thoughts from some guy

Trans people of color are underrepresented and outnumbered. When we stand up and make ourselves visible, we put ourselves at risk of disproportionate scrutiny and harassment, not just from transphobes and bad actors, but also from those within our own community. When we want to make ourselves heard, we're told that now is not the time. We're told it's stirring up drama, in-fighting, and bad optics. Even how, and when, we express our grievances is policed. When we use provocation, it's inflammatory and lacks nuance. When we use satire, it's offensive and unproductive. When we share our personal experiences, it's the oppression olympics. When we share statistics, it's sowing division. When we clarify ourselves, it's back-pedaling. When we defend ourselves, it's doubling down. When we criticize too harshly, we're asked to placate. When we don't criticize hard enough, we're ignored outright. When it's said by a large platform, it's engagement baiting and fed posting. When it's said by a small platform, it's buried and forgotten. When it's said by a SWer, it invites shame and disparagement. And when we're lucky enough to survive beyond all of the compounding systemic barriers placed upon us (before, during, and after transition), we're seen as the example and not the exception. It's suffocating, disillusioning, and isolating. Even within a community that claims to include and support us, we have no voice. Acknowledging the intersectionality of trans people of color, especially those who are black and indigenous, is not something new within progressive spaces. And it does not take anything away from the very real experiences of white trans individuals. But it also does not absolve them from, or grant them immunity to, the same racial prejudices and biases held (subconsciously or otherwise) if they were cis. Having a marginalized gender identity does not come with the awareness of marginalized racial identities. White hegemony and oppression do not disappear when recontextualized within a transgender space, just like they don't within queer spaces more broadly. It still exists including through unexamined racial privilege and how that shapes behaviors and attitudes, and how trans white voices dominate discourse and dictate the overarching priorities of the trans community while excluding, dismissing, sidelining, and being blind to, trans bipoc perspectives. And that was made very clear from the responses throughout this entire discourse, including the same familiar displays of white fragility and conservative talking points used when confronting racial inequality more generally. To me, and all the other trans bipoc, who read every defensive reaction, deflection, straw man, dismissal, bad faith interpretation, condescending interjection, anecdotal fallacy, pedantic argument, disparaging comment, accusation, and personal attack. Every "well actually", "not all white people", "all lives matter", and "we have bigger problems". Only for those same people to inevitably virtue-signal about how their peers need to do better when one of them is outed for racism (if at all). The irony and hypocrisy has not been lost on us.

It just bleeds this specific kind of anti-transmasculinity which denies our autonomy and treats us as less legitimate of trans people- and pathetic for that. To detransition for your boyfriend is like mocked as if it is a lack of backbone or a failure. There's a projection of weakness and frivolity on our identities- so this is just proof of our lack of commitment to being trans.

But even these jokes, stereotypes, and expressions of disgust- they have an acknowledgement that the transmasc person here is denying themself, that they're repressing. That's why it's humiliating, that's why it is shameful. You're folding on who you are for someone else's approval. And I just don't understand how people see this as anything other than a tragic byproduct of the fact that transmasc people are treated as unlovable to the point one would betray their own happiness to pretend not to be trans.

Our bodies are used as examples of horror and disgust, people who push detrans grifts focus hugely on how testosterone corrupts and defiles our once beautiful female bodies. As afab people we're raised with the treatment of our bodies as that which makes us valuable, lovable. Beauty and sex and the objectification as a collective, cultural possession. The value of gender conforming, cis femininity.

Transmasculine people, especially those who medically transition, are treated like shit. Like we're ruining ourselves, our value is stripped, our bodies are themselves a graveyard. Caricatures of us focus on how ugly we are, portrayed as grotesquely masculine for what should be a woman, obscenely and impotently feminine for what is trying and failing to be a man. Fearmongering about testosterone focuses on how disgusting our bodies will be.

On one end, cis gay male spaces can be intensely transphobic to transgender men and mascs. Straight trans men face rejection from cis women as well under a similar disgust that we just are not man enough. Manhood is so wrapped up in having a dick, it's like we're created as castrated and people treat us like that.

Then the cis men who are attracted to women who will still date and fetishize transmascs for their agab or feminine traits, they are revolted by our transitions towards masculinity, and feel an ownership over us, that we're taken away what makes us good. If we transition too much, then we're too masculine to fuck, too masculine to love.

And to a lot of society, that's, like, our whole point. Women and afab people's fuckability and its tie to the consideration of our humanity, to extensions of empathy. We give that up when we transition. Enough that it's treated as a threat to stop us from transitioning, that you're ruining yourself and no one is going to want you like that.

There are those who are attracted to masculinity look at transmascs and will never see us as masculine or man enough. No matter how far we transition. They call bottom surgery mutilation and never living up to "the real thing." To many, we'll always be stained by a ghost of femininity that will delegitimize our masculinity and our manhood. We're treated as, at best, a downgrade.

We get treated as too feminine to be loved for our masculinity. But too masculine to be valuable for our femininity (as cis women are).

It feels like no matter where you look, the world that feels you are owed to it, it is beating into you that you're ruining your chance at love and happiness. That you're disgusting and unlovable. That you'll never be enough of a man, that you need to accept your place as a woman because at least then someone might like you, or treat you kindly. Every where you look there is shame and the insistence you were supposed to be a girl.

And then when people cave to that shame, because they are so terrified of being alone, of being unloved- we're out here mocking them? Blaming them for it? Doing the same shit, projecting this toxic masculinity on us that I guess they just weren't man enough. That being afraid of being unlovable and rejected by society is just like. Skill issue.

Get a load of this guy. Being afraid of becoming an object of disgust and ridicule. Being afraid of losing the ability to be worthy of being loved especially after being raised in a world that treats you as if your feminine body is what makes you valuable and how demonized transgender men are as objects of disgust and seen as destroyed and soiled bodies that will never live up to true manhood or masculinity.

Definitely coincidental they might be particularly vulnerable enough to be manipulated back into the closet by a controlling partner. Putting aside your authenticity because we live in a world that does not show us a life for people like us where we are celebrated, loved, and wanted.

Why are other queer people so cruel about this phenomenon? We are literally subjected to high rates of intimate partner violence, SA, and psychological abuse. What compels you to look at this with such a lack of empathy, with such scorn.

It's often seen as a tragedy when queer people feel pressured by a queerphobic world to go back into the closet. But so many people just don't think of transmasc people as trans enough. That we're not as committed or legitimate, and that those who would do something so humiliating as detransitioning and repressing themself for (yuck) a man- are proof of that lack of backbone. Never do they consider how unlovable we're made to feel, and how desperate you can be to be loved. This trauma which primes you into being a victim of abuse.

It's just victim blaming, and so intensely rooted in anti-transmasculinity. Drenched in it.

This is just more of the widespread dismissal of our autonomy, the refusal to take us and our transgender personhood seriously- the projection of us as weak, shallow, and illegitimate. Paired with the ingrained misogyny of these attitudes, and treating our separation from womanhood as a free pass to treat us misogynistically without it being misogyny.

We have got to stop framing our oppression in ways that promote the idea that other people cannot relate to our struggles. Not only does it isolate comrades in the struggle, it actively diminishes recognition of other struggles--often including those even more horrific than what we are at risk of. And this happens especially between Gay and Black struggles.

"when have straight people ever had to check what states were safe for them?" Sundown towns are still a thing. Starlight tours. What states have abortion access? What states have open carry? What states have stand your ground? What states have 3-strike rules? Women, people of color, disabled people, immigrants, and more have had to be abundantly cautious where they travel to. Straight trans people have much more travel risk right now than gay cis people.

It's a new iteration of the same tired question: "imagine if straight people weren't allowed to marry" interracial marriage in the US is younger than my parents. We disgrace people of color by forgetting their history and contemporary struggles, and we abandon queer people of color, Black queer people, by segmenting their overlapping fights.

however. if I hadn’t gotten the hysterectomy back then and was trying to get one now, it would be harder. after becoming recognized as trans in medial systems, legally I would need two separate psychiatric professionals to write letters affirming I’d been under their observation, that I was mentally stable enough to know I wanted the surgery, and that they also believed it was necessary. and I would need to find a surgeon willing to operate on trans people.

like this is the difference. the literal procedures involved in medical transition are not exclusive to trans people. the difference is that these procedures are gatekept from us.

that’s why all the laws banning trans healthcare (in the US, I haven’t read legislation elsewhere) are framing it as only banned when someone has a “gender dysphoria” diagnosis. the point isn’t to stop performing the actual procedures, the point is to deny trans people healthcare because we are trans.

I know this screenshot is from a post from a couple of months ago but I want to put it in its own post because it’s so demonstrative of the kind of backwards reasoning these people use when it comes to trans issues.

When I say that both transmasculinity itself and transmasculine oppression are epistemologically neutered, this is exactly what I mean. Inequivocable proof of transmascs being unambiguously targeted for their transmasculinity (in this case, trans men of color being essentially tortured in ICE camps) is still inadmissible, because all this news proves is that a transfeminine person would have it worse. There is a rhetorical sleight of hand at play that substitutes the real, named transmascs in the story - specific and individual human people who relayed their own experiences in details firsthand - with entirely hypothetical transfeminine people not in the story at all. The transfem that the tagger imagined in their head for the sole purpose of dismissing anti-transmasculine violence becomes the real person, while the real and named transmascs melt into a mist and become purely hypothetical.

The nature of inhabiting transmasculinity in a world of history-long transmasculine epistemicide is that you are never taken as yourself, in your full living human body, with its discrete characteristics (whatever they may be), its history, its traumas, its unique positionality: you are never read as yourself because your ‘self’ is inherently illegible. Instead you’re like a text in an unknown language that others try to interpret comparing you to know quantities (even aberrant ones) and always finding you lacking in some way - less beautiful, less strong, less virtuous, less meaningful, less interesting, less valuable - because you are being graded on a system that is not just built without you, but rather built around your absence.

To make an example: Often I speak of the ways that growing up as a member of the female social sexgender class has shaped me in the person I am, and specifically the behaviors I have been trained and coerced into in order to escape additional punitive violence (on top of the regular violence being seen as a girl/woman gets you just to keep you subdued into the underclass). I have been taught to walk a certain way, stand and sit a certain way, to make way for people that register as men, to shrink myself around them, to fawn, to smile, to modulate my voice to sound submissive and placating, to defer to them, to apologize for speaking in the first place, to wrap my speech in conditionals and justifications, to make a show of doubting myself even when I’m sure of what I’m saying. This behavior is impossible to completely unlearn while living in a body perceived by others as female, because every step out of line is answered by a retaliation equal in proportion. You people would know about this if any of you listened to cis women. transitioning does not remove this behavior, certainly not instantaneously, and on top of that, having this heavily feminine-coded behavior and speech patterns while appearing even ‘imperfectly’ or ‘somewhat’ male is also grounds for punishment, more or less severe. You would think the people who talk all day of transmisogyny would be able to see this.

Now if I speak of this, I sometimes receive this response: but what about when you pass? When you look and sound and move exactly as a normative cis man does, won’t you have the space and opportunity to unlearn this behavior completely? will you still be claiming that your upbringing has shaped you so, ‘clinging’ to your AGAB? And that certainly sounds like a good argument, if you don’t notice the sleight of hand. If you ignore the fact that it is being told to me, a specific individual trans man with a specific history and body. I am 30 years old. I have been medically transitioning from a while. I do not look like a cis man or a cis woman or a transfeminine person - I look transmasculine. As of now, this much-discussed ‘male passing privilege’ has not reached me even remotely.

Now, because there is no cultural notion of what transmasculinity is or looks like, I am usually read as a medically aberrant and gender non conforming cis woman. At times I’m also read as a gender non conforming, queer, very young cis man, while some other times I’m read as transfeminine. In a few extreme cases where I do my best to ‘girlmode’ out of necessity I can even read as a quasi-normative cis woman, albeit an extremely quirky one. But I am never, ever read as a normative cis man. That has genuinely never happened to me. It is very possible that, due to a mix of my individual medical circumstances, my desires for my own body, and my sexuality and aesthetics, I may never happen. I may never move through the world as a normative (and straight) cis man on a regular basis. I cannot know that for sure because I have a hopefully long life ahead of me, but I certainly wouldn’t discount it as a possibility.

And still, to the person posing the argument of “what about when you pass”, my lived reality for my entire 30 years of life, which will continue to be my lived reality for the short and medium term future, is superseded by the specter of the entirely hypothetical, very possibly forever-inexistent, normative cis-passing straight-passing stealth masculine man they have summoned in their own mind to dismiss the real, present, firsthand testimony of my own lived experience. Their ‘headcanon’ of what I could one day turn into becomes more real than the living, breathing person I am.

Lied and said he was non-verbal

Lied and said he was incapable of communication

Lied and said he had not gotten the surgery of his own accord

Lied and said his "guardians decided [he] was trans"

Got MGT to call a procedure done on a consenting adult "criminal" just because he had cerebral palsy

Mass reported his video and his account, which he ran, until facebook terminated his account for "child exploitation" despite it being his account, him being an adult, and him not being exploited

Ableism and transphobia are inseperable. Just like ableism was used to prop up bigotry throughout history, now it is being used to deny transgender people bodily autonomy the same way it is used to deny disabled people bodily autonomy. It's not a coincidence that so much of the rights transphobic rhetoric is focused on labelling us as "mentally ill". They don't think any disabled people, let alone mentally ill people should have independence or liberation.