☁️🌞☁️

I'll give you a hint. It's not a small amount.

I've started seeing a good amount of zero nuance railing against femboys and similar archetypes by trans women who are made uncomfortable by these things. It's ok if they make you uncomfortable. It's ok to say so. It's not ok to throw your sisters under the bus with zero nuance takes on how everything related to femboys is transmisogynistic. You also should not be reblogging things like that.

And to demonstrate my point, over the past few years there has been a wide embracing of forced feminization by the trans woman community on here. Many of the same people railing against femboys and related concepts gladly talk about force feminization. The ironic thing is that the history of force feminization is so, so much worse than femboys. It was originally a genre of porn literally built on the fetishizing and disgust of trans women. Forced feminization stands hand in hand with things like traps and futas.

And yet many trans women resonate with the ideas presented by forced feminization. It would be absurd at this point to make a no nuance take about forced feminization being universal transmisogynistic trash. The concepts have been reclaimed by too many trans women for that to be a reasonable take. The same is true of femboys - it's just not as popular on Tumblr at the moment.

We should be embracing and welcoming all gender variance, even if a gender variant person is cis and therefore has privilege over us.

The odds are very high that person deals with a lot of the same prejudice as the rest of us.

One of the takes I've seen from multiple sources now is that femboys are bad because they are a type of man visually indistinguishable from a woman, a take that is so wildly transphobic I can't believe I saw it even once, let alone multiple times.

I've also seen repeated the idea that anyone presenting like that is clearly an egg and should be transitioning, and suggesting they might not be *a binary trans woman specifically* is transmisogynistic. Which is obviously extremely shitty to non binary people. Like I don't actually know if there is a word for transmisogynistic against non binary people specifically, I admit I am not really current on nb issues, but if there is that clearly applies.

And I've even seen people talk about real world actual "trans women" who once strongly identified with the femboy archetype and try to use them as an example of how it is an evil half measure identity that encourages trans women to not transition. F1nn5ter is someone I've seen brought up multiple times. Except F1nn5ter identifies as genderfluid, still uses he/him pronouns, and has publicly said that people trying to force the label of trans woman on him made him uncomfortable and delayed his transitioning efforts for a long time.

I could go on for so long.

Being a Femboy can be a wonderful way for Trans women to begin to explore themselves while they're still in that process. It can also be incredibly liberating for trans men to still feel like they don't have to abandon everything they did enjoy just because they're "feminine" as opposed to "masculine" hobbies or passion. I love that Presentation ≠ Gender or sexual identity was said.

also i think its been implied in this post but people need to understand that not only are there femboys who aren't trans women, and trans women for whom "femboy" was a bridge to their womanhood, there are also trans women who are also femboys. for some people, "femboy" is not a stepping stone to womanhood, its something that exists alongside womanhood. or maybe both "trans woman" and "femboy" are imperfect but useful / euphoric terms for a nonbinary person.

that's really the crux of the exorsexism at play for me. treating femboys like they are a completely distinct and oppositional category from trans women is deeply exorsexist.

the term "exorsexism" comes from computer programming / logic, specifically the "exclusive or" (XOR). the exclusive or for gender would be that the only acceptable categories are male-but-not-female (male yes, female no) and female-but-not-male (male no, female yes). exorsexism as a concept pairs well with serano's concept of "oppositional sexism" because they both rely on the idea that there can be no natural, healthy overlap between gender categories; they must always be separate and at odds with each other. this leads nonbinary people to be seen as artificial, deviant, and destructive to society.

people should not assume that the category of "trans women" inherently excludes femboys, or that the category of "femboys" (which is conceived of as an intrinsically cis identity) inherently excludes trans women. not just because there might be people who are questioning or closeted or dabbling in transness, but because there are people who are quite settled and sure of their gender identity who are already in both. for some people, "femboy" is an inherently trans identity, and i think that gets erased a lot in these conversations largely because of exorsexism and the aversion to letting there be any nuance or grey area between womanhood and manhood.