minty pickaxe

Someone says something like:

"Trans women are often viewed by society as being predatory men and this stereotype is incredibly harmful to trans women"

This is reasonable and true, it is backed by the material realities and experiences of trans women.

But what if someone responded with:

"Remove the word "trans" from this sentence and it sounds incredibly stupid! Women (cis women) aren't viewed by society as predators! Any trans woman who says she's been viewed as a predator for being a woman must not understand how the world works!"

We can agree that this is a ridiculous argument that ignores the reality of being a trans women in favor of projecting a cis-hetero-patriarchal view of gender onto trans women, while invalidating those who don't fit that framework.

i do not forget the violence of cis males, do you want to know what i also don't forget?

this is nex benedict. he was a sixteen year old indigenous trans boy, who after a year of being bullied for his gender identity, was forced legally to use the girl's restroom at his public school, and was beaten so brutally by a group of cis girls that he later that week committed suicide.

this is sam nordquist, he was a twenty four year old biracial trans man, who under the pretense of love traveled to new york to meet a cisgender woman. that woman proceeded to trap him, and with three other cis women (and three cis men) they tortured him, including raping him with table legs and broomsticks, forcing him to eat feces, urine and tobacco juice, and pouring bleach on him. he succumbed to his injuries after a month of this, when they then dumped his body in a field. twlaw enforcement is in fucking debate on whether or not this was a hate crime.

this is izabela zablocka, a polish trans man who was murdered by his cisgender girlfriend, who then dismembered him by cutting his body in half and buried him in the garden. he is survived by a daughter, who is the sole reason his murder investigation was pursued over fifteen years later.

this is kashmire nazier redd, a twenty eight year old black trans man, who was stabbed repeatedly by his cisgender girlfriend in a domestic violence altercation. he died shortly after in the hospital.

this is roberto gonzález onrubia, a twenty six year old spanish trans man, who was tortured by two cisgender women for a year until his death. one of the women was an old school friend he let stay with him, the other woman was her friend. he was said to be a gentle man, who had just begun testosterone hormone replacement therapy. these women isolated him, began controlling him and his finances, and beating him nightly. this escalated to repeatedly holding his head underwater until he turned blue, they filmed him after stripping him naked and shaved any hair that begun to grow from his transition, they threatened to force him into prostitution, and forced him to wear a mini skirt and heels as they paraded him around in public in order to humiliate him. during this year he lost up to eighty eight pounds. one night, he was beaten on his head so brutally that he died days later. he laid on a dirty mattress on the floor for seventy two hours until he succumbed to his injuries. he was buried under his birth name.

1. Your body is not your own.

1a. Your body is a site for other’s desires.

If they want you to be beautiful, it is cruel of you to deny them that. If they want you to be feminine, it is cruel of you to deny them that. If they think you should reproduce, it is cruel of you to divest yourself of reproductive duties.

1b. Your body is owned by the state.

Reproductive laws that can affect cis women also affect you, but you cannot weigh in on them, because you are not a woman.

Anti-trans laws affect you, but you must not bring this up; you are never the “real” target, even when you are, because you are not “really” trans.

When the legislation talks about “protecting” your fertility, you should feel lucky to be safeguarded from yourself.

- - -

2. Your experiences are not your own.

Your childhood does not exist. You cannot claim girlhood if you are a man, and you cannot claim boyhood if you did not grow up within it, and no other visions of childhood may exist. Your history, however you define it, is fundamentally incompatible with who you are.

Forms of sexism which are aimed at women, by a binary logic, cannot be aimed at men or mascs. If your experiences contradict this, either you are invalidating your identity, or you are appropriating womanhood.

It is your duty to blithely dissociate yourself from any trauma patriarchy may have inflicted on you. Men cannot be affected by these things even if it happens to them personally. A “real” man must be stoic and uncaring.

- - -

3. You are a “default” body.

You are to be assumed affluent, perisex, binary, and passing, with no legal or situational barriers to medical or social transition, and no reproductive concerns to speak of — unless your nonconformity can be used to dismiss you.

You are assumed to be able-bodied, sane of mind, white, and thin — unless your mental health or appearance is good for mockery.

You are to be treated as essentially cismasculine. Being treated as if you are cis is a compliment, even when it is erasing your lived experiences, and even if it is known and true that transfems have their own unique struggles from cis women too.

- - -

4. You are an “aberrant” body.

4a. Your body is a site of fascination. You (are presumed to) have a gestative capacity, and a fun extra hole. These traits are relevant when others assess your attractiveness and their kinks. They are not relevant in the context of your health. You’re a submissive little bottom, right?

(Your body is something to conquer and claim. This may be done to emphasize your femininity, deny your androgyny, or defang your masculinity.)

4b. Your body is a site of disgust. Any steps you may take to masculinize yourself are “ruining” your “female” features, regardless of any joy you personally take from the changes, and regardless of if you engage with medical transition or not.

(You are killing the woman you are supposed to be. Stand trial.)

4c. Your body is too unattractive to be sexually violenced. It doesn’t happen. When it does, you have anatomical privilege, because you are (presumed to be) in possession of a vulva, and victims with those are of course always believed. But it doesn’t happen, because you are essentially a cis man, and of course men don't get raped.

(It is not possible to be targeted for this violence because you are transmasculine. It is always misaimed violence, intended for someone else. Apologize to her for taking up her space.)

4d. Your body is a proxy for other’s ideas about activism. Womanhood is good, and manhood is bad, and things in-between are uncomfortable and hard to classify; therefore, a detransition back to cisfemininity would be a preferable state of being, wouldn’t it?

(Your transition is at odds with good feminism.)

4e. Your body is a joke. Men don’t menstruate. Men don’t gestate. Men don’t lactate. Men can't have breasts. If the suggestion sends people into hysterics, you must take it lying down.

(Remember; comedy is subversion, and you are an “abberant” body.)

4f. Your body is a hypothetical and not a lived reality. If men could menstruate or gestate, that would fix patriarchy. It would not result in men being denied at the door of the gynecology office, surely.

(To entertain your existence is a rhetorical inconvenience.)

4g. Your body is a source of put-down. You are a cunt, a pussy, a fembrained bitchmoid — and it isn’t sexist to refer to you as such, because you are a man. Your disinclination to be reduced to bioessentialist biogotry is simply proof that your masculinity is fragile. It is not proper for you to object to it, even when it is the same rhetoric spewed by patriarchy itself, and even if it would be equally galling to say to a woman, cis or trans.

(Have you not considered that your trans body is privileged under cis patriarchy?)

4h. Passing is universal to all transmasculine bodies and all life situations. Closeted, clocky, queer, or femme trans men and mascs cannot exist, and are not subjected to the same violence as women or other queer men. Legal gender markers don’t matter. Medical access isn’t a concern. People from your past cannot possibly be vindictive enough to out you, because queer or not, you have male privilege.

(Have you considered that you simply aren’t trying hard enough to pass?)

- - -

5. If you are inadequately masculine, pre-transition, nonbinary, or bi-gendered, you cannot “really” be a man.

Remember; you are a lost little girl when you need to be talked down to.

Remember; manhood and womanhood are diametric opposites, exclusive states of being.

Remember; poverty is not an excuse.

- - -

6. If you are inadequately feminine or too masculine, you cannot “really” be queer.

Remember; you are a “default” body.

Remember; you are essentially cis.

- - -

7. If you are too assertive or too unwilling to serve as a punching bag, you cannot “really” be a feminist.

Remember; men cannot be feminists.

Remember; men cannot need feminism.

Remember; your masculinity is most readily acknowledged when it provides a rhetorical threat.

- - -

8. If you really insist on your masculinity, then it must be in service to others. You owe them labor, defense, money, and deference.

You are not owed equality or reciprocity, because men are responsible for patriarchy. You are on the hook for the patriarch’s debt, and you are presumed to share his wallet.

(A man is a protector and a provider. I thought you wanted to be a man?)

- - -

9. Your interest in your own autonomy is indistinguishable from power-grabbing.

Your self-determination and self-advocacy aligns you with patriarchal interests, or is a sign that you are too battered by patriarchy to self-determine in the first place. Someone else must decide these things for you. Someone else must speculate on your motives. You do not get to speak for yourself.

- - -

10. Your inclusion and representation is not important.

10a. When you notice your absence from culture, art, and storytelling, others ask; why do you not simply project your experiences onto cis men? Remember, you are a default body. Surely you are different from other queer people who need direct representation.

(When you try to do that, you are classically fembrained and illiterate for thinking a given character could have transmasculine subtext or themes.)

Projecting onto cis women is akin to killing them.

Why are you not satisfied with mpreg fanfic?

10b. When you make your own art and stories, you are playing with dolls. It is unimportant, juvenile, and easily dismissed much in the way that people discuss teenage girls who act as culture-makers.

(If transmasculinity is not present in the world of art, it must be because it has no artistic merit.)

- - -

11. Your erasure is proof that you have nothing to offer.

The muffling of violence done to you or your brothers is proof that no violence occurs in the first place.

The muffling of you or your brother’s contributions is proof that none of you contributed in the first place.

The removal of your brothers from the historical narrative is proof that they didn’t exist, or that they never stood in solidarity with other feminists and queers.

Silence is proof that you need not speak.

- - -

12. Denying any danger that you may be in is affirmative to your masculinity, because men cannot be harmed.

There are no statistics that say otherwise if we never read them.

There are no patterns of abuse if we never speak of them.

There are no dead if they are recorded as femicides.

There are no victims if we do not speak their names.

- - -

"Cissexual" is a term popularized by a known transfeminist writer Julia Serano. In her terminology glossary, she defines it as the opposite of "transsexual", and "transsexual" as the following (highlight mine):

a person who identifies and/or lives as a member of the sex other than the one they were assigned at birth. (...) For these reasons, I favor definitions based on self-identity (i.e., whether one identifies as female or male) and/or lived sex (i.e., whether one currently navigates their way through the world as a woman or man) -- this conceptualization would be inclusive of pre-transition transsexuals (who are not yet living as a member of the gender they identify as), as well non-binary transsexuals (who navigate their way through the world as members of the sex other than the one they are assigned a birth, even if they do not fully embrace the identity of “woman” or “man”).

One curious implication of this definition is that people who both identify as a nonbinary gender and pursue social transitions that would place them outside of the binary categorically cannot be transsexual.

The word itself appears to have been coined in German by a German sexologist Volkmar Sigusch in a meaning identical to "cisgender" (as "individuals where physical gender and gender identity are completely and 'naturally' co-extensive"). This meaning is the one you're most likely to receive if you simply google the term.

Wiktionary also cites Sigusch and also pins the year of coinage at 1991.

The Wikipedia page on "cisgender" lists "cissexual" as a synonym.

In contrast to that, the trans community bounced off the definition suggested by Julia Serano and some define "cissexual" as a person not transitioning medically.

There exists an opinion that there are "cissexual" transgender people within the trans community, and that they enforce their values and goals onto "true" transsexuals.

Here are my arguments why the transsexual/cissexual distinction, and the entire concept of "cissexual", is harmful and unnecessary.

The question of privilege

Most users of the "cissexual" terminology present it as a given that "cissexual" transgender people have a similar social position and class interests with cis people. However, this is not explored other than as a hypothetical, and reality contradicts it.

For instance, while nonbinary people are both less likely to desire hrt and more likely to be denied it (page 99), they are also highly likely to face violence and discrimination and negative health outcomes. Evidence suggests that simply disclosing pronouns that imply nonbinariness, in absence of any medical information, leads to discrimination.

Another study suggests that, while gender conforming* trans people are more likely to experience discrimination the further they are in medical transition, gender-nonconforming** ones experience more severe discrimination if they do not transition medically.

If there is any conclusion to be made here, it is that trans people of any medical transition status are still regarded as deviant by the cis society and face similar hardships.

*defined here as being less visibly trans

**defined here as more visibly trans

Burden of disclosure

People end up not pursuing medical transition for various reasons. While many users of "cissexual" terminology claim they accept those who don't transition medically for reasons outside of their will, it is not a distinction you can draw at a glance. Nobody is obliged to provide you their medical, financial, or family history just so you can evaluate whether their reasons to not medically transition are valid enough.

Transition as a gradient

The trans community itself does not have a clear definition of what counts as medical transition. I have encountered opinions that undergoing only "partial" medical transition, without bottom surgery, is enough to disqualify you from being transsexual. While most defenders of "cissexual" would laugh at this (I hope), there are still many lesser known transition pathways, like getting facial feminization surgery and body hair removal, or radical breast reduction and hip liposuction. The answer to where lies the line between "true" transition and "cissexual" plastic surgery will depend on the speaker's opinions about basically everything else regarding gender. That is not a useful discourse to have, from the point of view of securing our rights to medical transition.

Conflation with cisgender

The way this word is used in practice, it invites a deliberate conflation with "cisgender". Its defenders might say "no, I am not calling you cisgender, this is not about your gender", but still act like "cissexuals" occupy a material position of cis privilege in practice (see the point about privilege above) and shift the goalposts of discourse.

Serano herself admitted to see more meaning in the cissexual/transsexual division than in cisgender/transgender:

While the word “cissexual” is used throughout Whipping Girl (according to Google Books, it appears on a whopping seventy-six pages, and often multiple times per page), the word “cisgender” only appears six times in the entire text. (...) So why did I focus almost entirely on cissexual privilege and cissexism while largely ignoring cisgender privilege and cisgenderism? As I’ve already discussed, the main reason is that I felt that transsexual-specific issues had not been adequately addressed by the transgender movement.

This is a part of a broader attempt to decenter the question of the internal self and its expression from transgender politics.

The question of goals

The previous sentence logically leads us towards how the writers and bloggers on that side of discourse understand their goals and goals of the "cissexuals". Here is an extract from the essay I linked at the end of the intro:

This insistent need to consider all identities, including the ones “truscum” transsexuals criticize as saturating the actual material needs of transsexuals, as “valid,” is a genuine threat to us with specific and unique transsexual interests as an intersectionally oppressed group of gender variant people.

Another essay that I believe fits this topic, despite not using the word "cissexual" itself and replacing the cissexual/transsexual dichotomy with a transgender/transsexual one, where "transgender" takes the role of the vilified medically nontransitioning invader:

Transgender partisans, meanwhile, elevated a deliberate incongruence between physical sex and gendered personality as more sophisticated than transitioning from one sex to another and living unmolested for it. Over time, the position has stretched into several of the core transgender claims that conservative justices took advantage of in Skrmetti: that one need not experience dysphoria or even try to change sex to be transgender; that transgender identity involves endless and shifting personal identification, making it impossible to define; or that everyone might be, in fact, a bit transgender because anyone can adopt an androgynous style or challenge stereotypes about women and men. The paragon of transgender liberalism is the rejection of transition as what distinguishes transgender people from the rest of the population. Instead of political liberation taking the form of redistributing the means of transitioning sex, liberation would now be from gender as such—a proposition so abstract that it appeals to people who don’t transition, are afraid to, or who try to cope with how difficult it is by recasting their suffering as noble.

The question we're dealing with is whether our community, by whatever name you call it, should be preoccupied with protecting the right to medically transition or the right to self-describe and have your word respected.

I believe we need both.

Moreover, I believe we cannot be liberated from the social norms that regulate our bodies without being liberated from the ones that regulate our minds. The people, or institutions, that don't trust you to know yourself will also not trust you to know your body. There is an ongoing tradition in anti queer legislation to outlaw both gender transition and promotion of transgender identity at the same time. It is essential that we criticize anti transition bias in trans spaces (when there is one - and not just people mistaking "you don't have to transition medically" as transition discouragement) without criticizing importance of the transgender identity as a standalone value.

Moreover, I can't help feeling like the cissexual/transsexual dichotomy is a product of a culturally US American social discourse, where gaining access to HRT has been historically easier, and stereotypes of what a "proper" transition looks like have emerged. The trans community needs to uplift trans people from countries where they have to rely on DIY and legal gender change is not possible, instead of telling scary stories about "cissexuals".

Gender identity freedom and body modification freedom are our shared need.

from "Promoting and Protecting Human Rights in relation to Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Sex Characteristics" by the Asia Pacific Forum of National Human Rights Institutions

For those who haven't heard of Shivy Bhat: he was 19 years old and already being abused by his family while living in California, when after asking his mother if he could cut his hair, she demanded he give her access to his phone and was outdated as trans. Under the pretense that they were taking a trip back to India to see his grandmother, Shivy's family kidnapped him, planning on forcing him to live in India in order to "fix" him by teaching him to be a "cultured Indian girl," and planning on forcing him into an arranged marriage. They had taken away all his identifying documents and his phone. He managed to escape with the help of a local queer feminist group, which then resulted in a legal battle as Shivy's family tried to accuse the group of kidnapping and sex trafficking to get access to him again.

oh its like talking to a fucking funhouse mirror with these people tbh. its the same with that one guy who was like "checkmate MRA, women in the 19th century were legally property and couldn't wear pants!!" when that. is literally an example of how trans men were also directly systemically affected by misogyny.

these people never stop for one single second to think of trans men who never get to transition. they never think about the countless trans men throughout history who have lived and died as women. who have been subject to child marriage and clitorectomies and been treated as legal property. they don't think about trans men in countries right now who go through all of those things, who legally cannot be outside without a male guardian because they are legally female, who cannot even get their own passport because they are legally female. its so fucking frustrating.

radical feminism has its hooks so deep in some parts of the trans community, and frankly a lot of people have internalized trans separatist talking points. even if they don't realize it they don't seem to think of trans people as a coherent group. all trans people's experiences are seen as just a shadow cast by cis men’s privilege and cis women’s oppression, and our experiences are reducible to cis men and cis women's experiences but slightly different.

people will tell you that people seen as men are gender-policed much more harshly than people seen as women and every little deviation towards femininity is noticed and punished, and that's why trans guys have it easier. but you'll also hear people tell you that people seen as men have so much more wiggle room, men can be all kinds of sizes and shapes meanwhile people seen as women have to fit into this tiny little box, and that's why trans guys have it easier.

these are two entirely contradictory lines of logic, but they lead to the same conclusion. because the conclusion is the point. its a backformed theory of gender. people believe, for whatever reason, that "trans guys have it easier" is an objective fact, and then storytell an explanation for why that is that sounds right to them. [...]. its about people just feeling, on a gut level, that trans guys must have it easier, by which they really mean, transmasculine suffering isn't socially visible, and it isn't natural for me to imagine it, therefore it must not exist; yet, trans suffering in general clearly exists, so there must be some reason that transmasculine suffering feels so abstract and immaterial to me and others.

once you start to see this you can't unsee it. people will just say insane bullshit that could easily be used to make the opposite point they are making

here's an example of this in action:

"if someone masculine happens to have something feminine about them, it is dissuaded"

Hey fun fact, when women speak as little as 30% of the time or more, they are perceived as dominating the conversation.

I'm not saying you're treating us as women dominating the conversation, but if the shoe fits...

haha jerma

that Black trans women have the highest rates of assault victimization in the community means nothing to me in terms of "disproving" transandrophobia, because no one is arguing with that

the link to "trans men make more money than all women" is to this study. i want to note that while obviously harvard is a trustworthy source, i am kind of frustrated by the lack of a methodology section in this report. there are, in fact, other studies that look at trans people and the gender pay gap. this frequently cited HRC study finds all trans people are below cis men and women, and this study looked at a ton of variables and found a lot of complexity in how trans people (based on both binary gender identity and AGAB) are affected economically, including that trans men experienced about the same pay gap as cis women. this study also found that "when estimating outcome gaps within the ‘Trans’ group, FTMs have significantly lower incomes, are more likely to be in part-time work [31%, compared to MTF 14%], but are less likely to be unemployed compared with MTFs." which is also a finding corroborated in part by this large European study, finding that 12.3% of trans women were unemployed (more than trans men), but of those with employment, 42.4% were full-time, while only 29.9% of trans men were. wage gap studies often look only at full-time work, meaning that potentially 1/3 of trans men who are employed may not be fully considered in many of these studies. this study of LGBT poverty found that trans men had the highest poverty rate at 33.7%, slightly higher than trans women at 29.6% and far higher than monosexual cis women at 17.9% (bisexual cis women actually have rates similar to trans women in this study, and bisexual cis men had rates of 19.5%, which we really should talk about more). ultimately, Things Are More Complicated Than That.

the other two points are just hilarious as mentioned above. this also does nothing to disprove transandrophobia because people who discuss transandrophobia talk about this a lot - and, in fact, talk about how "being treated as property" and "not allowed to wear pants" are not things that were left in the 19th century. there are in fact places where crossdressing is still illegal and where legal autonomy for those classed as women is practically non-existent, and people who discuss transandrophobia talk about this frequently. wonder why!

the last point goes to a broken link which i cannot find a fixed version of, but looking up in the quote its clearly an article pushing back on the MRA use of misandry to be a direct and complete equivalent of "misogyny." the points made here are fair but irrelevant to the specific transfeminist use of misandry I'm talking about. if you read the Transunity Manifesto, "misandry" is used and defined very carefully because, shockingly, it was written by feminists who knew very well how the term was associated with MRAs, and since the start of this discussion, people have been talking about how to define misandry or androphobia or anti-masculinity in a way which does not lend credence to a simplistic, cissexist, anti-feminist understanding of "male oppression" as a direct mirror of "female oppression." this person does not seem to have really engaged much at all with my definition of misandry, or my points about Black feminist discussion of misandronoir/racialized sexism.

"MRA dogwhistles" so the feminists I mentioned are also aligned with misogynists? just because some anti-feminists have used the term in shitty ways, no one is ever allowed to use it for feminists purposes ever no matter what, even though people are already doing that and its pretty fucking obvious they aren't MRAs based on the context it is being used it?

also, the MRAs who tell me to kill myself because they hate that i attribute the systemic suffering of men to patriarchy and not The Wicked Feminist Scourge, would disagree with you on who i'm aligned with methinks

"i am a trans man" this is perhaps the least shocking thing you could've told me in this situation

Every time I come on here, I'll see another 'transfeminist' with hundreds or thousands of notes, talking about a phenomenon that is supposedly unique to 'tma' people, and then I'll squint at it and its literally something transmascs have also been talking about on this site for over a year*.

The entire concept of malgendering (only being gendered one way when it can be used against you)

Invisibility messing with statistics

Being in cis men's spaces often being more dangerous than cis women's spaces as a visibly trans person

Permanent health issues because of gendered expectations growing up even if thats not the gender you identify with