Trotting Along

The fact that the image of the “rapist” has been historically constructed to be male, masculine and phallic, while the image of the “rape victim” has been constructed to be female, feminine, yonic, penetrable, etc. should not be considered directly an attribute of patriarchally constructed “womanhood” but rather an indirect one, that comes as a facet of rape being a crime not against the rape victim as a human person but against the rape victim’s patriarch for the damaging of his property.

The telealogy does not go: “the female gender has been considered to be innocent and incapable of crime, therefore rape committed by women has been forgiven or brushed aside more easily.” It goes: “females’ are the biological class of people who facilitate patriarchal reproduction by producing heirs for men of means to leave their property to, labor force to extract value from and defend that property, and more ‘females’ to keep the cycle going. High class men must protect the virtue of their property to ensure that the heirs they receive are their own. Low class men would ideally like to protect the virtue of their property for the same reason, inasmuch as they have anything to leave as inheritance, and if not, because having one’s woman be touched or penetrated by other men will lower her owner’s masculinity in the eyes of the community [a cultural byproduct of the patriarchal material phenomenon I am describing]. Therefore, if a woman is touched or penetrated by a man who has no legal claim to her, any man who has the ability to mobilize the power of the law against the offender will do so, on the grounds that his property has been compromised, damaged, or destroyed.” This is why marital rape has not been considered rape for the majority of history, in the majority of places, with few exceptions that are still by and large not actively enforced.

The fact that this causes rape committed by cis women against cis men, or by people classed as female against people classed as male, invisibilized, is a tragic byproduct of this. However, it is categorically not a function of any inherent blamelessness or so-called ‘ontological victimhood’ written into the female social role because victimhood is a status granted to human people, not property. It is also most certainly not a privilege, not even an accidental one, because it comes directly from a disprivilege. All you have to do in order to believe this is check how many cis women or otherwise people AFAB, even white ones, get any kind of justice when they report sexual harassment or violence: vanishingly few.

The trope of the ‘innocent white woman/AFAB’ who gets victimized by the scary transfem/man of color is itself not a reflection of how white cis women manage to leverage white/cis privilege to get justice against rapes committed by transfems or men of color, but a trope built and employed by white patriarchy in order to simultaneously perpetrate the narrative of women being property that needs defending from an outside aggressor while utilizing said narrative to create and punish a group of aberrant or undesirable ‘males’, inferior to the civilized white patriarchs. In short, it is a narrative that white patriarchy creates and repeats to reproduce itself.

Recommended readings time. The wikipedia article on marital rape is a pretty good intro. I know people don’t really need me to tell them about Wikipedia LOL but I feel like it often gets skipped because it’s too obvious when it’s a perfectly usable and helpful source. Here is a timeline of marital rape laws in the West. Did you know that it was considered legally impossible in England until 1991? Here is a monograph about the legal history of marital rape in the USA. A paper about the legal status of marital rape in India. And another. One about Malaysia. Here is a comparative analysis of legal status of marital rape from a global perspective. And another. And another. Here is a historical monograph on rape as seen in writing and law in Early Modern and Modern France. Here is a PDF of the full text of The Dialectic of Sex, which I will never get tired of recommending. Here is an extract from Susan Brownmiller's Against Our Will, a work that I have not read in its entirety but that is considered foundational to the concept of rape culture itself. Angela Davis speaks of rape in a racialized context, both as white patriarchal dominance against enslaved African (and later Black) women, and as white patriarchal myth used to perpetrate violence against Black men.

If anyone knows of more sources, especially entire books of theory and historiography on the historical construction of rape from a global perspective, please feel free to jump in and add some.

But that would necessitate acknowledging that what happened to them was the backhand of male socialization, which would mean that gendered socialization is real, which would mean that female socialization also exists and is necessarily more severe, as it is the sum of the social technologies that the partiarchy has spent several thousand years refining for the precise purpose of oppressing, exploiting and subjugating those subject to it.

Sworn Virgins of Albania

“Sworn Virgin” is the term given to a biological female in the Balkans who has chosen to take on the social identity of a man for life. As a tradition dating back hundreds of years, this was sometimes necessary in a society that lived within tribal clans, followed the Kanun, an archaic code of law, and maintained an oppressive rule over the female gender. Young girls were commonly forced into arranged marriages with much older men in distant villages. The freedom to vote, drive, earn money or own property was traditionally the exclusive province of men. A family suddenly without a patriarch or male heir would find themselves in jeopardy of losing everything. As an alternative, a daughter could become a Sworn Virgin, or “burnesha”, elevating her to the status of a man and granting her all the rights and privileges of any man. In order to manifest the transition such a woman cut her hair, donned male clothing and sometimes even changed her name. Most importantly of all, she took a vow of celibacy to remain chaste for life. As modernization inches towards the small villages nestled in the Albanian Alps, this archaic tradition is increasingly seen as obsolete. Only a handful of Sworn Virgins remain. As a portrait photographer with an interest in subjects that innately speak to the diversity of the human experience, I was fascinated with this story. This is historically one of the few examples of socially accepted gender change and it is rapidly disappearing. My desire to record the sacrifice, context and experience of these women/men set me on course to seek out some of the last burnesha. I was rewarded with a small collection of people who possess an indescribable amount 0f strength and pride, value their family honor above all else, and have few regrets for all they have sacrificed. Furthermore, their absolute transition is accepted, posited and taken without question by the people among whom they live. Photographing them was my greatest privilege.

First of all, a select few screenshots from LBR, the post that finally made me decide to actually write this after all. I think it was finally a sign, after people have been yelling in my askbox for days about the whole "chud to transfem" phenomenon.

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.

Whatever it was, to put it this way, if there were 10 studies on the trans community as a whole, there were 3 on trans women and trans fems and 0 on trans men and trans mascs, and 0 on nonbinary people. All of the mixed studies were also pretty much useless for my purposes as well because they were all so lopsided.

I think I swapped to a bunch of different things - addiction rates, smoking, depression, mental health in general - nothing that was even roughly equal in looking at all of us. Trans men, trans mascs and nonbinary people are so under researched as to be nonexistent.

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...)

the end result of this is you get a wonderful dynamic in which if you happen to be someone who doesn't abide by the narrow confines of petty separatism and doesn't want to be fucked, then you will be treated as an intellectually feeble and invisibilised workhorse whose sexual unavailability is a temporary obstruction to a commodity's access rather than a personal boundary, by the same people who complain of this dynamic happening to them at the hands of those deemed exempt from transmisogyny—who are the only ones that don't treat you like this for not being transmisogynised in the 'correct' way! funny how that works

Why aren't we talking about the real reason male college enrollment is dropping? (Celeste Davis, Oct 6 2024)

"White flight is a term that describes how white people move out of neighborhoods when more people of color move in.

White flight is especially common when minority populations become the majority. That neighborhood then declines in value.

Male flight describes a similar phenomenon when large numbers of females enter a profession, group, hobby or industry—the men leave. That industry is then devalued.

Take veterinary school for example:

In 1969 almost all veterinary students were male at 89%.

By 1987, male enrollment was equal to female at 50%.

By 2009, male enrollment in veterinary schools had plummeted to 22.4%

A sociologist studying gender in veterinary schools, Dr. Anne Lincoln says that in an attempt to describe this drastic drop in male enrollment, many keep pointing to financial reasons like the debt-to-income ratio or the high cost of schooling.

But Lincoln’s research found that “men and women are equally affected by tuition and salaries.”

Her research shows that the reason fewer men are enrolling in veterinary school boils down to one factor: the number of women in the classroom.

For every 1% increase in the proportion of women in the student body, 1.7 fewer men applied.

One more woman applying was a greater deterrent than $1000 in extra tuition! (…)

Since males had dominated these professions for centuries, you would think they would leave slowly, hesitantly or maybe linger at 40%, 35%, 30%, but that’s not what happens.

Once the tipping point reaches majority female- the men flee. And boy do they flee!

It’s a slippery slope. When the number of women hits 60% the men who are there make a swift exit and other men stop joining.

Morty Schapiro, economist and former president of Northwestern University has noticed this trend when studying college enrollment numbers across universities:

“There’s a cliff you fall off once you become 60/40 female/male. It then becomes exponentially more difficult to recruit men.”

Now we’ve reached that 60% point of no return for colleges.

As we’ve seen with teachers, nurses and interior design, once an institution is majority female, the public perception of its value plummets.

Scanning through Reddit and Quora threads, many men seem to be in agreement - college is stupid and unnecessary.

A waste of time and money. You’re much better off going into the trades, a tech boot camp or becoming an entrepreneur. No need for college. (…)

When mostly men went to college? Prestigious. Aspirational. Important.

Now that mostly women go to college? Unnecessary. De-valued. A bad choice. (…)

School is now feminine. College is feminine. And rule #1 if you want to safely navigate this world as a man? Avoid the feminine.

we need gynecological care. we experience higher rates of medical discrimination that effect access to gynecological care. our ability to get abortions is effected by this, as is it effected by abortion being made illegal. some medical providers deny birth control to trans people on testosterone hrt. forced pregnancy is commonly used to detransition us.

neither trans nor cis women face this in the way that we do.

“systemically there is no real patriarchal oppression trans men face that trans women do not.” 

period stigma. the financial burden of menstrual products. female class genital mutilation. female class infanticide. stunted development encouragement as children due to sexist bias. in some countries we cannot leave without the permission of a cis man due to being classed as female. 

this is real, systemic, patriarchal oppression, that those shoved into the class of 'female' at birth face, and trans women do not.

“the treatment of transfeminized people by society is inherently different. inherently worse. not just socially or interpersonally but systemically.” 

socially: trans men have higher rates of sexual violence, one in two trans men have been sexually assaulted. we also have higher rates of domestic violence, and intimate partner violence. we have higher suicide attempt rates. as well as being more likely to be in severe psychological distress and depressed. while less likely to be generally happy and thriving. we are more likely to be harassed or discriminated against in restaurants, hotels, retail stores, and bathrooms. and have higher avoidance rates of public bathrooms. 

systemically: we are less represented in political office. we are more likely to have negative experiences with law enforcement. we overall are found to make less money. we are more likely to be harassed when we present incongruent identity documents. testosterone is a controlled schedule III substance that can result in criminal charges without a prescription. it is more common for us to be denied insurance coverage of hrt. due to our higher rates of medical discrimination we are also much more likely to avoid receiving necessary medical treatment due to fear of harassment and discrimination. we have higher rates of being in poor health. and avoiding healthcare due to cost. and are also more likely to be harassed or discriminated against by government agencies. as well as have negative experiences with airport security.

we also have comparable violent victimization rates with trans women. and trans boys are just as likely to be homeless.

Via @amanofgreatexpectations 's tags (reformatting and bold by me):

This is the logical consequence of mainstream queer identity itself being formed through naturalizing the cisheteropatriarchal oppression of people AFAB.

If queer marginalization is in essence cisheteropatriarchal marginalization then it would follow that all people AFAB are likewise essentially 'queer marginalized' from birth irregardless of their identities. But in fact that is not the way that framing functions. It's pretty clear that the popular understanding of 'queer' identity is rather derived from the comparative aberrancy of people AMAB experiencing cis heteropatriarchal marginalization unexpectedly. The “unexpectedness” is the key - and the source of people AFAB being overlooked when acknowledging experiences of oppression within the community. It's too “expected” to count and queer people AFAB lack the same sense of 'relative deprivation' to demand the greater equity that they are deserved.

This is also why cis gay men - and others - take such umbrage at the thought of gay trans men calling themselves 'faggots'. 'Faggot' is a transgressive hardship identity derived from people AMAB (who are the Kantian-universal Default Human Beings in their minds) experiencing cisheteropatriachal oppression - which isn't *supposed* to happen to them and is therefore transgresssive (and is tacitly a tough “male” identity by association) whereas any person AFAB experiencing cisheteropatriarchal oppression is supposed to endure this naturally. People AFAB are not allowed to think that they are fellow members of a people that are not 'supposed' to experience this marginalization - in effect to deny their shared humanity and to lock people AFAB into their object beings.

Idk I'm rambling but. When cis gay men experience violence from straight men = obvious homophobic violence that can be recorded as a hate crime. When people AFAB experience violence from straight men = uh just regular intimate partner violence not motivated by any bigoted ideology.

'Person AFAB! your oppression is normal! Get over it! Other people Shouldn't be oppressed in the way you are and that makes their issues Most Concerning!', i.e., gendered structures are most VISIBLY troubled by the nonconforming person AMAB for refusing to confirm [at the] top of hierarchy.

There is this insistence that the misogyny faced by pericis women is the baseline default condition of existence - which is not to say cis women aren't privileged over trans people in various situations, but that is a function of being cis, not a function of having been AFAB. A person AFAB could perform the most gender-conformance possible or the most gender-flouting dykery possible and they would still experience certain types of oppression regardless of proximity to the external femininity expected of them.

I am going to start with this comment on my last post that I think expertly nails down the particular issue with whipping girl, where all the problems stem from. I am not going to cite the person who wrote it because I guarantee this post is going to generate a lot of hate and I want to put as many steps as possible between seeing this and harassing that person, but if you wrote this know I think you are great.

I am going to be less kind about it than the above comment. Julia Serano came up with a social theory that explains the experiences of Julia Serano and then decided that was reflective of all of reality, which she then insists on very vehemently without any consideration of other points of view. She makes light of any prejudice people experience that isn't easily explained by her theory and outright denies and erases prejudice people experience if it is inconvenient to her theory.

I don't think she even accurately represents trans women (even most trans women) as a group. Her theory certainly does not line up with my experience as a trans woman, and the way she makes light or dismisses things that don't fit in her theory is honestly kind of offensive.

As written in whipping girl, her perspective is myopic, her conclusions unsound, and her thinking biased.

I would like to reiterate at this point I don't think she is a bad person, and there is a lot of good in whipping girl. Mainly when she is talking about her own experiences and resists the urge to extrapolate to what that means for other people. And from what I have seen she has improved significantly in the last twenty years. Like I said in my last post, be very critical of a person's words, be as generous as possible with the person.

She fucked it up bad with Whipping Girl, but that doesn't mean she has nothing of value to say or she is a bad person or she can't improve or anything like that. What it does mean, unfortunately, is that many key elements of Whipping Girl are critically flawed and steeped in bias. And even more unfortunately, its the most important parts of the book.

In particular, the section where she coins transmisogyny. To read the whole section, start at the part titled "Trans Woman Manifesto". It is too long to cite in it's entirety here, but this is the part where she actually coins the term transmisogyny:

"When a trans person is ridiculed or dismissed not merely for failing to live up to gender norms, but for their expressions of femaleness or femininity, they become the victims of a specific form of Trans Woman Manifesto discrimination: trans-misogyny. When the majority of jokes made at the expense of trans people center on “men wearing dresses” or “men who want their penises cut off,” that is not transphobia—it is trans-misogyny. When the majority of violence and sexual assaults committed against trans people is directed at trans women, that is not transphobia—it is trans-misogyny. When it’s okay for women to wear “men’s” clothing, but when men who wear “women’s” clothing can be diagnosed with the psychological disorder transvestic fetishism, that is not transphobia—it is trans-misogyny. When women’s or lesbian organizations and events open their doors to trans men but not trans women, that is not transphobia—it is trans-misogyny."

The thing to notice about this section is that transmisogyny is coined almost entirely in terms of comparative oppression. Its not just that trans women experience qualitatively different oppression, it is, according to her, they experience the worst oppression. The most jokes, the most violence, etc.

As it is coined in Whipping Girl, transmisogyny is defined by comparing oppression. That is the central point. And I think this is especially driven home by what she says immediately proceeding her coining the term:

"While trans people on the female-to-male (FTM) spectrum face discrimination for breaking gender norms (i.e., oppositional sexism), their expressions of maleness or masculinity themselves are not targeted for ridicule—to do so would require one to question masculinity itself."

A statement I have called out in the past for being ignorant and completely divorced from reality. This is one of the major points where she outright dismisses the oppression of others because it is convenient to her theory. This is so important to her defining transmisogyny that it immediately proceeds it. What is the single most important thing she wants in your mind when she defines transmisogyny? What does she choose to be the thing that frames the definition? Her assertion that trans men don't have it as bad.

This is really fucking bad.

The context required to understand why comparing oppression, especially in a very hard way like this, is so bad is the stuff of entire books worth of theory.

It is in fact so bad that I don't even know how to explain how bad it is. It is too big a subject to get across in so brief a format. It is the sort of thing you can only do safely with very, very careful consideration, probably something only an expert should do with a lot of careful qualifying statements, and the rest of us should just avoid it completely. Anyone who has studied exclusionist movements of the past 60 years will understand that comparing oppression is always a pillar of exclusionist movements. Disabled communities warn against this, and specifically consider it prejudice to compare "how bad" different types of disability have it. The autistic and neurodivergent communities warn against it. We have special, insulting terms for the prejudice comparing oppression results in ("Playing oppression olympics", for example.)

You don't and shouldn't have to take my word for it. But I can't meaningfully demonstrate it any further here. Go study this on your own if you need more context.

And I don't even think her definition of transmisogyny rests on sound facts. If we include the immediately proceeding statement about trans men, she makes six statements. Of those six, the statement about trans men is just pain prejudice on her part, the statement about trans women suffering the most violence we know isn't true (though it could be argued it was the best information she had at the time), and the idea that women can wear men's clothing shows a deep lack of understanding of recent feminism. Women (in some parts and cultures of the USA, because that is the very narrow view we are actually talking about here) are not allowed to wear mens clothing because masculinity is seen as better, but because feminists fought long and hard to make that a reality. Bias, ignorance, and dismissing the reality of the situation to better fit her theory are in full display in these three statements.

I would even argue that the statements about jokes and who is allowed in queer spaces are questionable in how lightly she addresses what are very complex issues, and that she is assuming much. I would argue that the only thing in the entire section that is not questionable is the second statement:

"When a trans person is ridiculed or dismissed not merely for failing to live up to gender norms, but for their expressions of femaleness or femininity, they become the victims of a specific form of Trans Woman Manifesto discrimination: trans-misogyny."

Now I don't think we should throw out transmisogyny as a term, it has evolved since then. But I do think that we have been dealing with the fallout of such a disastrous coining of the phrase ever since.

Understanding how transmisogyny was coined in Whipping Girl explains a lot about the behavior of people who have based a lot of their understanding of the trans woman condition on Whipping Girl. I am going to highlight two such things.

First off, there is an enduring hatred from many trans women towards any effort of trans men who speak out about their own oppression, especially when they try to create terms to use for themselves.

If a core part of the definition of transmisogyny is that trans women have it the worst, specifically in comparison to trans men, then someone trying to coin a similar term for trans men is directly challenging and attacking the very concept of transmisogyny. For example, if "transandrophobia" is, as many have said, "like transmisogyny, but for trans men", then they are incompatible terms under this understanding of transmisogyny and transfeminine as a whole.

People who understand transmisogyny as "trans women have it worst" see transandrophobia, a term that seems to mirror transmisogyny and is even sometimes explained in those terms, then they assume "transandrophobia" asserts that trans men have it worst. And since only one group can have it worst, this means they see transandrophobia, or any attempt to coin a conceptually similar term, as a direct attack on the idea of transmisogyny. This quickly becomes a deep and enduring belief that any trans man talking about their issues is making a direct attack at the concept of trans femininity. It becomes of overwhelming importance to establish an us and them and to establish who has it worse (TMA vs TME). And it becomes necessary to drive out anyone who would challenge the narrative they believe is so important.

And so an exclusionist movement is born.

The second consequence I want to talk about is the way that this kind of belief necessitates the flattening of trans women into fitting into the Julia Serano model. Trans women who do not fit this mold, who do not agree, who are not like Julia Serano, are excluded and silenced for going against the dominant narrative.

That covers trans men and trans women, but I know it hurts other trans people just as much, but I don't think I understand enough to explain why and how. I am sorry for that, but understand that this is incomplete without talking about how this contributes to other prejudices, especially exorsexism.

This may end up being one of my longer posts, and possibly the most important post I'll ever make. If you're reading this, I beg you to save it so you can find it whenever you have time to take out of your day and read it in its entirety.

Since it was mentioned in a post I saw yesterday, I'd like to leave a couple of videos from The Alt-Right Playbook series by Innuendo Studios. This video below is the one that was explicitly referenced in the post. It's less than 5 minutes long.

This next one is one that very well illustrates a specific bad faith rhetorical strategy that originated in very right-leaning online spaces in the early to mid 2010s (mainly 4chan and Reddit) and was then disseminated to other social media with more politically diverse userbases when the channers and redditors started using it (among others discussed in the series) to obfuscate, silence, or "takedown" arguments by progressives. I'm highlighting this particular one because I think it is very commonly used now on Tumblr among users calling themselves "transfeminist" in a way that destabilizes and obfuscates actual feminist analysis. (I don't think everyone who does it is equally aware of what they're doing - this is a strategy that does not require a complete awareness of its results on the part of the user. However, many people who use it do very well know what they are doing and feign ignorance, as the strategy is one that has plausible deniability built into it. The video goes into this.) The video is 18 minutes long.

I would sincerely recommend anyone who considers themselves a progressive and who frequently comes across bad faith arguments made by people who try to smuggle in regressive ideas in the form of quippy statemens, "owns", gaslighting, goalpost-shifting, etc. to watch the entire series. It has many parts but most of the videos are pretty short and the whole thing is really digestible and simply phrased.

More specifically to the topic of this blog, the recent trans community """infighting""" is one where a contingent of 4chan and old-school Reddit expatriates have been pushing increasingly antifeminist beliefs into the previously relatively progressive and feminist demographic of queer and trans Tumblr users, moving the overton window slowly but surely to the right on issues like rape culture, domestic abuse, reproductive oppression, and the way gendered socialization produces unequal consciousness and thus unequal material results, while gradually discouraging direct engagement with the history of feminist political action and feminist theory and literature.

Now, I guarantee you that I have been online for longer than at least 80% of the people reading this. This is both because I am old (#MillennialCringe) and because I, like many nerdy girls and "girls" of the 00s, was a very early adopter (never let them tell you that the internet was solely or mostly male until X recent date. It's a sexist lie.) So as someone who has been online for a very long time and has been immersed in online political discussion for almost as long, let me tell you, the Internet's historical memory is extremely short.

The reason people who unironically believe in things like AFAB privilege, that "people with a vagina can get justice for rape if their rapist is AMAB" (quite literally the opposite of how rape has worked for the entirety of human history, BTW!), that cis men are closer to being "TMA" than anyone AFAB or even cis men are TMA (where to be "TMA" is to universally suffer the most severe gendered victimization and violence, since "literally everybody AFAB has privilege over ["TMA" peope]"), that "there is a type of power that AFAB people hold that cis men don't" due to "having access to cis womanhood", who proclaim their "little fondness for cis women as a class" while having "no quarrel with the cisgender men", who argue in favor of introducing "nuance" to the condemnation of a rapist as an offender and wonder whether it is even possible to know if or when rape has occurred, who perpetrate the classic MRA talking point of "false rape accusationss", can insist that they are the indefatigable feminist activists being harassed and persecuted, while the people who point out the physical, psychological, medical, legal, economic, reproductive, occupational, and sexual damage that being classed as female has come with for the majority of human history* are maligned as "MRAs", or "gamergaters" with so little pushback from anyone, is that the true nature and history of those fascist, racist, and antifeminist movements has been memoryholed, even as little as <15 years after they happened. At the same time, its agents have demonstrably succeeded in normalizing their language and beliefs throughout the entire Internet, to the point that the average Twitter or Tiktok feed of 2026 looks not unlike the front page of /pol/ in 2014.

I believe it has at this point become fundamental for anyone who considers themselves a progressive to actually educate themselves on the history, tactics, demographic makeup, language, and aesthetics of those movements. This is especially true for anyone who considers themselves a feminist and who wants to spread feminist beliefs, participate in feminist analysis and work to end sexist oppression. Sexism has always been one of the chief values used to attract people, mainly white cis men who felt disenfranchised from masculinity, to these environments and radicalize them. (The other big one of course being racism.) Here is a video in the Alt-Right Playbook series on how such radicalization worked in detail, it's longer than the others but very important, please, please watch it.

It's especially important to note that I don't believe it to be a coincidence that these movements gained traction not thanks to platforming or support from "classic" conservative hubs but thanks to the radicalization and infiltration of nerdy online spaces with a predominant white male presence. It is equally not coincidental, in my opinion, that to the sexist, racist men in these communities, Tumblr was seen as the stronghold of the annoying, whiny, self-victimizing feminists. This was due to the fact that Tumblr (and some other often female-created and female-moderated fannish spaces, like FF.net, LiveJournal, and later Ao3) was where all the nerdy girls and women ended up gathering, in order to be able to discuss nerdy interests somewhere where they wouldn't be subject to misogynistic harassment. All of this takes on even more significance when you remember that Gamergate, and the broader culture of anti-feminist movements it both was an early part of and further sparked, started specifically as a reaction to feminist journalist critiquing sexist ideology and content in video games, and more broadly to the growing voice of women in the culture of nerd hobbies.

(From Meme Wars, Chapter 3: Gamers Rise. Full citation below)

(From "Right-Wing Extremism in Mainstream Games". Full citation below.)

One last thing I want to note is that many of the antifeminist talking points and stereotypes - and their related imagery - that were created at the time by these communities seem to have been recycled into talking points and imagery that is now used against transmasculine people and NB people AFAB (though they do of course still get used against women.) There is a clear and straightforward lineage that can be traced from the "hysterical feminazi" to the "whiny bitchboy transandrocunt", from the "crazy bitch who wants to cuck videogames" to compensate for her inferiority to the "power-tripping TME using AFAB privilege to censor TMA expression", from the "cringe fat SJW screeching about being lithosexual" to the "ugly theyfab with giant tits who thinks pronouns make them oppressed" or "delusional dyed-hair pooner with zippertits and fandom brain." The place where this lineage can be seen most evidently is in the wojak-style cartoons produced in these sort of spaces, where the aesthetic similarity and the correspondence of the language use highlight the fact that there is a direct continuity between the antifeminist 4/8channers and Redditors of then and the antifeminist anti-transmasculine exorsexist posters of now. The latter's ideologies still often start off on Chan boards, and eventually spread to Reddit and Twitter and Instagram and Bluesky, with the difference that they now use Tumblr as an inbetween step to proliferate and solidify their ideas, having at least partially supplanted the native userbase of Tumblr ("woke snowflake SJW" types) but having retained the website's function as a petri dish for percolating ideas about LGBT+/queer identity and about feminism before they get "tricked down" to the rest of the queer/feminist internet. At the bottom of this post I will leave some images as examples. (TW for virulent misogyny, transphobia and racism, and for self harm scars)

- breast growth is a natural consequence of estrogen therapy. when trans women get top surgery at all, it is usually augmentation, which is generally minimally invasive and produces minimal scarring due to small incision size, depending on the procedure the patient chooses.

- in contrast, most trans men are not good candidates for minimal-scarring top surgery techniques and the most common procedure (double incision) involves two 6"+ incisions which usually require drains afterwards, and grafts or more complex incisions if the patient wants to keep their nipples.

- neovaginaplasty is generally a one- or two-stage operation which does not necessarily require flaps/grafts (for penile inversion, though other methods can be more complex).

- phalloplasty almost always requires at least two and possibly 3 or more staged operations, meaning the timeline can be a year or longer from the first procedure to the finished result to allow for healing between stages, and RFF (most common donor graft site) requires physical therapy to regain circulatory and motor function in the arm the graft came from. complications can involve loss of motor function or sensation of the hand.

- orchiectomy is an outpatient office procedure that only requires local anaesthetic and has a low rate of complications.

- hysterectomy is a major surgery requiring general anaesthesia or spinal nerve block and can result in complications such as significant blood loss, damage to nerves controlling urinary function, bowel perforation, etc.

- freezing sperm for future use is fairly straightforward, painless, and does not involve exogenous hormones if the patient has not already undergone HRT for an extended period. this can then be used to artificially inseminate a partner or surrogate at a later date, a process with a high success rate and low risk.

- freezing eggs for future use involves the administration of large doses of FSH and LH which in turn causes estrogens to spike in the patient, which may cause mood changes, cramps, and dysphoria. then a needle is inserted via the vaginal wall to harvest the eggs. lastly, actually reproducing using those frozen eggs requires IVF, which is considerably more expensive and complex than artificial insemination.