#transmasculinized

Transfeminized = someone who has been treated as transfem (regardless of whether they are or not), particularly in an oppressive manner; people who suffer from transmisogyny, regardless of whether they consider themselves transfem.

A few examples:

-Transfems. -Intersex or otherwise varsex people who are perceived as transfem (regardless of if they are or not.) -Some gender non-conforming men. -Non-transfem non-binary people (especially if they have been raised male), who are viewed as transfem due to people only ever sorting enben into "transfem" and "transmasc" categories. -Black or brown pericis women who are accused of transfemininity due to eurocentric beauty standards masculinizing black/brown traits. -East Asian men who are accused of transfemininity due to eurocentric beauty standards feminizing East Asian traits.

Transmasculinized = someone who has been treated as transmasc (regardless of whether they are or not), particularly in an oppressive manner; people who suffer from transandrophobia, regardless of whether they consider themselves transmasc.

Some examples:

-Transmascs. -Intersex or otherwise varsex people who are perceived as transmasc (regardless of if they are or not.) -Some gender non-conforming women. -Non-transmasc non-binary people (especially if they have been raised female), who are viewed as transfem due to people only ever sorting enben into "transfem" and "transmasc" categories. -Black or brown pericis women who are accused of transmasculinity due to eurocentric beauty standards masculinizing black/brown traits. -East Asian pericis men who are accused of transmasculinity due to eurocentric beauty standards feminizing East Asian traits.

How to use these terms in a sentence:

"An experience of transfeminization I had was..." "People who have been transfeminized/people who have been transmasculinized" "I have been transmasculinized in the past."

Not all transmasculine or trans folks who went through endogenic estrogenizing puberty are small or short. Even if there were no tall trans men, mascs, or adjacent, the fact that antagonists choose to diminutivize transmasculinized people is transphobic and moreover, a classic example of sexism, point blank. It is an extension of larger patterns of infantilization, and contributes directly to epistemic injustice through framing the transmasculinized as too infantile to have authority on their thoughts or experiences.

I'm intersex and don't really understand the terms, it appears I am not 'tme' by my experiences, but I'm far from being a trans woman.

I can't figure out what you've said or done to be 'avoided', either..

Overall I'm very confused. I only just entered queer discourse, but I've heard horror stories.

If you're ok with it, it would help to know your perspective on why they might have said this - i.e. is this something people have said to you?

I'm looking through tags revolving around these debates and it seems pretty... violent and accusatory 🙂

People accuse us of being anti transfem because we think TME/TMA has been bastardized to the point of being useless, and because we believe marginalized men exist.

You can read our posts on the matter here:

1 [link] (About TMA/TME.)

2 [link] (Also about TMA/TME.)

3 [link] (About marginalized men, in case its not clear what we mean by that.)

4 [link] (Bonus discussion about transandrophobia, since transandrophobes are often the ones who get violent about discussions of TMA/TME, and claim transmascs are "less oppressed" than transfems are.)

We are not anti-transfem, we just acknowledge that TMA/TME has been so severely co-opted by transandrophobes, exorsexists, and intersexists that they have bastardized the terms beyond belief, and apply it to people without their consent.

Basically, TMA/TME are being used to tell people they are "not affected by transmisogyny unless they are transfem", even when thats so blatantly not the case for many people.

They are also being put into bios as if they are some sort of identity, like you have to declare how you've been oppressed before? Which like. So should we put in our bios if we've been affected by ableism, racism, fatphobia, etc? Should we declare every negative experience we've ever had? No, it's silly. TMA/TME should not have been made into identities.

We think terms like transfeminized, transmasculinized, cisfeminized, cismasculinized, degendered, etc are better.

Transfeminized & transmasculinized [link]. Cisfeminized and cismasculinized are basically the same thing, but enforced on non-binary people or intersex trans people who have been wrongfully enforced as cisgender.

when i was a teen, like around 14 maybe, i came across online feminist spaces in this social media everyone uses in my country. and it's a very conservative country, tiptoeing around banning abortion, actually banning "childfree ideology" and violating human freedoms in a lot of other ways. so, at the time, these feminist spaces were the most progressive and left-leaning spaces i've ever seen, which is why i tried to stick around and learn from them. they were not terfs, or even radical in any way, but they were very ignorant which led to their entire framework to only describe cis (non-TGD), perisex, abled, very likely non-queer women (and men). now, i was a sheltered 14 year old on the internet who didn't know much about genderqueerness or intersex people either. i had a "burner" social media account where i specifically obscured not only my age, but also my gender: i used the most gender-non-specific (but still common) name possible, and avoided using any nouns or even pronouns that might hint something. that was "for anonymous reasons", and because i tried to divorce my persona from the arguments i was making (so people won't jump onto my traits instead of tackling specifically the point i've made), ((and in retrospective because i felt dysphoria)). AND i was using this acc to engage with said feminist spaces. i was naturally questioning a lot they had to say, because what they had to say is "men can't be feminists, they could only call themselves pro-feminist, feminism is a movement for women", "it's hilarious how men are painted as stoic and strong when i know they would screech and die if they suddenly experienced period cramps", and so on. i was never mean. i was never acting like i knew better. i tried to learn from them and started discussions out of curiosity, as it was the first space i've been to that talked about gender, and gender roles, and biases that you're weaved into living in a patriarchal society, which was exciting for my sheltered i-don't-fit-anywhere self. ...finally to the point: i was shamed and chased away. on many separate occasions. by different women. and they did it by saying "another man barging into women's spaces", "no uterus no opinion", "not everything is about men, leave us alone", etc. i am not a man. at the time i believed myself to be a confused and weird cis girl who hid behind a genderless account. they, however, saw someone who wasn't immediately into their rhetoric, and assigned them "the Evil Gender Of People Who I Disagree With", AND used it as a tool to cut off any possible discussions because "there's no reasoning with men". it felt really gross. they were gender essentialisting so hard their confirmation bias had to bend reality.

cut to the present where i'm an adult with a more solid grasp on society and gender and my own identity. i learned english. i read a lot about queer experiences of people outside of my conservative country. i ended up on tumblr. i ended up in "gender discourse" (sadly). i have something to say about the wave of "trans men are men therefore oppressors therefore (literal rehash of that specific flavor of feminism above, with "no uterus no opinion" except the uterus part switched to something less transmisogynistic)", especially because in my country being trans is literally illegal, so you can't feasibly be recognized as your gender, even on an interpersonal level (it gets known -> you risk a lot of horrible repercussions). i think that offering my perspective may be helpful to shift the target from trans men to.... you know, non-queer people in power who keep us all under the boot. i start by saying "your framework seems flawed, as trans men can't have inherent privilege in my country, because...". what do i get in response a lot of the time? "you trans men seem to not understand....", "transmascs are really eager to focus on...", "typical case of trans men trying to absolve themselves from....". BASHING. MY. HEAD. AGAINST. THE. WALL. this time around i have a non-binary flag and they/them pronouns in my bio (which of course don't mean i'm not a trans man or transmasc, but it is an assumption on their part as i don't describe myself that way anywhere at all, as i am NOT one. they also probably immediately assumed my agab </3). and i guess my displayed name is kind of masculine, i don't know and don't really care. they don't care either. they see me disagreeing with their "feminism" as "bashing on women", and by extension all men are evil and all evil is men or something. this is so similar to "you're advocating for gays?!?!?! are you one of those dirty fags yourself??!?!?" right-wingers pull, too. i just can't believe something like this happened twice to me, and the second time in a trans space no less.

i believe what i've described here is anti-masculinity regardless of my actual proximity to masculinity, right?

Yes, absolutely. This is anti-masculinity and androqueerphobia. Its a prime example of cismasculinization/transmasculinization.

Gender - what's your experience with gender? how do you understand it?

Gender, as we& understand it *in this context* cause there's so many contexts, refers to one's role in society, self-perception and perception by others, and how one navigates the world around them particularly in relation to social structures. And this context is mostly looking at gender identity as opposed to the broader concept of gender. I tried to pull out our old sociology of gender notes for this but apparently those aren't in the same place as all our other class notes are

And as a collective, we've got a lot of it. Gender identity, that is. It's pretty concretely in there

We're multigender in a sense (but we haven't figured out what this sense is exactly), with the most prominent of our genders being occunous (link) and SCPgender (link). For more elaboration on those I'll just link you to this more in-depth post (link) we've already written about it. Other prominent genders we've got going on are two-spirit, genderqueer, and transoutherine & transmaverine (which are linked, and we say transouthmav for it a lot). These genders don't have firm lines between them, they all kind of interact with and influence each other

We're autigender because our autism and MOGAI special interest have a *massive* influence on how we view and understand gender. Cannot overstate that. We're comuniterm (link) for the same reason, plus the addition of how our place in the MOGAI community shapes those self-perception, perception by others, and role in society thingamabobs. We're intergender cause we're intersex and that affects where society tries to put us in the gender binary. Greenhoodiecomfic (link, eyestrain) because we're always wearing the same green hoodie to a degree it's pretty heavily baked into both our self-perception and how others see us (and this recognizability and distinctiveness plays into our& occuine othered-ness). We're not transmasculine, but we *are* transmasculine-aligned, given we share a good chunk of experiences with the archetypal transmasc and we&'re transmasculinized (link). I could do this for pretty well any label on our list. Each one is on there because we have an explanation for it. On a collective label, and a lot of us individually too, we don't self-apply gender labels without being rigorous about the decision

And I'm personally an oune and transmasc. Sole reason for being an oune is because it was the first term I saw when I just split (born yesterday lmfao) and I guess it kinda wormed its way into my me. I don't actually feel like I'm too big on self-labeling, not my thing

the really radfem sides of the tme/tma discourse are incredibly anti-masculine. Especially when I see posts from someone who is claiming that all men are predatory and therefore trans men are predatory and should die. Or the claim that trans men don't have any valid experiences with misogyny that I see radfems say.

and honestly? The other extreme side falls to the same takes in a different way. I've seen the really extreme anti-radfem side making the claim that trans women are predatory because they have a penis (not all trans women have a penis, but the posts I see usually make wide generalizations that they do).

This is anti-masculinity that overlaps with androqueerphobia, homoandrophobia/andro-monosexism/andro-amatonormativity*, transgynephobia, exorsexism, and varsexism.

(*Because often, these people will act as if queer men have no unique form of oppression, and that the only oppression they could face has to be in relation to transmisogyny.)

My thoughts on the TME/TMA discourse can basically be summarized here [link]. I think its just ridiculous that it basically became an "identity."

Context [link.]

Yes, absolutely! That is a prime example of transfeminization!

On the subreddit r/accidentalallies, there are tons of posts about people being assumed to be the "wrong kind of trans" (usually trans men being he/him-ed because they are mistaken as trans women, and trans women being she/her-ed because they are mistaken for being trans men), and those posts are prime examples of transfeminization and transmasculinization.