#institutional oppression

The good news? I got first crack at my library's fresh copy of Oathbound by Tracy Deonn just a week after release. Yay!

The better news? It rocks. And it's a huge book - 650 pages.

The greatest news? It's not the last book.

The bad news: I have to wait for the next book now.

There's something for everyone here -- some more awesome Black Girl Magic and Love, new characters and factions, more communities and cultures, some great introspection for a lot of characters besides the protagonist (who gets good growth).

I really love how Deonn also explores mixed heritage in a lot of different ways, as well as the struggle with shame and guilt if we don't live up to what our ancestors wanted from us, and the sticky question of whether we are bad for cutting off hurtful family.

Transmeds don't even realize that "tucutes" aren't the ones making it harder for "real" trans people to transition. It's transphobic insurance companies and doctors. You know, the ones who lie about hormones being a limited resource (even though thousands if not millions of cis people take them for a variety of reasons, which is possible due to the abundance of HRT resources)

If a trans person is denied care, it’s not because someone has used neopronouns, or didn’t suffer from gender dysphoria I was able to get HRT, fully covered by my insurance (aside from a monthly $10 co-pay), before I ever got my dysphoria diagnosis And I was very open about being non-binary (genderflux) You know how I did it? Because my doctor wasn’t a transphobic piece of feces

Yeah like, I’ve been denied access to trans healthcare despite having dysphoria, as have loads of others. Not because of the threat of ‘transtrenders’ but because I didn’t fit the exact stereotype my medical gatekeepers wanted me to be.

Trans healthcare has been declared medically necessary across essentially all major health orgs in the west, with loads of supporting documentation that (while flawed) presents overwhelming positioning for trans healthcare as necessary for insurance to cover, and yet loads of insurance companies don’t because they don’t actually care what the medical community says. Something can be deemed medically necessary by all healthcare pros and researchers, and insurance companies will still cut coverage to save whatever tiny amount of coin they’d save. 

Doctors and insurance providers hold the power. They act as arbiters on who gets access to healthcare, who gets access to ID changes, etc. Transmedicalists and truscum run on the idea that medical professionals and insurance companies are just and play by some pre-set collection of rules where if certain conditions are met on the definition of trans people, they will provide unfettered access and coverage for the trans people that fit that description, whereas that’s just not the case. 

I mean, the only people who CAN be transmed are trans people. Otherwise, they’re just cissexist, abusive cis people.

So yeah, some trans folks are transmed, and they do tend to huddle together closely because other trans folks know they’re shitty people, and given they don’t tend to accept that people who aren’t transmeds/truscum are actually trans, it isn’t surprising to hear that they only knew other transmeds. They could be surrounded by other trans folks, but if they don’t recognize those folks as trans, and instead see them as ‘transtrenders’, then of course they’ll disqualify them.

Transmeds/truscum DO harm trans people, because they support the gatekeeping system that has been at the core of trans people’s genocide for the past few decades. Usually transmeds have made it through gatekeeping and want to feel pride at cis people valuing them for conforming and being exactly what cis folks expected of them, or they’re not yet into medical transition but are operating under the social brainwashing that cissexism isn’t a form of oppression but an important perspective in understanding the reality of the world (usually these folks are trans men that assert they are female, but sometimes you’ll find trans women that assert they are male, that ‘biological sex’ is immutable and set in stone at birth, etc.). 

My advice is to generally stay away from those folks if at all possible. They’re pretty toxic and generally so set in their ways that it’s often useless trying to bring them around to a better perspective on life than being cis gatekeepers’ lapdogs

AERF, as a term, is inherently violently transmisogynistic

And after a cursory twenty minute sifting through tumblr, I recognize a lot of the people I saw supporting it as folks who are routinely transphobic/transmisogynistic, and/or contest that transmisogyny exists or is meaningful, and often have some pretty ahistorical views on the LGBT+ communities at large (like believing calling the q word a slur is ‘terf rhetoric’ and originated with terfs, rather than it being a decades old intracommunity issue stemming from experiences of trauma and navigating slur reclamation and community identity development), so it’s pretty evident that there’s a problem there

So yeah. AERF is violently transmisogynistic. I shouldn’t have to explain why, it’s patently obvious to anyone who cares about trans women. 

Additionally, as a refresher since we’re on the topic of violent transmisogyny in online spaces, using the term ‘gatekeeper’ within an LGBT+ context to describe anything but the medical/institutional oppression-fueled genocide against trans people? Violently transphobic.

Equating TERFs/TWERFs to cis het exclusionists, and using ‘TERF rhetoric’ as a catch all for any ‘exclusive’ commentary? Violently transmisogynistic.

This shouldn’t have to be said. Whatever folks’ views are on a spec folks in the community, they can talk about this without throwing trans folks, primarily trans women, under the bus and appropriating our history of oppression, and purposely undermining the clarity we require to name and discuss our oppressors and enemies

It stands for Reactionary Exclusionary Gatekeepers, iirc, which is appropriative, given it is used by aro/ace folks to labels folks within ‘the community/communities’. 

Gatekeeper, within the LGBT+ context (words hold different meanings depending on context, after all), is a term used to describe the ongoing genocide of trans people. It has, over the years, sparsely been used to describe other issues, but in nearly all cases, those folks have swapped to other words/phrases to express those issues out of respect and acknowledgement of the long, bloody history of violence trans folks have faced due to gatekeeping

The use of gatekeeper in this way de-centers the term from the ongoing genocide of trans people to issue aro/ace folks face, and functionally obscures that history of violence while using its true meaning as a means to amplify emotion and intensity around aro/ace issues.

Given that aro/ace folks are part of ‘the community/communities’, it’s vital that they not appropriate and undermine language used to describe specific forms of oppression and histories of violence that aren’t inherently related to them just to prop their own issues up. That is violently transphobic, and it can’t be tolerated.

That all stands aside the fact that the term REG was specifically coined within the context of wanting a term similar to TERF to describe their ideological opponents, which is transmisogynistic, because comparing TERFs to their opponents... whether they’re prejudiced against aro/ace folks, or wish to exclude cishet aro/ace folks, etc. ...is a false equivalence, and violently transmisogynistic given TERFs have played a significant hand in the ongoing genocide of trans folks, have relentlessly fought against the rights and freedoms and safety of trans women, etc. and that’s not comparable to whatever sufferings aro/ace folks endure from these apparent ‘REG’s. It’s using the intensity and emotions and violent histories tied to trans women’s (and trans folks’ as a whole) experiences with TERFs as a means of trying to validate their own issues/experiences and coax people into responding similarly, ultimately appropriating trans people’s suffering for their gain, which...again...violently transphobic, primarily violently transmisogynistic.