Home sweet dumpster fire

I am begging the UK trans community and its allies to attend the Mass Lobby at Parliament on June 25th, 11am-4pm, organised by Trans Solidarity Alliance.

The new EHRC Code of Practice pushes trans people out of toilets, hospital wards, and community spaces. It normalises gender policing based on appearance and stereotypes. It becomes statutory guidance in the UK by the end of June.

Trans people are now legally their assigned gender at birth and must join gendered spaces accordingly, but if they are perceived as their lived gender, they can also be ejected from those spaces. The guidance says: either break the law, or don’t pass too well.

A mass lobby is where you invite your MP to discuss your concerns with you in-person. Ask your MP to:

Demand full parliamentary scrutiny, debate, and use their free vote on the EHRC Code of Practice.

Support any motions rejecting the EHRC guidance. As of June 4th, Labour MP Nadia Whittome has submitted a prayer motion - Early Day Motion 240.

Write to Bridget Phillipson, the Minister for Women and Equalities about our concerns

Your MP does not have to be an ally, they do not have to respond to your email for you to show up and greencard them (details below the cut.) What matters is that as many people as possible show up.

I cannot stress this enough: Showing up in person matters. It is much more effective than petitions, emails, and letters.

It is a horrible, stressful time, and I am so sorry if you're trans and live in the UK. But I was at last year's mass lobby and the line for greencarding alone stretched around the back gates. It was a record breaking mass lobby and made us impossible to ignore. Let's do even better this time. Details under the cut:

I'm not going to be able to go, but I do have some experience with lobbying my various MPs over the years, so here's some quick advice off the top of my head:

If you're resident in the UK but not a citizen you still have the right to go to Parliament and be seen by your MP.

If you don't know who your MP is you can look it up by putting your postcode into the Find My MP page on Parliament's website (pro tip if you are a uni student, check your MP for both your family home and your uni, one may be a better option for lobbying than the other, you may even be able to Green Card both of them, but I don't know if that's possible, ask on the desk when you ask for the card).

And everyone needs to remember that while officially you're not required to show photo ID to get into Parliament the official guidance from the House of Commons is "you don't need photo ID to get in but we suggest you bring it anyway" (which is just unhelpful)

You will also be required to pass through airport style security which obviously may be a stressful experience for some of the people taking part in the mass lobby. That can take anywhere up to half an hour, the staff are usually pretty nice, but the entry into the security check is a sloped metal ramp with zero shade and nowhere to lean or sit so plan accordingly.

If your MP is not in the building to come and meet you they are required to respond to your Green Card as soon as possible via the contact details you put on your Green Card. While meeting them in person is the ideal you will get a response so it will be worth it even if your MP is unavailable.

People in general, are more likely to take you seriously and want to help you if you are nice and polite to them.

They may not be in parliament. They may be their London offices which are located a 5-minute walk away in the Portcullis House.

The most annoying people in the world: "Oh my godd make your OWN POST, why do you have to make EVERYTHING about MEN"

Transmasc: "Okay", makes a blog called Transmascs-Deserve-Soup

Tumblr User Transfems-Deserve-Soup: "Oh my god trans women cant have anything can we its like the whole world wants to take everything from us i hope every tme person gets burned alive"

Never forget that the yay-bunnies blog deliberately ran another transmasc bunny blog off the site, and celebrated them being severely harassed

"Make your own post/blog" and when we do, we're "stealing from transfem culture" or we're called transmisogynist because we didn't mention trans women.

I can't make a post about medical mistreatment of trans men without someone reblogging it saying "we all know trans women have it worse", but trans men are talking over trans women? Shut uppppp

the average threads comment section under a post about Elliot page:

Trans men being seen as "undesirable, unfuckable women" after transitioning

Trans men being one of the demographics of the LGBT community at highest risk of rape

Trans men being targets of forced detransition via corrective rape and forced pregnancy

People denying both that this increased risk of rape and forced detransition even exists, and instead attributing it to trans men being "TERFs in waiting"

People insisting that trans men being seen as unfuckable women and/or mentally ill girls protects them from systemic violence and therefore makes them less worthy of protection

>ask if its sexual appreciation of trans men or a boypussy fetish

>they dont understand

>explain that being attracted to trans men and talking about it is normal and good but trans men have all sorts of different bodies and sexual preferences and a lot of trans men dont have vaginas or dont want anything to do with that part of themselves and even a lot of trans men who do have vaginas and like using them during sex dont want to just be fetishized for being a man with a vagina

>they laugh and say "we love and support trans men sir"

>look inside

I remember seeing a post from presumably a trans radical feminist talking about the poor representation of trans women in porn compared to “TME porn.” Of course, we all know what these people mean when they say TME. It’s a term designed to put trans men/nonbinary people into the category of cis people, people who have systemic power over us, while having plausible deniability because “it means cis people too! I could totally be talking about just cis people!” But I would like to talk about trans men in porn, and the sexualization of trans men and the fetishes forced onto us.

For starters, the vast majority of transmasculine representation in porn is of white, skinny, fem/androgynous trans men. They are often pre/non op top surgery, and are almost always pre/non op bottom surgery. The vast majority of porn featuring trans men involves trans men having their vaginas penetrated by a penis. Even in porn where a trans man tops, the strap on is never realistic (can’t be having people imagining a trans man with a dick, of course, otherwise they wouldn’t be good little sex objects) and there is always some sort of focus on the trans man’s vagina at some point in the shoot. Same with anal, there will typically also be vaginal penetration at some point.

If you are a trans man who isn’t white, who isn’t skinny, who is more masculine than androgynous hairless twink with a flat chest, post op top surgery and especially post op bottom surgery, or don’t have any interest in having your vagina touched, you will not be represented in the vast majority of porn featuring trans men. This is also true for T4T porn of trans men. It’s not exclusively when trans men are with cis men or cis women.

I post in transmasculine porn subreddits. I am an exhibitionist, it’s a major kink of mine (among other things). I am someone who also doesn’t draw any focus on my vagina in my posts, I am anal only, and I definitely don’t fit the beauty standard for trans men. I am a fat, hairy, bearded trans man who can’t be easily put into the category of “hairy tomboy,” especially given that there’s not that focus on my vagina. This is mainly in transmasculine porn subreddits. I’ve said on my other account on here, but I’ve very much enjoyed posting in gay bear porn subreddits. They have all been very respectful, and any time I’ve experienced any transphobia, it’s been removed, and the vast majority of interaction that I’ve gotten from the other bears there have been positive, because those subreddits are specifically for people who look like me: fat, hairy, bearded, masculine men. Most people don’t care about what I have downstairs, especially seeing as I don’t use it to begin with. When I said that I was getting bottom surgery, I was celebrated for it.

But the majority of interaction that trans men get in transmasculine porn subreddits is content surrounding vaginal penetration. And that’s just the non-kink focused subreddits. When you get into subreddits surrounding trans men with kinks, it’s a whole nother thing.

One of my biggest issues is with the detrans/misgendering kink. I don’t necessarily have an issue with trans men who either use the kink to get money because they are doing sex work (you obviously have to do what you have to do, and we’ll talk about trans men who have to do sex work in a minute) or even trans men who actually have those kinks. However, there is no way to have a conversation about the way that trans men are fetishized without mentioning how many people have the detrans/misgendering kink for trans men. When you look at transmasculine porn subreddits that center kink, the vast majority of interaction is on posts where trans men market that they have a detrans/misgendering kink. It’s not only cis people who partake in this kink. Even outside of reddit, I can’t look at a lot of transfem sT4T domme’s NSFW accounts because the majority of their posts about trans men are detrans/misgendering content. “Fakeboy” content is a big part of the tumblr transmasculine kink scene. I am someone who is a sT4T male sub with a femdom kink, and I can’t relate to most other trans people who post about that kind of deal because a lot of it focuses on detrans/misgendering trans men, and the ones that don’t focus on trans men who use their vaginas during sex. If you find something without that, it’s a trans man who’s a top/dom, and that’s great and is their right, but that’s not me either.

I often find social media NSFW profiles that center around wanting to find transmasculine sexting partners specifically to misgender and detransition them. It’s marketed as a kink, but at some point it’s hard not to at least think that a lot of the non-trans men who post about this kink so frequently just genuinely want to detransition and misgender trans men, and are just calling it a kink. Even other trans people. I don’t really trust any non-trans man who has a misgendering/detrans kink for trans men, even if they’re also trans. Even in the trans community, we are expected to conform to femininity to make other people more comfortable, so forgive me for being distrustful.

The forced impregnation kink is another thing. I have my own kinks, but it’s another thing when it’s forced onto trans men who have no interest in it. Breeding is hot, but we have to be sensitive to the group of people who are both disproportionally affected by forced impregnation in order to detransition them, and the group who specifically has very complicated feelings surrounding pregnancy. I’ve talked about forced impregnation before, and I’ve had several, at least 100 trans men express on a post that I made some time ago that if they ended up pregnant and couldn’t abort, they’d commit suicide. Trans men who want to get pregnant, are pregnant, or who have been pregnant are valid and deserve the space to talk about their experiences, but we can’t erase those of us whom pregnancy is one of the worst things that they can think of happening to them. I had an ex girlfriend try to babytrap me, and she stopped when I said I was sterilized, but it’s still very disturbing to think about. This was the ex girlfriend who repeatedly raped and tried to kill me. The cis man who correctively raped me wore a condom when he did it.

At one point, I got a private message from another trans woman. She was only 18, I’m not that upset with her for saying this because she was young, but I had just had a hysterectomy, and she said that it was “sad that [I] got a hysterectomy,” presumably because she wanted to get me pregnant. I don’t really feel any type of way about pregnancy as somebody who definitely can’t get pregnant on account of not having reproductive organs, and I did/do have a breeding kink, but that message really upset me, because who says something like that? That a trans person’s gender affirming surgery is “sad” because you wanted to fetishize them pre op? It’s one thing for cis people to say inappropriate, transphobic shit like this, but other trans people should know better. It’s so much worse coming from another trans person.

The primary issue with people pushing the forced pregnancy kink onto trans men (besides that a lot of trans men are uncomfortable with that) is that pregnancy is often used as a form of control. Pregnancy leaves you physically dependent on the people around you, and having a child leaves you financially dependent on the people around you. The person that you are often dependent on is the person who impregnated you in the first place. This is something that often happens to cis women in abusive relationships, but it has different implications for trans men. Trans men who are forcibly impregnated by someone who wants them to detransition, and are dependent on that person, often do have to detransition. Pregnancy is often a dysphoric nightmare for trans men, and having to detransition and be dependent on a transandrophobe who impregnated you is a fucking nightmare for all of us I’m sure. When you think about that, the forced impregnation kink with trans men is a lot darker than you might have thought. And trans men can absolutely have that kink and that is their right, but forcing it onto trans men, even just sharing your fantasy to a nonconsenting trans men, is sexual harassment and a threat.

Back on trans men forced into sex work, a lot of them are forced into marketing off the detrans/misgendering kink for money. I’ve seen an account from a transmasculine sex worker, whose bio was something to the extent of “he/they unless you’re paying me, then you can use she. It doesn’t matter if I’m dysphoric about it.” I’ve seen a trans man make a series of photos that I was really into, but he misgendered himself in it. The description was “don’t misgender me please, this was a photo series for work by a paying client.” I’m sure a lot of trans men in sex work market off the detrans/misgendering kink wouldn’t do so if they would get enough money otherwise. Beyond that, I’m sure a lot more of them would get top surgery, and some of them aren’t even on T because they can’t transition because they rely on their pre-medical transition body to get money. When we talk about survival sex work in the trans community, the discussion is very focused on trans women. Which makes sense, trans women disproportionally are made to do survival sex work due to the inherent transmisogyny in our society. But trans men are also forced into survival sex work on account of being trans men, and that does need to be talked about. And trans men also have to degrade and misgender themselves for money. Trans men also have to use slurs and derogatory terms for money. And it doesn’t get easier because they have a vagina.

I also think it’s important to mention the amount of transandrophobic TRFs who post things with the effort to silence trans men on our own struggles and oppression, and then turn around and post that they want to fuck a “tboy” or a “boypussy.” I remember seeing a post on tumblr from a very notable transandrophobic TRF trans woman, that was something to the extent of “idk why TMEs hate me so much, I’m trying to bridge the rift between us in bed.” It had several reblogs. I happened to see it from checking a “transfeminist” account for transandrophobia, which I obviously found. I was so disgusted and uncomfortable that I never screenshotted it, I didn’t even talk about it for at least a week to anybody, because it just left me with a sinking feeling. This particular trans woman is a VERY big name among transandrophobes and TRFs. She’s posted horrible things about trans men, and she obviously fetishizes trans men from the things that she’s said to me and my transmasculine friends. It’s one thing for somebody to fetishize trans men when they don’t have multiple social media accounts dedicated to talking about how much they hate trans men, but she does. A lot of people say that all TRFs/transandrophobic trans women are T4T lesbians, or lesbians in general. This is not true. Many transandrophobic trans women are open to dating trans men or even exclusively date trans men. This is predatory behavior. A trans person exclusively dating trans men isn’t inherently predatory, that’s just called being T4T, but it’s different when the person doing it hates trans men and views trans men as sex objects.

I saw a screenshot from instagram, from presumably a transandrophobic trans woman. The post was parodying “nonbinary people don’t owe you androgyny,” “trans men don’t owe you masculinity,” ect. The bit about trans men was “trans men owe the dolls dinner dates.” Again, posted by somebody who does not believe that trans men should have the language or even ability to talk about our own struggles and oppression, believes that trans men need to shut up and take TRFs on dates. I saw a post several months ago from a TRF saying that a trans man who makes porn is a “model trans man” because he doesn’t talk about trans men’s issues and just does porn. Essentially that he was “a good tboy who knows when to shut up and suck dick.” They went on to call trans men who were upset and uncomfortable with this blatant fetishization and objectification of trans men out on their “dry pussies”. TRFs and other trans people who seek to silence trans men and then fetishize us are a real problem in the trans community. Being T4T isn’t inherently safer than dating cis people for trans men, especially with the state of the trans community and the ideas that trans people have about trans men. I’m obviously T4T but I have experienced violence and other forms of harassment from some of the trans people that I’ve dated. I’ve experienced even more from trans people I’ve encountered on the internet and in IRL trans spaces.

I also think we need to have a discussion about the way that trans men who are tops/doms are treated by the people that they have sex with. Trans men who top/dom are essentially seen as pleasure dispensers. They are expected to make their partner cum and then not receive anything in return. I was sexually abused by both of my subs/bottoms before I stopped topping/domming, and while one of them was of course the cis man who correctively raped me, one was my cis girlfriend from college who wouldn’t take my “no” for an answer when she tried to make me do sexual activities with her when I didn’t want to. I was a highly dysphoric detransed lesbian who detransitioned because of the transandrophobia I had experienced since coming out, and she would make me dysphoric on purpose to “brat” with me. If I ever raised my voice after telling her “no” several times, she would get sad, and I’d have to comfort her, and then she’d do it again. She’s a teacher now. Trans men who bottom/sub are expected to just be holes for people to stick their dicks in. People, and women especially, in the queer/trans community refer to us as being like “cis men who can make women cum” and “if cis men had empathy,” then we are treated with none of the care/tenderness that we provide to the women in our lives. Trans men are expected by the trans/queer community to give up our bodies and our safety for other people’s pleasure. We are expected to be good sex dolls and “protect” the trans/queer community while not being protected when we need it, are abused by the people within our community, and actively being silenced when we talk about our needs from the community and the oppression that we face. We’re human meat shields, whipping boys, scapegoats. We are expected to bear the sins of cishet men by people who don’t have the systemic/social power to oppress/discriminate against cishet men, we are punished for things that disproportionally affect us as trans men, we are silenced when we speak up about this injustice, and then we are expected to be the “protectors” of the trans/queer community, while benefitting from none of the protection that we are forced to provide to others that could not care less if we live or die. If we say that we need to prioritize trans men, we are called misogynists and “tMRAs,” by people who totally aren’t TERFs because they only hate trans men, and being a transmasculine exclusionary radical feminist isn’t really trans exclusionary because we’re not trans in the way that trans women are. Trans men have the highest risk of sexual abuse in the trans community at around 50%, and there are probably even more that don’t disclose. We are sexually abused by the people we date/have sex with, and then they turn around and say that trans men are “very well represented” in porn because they think all trans men are skinny white fem/androgynous twinks who let people fuck our pussies. That’s all they see us as.

so predictably this isn't true

i actually watched the lecture and while i don't agree with all of amin's core positions (he's a gender abolitionist and i'm not, so i would expect that) when he talks about crossdressers he clearly does so in a context of a case study of historical self-identified "heterosexual transvestites." to roughly oversimplify, the talk as a whole is about the theory of identity construction as a function of class and racialization and how economic opportunity = leisure time = space to create Identity as separate from Action. basically, that white trans women, especially those attracted to women, historically delayed transition because they had more to lose than black and latina women, and the barrier between the lived experience and internal sense of self created certain identity-forward ways of thinking about gender