throw the fucking ball already

hello non-transfem tumblr user! in this game show, i will be presenting a few scenarios that you may stumble across during your time online (not just on tumblr either). these scenarios pertain to how you should treat transfems online.

SCENARIO #1

in front of you is a trans woman who you just referred to with "they/them" pronouns. she is visibly upset and angry with you, as her pronouns are at the top of her bio and pinned post, and her friends are defensive on her behalf as this is an extremely common occurrence to her. do you:

A) say that you were just using gender neutral pronouns because you can never be sure

B) say that you don't have time to check people's pronouns on a social media platform that has no time limit

C) say she should be grateful that you aren't a terf and therefore you didn't use he/him

D) call her dramatic and tell her she's just cherry-picking your points, and that that she and her friends are just virtue signaling for woke points

E) say "oh i'm sorry," and correct yourself

if you selected any answer besides E, then the floor will promptly open up underneath you and drop you into straight down to the earth's core where you will be burned to a crisp. though you may not have malicious intent in using they/them pronouns to refer to a stranger, this does not mitigate the reality that you degendered a trans woman in a world where even other trans people try to deny them womanhood.

if you DID select e, then congratulations (and i hope you do this in reality, not just when the scenario is presented to you in a neat and organized way)! you can move onto the next scenario!

SCENARIO #2

you are scrolling through your dashboard when you see a blogger you follow (BYF) in a heated argument with a trans girl about whether dogs or cats are better. the trans girl made a post that the BYF interpreted as hating dogs despite it clearly not being intended as such. during this argument, the BYF says, "dude shut the fuck up." the trans girl tells the BYF not to call her "dude" and to leave her alone. you feel the need to chime in on the situation with your two cents. your solution is to:

A) tell the tgirl that "dude" is a gender neutral term

B) ignore the misgendering entirely and just focus on the original argument about dogs and cats

C) ask how the BYF was supposed to know that the tgirl didn't want to be called dude.

D) tell the tgirl to go outside and talk to real people who don't care about this

E) call her a pedophile

F) tell the BYF to not misgender her and stop harassing her. if BYF chooses to do any of the above answers, block and report.

if you selected any answer besides F, the floor will now open up! "dude" is not a gender neutral term. it is quite explicitly used to mean "man." the misconception that "dude" is gender neutral comes from the fact that we live in a world centered around manhood.

it is your responsibility to not only avoid growing defensive when you or people you like/admire when trans women point out misgendering/degendering in conversations, but to actively call out and deplatform transmisogyny in your spaces. if you want to be an ally, you need to be able to do this. you need to be able to recognize your own capacity for transmisogyny as well. if it had been you who had said that instead of BYF, you still need to be able to apologize and evaluate the language that you use in your day-to-day life.

SCENARIO #3

you came across a post on your "for you" page that features a trans woman venting about the transmisogyny that she experiences from other trans people. in this post, she mentions that she is tired of tme trans people making excuses for the violence she experience, and says "kill all tmes" in a hyperbolic fashion

A) tell her to stop infighting, that we're all faggots in the eyes of the state, and that she should kiss/fuck the nearest transmasc

B) call it white woman tears

C) make a sideblog to post waterboarded screenshots every time she says something about tme trans people to misconstrue it as her being transphobic to everyone besides transfems

D) reblog her post with a five paragraph rant about how tme/tma are problematic because they ask about your genitals or whatever

E) report her for violent content, and make calls to your followers to mass report her and any new blogs she makes as well

F) block her and move on

G) recognize that she is a trans girl who has experienced transmisogynistic abuse from people who she should be able to trust. like and reblog the post.

if you picked A, B, C, D, or E, the floor will now open up beneath you. if you picked F, you'll be spared for doing the bare minimum of not harassing or stalking a trans girl, but you will not be allowed to leave the room until you have read and internalized at least 300 pages of transfeminist literature.

if you picked G, then good job on recognizing a trans girl's struggles and uplifting her voice. recognize that even if you did a Good Act Of Allyship in doing so, you are still responsible for unlearning internalized transmisogyny, calling it out in your spaces when you see it, and not expecting transfems to sing your praises in return.

CONCLUSION

that conclude's this iteration of miss lavender's transmisogyny gameshow! if you didn't get all three answers correct, then spend some time tonight pulling that enormous stick out of your ass and read some transfeminist literature! then come back next time and try again.

and even if you correctly selected all three answers, i want you to go back and read over the other answers i listed. these are just a few of the methods and mantras that non-transmisogynized folks have used to hurt and silence us. it's not just petty online discourse like you might be tempted to dismiss it as. the way you treat trans women online often correlates with how you treat them in real life, or how you would if you don't know any (you should try to fix that if you are in an area that allows for it)!

are you listening to what she has to say? are you boosting her voice? are you recognizing that even if you do do that, she doesn't owe you praise or worship? are you willing to look at your own privilege through the lens of a transfeminist? even if you are a Perfect TME Ally, transfems may be wary of interacting with you. we've had plenty of "allies" treat us as badly as any of the people doing the incorrect answers on this post, we have no way of knowing if you're going to do the same.

🦭 femboyactionfigure Follow

i just don't get why trfs won't let trans men speak about their issues. we're literally so calm and reasonable and these hysterical bitches still whine about it

🦭 femboyactionfigure Follow

here's a bunch of screenshots of this random adult transwoman doing consensual kink with other adult transwomen. this makes them a pedo and we have to kill them

🦭 femboyactionfigure Follow

transwomen are male socialized and have male privilege which makes them the oppressors of trans men and other afabs

edit: i can't believe i have to say this, but terfs dni!

🦭 femboyactionfigure Follow

saw this transwoman's mutual aid post on my dash and decided to go digging just because. but lucky i did, because turns out this transwoman is a pedophile. they literally wear absorbent underwear, i have a bunch of pictures of their ass here to prove it. i also found the college they go to and forwarded this information to the faculty. but anyways please stop reblogging them and giving them money, sick creeps like this need to fall into irrelevancy

🦭 femboyactionfigure Follow

another friendly reminder that this blog isn't a safe space for terfs! no clue what made y'all feel safe to follow me, but get lost. transwomen are valid 💖

🦭 femboyactionfigure Follow

i really like to use my alt account to form superficial friendships with these creepy pedo transwomen i don't like so that i can try and find out more about them. if you have nothing to hide then you shouldn't have a problem with this

🦭 femboyactionfigure Follow

i really wish i had more transwoman mutuals. i feel like almost every transwoman i've met on here has been a trf, a pedo, or both... all i have is my transwoman girlfriend @.blankblogwithnothingonit

🦭 femboyactionfigure Follow

is it just me or does it give off red flags when a transwoman has an anime profile picture? like i can just smell the degeneracy from here, especially because they're always white.

edit: ...poc transwoman? what is that, can somebody please explain

🦭 femboyactionfigure Follow

Noticed the image of the article looks AI generated

Noticed that the image was posted without a link.

Googled "Epstein Hunting Black People" (no search results, suspicious considering this post was made 3 days ago and that would be a long time for this story to be up on a news platform without being disseminated widely)

Went to the news source listed in the image (News Wall, found this to be a yellow flag because it's a source I've never heard of) and found that while it is a real site, it does not have any articles listed with this title.

In conclusion, before making an attempt at *educatedly* correcting black people publicly, ensure you’re correct. Don’t rely on chat bots or google results, know how to do your own actual research.

Underneath each screenshot I’ve also included the file number so anyone is free to fact check it as well.

EFTA00580261.pdf

EFTA00813721.pdf

Their instagram post doesn't indicate an article is written, only that there's something to report on, which SHOULD BE your sign to start digging into this by looking for the EMAILS that EPSTEIN sent.

As Lena has pointed out, they are easily found in the Epstein library, through the Department of Justice, where the files have been being released from. (It isn't hard to actually do the work to look into something, btw. You just have to actually look at the information thoroughly.)

because yes, there are a lot of non-transfems who use it, and on a certain level as a descriptivist linguist, a word means what people use it to mean. but also, especially when it comes to marginalized groups and their own terms, it can be really important to establish and understand and respect what they mean, not broaden and coopt them into meaninglessness. so let's talk about t4t as a term and why i personally hold that it refers specifically to transfem4transfem.

most of you are aware that t4t means trans4trans, and comes from dating and hookup websites, the same way terms like m4f, f4m, m4m, and f4f do. so, in order to really dig down into how these terms were used and what they signal to, we have to talk about how the word "transgender" gets used in cis dominated, 18+ spaces online, both now and in the early 2000s.

the fact of the matter is that trans women bear the absolute brunt of fetishization and sexualization from cisnormative society. when people say "tranny", they mean trans women. when people talk about trans sex workers, they mean trans women. when people talk about trans pornography, they mean trans women. when people talk about trans predators, they mean trans women. and when chasers on dating sites talked about looking for trans hookups, they meant trans women.

and that's where this usage originates, that's the environment under which t4t becomes a seeking category as well. for trans women looking for other trans women to date, rather than the chasers fetishizing them. and just like the word tranny, those who do not bear the brunt of the fetishization, sexualization, and marginalization that gave rise to the word do not get to reclaim it. so it is with tranny, and so it is with t4t.

it is also, i think, worth noting some other context surrounding why transfems would specifically need a term for dating each other, instead of dating anyone else. lots of transmascs date each other too, and lots of trans men and women date each other. so why shouldn't this fall under t4t?

consider what t4t means, given the historical context discussed above. t4t means transfems, trans lesbians specifically, seeking each other out for love and sex and connection. t4t specifically being a trans lesbian term is important, because trans women have been largely excluded and pushed out of lesbian communities and scenes, a problem that still persists today.

yknow who isn't excluded from those communities? transmascs, even trans men. the "lesbian community" at large, as much as such a thing exists, has been more willing to discuss the philosophy of men being lesbians than it is to accept that trans women can be lesbians. tme trans people have been accepted into the wider lesbian community since before the dating sites that spawned the term t4t existed. they've had communities, they've had ways to find each other, to seek love and sex and connection amongst each other.

transfems have been excluded from the lesbian community by tme lesbians, fetishized by chasers, and made to feel unsafe and dehumanized regardless when dating. for these reasons, t4t is a specifically lesbian, specifically transfem term, one that helps lesbian transfems find each other, find safety, find solidarity, find love and lust and comfort and companionship amongst each other, when surrounded on all sides by exclusion.