Crossroads Blues

My answer to those people is Get Kate Bornstein'd:

Tranny. Many people don’t know the history of the word, they assume it was an assigned hate term or slur along the lines of the “n” word. That’s not how it happened. Tranny was invented by us in Sydney, Australia in the 1970s where drag was a big deal, and still the best drag shows ever are in Sydney, Australia – they’re amazing. So a lot of trans-identified women who were assigned male at birth did drag, that’s how you made your living. And so they were transsexuals, transvestites, drag queens, and they were all doing drag to make money. They all bickered amongst each other who is better than who, “Well the drag queens are better,” “No, the transsexuals are better.” “You are all freaks, we’re better.” And on and on and on. But they worked together and they were family together, so they came up with a word that would say family and that was tranny. In Australia they do the diminutive, that’s how they come up with words. So tranny. I learned the word in the mid-1980s, late 1980s from my drag mom in San Francisco, Doris Fish, who was the city’s preeminent drag queen and she’d come from Sydney. And she schooled me in this word tranny, she said, “This way it means we’re family, darling.” “Thank you mama.” [...] So we used it and we were trannies together. And F to M was just beginning to start, the trans men were just beginning to become visible, Lou Sullivan was a neighbor of mine around the corner, and he was the first big out trans man, wrote his book. So trans men and cross dressers . . . cross dressers were also family. Transsexuals, we were all trannies and that felt good. That got into the sex industry and became a genre – there was tranny porn, there were tranny sex workers – chicks with dicks, she-males. [...] And, my only guess is that people who . . . because the only way they would have found out about the word is if they were watching tranny porn or having been with a tranny sex worker and then hated themselves so much that they turned it into a curse word. So it’s not really technically correct to say we’re reclaiming a word – it was always ours. So, many people mistake the word for the hatred behind the word and, in my generation, and I’m sure in future generations of trans people, tranny is going to be a radicalized, sexualized identity of trans in the same way that faggot is a prideful identity in the gay male community – not all gay men are faggots, but those who are are proudly fags and those who are dykes are proudly dykes within the lesbian community, trannies are proudly tranny within the transgender community. Does that mean we can’t call ourselves that because some trans woman does not want to be called a tranny? No. I’m going to keep calling myself a tranny. To the trans woman who gets called tranny, I’m sorry – as soon as . . . you’ve got to look at why you’re getting called tranny and if you don’t pass, you’re going to be read as a transgender person and then you fall back on the cultural view of trans folk which is freak, disgusting, not worth living, we can hurt you. It has nothing to do with the word, it has everything to do with the cultural attitude. So the word has stirred up a shit storm, but it’s not the word.

^ From this interview

Four weeks ago, Bear posted a call for submissions on his blog. In the interests of keeping the call as open as possible, we agreed to include as many trans-identities as we knew, so we used the word "tranny." And that's where the activist shit hit the postmodern fan base. People have been pissed. Here's their argument: FTMs are co-opting a word that belongs to MTFs. The word "tranny" belongs to MTFs, reason those who were hurt by our use of the word, because it was a denigrating term reclaimed by MTFs—ergo, only MTFs could be known as trannies. I spoke with Bear, and we agree that’s wrong on several counts:

Tranny began as a uniting term amongst ourselves. Of course it’s going to be picked up and used as a denigrating term by mean people in the world. But even if we manage to get them to stop saying tranny like a thrown rock, mean people will come up with another word to wound us with. So, let’s get back to using tranny as a uniting term amongst ourselves. That would make Doris Fish very happy.

It's our first own language word for ourselves that has no medical-legacy. 

Even if (like gay) hate-filled people try to make tranny into a bad word, our most positive response is to own the word (a word invented by the queerest of the queer of their day). We have the opportunity to re-create tranny as a positive in the world.

Saying that FTMs can’t call themselves trannies eerily echoes the 1980s lesbians who said I couldn’t use the word woman to identify myself, and the 1990s lesbians who said I couldn’t use the word dyke. 

At one phase in the evolution of transpeople-as-tribe, it was the male-to-females who were visible and representative of trans to the rest of the world. They were the trannies. Today? Ironically true to the binary we’re in the process of shattering, the pendulum has swung so that it's now female-to-males who are the archetypal trannies of the day. The generation coming up beyond the next generation, i.e. my tribal grandchildren are the young boys who transition to young girls at the age of five or six. They’re the next trannies. None of us can own the word. We can only be grateful that our tribe is so much larger than we had thought it would be. How to come together—now that’s the job of the next generation of gender outlaws.

^ From Who You Calling A Tranny?

We've been having this debate forever and its been stupid forever.

This is a really good example of how TERFs disguise their attacks against trans men, and why it’s so harmful to consider TERF attitudes towards trans mascs as infantilizing.

The post is made to appear sympathetic to the man they are mocking. “Look at this poor ‘girl’ and how he’s mutilated himself” sounds sympathetic, especially to trans people who are subjected to aggressive, direct attacks on their identities and humanity.

But this performative sympathy is just a front so that TERFs can enjoy being cruel without appearing as the aggressor. This allows the audience to still enjoy the pleasure of engaging in cruelty while dressing it up as pity.

This plays into the broader tactic TERFs deploy with trans mascs.

Rarely ever do they confront us directly the way they do with trans women.

In fact, because they see us as women, their primary objective is to make sure we are never ever heard at all, so that they can maintain the narrative that none of us would ever transition of our own free will.

Instead, they poison the well. They talk to our “handlers”. Our parents, our doctors and psychiatrists, our husbands, boyfriends, our pastors.

The veneer of sympathy is not to appeal to trans men. It is to appeal to those they see as having ownership over us. When trans men fight back against this, the malice comes out in full force.

This is a really good example of how TERFs disguise their attacks against trans men, and why it’s so harmful to consider TERF attitudes towards trans mascs as infantilizing.

The post is made to appear sympathetic to the man they are mocking. “Look at this poor ‘girl’ and how he’s mutilated himself” sounds sympathetic, especially to trans people who are subjected to aggressive, direct attacks on their identities and humanity.

But this performative sympathy is just a front so that TERFs can enjoy being cruel without appearing as the aggressor. This allows the audience to still enjoy the pleasure of engaging in cruelty while dressing it up as pity.

This plays into the broader tactic TERFs deploy with trans mascs.

Rarely ever do they confront us directly the way they do with trans women.

In fact, because they see us as women, their primary objective is to make sure we are never ever heard at all, so that they can maintain the narrative that none of us would ever transition of our own free will.

Instead, they poison the well. They talk to our “handlers”. Our parents, our doctors and psychiatrists, our husbands, boyfriends, our pastors.

The veneer of sympathy is not to appeal to trans men. It is to appeal to those they see as having ownership over us. When trans men fight back against this, the malice comes out in full force.

There is a reason why legislation and social pushback is typically focused on preventing you from coming out, preventing you from transitioning from the start, or detransitioning and/or closeting you. That is state violence, but the state is hoping you will either do the dirty work yourself (suicide) or fall in line with the White Supremacist Patriarchal gender roles it expects of you (closeting/detransition). I know that is bad. It's abysmal. It's awful. We are not here to downplay the violence that happens broadly to queer people at the hands of the government.

However, under White Supremacy, as a white queer person, you can be "saved" from the "lifestyle choice" you have "made". We're in a country dominated by Christian savior complexes, conversion therapy is a regrowing industry, the laws targeting us are laws of restriction, laws of "prevention". White queer people are a "problem" to be "solved" by trying to "save" us from ourselves so we can reintegrate into broader white, Christian society alongside other white people. We need to be "corrected" and "saved" because our whiteness is still valuable to Christian, Patriarchal, White Supremacy.

White Supremacist state violence in the United States murders Black infants on the false allegation that their mothers are stealing diapers. White Supremacist state violence murders Black children for playing with toy airsoft guns. White Supremacist state violence murders Black women for experiencing a mental health crisis. White Supremacist state violence murders Black men on the unproven allegation that they used a counterfeit $20 bill. White Supremacist state violence murders Black people for simply existing in their homes. Kohen Wiley, Tamir Rice, Sonya Massey, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Roger Fortson. The list could go on because just existing while Black is dangerous under White Supremacy.

Your analysis of your own place in society as a queer person is incomplete without this analysis. It is not enough to say "well trans WoC have it harder than me but cishet people all have it easier" because that is incomplete and ignorant at best and flat out wrong and racist at worst. Why do trans WoC, particularly Black trans women struggle and experience so much violence in our country? Why does that violence happen? You can't just say "because they're transgender and they're women and they aren't white" and leave it at that. What are the institutions, the power structures, the long standing histories of violence and subjugation at play here? Why is it dangerous for someone to exist as a Black person, everything else aside, in the first place? Why and how does your whiteness protect you where their Blackness creates a target for them and how do the systems around you exploit that and target you differently on a material level?

especially when they are fat. especially when they are Black or Native or Asian or any racial/ethnic group that isn't white. especially when they are tall and broad and have a deep voice and a beard, and especially when they like themselves that way and still are hurt by misgendering. especially when they have gone on E and T blockers and have gotten facial feminization and vaginoplasty and have DD tits and like themselves that way and still are hurt by misgendering (even when people think they should be grateful for it, even when it feels like the lesser of two evils). especially when they transition in ways people see as "only halfway" and dress androgynous and use contradictory labels and call themselves femboys in the same breathe they do tgirls and they like themselves clockable as fuck and still are hurt by transphobia and exorsexism.

Gender is constructed, yes, but there are some things that are indeed mutually exclusive. From a class perspective, a trans woman cannot be a gay man. Man and woman are, at the same time, totally-constructed, mutually exclusive categories AND (!) material realities that exist. The class conditions of men and women are different, because women face structural misogyny, and men do not. People split the lines of these two classes all the time, but this doesn’t mean these two, specific, mutually exclusice classes don’t exist.

While the classes of woman and man as well as their class interests (the destruction or the continuation of misogyny, respectively) are real, the concepts themselves of man and woman don’t map neatly onto reality, and this absurd imposition of fiction onto reality creates massive suffering, as does the real class structure this fiction supports. Just as there’s no innate, permanent, immutable, and solid difference between a capitalist and a worker, there’s no such difference between men and women. This is the ground reality below the infrastructure, below the structure, and below the superstructures of society. Those structures also have no innate, permanent, immutable, or solid existence. But the experiences that people have from them are just as real as anything else. These structures and categories are constantly shaped and reshaped by the actions of society. People move between the gender classes all the time. Pointing out the absurd difference between how people are treated as classes by saying oxymoronic identities like “gay man who is a trans woman” can help reduce their power, trying to get rid of class labels altogether won’t undo the conflicts between classes. It just makes it harder to see what’s going on while those class conflicts happen out of sight if nobody can talk about it.

I am one of the women you were talking about in this post, the fat trans woman who has facial hair, and a trans woman who tried being a gay boy. I seriously identified as a girlfag for years. I stopped, though, when I saw that I lost access to my gay male life completely once I transitioned past a certain point. The moment that I was seen as a woman, trans or cis, by gay men, I was an outsider to them. Sometimes there are gay men who see me as a man. They are a little more warm to me, but only when they can fuck me. Which I don’t like doing bc they think i’m a dude and it feels terrible for me ewwwwww.

But can you see where I’m coming from? I’m just one girl, but I think that adopting the framework of real class interests/constructed gender could contribute to the liberation of women and therefore the complete freedom to move between categories. Also, I think this is important enough to write a response to a stranger because this very conversation could change how some trans women are treated. The treatment we got as “gay men who identify as women” was something we fought to change, and I don’t want to see that clock turned back.

No matter what we say, what we do, how we say it, what’s done to us, any of that, it’s somehow painted as malicious on our part. Just as a few examples…

For a time there was not really any well known transmasc theory floating around, and this was seen by some as an indication that trans men and transmascs just wanted trans women and transfems to do all the work for them. No one thought maybe we were just being actively erased or that they simply hadn’t been looking for it. There was a jump to the conclusion that we were simply lazy and entitled.

There are cis lesbians who would not date or have sex with trans women but would date or have sex with trans men. I have seen on multiple occasions, even in comic form, a narrative that the trans man is an active participant in this, that he is willingly misgendering himself to get into transphobic lesbians’ pants. When I talk to trans men and transmascs about this, I don’t hear that narrative at all. What I do hear is stories of transphobic cisbians sexually harassing trans men who don’t want to date them, or outright TERFs pretending to be accepting in the hopes of forcing a trans man to detransition during the relationship, or transmascs having a complicated relationship with their gender and sexuality in such a way where not only is dating a lesbian not a form of misgendering for them but they actively consider themselves a lesbian for one reason or another.

I once made a post about how it’s weird to go around announcing you’d never date a trans person when nobody asked and all that happened was a trans person existed in your presence. I was very clearly trying to convey that announcing you don’t find trans people dateable or fuckable unprompted purely because a trans person exists near you is weird and transphobic and completely unnecessary. A cis woman responded by angrily telling me I shouldn’t be trying to trick women into thinking I’m a real man, as if the reason why I transitioned was to dupe cis straight women into having sex with me.

There’s a book titled Female Masculinity that was published in 1998 by Jack Halberstam. I don’t think Jack himself uses the term transmasc to describe his gender, but his book touches on not only Butch lesbianism but basically anyone who was assigned female at birth and is masculine, which means a lot of transmascs and trans men are exactly who he’s talking about. I recently got word that someone has attempted to debunk his book because they don’t think he can be trusted to speak honestly about his own experiences and community.

Multiple notable trans men on YouTube have been listed as vectors of a social contagion by the book Irreversible Damage. Here’s Ty Turner talking about it.

Speaking of the social contagion idea, the more I look at it, the more it becomes apparent that one of the things it relies on is the idea that trans men simply existing near your cis daughters will turn them trans. For many a conservative, this would mean trans men in public are dangerous and cannot be trusted. When we say transitioning improved our lives and that we’re happy this way, they don’t believe that. They look for secret signs that we’re actually miserable, as this one transphobe did to Elliot Page, which was reacted to by Jammidodger.

The words that come out of our mouths are always less believable than what somebody else imagines us to be like. We cannot be trusted, so when we speak, somebody else has to step in and correct what they see as falsehoods. We’re secretly miserable and in need of help we won’t admit to when we’re not too far gone in our transitions and secretly predatory and a danger to women and girls when we have. From the right, we’re misguided women who need help until we’re spreaders of a dangerous disease that will cause the girls you love and care about to poison and mutilate themselves. From the left, we’re misogynistic gender traitors who have no real problems and are even more dangerous than cis men due to our ability to fall back on our agab when needed and therefore we need to be kept in check more than any cis man does. Both sides consider us sneaky and suspicious and deceitful. Neither is willing to think we are just existing and living our lives in a world that actively wants us gone, and when we dare to complicate things by suggesting that our lived experiences don’t align with the theory that’s been put forth and we’d like to contribute, not a single word of it can be trusted.

There are, right now, trans men who are currently living as someone's tradwife. Many men, all around the world, are currently experiencing that. There are trans boys who are pressured or forced into marriages at a young age. There are trans men who grew up in such an environment where actually being able to live as a trans men felt unthinkable and so they went along with what was expected of them, especially when they did not want to be hated and discarded by everyone they've ever known and loved.

Aside from the fact that, no, we are in fact talking about trans people here. By treating transness as an aside to our gender, it implies that cis gender dynamics are somehow more true and objective. I am trans. that is a material fact about my existence. It's impossible to extrapolate cisgender experiences to define our own because we are not cis

—Did you know that Juneteenth is also celebrated in a part of Mexico? Nacimiento Mexico was once home to thousands who escaped slavery in the US. As many as 10,000 slaves followed a clandestine Southern Underground Railroad to Mexico. —To date, many Black Mexicans from the Texas area retrace a portion of the same route their African American ancestors followed in 1850 when they escaped slavery. —Descendants of slaves who escaped across the southern border observe Texas’s emancipation holiday with their own unique traditions in the village of Nacimiento. —Slave hunters would patrol the southern border for escapees, led by the Texas Rangers but the Mexican army would be there waiting for them (the slave hunters) to turn them away.