starfish boi

But just for the record: are you saying that I'm not allowed to talk about disabled issues as it pertains to reproductive rights because I use he/him pronouns? Despite the fact that you seemingly agree that disabled issues are important in these discussions?

In 1934-1936, trans brothers Mark and David Ferrow of Yarmouth, UK, both transitioned at age 13 with full parental support. Mark medically transitioned first in 1939 at 17 and his brother soon followed. “Though we have been girls, we have both felt men at heart,” Mark told a reporter. Their stories show that trans youth can grow up to be happy, celebrated adults.

So LA has been — and continues to — protest against ICE. These protests haven’t gotten any smaller or lost any momentum, but social media wasn’t reflecting it.

TikTok users, realizing that the platform/other social media are censoring/deleting/shadowbanning these protest videos, decided to find a workaround.

They’re calling it the LA Music Festival. Ice detention centers and other protest locations are “stages.” The hottest band is Rage Against the Machine. “Here’s what gear you should be bringing to stay safe at the LA Music Festival.”

And it fucking worked.

TikTok has become a proving ground for a lot of new music, meaning lots of labels and organizations have lucrative deals with TikTok to promote their new artists and music festivals. So they absolutely cannot censor the words “music festival” or train the algorithm to ignore it, or they risk endangering that very important revenue.

Everyone who had something to say about "do you want to be seen as a man or not" is proving my exact point that people cannot fully accept the notion of men who are not welcomed into the boys club of cis manhood. The notion of "Man" is entwined inextricably with Power, Control, if I am a man that must mean I wear The Boot because Man means Wearing The Boot. You want me to chose between my sense of self and my lived experiences because to you, a "real man" would not have had my experiences.

You people are incapable of understanding gender as an internal sense of self and not as a magic spell. You fail to progress your feminism past a no boys allowed sign hung on the door of a playhouse. You are deeply fucking unserious and it's frankly embarrassing.

It means that trying to assign any kind of "male privilege" to ANY category of trans people will never truly be fruitful, because the concept of "male privilege" was created by cisgender women to discuss cisgender men under cisgender gender dynamics without the experiences of transgender people in mind.

I think we can all agree that transgender women, transgender men, and nonbinary people are NOT cisgender men.

Even when we are discussing trans people who are externally perceived as / assumed to be cisgender men within society because they are stealth, closeted, or non-cis passing — those trans people are experiencing something conditional that can be stripped from them the moment anyone in a position to harm them finds out they are trans.

I think we can all agree that being misgendered and/or having to hide a part of yourself so you do not get hate crimed and/or lose employment or benefits or housing, etc. is NOT an exercising of privilege.

Even when we are discussing misogyny, an important and longstanding part of feminist discussion on misogyny is the fact that everyone is capable of being misogynistic. Misogyny is not stored in the assigned sex or gender identity. We all live in a patriarchal society, NO ONE is immune from internalizing misogynistic, patriarchal worldviews and acting upon them.

I think we can all agree that there is no transgender person who is incapable of being misogynistic, because there is no person in general who is incapable of being misogynistic.

To act as though privilege and bigotry are stored in a sex assignment or gender identity is to be gender/sex essentialist.

that's the stupidest shit ever posted on the internet and i think that any trans person who grew up as a girl can agree to that, except a small minority who grew up in a privileged background

masculinity is only ever accepted in ppl perceived as women if it panders to the cishet male gaze. it's very similar to the Gone Girl "cool girl" monologue. u can like fixing cars, but u better wear a really small top and have nice tits while doing it. u can like sports and hanging out with guys, watch sci fi and be fun and messy, but u better have a full face of appropriate make up during it and be careful that u remain skinny. also if u have a traditionally considered male hobby or job, it's cool, but only as long as u are not better than the men around u. that' not masculinity being accepted, it's immature cishet men wanting a girlfriend that puts as much effort in her appearance as a girly girl without being "high maintenence"

and all that shit applies if you're gender conforming

when u start presenting in a masculine way is when shit hits the fan. i wouldn't say that u lose all privilege (if you're cis) when u go masc, but the way u are perceived is not the same. suddenly u are no longer deserving of protection, kindness or dignity. when i presented hard masc it was almost impossible to go outside without gettimg harassed at a magnitude i've never experiences before or since. ppl stopped being kind to me, i was treated like a freak show, the little queer u can show like a new purchase, ppl treated me like i was stupid to the point that it affected my school life. ppl were routinely staring at me, and in some instances even tried to touch me (my tits specifically) without consent to see if i was a girl

but that's not all

regardless of what some trans radfems like to claim, u are forced into femininity, all the time. every hair cut, every shopping trip, every year when u don't bring a boyfriend (bc transandrophobia and lesbophobia have always been cousins), every day u don't put make up on, every time u shot down a demand to perform femininity, is followed by screaming, crying and monstruous fights from family members or ppl in a position of power, during which u are repeatedly reminded that being yourself is wrong and you're an abomination

"suggesting that Australia has uniquely hostile flora and fauna isn't wrong" FACT CHECK:

what do you mean by "uniquely hostile"? is it based on amount of harm to humans? because I can tell you now. horses killed more people in 2023 than spiders did. how would you feel if I said that europe introduced the uniquely hostile horse to the australian environment?

look at these stats: https://www.firstaidpro.com.au/blog/leading-causes-of-death-in-australia/#elementor-toc__heading-anchor-1

now look at this: https://www.vice.com/en/article/cows-and-horses-are-australias-number-one-killers/

can you please give me a list of examples of flora and fauna that you would place in this category?

"aboriginal tribes" FUCK OFF!

if you can capitalise Australia you know how to capitalise Aboriginal

"tribes" is not the right word here even remotely. try again next time. "Aboriginal people" would be a great start. being able to name even one country or language group would shock me to death. give it a go though

"marsupials reign supreme" don't make me laugh

CHECK: why are you using language that inherently ascribes a particular morality to animals? what motivates you to frame Australia as uniquely 'ruled by animals'? what else might this imply and where might this framing have come from?

"most venomous and hostile" why are you putting those adjectives together?

Australia's most venomous snake (the inland taipan) has not killed a single person in recorded history because of how rare it is for that snake to come anywhere near humans. again, refer to the stats above

"hostility" is another example of ascribing negative moral values to an animal where it is not at all appropriate

"one of the less hospitable places on earth" colonialism check!

hospitable to whom?

you mean that pre-colonial Australia didn't follow western ideals of housing and agriculture don't you? (<- there very much was agricultural practices in First Nations groups for the record)

you're implying that the land had to be tamed by colonisers, aren't you?

> looks inside

A transmasc posted about how transmascs and trans men are often invisible, how our issues are dismissed, and how resources, especially medical ones, are almost always written with non transmascs in mind. They posted this both to r/Trans and r/lgbt.

A moderator of r/Trans responded by telling them to “stop bitching.” That’s the word they used. That’s the level of respect trans men get. Transandrophobic by the way, don't call trans men bitches.

The comment was deleted, quietly, after backlash. Then the entire post was removed. When asked why, a mod responded that the post was “playing oppression olympics,” and took the time to go through and dismiss each of the original poster’s points, including saying that trans men being sexually assaulted isn’t “unique to transmascs” and therefore not an issue, and claiming that access to testosterone isn’t any more restricted than access to estrogen, which is a straight-up lie, because T is a tightly controlled substance in most places and E is not.

The original poster was banned for three days.

Then a separate mod made a post saying, “nobody asked us our side of the story,” which is wild because people absolutely did, publicly and repeatedly. Users also started reporting that they’d had supportive comments removed or had been banned after disagreeing with the mods, some of those claims are still unconfirmed, but given the general behavior, it wouldn’t be surprising.

Then r/Trans locked down entirely. No new posts. The conversation was forcibly ended.

Some people posted about it on r/FTM, many of those posts were mass-reported, automatically removed by Reddit’s automod, or quietly buried. Meanwhile, r/lgbt also removed the original post, with no explanation.

One of the r/Trans mods eventually posted an “apology,” which was really just a soft-scrubbed PR post full of noncommittal language and distancing. They said they didn’t mean to call a trans man “a bitch,” they just used it synonymously with “complaining,” and they didn’t think about the implications until later even though the first post was about microaggressions just like the mod committed. They did not apologize for anything else, not for wrongfully banning people, not for accusing a transmasc venting like any other user of playing oppression olympics, nothing at all. They said they’re on break and can’t do anything about it. They said, and I quote, “please don’t be mad at the rest of the team.” even though the rest of the team are just as culpable for not stopping their behavior.

They also added that trans men are “a welcome part of the community” and tried to point at moderation history as proof. Because apparently we should be grateful that people occasionally get banned, every so often, for implying trans men aren't oppressed at all, wow, thanks, that is like below the bare minimum, cool.

The current state of things is: r/Trans has over 600,000 members, and trans men and transmascs were silenced, banned, and told to shut up for bringing up their own oppression. And the subreddit is locked down. There’s a mass exodus happening to the new sub, r/trans4every1, but let’s be real, the damage has already been done.

Now let’s talk about what this actually means.

This is not “just more Tumblr discourse.” This isn’t some random blog saying they don’t like transmascs. This isn’t a Twitter reply guy. This isn’t a niche zine or a spicy personal take. This is a massive trans-focused subreddit with over half a million users. It's easily one of the largest public facing trans community online, maybe even the largest, I've certainly never found a bigger one myself. And the moderation team made it crystal clear: they do not want transmascs to feel safe or welcome there.

This is what transandrophobia looks like on a slightly larger internet scale. When it’s in the hands of people who get to decide who gets heard and who gets deleted.

And for anyone who’s still stuck on “well they apologized” listen: trans men are told all the time that we’re being too loud, too angry, too entitled, too manly, too feminine, too confusing, too “binary,” too "Nonbinary", too much. We’re told that we’re “oppression olympics-ing” just for talking about our lives. And now we're getting banned and locked out of the spaces that claim to represent a huge portion of online trans people.

This isn't just online drama. This is a bellwether. And if it isn’t setting off alarms in your head, it should be.

The way transandrophobia manifests in online spaces absolutely bleeds into real life, into medical gatekeeping, into poor data collection, into the erasure of sexual violence against transmascs, into advocacy groups that write us out of the picture, into educational materials that treat us like footnotes, if they include us at all.

And if you’re sitting there thinking, “well it’s not that deep,” you’re part of the problem.

We need to start being more honest about this: Transandrophobia is real, it is widespread, and it is growing. We need to stop giving people the benefit of the doubt when they’ve shown us they don’t want us in the room.

And frankly?

We need to start making TRFs [Trans Radfems & transmasc-exclusionary feminists alike] deeply uncomfortable being open about their beliefs. We need to make them afraid to be TRFs, the way they’re trying to make us afraid to exist.

The same way we don’t coddle fascists. The same way we don’t tolerate TERFs. We need to stop tiptoeing around transandrophobia.

Because this growing wave of transandrophobia is going to kill people. Full stop.