#gender binary

And I keep seeing them used as reactions to each other. You get away from one and fall into the other.

"hey, before you interact, tell me what category of humans you think are inherently evil and disgusting and that we should exterminate to live all peacefully and safely? :)" <- this is how it sounds.

people still use the term transsexual, transsexual is a term steeped in trans history and trans liberation because transness is not just about the gender binary but also about the sex binary. for many people transness is inherently related to their sex and they are trying to change their sex. sex is not an irrefutable, immutable fact and the sooner people accept that the sooner trans, nonbinary and intersex liberation becomes a possibility. I hate the sentiment that gender is a changeable social construct and sex is a biological fact because sex is also a changeable social construct.

Sex is the social construct we use to attach gender to bodies.

If it was actually about science, they would have updated biology classes with info about intersex variations as soon as they were discovered and documented - the way animal biology does with new species, and chemistry does with new elements.

There are over 40 different intersex variations named and described by medicine!! We know for an absolute fact that intersex traits exist, including chromosome sets besides just XX and XY - there's also XXY, XYY, XXX, X-null, and more. If this was actually about science, you would have been taught about them.

If it was actually about science, you would have been taught that what we think of as biological sex isn't any kind of binary - it's constellations of averages of similar traits, any of which may or may not occur alongside any other sex-associated traits in any specific person.

If it was actually about science, we wouldn't actually still be arguing about this, period, because the fact that the sex binary is false undermines the entire rationale for the gender binary's existence.

CWs: Rape, fetishization, impregnation by assault, dehumanization, transmisogynistic degendering, misappropriating the language of racial justice, objectification, and worst of all, "infighting". I'm going to do something stupid---post about transfeminism on Tumblr again. The following is transcribed from two Bluesky threads:

I have a story.

About how "transfeminists reinvented the gender binary". About how "every trans person is subject to transmisogyny". About how "we're all faggots, deviants, perverts, so why demand specificity?" It begins with a transmasc individual saying "chicks with dicks" isn't offensive.

See, this individual identified as a chick with a dick. Or a man with a vag, depending. They revealed a lot about themselves over the course of the argument with a trans women. They were 19, married, a parent, and never availed of any transition care. They didn't consider this term dehumanizing.

When the trans woman they were arguing with told them that they didn't have the authority to deem whether a term fetishizing her was dehumanizing or not, they got very nasty. Trans women did not have any special claim over 'chick with dick', and to say so was to practically misgender them.

So justified, they talked about how trans women *are* just a sexual identity, a kink identity, and we did not have any special authority over transphobia or transmisogyny. Unlike them, who experienced real oppression. This is where they strongly implied that they had been impregnated by assault.

That's deeply traumatic, and violent, and something no trans woman will experience. So therefore, of course, we have no epistemic authority over misogyny. Or transphobia. Or sexual assault, and fetishization. Our suffering is always going to be a subset of "real" misogyny, see. Because no wombs.

This individual is young, and they do not know they are a TERF. Trans identity, to them, is a mask, a way to "escape being gendered". Oppression to them is intrinsically linked to reproductive exploitation, which is synonymous with misogyny, and trans women don't experience that. We costume.

Every time I hear someone say that "we've reinvented the gender binary", I sigh deeply. We never needed to reinvent it. Trans women, in the midst of the most queervoid-y of spaces, have always keenly been aware that our claims of oppression and experiencing misogyny are rarely believed.

You can say this was a young individual---but where are they going to learn better? Who is going to tell them that trans women's oppression isn't a costume, isn't a stigma for a kink, is more than just a mask we put on? That we are, meaningfully, women? Even without the wombs?

The gender binary is already there. The queervoided social spaces always cease to be queervoided when a tranny walks in, because these spaces recognize true trans people yearning to be free from (re)gendering and oppression, and "male pretenders who want to be gender I wish to escape, the freaks".

I am not the one who made the gender binary important. I am not the one who tolerated TERFs in my spaces, who encouraged the uncritical adoption of naturalized sex split from gender, and promoted a model of misogyny intrinsically tied to reproductive injustice.

I am the one who is offal.

Trans women are women who cannot be reproductive exploited, and we are too tainted to be allowed to be men ever again. So we are trash. Even to queervoids, because their "beyond the binary" ends at the threshold of a tranny demanding respect.

You think you are beyond sex? You think you have eliminated the need to divine what kind of gendered violence an individual is subject to?

I don't believe you.

I don't believe you, because I have seen gendervoids enact this violence on trannies, time and time again.

I don't believe you are beyond gender.

[Red, in a different post]:

I don't believe you are beyond gender.

I don't believe you are beyond gender.

YOU MARK ME AND MINE IN THE SAME WAY THE CIS DO, IN THE SAME WAY OUR MOST DEDICATED EXTERMINATIONIST FOES DO, AND YOU HAVE THE SHEER, UNREPENTANT, UTTER GALL TO PRETEND YOU ARE IN ANY WAY MORE ENLIGHTENED THAN THE GUTTER OF THE PATRIARCHY YOU EMERGED FROM?

You are not beyond gender.

Fuck your pronouns. You treat a tranny like this, your gender is fucking "sexist". Piss on your "gender abolition". It's worth nothing.

I will, in fact, be even blunter:

Trans women are not trying to say transmisogyny is "the worst oppression". We gave up on trying to stress the severity of it a long time ago. We are, at this point, trying to communicate that we *are oppressed at all*, to people who refuse to believe it.

I have seen fifty-year old men pull out the "I was a woman longer than you, tranny" card. I've seen people of every identity and experience go "I'll always be more of a woman than you, tranny, and don't you fucking forget it." Trans women are surveilled, scrutinized, targeted, and not believed.

The most gender-enlightened of us all refuse to deign to recognize trans women as meaningfully impacted by misogyny, as anything but second-class citizens of womanhood and feminism, as meaningfully oppressed because we are woman-gendered, sure, maybe, but we are not FEMALE.

And we notice that.

Then when we notice that even fellow trans people are more willing to self-regender to talk over us than BELIEVE US ABOUT OUR OWN LIVES AND OPPRESSION, or GRANT US THE PRIVILEGE OF SPEAKING AS THEIR EQUALS IN THE STRUGGLE AGAINST PATRIARCHY, we are called "divisive".

Fuck that.

Hear me, here and now: You will get nowhere but a singularity of a "gender-enlightened" movement collapsing in on itself because for all the yearning for a post-gender existence, no one is willing to grant the tranny the dignity of womanhood, to admit that she, too, suffers AS a woman.

If you want to tie the core of misogynistic oppression to reproduction and deem transness as nothing more than "gender-play", fine. I wish you luck.

This ice cream shop will sell two flavors: vanilla and not vanilla

“What’s not vanilla?” I’m glad you asked, because I can assure you, it’s not vanilla

“But not vanilla could be a lot of things” oh you mean like how nonbinary could be a lot of things?