thing. We need to recognize our own struggles in each other's, and each other's struggles in our own, and unite as a community. Trans solidarity, trans unity, is the only way any of us can possibly achieve liberation.

The symbol (which I didn't design, but I was part of the conversation for) encapsulates that idea. Inspiration was taken from the recycle symbol, with each of the arrows feeding into the next. The intention, to my understanding, is to communicate that they are all equally important parts of the same whole. The symbols at the end is each line segment are the same ones at the ends of the more traditional trans symbol:

I don't remember why the upper left was replaced with an asterisk, but my guess/fuzzy memory is just that it was meant to be a more inclusive, less binary-based symbol for nonbinary folks.

i took a step back because it was getting distressing staying in discourse spaces online, but i still believe in transunity. i don't want it to fade away. i truly do think the only possibility for progress as a community is together, and i'm glad to see more people taking up the mantle.

The circle with the asterix on the end is the genderqueer symbol

a circle with an x on the end is a nonbinary symbol.

although both seem to be used interchangeably for nonbinary and genderqueer. which might also reflect that people treat the identities as interchangable.

neither are intersex specific symbols. although in recent years I have seen a few claims floating around that they are intersex symbols. I don't know about the original origins of the asterisks, however when I first became aware of it a decade ago there wasn't any talk of it being an intersex symbol even from places that were talking about intersex issues. So that seems relatively new. especially when I wasn't able to actually find any mention of it being intersex while looking it up for this. (the purple circle on yellow flag, the earth symbol ⴲ and mercury symbol ☿ got mentioned as did combined male+female ⚥, so did a few others, but nothing that looked like the x or asterix (antimony sign). the X symbol was absolutely created for nonbinary people as i was able to find multiple sources of that.

Uh here have a bunch of links showing various multiple sources saying more or less the same thing.

I didn't change the shape of the nonbinary/genderqueer symbol to make it more nonbinary, because it's drawn ambiguously in such a way that it's hard to say whether it's an asterisk or an X on the line.

Because I basically traced over the original image, I made it bigger and it's 2k by 2k now.

Part of Emi Koyama's self-critique of the Transfeminist Manifesto, discussed right alongside its failure to fully integrate transmasculine and NB/GQ experiences, was its failure to challenge white feminism and to fully integrate an intersectional, anti-racist feminist approach. I feel this has been left out by transunitist discussions in the past & it shouldn't be.

Emi discussed both of these issues side-by-side. In her pdf copy of the Manifesto, she included the speech "Racist Feminism at the National Women’s Studies Association."

But there was something unsettling about the “Manifesto.” In an effort to forge an alliance between transsexual and non-transsexual women, the piece neglected the struggles of transsexual men and other transgender or genderqueer people who do not identify as “women” unless it was convenient to include them. The piece was also weak on intersectional analysis–that is, how anti-trans sentiments and oppressions compound and complicate oppressions other than sexism, including and especially racism and classism. It borrowed from the work of women of color when it was useful–for example, to point out that transsexual women’s unique experiences should not be the basis for their exclusion because to do so would presuppose a singular universal female experience, which is obviously false–without contributing any insights as to how the inclusion of trans sensibility helps to fight racism and other oppressions.

This goes into more detail than her postscript does, and links both of these issues to white feminism, specifically saying that "what I had written was a version of white feminism that was modified just enough to include transsexual women."

I feel a lot of the discussions that fall under "transunity" as a descriptor have been, in practice, intersectional (or at least aim for intersectionality) and have involved a discussion of Black feminism, and transunity fundamentally could not exist without the work of Black feminists, and feminists of color (like Koyama) more broadly. I think, with the hope that transunity will collectively developed further as a lens / mode of transfeminism, that we can learn from both of those self-critiques.

Are you happy with it?

^^^^^^

https://wheelofnames.com/5k9-xsu

Okay so. I'm stuck in a dead end retail job that doesn't provide insurance at a business where one of my bosses can't gender me correctly to save her life despite the fact that I haven't had a foot in the closet for over a decade. I pay for all my health care and medications out of pocket and effectively work pay check to pay check. Now you know a trans masc who doesn't have a glowing career and private health insurance.

I know a couple trans fems with well paying jobs who are very accepted and accommodated in their places of work, who have health insurance and had their gender affirming surgeries approved by said insurance. They haven't lived pay check to pay check in years.

I know many other trans people across multiple identity lines who are in similar positions to me working dead end jobs and just scraping by. In fact that's most other trans people I know, regardless of if they're a man, a woman, masc, fem, genderless, genderful, it doesn't matter, we're all kind of in the pits together.

The like 3 gender conforming/stealth trans fems I know are an outlier and frankly shouldn't be counted, but could you imagine if I solely based my perception of how trans fems navigate the world based on their experiences alone? That would be fucked up! So why do the exact same thing with trans mascs?

*if comfortable doing so, you may include your age range/generation in the tags for helpful demographic data

When I was a kid, I always complained about how I didn’t have rights and how I wasn’t allowed to ever make my own decisions. I had “therapists” who forced me to do things that hurt me and told my parents they couldn’t pick me up yet because I was crying and if I got to leave without calming down it would just make me Worse. They used their titles as “Experts” as leverage to abuse me, and my parents went along with it because surely an Expert would know better than a kid. I wasn’t allowed to say “I don’t want to see her anymore.”

When I was a kid, there was a Jewish girl who was allergic to everything. And I mean everything. Wheat, dairy, fish, shellfish, nuts, corn, certain food colorings, and more. One day, around Hanukkah, she brought homemade latkes for everyone to try. She loved them because they were part of her culture, but also because they were one of the only things she could eat without any worries. I remember how many kids made fun of the “weird name”, or called them gross even when they loved the awful fries the cafeteria served. She moved away that year.

Not only does it clarify things for people who might be out of the loop on what you find hot but there’s something objectively funny about it in practice to me

“I love beating people” concerning statement out of context

“I love beating people /kink” same lmao

“I want to tear your flesh off your bones with my teeth and eat it /kink” thank you for clarifying, but also please don’t do that