Don't Be Weird

& like i DO agree with the op post too. misogyny is a real and current problem and it is no less real and current in leftist spaces than in conservative ones, nor any less in queer spaces than in heteronormative ones. but when you talk like this & when these (third screenshot) are the kinds of people engaging with your post, i'm sorry but it feels like you are, in the grand tradition of enemy feminisms, using the issue of misogyny not primarily as a chance to fight injustice and support victims of this kind of injustice, but rather to construct an identity as a victim of this injustice that legitimizes your voice while also policing that identity in order to delegitimize other's voices, along pre-existing lines of visibility and erasure and power and suppression.

emphasizing how you are a WOMAN and how this is something WOMEN experience and MEN (even men who are known to be profoundly shaped by being classed as women and having bodies perceived as female) need to SHUT UP about it reflects a need for the discussion of misogyny to centered around you and your experiences and getting to have a voice amongst voices like yours. if it makes you uncomfortable that discussions of misogyny aren't only and exclusively about the kind of misogyny you and others like you (however that is being conceived), that in fact other people's experiences with misogyny may reveal layers to misogyny that you are not perfectly affected by - perhaps the problem is located more in internalized cissexism and racism and classism etc. you need to realize that talking about transmisogyny or misogynoir doesn't make your feminism intersectional when you fundamentally do not think intersectionally and act with hostility towards intersectional feminism that causes you discomfort.

This is not about how trans men should be incarcerated in men's prisons because "women's prisons are too dangerous for them", or about trans men "having it worse than trans women", or about any kind of easy fix. It's about the common assumption that trans men and transmascs can safely be in women's prisons; which is an assumption that shapes legislature, judicial decisions, and causes a lack of safety precautions and consequences.

In a lesser sense, this is also about how this assumption is often considered to be a "privilege" over trans women, who are commonly considered much less safe in their "agab-aligned" prison than trans men are, due to the existence of V-coding. This supposedly leaves trans men with the assumed "privilege" of having safety in at least one type of prison, and trans women with none, since they're v-coded in men's prisons and a (perceived) "male threat" in women's prisons.

But there is no inherent "safety from abuse" in a women's ward (or women's spaces in general; this goes hand in hand with not believing victims where the abuser is a woman) for genderqueer people perceived as female (or anybody else, for that matter). The victim in this article describes experiences of sexual assault in the women's ward very similar to v-coding, as well as simultaneous punishments for being perceived as a "male threat" and an inherent danger to the other inmates!

This shows that trans men and transmascs (and I would wager any other type of person who is not cisperisex, regardless of identity or c/agab / c/asab) are at a heightened risk of gender-targeted abuse in both men's and women's prisons, just like trans women are too! Sometimes it's (trans)misogyny, sometimes it's (perceived or not) proximity to maleness, sometimes it's exorsexism, sometimes it's all of it. But cis-gender non-conformity puts all of us on a silver platter for targeted abuse, and all of it needs addressing — This is the key takeaway here. We are all at similar risks.

there is no hand holding here, either you don’t want it and therefor you aren’t a pedophile and are probably dealing with obsessive compulsive disorder, or you do want it and you think that your own sexual gratification is worth the lifelong suffering of the innocent and i think you are a danger to everyone around you and you should be put down. this is the only time i’m gonna talk about this of my own volition. my opinions will not change. i know this is the We Love Pedophiles site but my corner of the internet here is very different than that, and there will be absolutely no debate or budging. if you take issue with this just block me, you’ll be doing me a favor.

to reiterate one more time: if the thoughts make you uncomfortable (yes even if they also feel good in some weird way too- intrusive feelings are a part of this whole mess too! i’ve had ocd for twenty years you cannot trick meee /lighthearted), there is help, you are going to be okay, everything will be okay and you do not have to suffer like this forever i promise you. you are not what you most fear, and you can get to the place where you believe that too.

the comment:

A small compilation of posts from the latest trans twitter discourse. I haven't bothered to screenshot all of the most viral tweets, but also I think it's important to include a lot of the smart ass replies to really help you simulate just how many people are going under black posts and asking "well, what even is racism really?" And if you'd like to know, one of the largest black trans women on twitter was harassed off of the site. No she did not do anything in particular, just posted an image of a sign she didn't make herself that claimed white trans people oppress black trans people (referring to I believe the silencing of a black trans woman who was slated to speak at the protest but was kicked off last minute. @/septembersister, If that's accurate.)

I don't think it ended up in the screenshot but the scenario of the trans bipoc sex worker they were called sex pests in a reply. Victryena was harassed into deactivating.

I think posters who are attempting to swing back on this conversation claiming this is an organized attack against trans women and fems are willfully ignorant. The sign does not name transfems. The sign is in defense of a trans woman. The vast majority of people making this about trans women are trans women posting racist bullshit. It's not my fault they are trans women. My go to search has been 'white trans' as well as off of my feed. Klansmascs and klansgender nonbinaries are also a plague on our spaces that keep us from community or action, but to dismiss this behavior as a psyop is to engage in apologia for racist communities and erasure of transmisogynoir.

Racism is a "personal grievance". Racism is a "niche cultural issue." Racism takes up all the air in the room and addressing it is hampering REAL action. Antiracism is "liberalism".

The most disgusting idea I have seen thrown at Vic, who is an asian trans woman, is that she is weaponizing racism or the struggles of TWOC/TPOC. Absurd as an idea of that is it makes me furious that we as a community continue to use the statistics of violence, sexual assault, and murders of black trans women to push for trans rights but when black trans women attempt to discuss racism they face backlash like this. We have tokenized the idea of the black trans woman as a silent victim, the emblem of transmisogynistic abuse, and continue to deny her her struggles lest she be masculinized and deemed an oppressive force herself.

Victry's racial identity is also important. As an asian woman and due to the racist misogynistic associations we, largely as American and Europeans, fetishize the 'natural femininity' of Asians. Her dysphoria is invalidated, she has had an 'easy transition', her sex work is weaponized as equivalent to racial violence. For those who haven't followed along, she returned to twitter with an eloquent statement I will add here.

I think its also important to notice how many of these creeds attempt to call on ones marxist values and position TPOC and POC as welding imaginary economic power over white victims. Sex work is continually used as a bludgeon (perverted sexually deviant TWOC are whining when they reap monetary gain vs white trans women as the victims of sexual violence forced to participate in survival sex work are being looked down upon by rich TWOC who never have to experience sexual violence to benefit)

For every singular person rolling their eyes and proclaiming their oppression has tuned them into the concept of suffering, that their experiences make them the true savior of the oppressed masses who doesn't NEED to ever listen to another group, theres 10 more replies 'just wondering' why we 'even bother to see color', or if antiracist action was CIA funded to erode leftist unity, and all of them are trying to make this exclusively about trans women. It's insane.

A couple more to close this out.

Racism is trivial. What even IS race? These rich blacks are speaking over fragile abused white trannies. Racism is a niche issue, you're distracting from actual problems. Calling organizations racist is too aggressive, you can't speak here. You're being inflammatory. You're not showing enough nuance. How was I supposed to know theres a victim when all your political slogans are so mean and violent? Discussions of race is a CIA psyop meant to dissolve the left. I'm angry you called me white and this is YOUR fault. Calling me racist is the justifying transphobic violence. You're equating me to a police officer murdering black people right now! YOU support trans peoples deaths because of the color of their skin! I'm not racist! YOU'RE racist for noticing race!

1) His character doesn’t exist in Homer’s Odyssey and was taken from Virgil’s Aeneid and given to him instead of giving him an actual character in the Odyssey. If someone were to visit the original source material, his role will not even be there.

2) He is essentially the dead wife of the plot, and is also one of the youngest characters. He haunts the narrative, which is a pretty common role given to women so as to not actually write them into the plot, but please do keep telling me that there is absolutely no transphobic or misogynistic biases towards why Elliot Page was specifically selected to play Sinon.

3) He still only gets a combined amount of about five minutes of screentime, and considering this is the most notable role he’s recieved since coming out 5+ years ago… I don’t think this is proof that transitioning has benefited his career. Every time Elliot Page is even mentioned by name, the internet goes on a horrifically transphobic crusade for months until he’s forced back into obscurity. His acting career has objectively tanked since coming out.

4) Elliot Page has already worked with Chrisopher Nolan and was given a (noteably) bigger role in Inception pre-transition. Christopher Nolan did not “wait” for Elliot Page to transition (whatever the fuck that means), the two already knew each other from previous projects.

like, the OP of one particular post that went around got mad at people in the notes for calling them out, talking about how they were just trying to use this as an example to talk about misogynistic writing and "see, you derailed this post about how women are treated to talk about a man!" but its more than just an ill decision on their part.

people are so eager to make the joke that Page transitioned as is now getting better roles, regardless of whether or not its true. people are eager because its a joke that paints such a clear, pointed image of how cis women are affected by misogyny. its the same reason people love "if men could get pregnant..." jokes and sayings even when they are supposedly trans-inclusive. its the same reason that gender studies classes motherfucking love talking about how binary trans men and women in office jobs lose or gain male privilege, because it reduces trans experiences to a vehicle to illustrate cis women's oppression and cis men's privilege.

To everyone in all those categories, the impact of misogyny on both the world at large and their own lives is extremely obvious. It's just... the state of things. And the vast majority of the time, when some cis woman is talking about, say, experiencing reproductive oppression or health inequities because of her uterus, she really isn't making some “point” about trans women. Only a minority of cis women are truly terf-brained, and most of them aren't even thinking about trans people when they talk about these things; they're just talking about obvious facts of their reality.

But if cis women start to get the message that “the stance of the trans community is that talking about misogyny as it affects people with uteruses and people who had girl-gendered upbringings is terf shit”, a hell of a lot of them - because remember, the vast majority of cis people know nothing about trans issues, barely consider us at all, and don't actually know the ins and outs of “the trans debate” - will conclude, “Oh, I guess I'm a terf then, if that's what that means. Because I'm sure as hell not on the same side as anyone who tells me I can't talk about how having a uterus has impacted my life.” And at that stage, they're not actually a terf, in any meaningful sense of the word; they're just a cis woman who has had a lifetime of misogyny and wants to talk about that. But if they're told that that makes them a terf, they'll start mixing with actual terfs. They'll start gravitating towards shit clearly aimed at further radicalising the terf-curious. They'll see people get rightfully called terfs and think “they must be part of my group, so I'm likely on their side and what they're saying is probably reasonable” and they'll see people say “fuck terfs!” and think “wow, we're being insulted just because we want to talk about how being raised as girls or having a uterus has affected us? I always thought there might be something off about the whole trans rights thing...” Their language and thinking will drip more and more with bizarre terf dogwhistles. And before you know it, Normal Cis Woman Who Never Really Thought Much About The Whole Trans Thing has become Radicalised Terf Wombyn Who Hates Trans People.

Am I “blaming trans people for our oppression”? No. I'm not implying that the reason every terf became a terf is that a trans person called them a terf. What I'm saying is that we cannot allow “talking about misogyny” - specifically in the ways that it affects cis women, those assigned female at birth, those who grew up being treated as “girls”, and those who have uteruses - to become “terf shit”. We cannot cede that territory to terfs. We cannot allow the general discourse to assume that “being a terf” just means “wanting to talk about menstrual health inequalities or the impact of having a “girl” childhood”. None of this is “terf shit”, it's just “talking about misogyny” shit.

And sometimes, people who talk in ways that get accused of being “terfy” are actually talking in ways that are more trans-inclusive! Maybe that person is saying “people with uteruses” instead of “women” because they're very specifically talking about people with uteruses, and don't want to imply that that category is exactly the same as the “woman” category, which would be transphobic! “I really hate how people with uteruses don't get taken seriously by doctors; I've been trying for years to get a hysterectomy because of my horrific periods and no doctor will do that for me because they're too concerned about my hypothetical future husband” is someone talking about medical misogyny in a perfectly trans-inclusive way that doesn't assume that uterus = woman and woman = uterus. It would be actively less inclusive if they'd said “women” instead of “people with uteruses”. “I really hate how we uterus-owning large-gamete-producing wombyns keep having to share our single-sex spaces with these big hairy male-socialised trans-identifying males” - now that is terf shit. They're not the same thing!

Trans people need feminism. Trans people need a trans-inclusive feminism. Trans rights - in every “direction”: trans women, trans men, absolutely everything else besides - are a feminist issue. But it seems like some people have got so single-focused on transmisogyny that it's as if they have completely forgotten or dismissed the existence of regular misogyny - a problem which is very, very, very far from being “fixed” or “over”.

Right now, cis women are a pretty important base of support for trans people. They are statistically far more likely to be friendly to us than cis men are. But some of the discussions I see among “transfeminists” are so incredibly alienating to anyone who wants to have particular discussions around misogyny that I'm worried we are going to be pushing impressionable cis women into the arms of genuine terfism, not the supposed “terfism” of “bringing up that you have a uterus in any way is terf-coded”. (And none of this is even to get into the fact that, if you listen to the way some people speak, cis women talking about misogyny is absolutely fine, while anything a trans man says about experiencing misogyny is all bollocks. Hmmmm... I wonder why that apparently is... I wonder what biases may be leading them to that conclusion...)

This mentality is 100% the consequence of a white feminism that positioned (white) trans women as the “canary in the coal mine” (which is a phrase that until recently, I associated with the history of antiblack oppression) which outright ignored how transphobia (at least in the United States) was downstream of white nationalism and transphobia became more popular as these chauvinist groups became more mainstream.

Trans people in the United States were also demonized for participating in many of those early anti-Nazi rallies which were focused primarily on racism but because some of us were visibly opposed to white nationalism we became associated with antifascism creating the “trantifa” canard. This only happened because trans people saw these groups explicitly rallying around racism and so the racists began attacking the trans people who appeared.

The idea that this fascist society first targeted trans women and trans people more broadly before moving on to other groups is something you can only believe if you outright ignored the white nationalist activity that helped normalized transphobia in the first place.

There has been an antagonism between white trans women and people of color over the issue of racism the past few years where some women will see accusations of racism as inherently transmisogynist implying the other people to make these criticisms are TME.

Sit with why it makes you uncomfortable that a lesbian trans man, lesbian trans woman, lesbian nonbinary person, and lesbian cis woman are all lesbians in community with each other.

Sit with why it makes you uncomfortable that a gay trans man, trans woman who also identifies as a gay man, nonbinary person who also identifies as a gay man, and a cis gay man are all gay men in community with each other.

This shows us something fundamental about how the people who use tma/tme think. In particular, that the only meaningful way to discuss your own oppression, and in particular transmisogyny, is in terms of comparing oppression.

It is a hard mindset to break from and very easy to fall into. It's also an astoundingly prejudice way of thinking. It is one of the major roots of all exclusionist movements within the queer community. When I compare tma/tme to gold star lesbian, I mean that very genuinely. I don't think everyone who uses it is a bad person, but they are getting caught up in something that will end very poorly and be remembered as this incredibly toxic and prejudice thing that grew out of this need to directly compare your oppression to others - or in reality, the wildly inaccurate assumptions you make about how others are oppressed.

And it all seems so reasonable at the start. I get that. I really do. Just like it seemed so reasonable and obvious that lesbians are more oppressed than bi woman, and bi women would never really understand.

I don't think most of the early rad fems were bad people. I think they were trying to come to terms with and explain the problems they were seeing and experiencing and many of them inadvertently fell into prejudice ways of thinking. They tried out ideas and rather than dismiss them when they proved a problem they became attached, dug in.

The same thing is happening now. I don't think the people using tma/tme now are bad people. But they have adopted prejudice patterns of thought, have become attached, and are digging in.