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check for information on protests, donations, and other resources worth sharing on palestine and other causes i care about here (sometimes i forget to tag things so there may be more on my blog in general than on the tag alone)

trans men are no different. when transphobes say that we only transition due to internalized misogyny or whatever, the equation going on in their heads is "being a woman objectively sucks, no one would want to be a woman + being a man is objectively better, everyone in their right mind would want to be a man + girls have done boy stuff despite patriarchy since time immemorial, so trans men are on the whole stupid". like nsambu za suekama explained, anti-transmasculinity is the "trojan horse" for transmisogyny - you can’t get “trans women must be a special kind of bad for “wanting to be women”” without “no one assigned to womanhood actually wants to be or likes being a woman” - confusing being negatively impacted by systemic misogyny with the category of “woman” being both innate and a burden. the latter sentiment, which implies that being a man > being a woman, works in combination with masculinity being exclusive to give transphobes the impression that trans men's transness must be contingent on misogyny - "real men" don't have these problems, so our "born womanhood" must be the defining factor of any possible gender-related feeling or thought we could have. this contributes both to our erasure and the vilification of trans women at the same time

the problem is that how we talk about masculinity was not designed to take people who have stereotypically masculine attributes while not being "real men" into account. as a result, it's easy to assume that the only or easiest way we can talk about said people being oppressed is by what differentiates them from "real men", which often means relying on cultural shorthands designating "oppression" (such as "woman") to do the work for us. this leaves the masculine aspects implicit as if they're not factoring into the shape of what we're seeing. think about it - gay men are able to speak about homophobia on the basis of our attraction. however, the idea of us being perverts and predators has a lot to do with our being men - we're deliberately stepping down from a superior social position in favor of a fundamentally incorrect sexual preference. that doesn't mean that we're oppressed for being men, but that masculinity > femininity is part of what's being used to explain how we're not "real men" while not denigrating masculinity. however, the presence of our sexuality gives the impression that everything we're being oppressed for is to do with our sexuality. even lesbians often end up talking about lesbophobia on the basis of being women who are attracted to women, when the idea of attraction to women being fundamentally correct (think male gaze) is a large contributing factor in their sexuality not being taken seriously.

trans men have no "third aspect" to do the explaining for us. in our misogynistic society, man > woman, so there should theoretically be nothing that's oppressing us. on the other hand, we're still oppressed, so it should be because of our birth assignment, right? either option paints what we face as either "adjacent to women" (oppressed) or "adjacent to men" (not oppressed), creating a false dichotomy where "adjacency to women" is the only way anti-transmasculinity can be understood as a bigotry. this is essentialist because other groups of queer men face misogyny too, but we tend not to think of it that way because of what we assume their birth assignment to be, and we understand them to be oppressed all the same. for trans men, we treat misogyny as if it "subsumes" other forms of gendered oppression, so we can't be oppressed in ways that aren't related to how cis women are oppressed because "men aren't oppressed". if that's the case, anti-transmasculinity can't be a form of transphobia, only a form of misogyny, meaning that we end up getting lumped in with women even in language intended to be "on our side". i'm not saying that what we face has nothing to do with our birth assignment, only that there's a difference between acknowledging that on a systemic level and using it as the basis of how you holistically consider our condition.

the latter leads to putting walls around "who should face what kind of oppression" via false dichotomies like the one in the first paragraph. for example, reducing us to "confused girls" may sound like regular misogyny, but it's in reality is just as much binary reification as disallowing trans women into women's sports because they're supposed to be stronger than cis women. they care about the idea of a "confused girl" (who more often than not is also white in the western context), not actual trans men, otherwise they'd be making noise about stuff like this. it's an acknowledgement of oppression only for the sake of justifying putting people into boxes so they can be easier to understand according to an arbitrary set of rules on how the world "should" work. so, speaking about anti-transmasculinity as being primarily about "being seen as women" is essentially making the same mistake transphobes are.

rather than taking "woman" and our birth assignment, cultural shorthands for oppression, as the primary factors when thinking about us, we should be considering "transness" on its own to be a vector of oppression. the solution isn't to look at it through what our birth assignment should theoretically indicate, but attribute + positionality. trans men aren't oppressed for being men because cis men aren't oppressed for their gender. we also aren't oppressed for being women because we aren't women. we, like all other marginalized men, are oppressed for being "fake" men. imo anti-transmasculinity is best understood as anti-effeminacy, and the fundamental existential fear is that there's more than one way to "properly" be a man.

i'd put it this way: men, masculine people, and people perceived that way are expected to use the "grown man" inside them to suppress their internal "little girl". trans men, being at the very least seen as masculine, are subject to this. because we're also trans, we're at the same time judged on the basis of the harm our "grown man" is perceived as doing to our "little girl". this can function as crocodile tears at the crier's own expectations ("trans men have internalized misogyny") or assumptions of selfishness and arrogance ("trans men are misogynists") because "grown man harming a little girl" is culturally coded as the epitome of evil. it can also be questioning our gender whenever even a slight indication of the girl shows up (including anything from being gnc to not wanting to go bald) because do we really want to be men if we don't fully suppress her ("faggots aren't men")? if "grown man" and "little girl" can't exist side-by-side, we can't exist