sneef blog

gender is absolutely fake but something to think about is that like i've never been able to relate to that

like, society made up a lot of this bullshit sure but at the same time, was gender fake when i wanted to wear a dress at the age of like 6? was it fake when i first started growing facial hair i started cutting my arms & legs instead of my beard because i was so afraid of being seen as what i knew to be unmasculine?

and etc etc

it's a tough circle for me to square because these are all things i know to be true, that society makes the rules of gender and it isn't something innate, but also, i have what i know for a fact to be a physiological condition that makes me one of those and not the one everyone else wants me to be

how i choose to interpret that, i feel, makes the average difference between myself and any number of nonbinary or gnc people (I ASSUME) but materialistically, my brain expects a certain hormone composition it did not have until i started taking estrogen, and now i am noticeably materially better off, more mentally well, happier and more confident

a lot of the time i feel like i sound like a transmedicalist but that's really not the case, it just so happens that to me it makes the most sense to view it as a medical condition that can be treated with healthcare; just like my other endocrinologically significant condition

if i don't take insulin shots multiple times a day, i am extremely physically unwell and have to see a doctor

if i don't take estrogen, i am physically unwell and probably should have seen a fucking doctor (to get estrogen)

& the same goes for many other problems & gotchas that go with being fucking trans that i didnt have a fucking answer for until i started seeing it this way (purely materialistically)

like why should i expect a lesbian to be attracted to me, a woman with many undesirable masculine features

if youd asked me a year ago, i would have just said idk i shouldnt expect that and apologize for having the audacity

now i have to ask the question, idk, would the average lesbian be attracted to a woman with six fingers? or scoliosis? or a deviated septum? or a club foot? or a harelip?

and the answer is fucking yes, obviously, because none of those conditions invalidate those women's feminimity

and those same terf lesbian women who would reject trans women because of their being transgender, as it so happens, are perfectly fucking fine with sharing spaces with men

like, in the past 30 years the average transphobic lesbian event or gay bar or whatever, routinely are fine with trans men, who, if you're not aware, are men, on the basis of some imagined connection to a womanhood he meaningfully did not experience even growing up AFAB

because that isn't how the phyisology of the human brain functions

and of course i don't actually give a fuck who gets in where outside of the real scientific sociological function patriarchal ideation serves

but again looking at it purely materialistically, what does matter to me is that the enumeration of the biological facts behind gender keep accumulating

gender is real to me (in a specific sense) because it's what fucking tells me i'm not delusional

because learning the biological reality behind what makes me feel the way i do & backing those findings up with tangible medical care is what it took for my body to start fucking healing

because when my ex kept asking me what kind of idiot would just "feel" like a woman and what that even meant (even though i'd never once claimed to "feel" like a woman) i didn't have a fucking answer because that question isn't a valid question; it can't be answered because the general whimsy behind "being a woman" isn't a measurable qualia

what is, in fact, is the fact that i have a brain that functions in a certain way, that has a predisposition for the same gendered experience every other woman has

call it what thou wilt, surely, but the obvious answer to these and these things is that it makes me a fucking woman because those are the same biological criteria that makes anyone a woman

and let's not mince words here that's the only fucking valid definiton of "a woman" there possibly could be, because it is the only one that allows no exception

the epistemology of this is a solved issue & i will brook no argument here, like, genitals don't make a woman a woman because trans people exist (or, if we accept this to be a tautology, intersex people exist); chromosomes for the same reason, organs have a whole fucking array of interstitial variance

ok ill stop now

for someone claiming to have a "purely materialist" worldview where the epistemology of gender is a "solved issue," your arugment is remarkably detached from material reality.

to claim that trans men and cafab trans/nonbinary people "meaningfully did not experience womanhood" growing up is an astonishly privileged blind spot to have. patriarchy and misogyny do not check your brain chemistry or your internal gender identity before deciding how to treat you.

as a cafab intersex trans person, let me tell you how this actually works in the material world:

a massive, ventral source of trauma for CAFAB trans people is the violent, non-consensual imposition of womanhood. I have been socialized, perceived, categorized, and abused as a woman by a society that demands I fulfill that role, no matter how much it felt wrong and no matter how hard I tried to reject it. To deny that this is a lived experience of womanhood (even an alienated or forced one) is completely ahistorical.

and your logic is entirely circular. you argue that your internal biological predisposition makes your childhood distress a "women's experience" despite being perceived as a boy, yet you deny CAFAB trans people the same courtesy. you claim our actual, lived history of navigating misogyny is just an "imagined connection" because it does not fit into your neat, pseudoscientific box you've built to protect yourself from your ex's bad-faith questions.

furthermore your history of lesbian spaces is totally backwards. transphobic cis lesbians didn't routinely allow trans men into their spaces out of a gentle respect for "shared childhoods"; they did it (and STILL do it) via the patronizing and transphobic rhetoric that trans men are just "confused sisters" or butch lesbians lost to the patriarchy. It is an aggressive denial of their manhood.

was the specific womanhood that the strawman (that i did not imagine, mind; i was referencing a thing that did and i assume does still happen. i dont fucking give a shit about how true what i was saying happens or did happen on an average level because how the fuck am i supposed to measure that; only that it did happen at least once because i heard a fucking anecdote.) lesbian i imagined was ascribing to the theoretical trans man. whatever mystical connection to womanhood that this trans man has that i do not fucking have doesn't exist and he cannot have had it because it isn't fucking real. there is no fucking womanhood you can have that makes you any more of a fucking woman than anybody else because that isn't how fucking gender works and there's no goddamned way you don't know this. this, to me, is the same fuckin shit as what you're saying? like, a patronizing proscription of womanhood onto trans men that isn't real. right??? like, even if i'm mischaracterizing a person who isn't real while genuflecting at other more real people who i'm personally unfamiliar with in a casual conversational sense, why in gods name is the pedantry of the motivation behind the transphobia more important than the fact that- and we agree about this- it is transphobic for this to be the case.

like wtf are you even talking about? i've said it many fucking times and you'll have to fucking forgive me but i don't really understand intersex and nonbinary issues because i'm very undereducated about it, but insofar as binary trans people are concerned, i'm pretty certain i have a handle on the fucking fundamentals.

genuinely enlighten me as to what experience binary trans men have that i'm denying. as far as i fucking know, binary trans men are men, and therefore i'm ascribing the same circumstance that i'm ascribing to myself. maybe a trans man wouldn't frame it that way, and in fact that's kind of the whole fuckin thing i'm saying, that this is the way that i personally frame it in my head and it's what makes sense to me. i wouldn't contradict someone who feels otherwise just because i have like two fucking anecdotes that make what evidence i have seem to support my interpretation.

i get that the way i said what i said and frankly my bias makes it sound like i'm saying that binary trans men don't experience womanhood, or misogyny etc. & while you might fuckin catch me saying something like that at some point, in this particular instance it wasn't what i was getting at.

i'm at a point in my life where i'm trying very hard to change my own attitude with regards to what i allow myself to think and believe. if you'd asked me a year or two ago if i had literally any ability to speak about the experience of being trans, or being a woman, or being any number of things i fight myself pretty fucking hard to recognize as objective facts i would have told you no.

however, to me, right now, the prospect of a binary transgender man deserving more of a seat at the womanhood table than me, doesn't fucking seem right. that's the sort of fucking thing i believed at the same time as i believed i was a fetishist. that's the same sort of shit i believed at the same time i was getting told i had AGP. if i am to believe the things i actively assert are true for other people i by necessity must also believe them of myself.

Nobody is playing an adversarial game of 'who deserves a bigger seat at the womanhood table.' I am not trying to take your seat, and I am not trying to validate the TERF logic of your 'strawman.' You are projecting your deep-seated defensiveness regarding your own validity onto a critique about structural power.

When you ask, 'what womanhood does a man experience while being coerced into being a woman?' you are entirely proving my point about your massive blind spot. You are treating 'womanhood' purely as a clean, internal, biological qualia—which, ironically, you claimed earlier wasn't a thing. In the real, material world, womanhood is also a socio-political caste. When the state, medical systems, and abusers violently force that caste onto CAFAB and intersex people, the resulting trauma is a material experience of navigating womanhood. Acknowledging that forced structural reality does not threaten your internal identity as a woman.

and "nobody"? really? you think so? i mean really now, nobody? you and i perhaps not but i'm specifically speaking about transphobic people here. i'm not accusing you of following the same logic as the hypothetical, i'm accusing you of not actually acknowledging it. if the material experience of womanhood that society enforces upon people who are not women is semantically identical to the womanhood imagined by the TERF hypothetical that strictly claims that trans men are women then that's both transphobic logic and certainly invalidates me.

i obviously hadn't meant to draw such a line between the sociological womanhood of transgender men and the gender identity of transgender men because i wasn't disagreeing with the first to satisfy my characterization of the second.

but yes, this is indeed a solved fucking issue scientifically. is it not? how we know what we know about the biological mechanics of gender is a solved issue insofar as it is a variable spectrum and a reflection of the brain and not assigned sex at birth. that's all i'm saying. you seem to believe i'm making some sort of claim that isn't that, and i admit that in this particular instance, it might as well be a truism, but what could you possibly point to about intersex and nonbinary people invalidates the fact that gender cannot be determined by looking at chromosomes?

i haven't actually walked any of what i said back. i said that i didn't mean it like that, and admitted that you're probably right in magnifying my bias here, but what i didn't say was that i was wrong. the sweeping generalizations i made, or at the bare fucking minimum attempted to make, was that nobody experiences the womanhood ascribed to them by transphobes because it isn't real.

and listen, i get that you're trying to point to me saying that "trans men did not meaningfully experience womanhood (in this context)" and extrapolate that i meant "trans men do not experience womanhood (of any kind)" and you have what i'm sure to be persuasive argumentation on the topic and many compelling invectives (i'm not going to pretend you're not being a bit rude about it) besides, but that wasn't what i was saying.

it would be cowardly of me to not admit i don't see the appeal in that rhetoric, and like i said before, you might actually catch me saying something to that effect, because when i see trans women saying that "i was always a woman" i identify with that and find it compelling because i'd like to see it as true. if i were to extrapolate that to "trans women have always been women and thus experience womanhood even before transitioning, and even before figuring out for themselves that they are women", i also identify with this and would like it to be true. i see what evidence i have seen as supportive of this. in my opinion, the next thing that would be true as a consequence is "trans men have always been men and thus did not experience womanhood etc".

now, that's a statement i don't personally identify with, and hold mixed feelings about, but it's the statement that is the logical synthesis of the previous two, is it not? for this to be true would necessitate then that the oppression experienced by trans men that is in some way an extension of misogyny that in the context of this conversation constitute a form of womanhood would have to be non-contradictory. and in reality i don't see it that way; i realize that the language i use to say what i'm saying does sound awfully contradictory but i don't actually think it is. the reality of the situation is that in my opinion for those of whom this statement applies the gender identity of a pre-transition child does not contradict the oppression they face in spite of or because of it. i feel like this is what you were trying to argue against and as much as i have a degree of ambiguity on the subject (i didn't mention how intersex and nonbinary people would apply to my framing of the argument here, this is because i am largely unsure of how it would) i have to reiterate that this wasn't what i was actually saying here, because that sort of bigger picture thought doesn't really factor in to my having complained about transphobes casually to a nonbinary friend of mine.

it could be that i'm wrong and pseudo-scientific, i'm not a scientist or what the fuck ever, but the studies i take the time to read seem pretty fucking persuasive that gender has a biological component and isn't "when you have xx chromosomes you're a woman". that's a solved issue to me. i'm not saying the science is done or there's nothing more to be learned or fucking whatever because that isn't how science works and you know that, what i am saying is that transphobic (lack of) interpretation of the science does not and will not change the reality of gender identity having a material basis. none of us are making this up and none of us are delusional and that is as much of a fucking fact as the earth being round is. oblately spheroidal.

i'll say it again i made 0 attempt at any point to try and deny the societal reality of the oppression people experience and that whether any particular individual is a woman or not has no bearing on whether or not they will experience one societal repression or another. this conversation is predicated on the question of whether or not an individual experiencing the oppression aimed at women constitutes a "womanhood", and with regards to the oppression that specifically trans men face sure, i don't disagree, it is obvious the types of oppression that trans men face is a constituent part of what makes up womanhood for women. it's also true, however, and again this is what i was highlighting in my original post, that this does not make trans men women and importantly a TERF might say that it does, and that TERF would be fundamentally incorrect.

it isn't that i want to walk my statements back or that i want to shy away from being decisive on the subject, only that my original post wasn't that conversation. i believe that justly softens the blow of my having mistakenly erased the experience of intersex/nonbinary people.

gender is absolutely fake but something to think about is that like i've never been able to relate to that

like, society made up a lot of this bullshit sure but at the same time, was gender fake when i wanted to wear a dress at the age of like 6? was it fake when i first started growing facial hair i started cutting my arms & legs instead of my beard because i was so afraid of being seen as what i knew to be unmasculine?

and etc etc

it's a tough circle for me to square because these are all things i know to be true, that society makes the rules of gender and it isn't something innate, but also, i have what i know for a fact to be a physiological condition that makes me one of those and not the one everyone else wants me to be

how i choose to interpret that, i feel, makes the average difference between myself and any number of nonbinary or gnc people (I ASSUME) but materialistically, my brain expects a certain hormone composition it did not have until i started taking estrogen, and now i am noticeably materially better off, more mentally well, happier and more confident

a lot of the time i feel like i sound like a transmedicalist but that's really not the case, it just so happens that to me it makes the most sense to view it as a medical condition that can be treated with healthcare; just like my other endocrinologically significant condition

if i don't take insulin shots multiple times a day, i am extremely physically unwell and have to see a doctor

if i don't take estrogen, i am physically unwell and probably should have seen a fucking doctor (to get estrogen)

& the same goes for many other problems & gotchas that go with being fucking trans that i didnt have a fucking answer for until i started seeing it this way (purely materialistically)

like why should i expect a lesbian to be attracted to me, a woman with many undesirable masculine features

if youd asked me a year ago, i would have just said idk i shouldnt expect that and apologize for having the audacity

now i have to ask the question, idk, would the average lesbian be attracted to a woman with six fingers? or scoliosis? or a deviated septum? or a club foot? or a harelip?

and the answer is fucking yes, obviously, because none of those conditions invalidate those women's feminimity

and those same terf lesbian women who would reject trans women because of their being transgender, as it so happens, are perfectly fucking fine with sharing spaces with men

like, in the past 30 years the average transphobic lesbian event or gay bar or whatever, routinely are fine with trans men, who, if you're not aware, are men, on the basis of some imagined connection to a womanhood he meaningfully did not experience even growing up AFAB

because that isn't how the phyisology of the human brain functions

and of course i don't actually give a fuck who gets in where outside of the real scientific sociological function patriarchal ideation serves

but again looking at it purely materialistically, what does matter to me is that the enumeration of the biological facts behind gender keep accumulating

gender is real to me (in a specific sense) because it's what fucking tells me i'm not delusional

because learning the biological reality behind what makes me feel the way i do & backing those findings up with tangible medical care is what it took for my body to start fucking healing

because when my ex kept asking me what kind of idiot would just "feel" like a woman and what that even meant (even though i'd never once claimed to "feel" like a woman) i didn't have a fucking answer because that question isn't a valid question; it can't be answered because the general whimsy behind "being a woman" isn't a measurable qualia

what is, in fact, is the fact that i have a brain that functions in a certain way, that has a predisposition for the same gendered experience every other woman has

call it what thou wilt, surely, but the obvious answer to these and these things is that it makes me a fucking woman because those are the same biological criteria that makes anyone a woman

and let's not mince words here that's the only fucking valid definiton of "a woman" there possibly could be, because it is the only one that allows no exception

the epistemology of this is a solved issue & i will brook no argument here, like, genitals don't make a woman a woman because trans people exist (or, if we accept this to be a tautology, intersex people exist); chromosomes for the same reason, organs have a whole fucking array of interstitial variance

ok ill stop now

for someone claiming to have a "purely materialist" worldview where the epistemology of gender is a "solved issue," your arugment is remarkably detached from material reality.

to claim that trans men and cafab trans/nonbinary people "meaningfully did not experience womanhood" growing up is an astonishly privileged blind spot to have. patriarchy and misogyny do not check your brain chemistry or your internal gender identity before deciding how to treat you.

as a cafab intersex trans person, let me tell you how this actually works in the material world:

a massive, ventral source of trauma for CAFAB trans people is the violent, non-consensual imposition of womanhood. I have been socialized, perceived, categorized, and abused as a woman by a society that demands I fulfill that role, no matter how much it felt wrong and no matter how hard I tried to reject it. To deny that this is a lived experience of womanhood (even an alienated or forced one) is completely ahistorical.

and your logic is entirely circular. you argue that your internal biological predisposition makes your childhood distress a "women's experience" despite being perceived as a boy, yet you deny CAFAB trans people the same courtesy. you claim our actual, lived history of navigating misogyny is just an "imagined connection" because it does not fit into your neat, pseudoscientific box you've built to protect yourself from your ex's bad-faith questions.

furthermore your history of lesbian spaces is totally backwards. transphobic cis lesbians didn't routinely allow trans men into their spaces out of a gentle respect for "shared childhoods"; they did it (and STILL do it) via the patronizing and transphobic rhetoric that trans men are just "confused sisters" or butch lesbians lost to the patriarchy. It is an aggressive denial of their manhood.

was the specific womanhood that the strawman (that i did not imagine, mind; i was referencing a thing that did and i assume does still happen. i dont fucking give a shit about how true what i was saying happens or did happen on an average level because how the fuck am i supposed to measure that; only that it did happen at least once because i heard a fucking anecdote.) lesbian i imagined was ascribing to the theoretical trans man. whatever mystical connection to womanhood that this trans man has that i do not fucking have doesn't exist and he cannot have had it because it isn't fucking real. there is no fucking womanhood you can have that makes you any more of a fucking woman than anybody else because that isn't how fucking gender works and there's no goddamned way you don't know this. this, to me, is the same fuckin shit as what you're saying? like, a patronizing proscription of womanhood onto trans men that isn't real. right??? like, even if i'm mischaracterizing a person who isn't real while genuflecting at other more real people who i'm personally unfamiliar with in a casual conversational sense, why in gods name is the pedantry of the motivation behind the transphobia more important than the fact that- and we agree about this- it is transphobic for this to be the case.

like wtf are you even talking about? i've said it many fucking times and you'll have to fucking forgive me but i don't really understand intersex and nonbinary issues because i'm very undereducated about it, but insofar as binary trans people are concerned, i'm pretty certain i have a handle on the fucking fundamentals.

genuinely enlighten me as to what experience binary trans men have that i'm denying. as far as i fucking know, binary trans men are men, and therefore i'm ascribing the same circumstance that i'm ascribing to myself. maybe a trans man wouldn't frame it that way, and in fact that's kind of the whole fuckin thing i'm saying, that this is the way that i personally frame it in my head and it's what makes sense to me. i wouldn't contradict someone who feels otherwise just because i have like two fucking anecdotes that make what evidence i have seem to support my interpretation.

i get that the way i said what i said and frankly my bias makes it sound like i'm saying that binary trans men don't experience womanhood, or misogyny etc. & while you might fuckin catch me saying something like that at some point, in this particular instance it wasn't what i was getting at.

i'm at a point in my life where i'm trying very hard to change my own attitude with regards to what i allow myself to think and believe. if you'd asked me a year or two ago if i had literally any ability to speak about the experience of being trans, or being a woman, or being any number of things i fight myself pretty fucking hard to recognize as objective facts i would have told you no.

however, to me, right now, the prospect of a binary transgender man deserving more of a seat at the womanhood table than me, doesn't fucking seem right. that's the sort of fucking thing i believed at the same time as i believed i was a fetishist. that's the same sort of shit i believed at the same time i was getting told i had AGP. if i am to believe the things i actively assert are true for other people i by necessity must also believe them of myself.