TierneyLikeHell

“Cool,” says one kid. “I don’t want to be a boy, I want to be a girl sometimes.” And I say okay.

Children are taught fear. They are taught that the worms are gross. It isn’t until they’re a few years older than my class - up in 3rd or 4th grade - that they start shrieking at my little worm friends. They won’t play the silly games or sing the silly songs or even promise not to tug. A fourth grader hears my lesson about gender and says, “That’s so weird,” and suddenly I hear from the mouths of these beautiful children, “Yeah,” “this is weird,” “No, mine is a girl.”

It is not the 4th grader I blame. It is the person in her life that saw something beautiful and ruined it for her. It is the “put that down, it’s gross,” “you don’t want to get dirty” “there’s us and there’s them.” I want to show her - without the humble little blind noses of worms, we are nothing. We need them. Did you know if they grow a belt they’re over a year old! Spent tunnelling through the secrets of roots. I want to show her: it’s okay if tomorrow you feel like a boy or maybe something neither, something different that is entirely you.

But fear, once discovered, is not an easy stain to get out. We say, “What will we tell the children” and forget - the children already heard. They heard you snickering about the person down the street. They saw you talking to your friend about “those people”. And they internalize it, burrow it into them. We don’t tell the children, we model hatred until the children can’t hear you, can’t hear you declare, “do as I say, not as I do.”

good day:

make coffee

regular day:

put water in coffee maker

put coffee in coffee maker

turn on coffee maker

bad day:

take pot from coffee maker

turn on sink

fill up coffee pot

turn off sink

pour water into coffee maker

put coffee pot in coffee maker

open cupboard

get coffee filter from cupboard

get coffee beans from cupboard

put filter in coffee pot

measure coffee

pour coffee into filter

close coffee maker

turn coffee maker on

someone sitting at home alone, an active alcoholic, squandering your charity, drinking all day is better situation than a street homeless alcoholic. someone using drugs in your charity house is better than them doing the same w no shelter

most of you would not like most street homeless people, I definitely don’t and didn’t when I was street homeless. for every one person who uses unconditional shelter to turn themselves around, someone else will do jack shit and very slowly, if ever, work through the issues that made them homeless, will maybe never be able to live independently. still better than street homelessness, still worth doing. ultimately either you believe that shelter should be universal or you don’t

January

February

March

March

March

March

March

March

March

March

March

March

March

March

March

March

March

Ap-

Junly

Augsepoctob…Halloween

Destiel

Deaf People Exist

auditory processing disorder is a Bitch

people with ADHD can find it hard to concentrate on what is being said without the words in front of them

^autistic people for the same reason

autistic people may also find it hard to interpret verbal messages within the context of the video, so it's useful to have written alternatives to fall back on

do you know how painful it is to be excluded from every joke, every video, every conversation because others just Can't Be Bothered?

some people live in a conservative household or with family who don't share the same ideals, and they may not have privacy to view things on their own, so they may need to watch things with the volume extremely low or muted

We Want To Watch Videos In Public, Dammit

feel free to add on!

When people say ‘transmisandry doesn’t exist because misandry doesn’t exist’. they are fixating on the semantics instead of on our need for a specific word to describe issues that affect only us. Transphobia doesn’t cover it any more than ‘misogyny’ covers transmisogyny.

Trans men do not experience misandry. They experience something different which can be called transmisandry , which is not at all the same thing as being hated for being men, and is not the same as what trans women experience so it’s not interchangeable with transphobia .

You can use another word but I really need to protest against the arguments that put misandry as defined by cis men as a criteria for what trans men experience.

Here are just some of the things that trans men experience due to society’s hostility that we need our own specific language and space for:

being assumed to have the same male privilege as cis men

being assumed to WANT this privilege at the cost of women; i.e. treated like predators

being denied shared experiences with women because we are not women

being accused of invading women’s spaces

fearing cis men even though we are also men

not being respected by cis men

struggling with feeling inferior to cis men, to trans women, and to cis women

misdirected lesbophobia and the issues it causes

our bodies being affected by birth control issues

risking misgendering in ways specific to trans men (for example not being able to pee standing up)

struggling to define our gender while rejecting the toxic social constructs of it

being hated for being women (!! we are perceived as women by so many)

struggling with the influence of cis men on our behaviour

the safety of feminine spaces vs the desire not to encroach on them

making women uncomfortable

supporting feminism while rejecting things typically seen as feminine

for example, not being able to take part in destigmatising periods because of dysphoria and provoking misgendering

the guilt of rejecting femininity

the guilt of embracing masculinity

the guilt of hating our female-coded bodies in a world that hates women’s bodies already

underrepresentation in media of trans men specifically

fatphobia and body policing in a trans male context

and finally, I’m sorry, but this kind of dismissive attitude and erasure of our need to have our own words simultaneous with a complete support for trans women to have theirs, based on…well…the fact that we’re men. That’s exactly transmisandry- we’re trans people whose struggles are brushed aside because we’re men. :/

And yeah, trans women experience some of the above too- but in a different context that only they can truly understand, and that’s why they have ‘transmisogyny’ as a word to describe it.