here

a) someone saying with their whole chest that having been assigned female at birth is not an axis of marginalization

and

b) someone else, in an argument with a t*rf, confidently saying "cis women have the same rights wherever they go!" and then hastily amending this to "in the west," neither of which are true as can be evidenced by a cursory glance at, for instance, the United States lmfao? (and then replying to a mention of female infanticide with a smarmy little "well clearly YOU, and 99% of women in the world, were not a victim of that")

like Jesus fucking Christ yes obviously argue with t*rfs for the fact that they downplay the oppression of trans women and exclude them from resources they desperately need access to as a marginalized gender and communities where they could find belonging as women.

but don't claim patently untrue immediately disprovable things to try and dunk on them good god. you muddle the argument and are throwing the baby out with the bathwater when you try to dump every line of feminism they have co-opted and weaponized. the major error of t*rfs is their platforming and justification of violence and suppression of trans people in the name of their incomplete version of feminism. this does not mean every single thing they have ever mentioned is Inherently Untrue and Evil, but that we must untangle how they have been twisted to discredit trans people.

and i understand this is an instinctive recoiling reaction to seeing these particular arguments misused to exclude and berate trans women! but like. holy shit look outside your western bubble for one moment; cis women certainly have privilege over trans people on the basis of their cis-ness, but at the same time they cannot be claimed to be Unilaterally Gender Privileged Everywhere They Go because um. yes actually that birth sex assignment despite aligning with their gender is also used to justify violence against them.

no, naming the category that in this binary system, under the patriarchy, is systematically singled out as immediately lesser, is not reifying asab itself.

yes, actually, in the majority of the world -- including parts of the "western" world though it disturbs your privilege to think of it as something beyond a Third World Issue -- babies afab and people who go through, at the very least, their early lives and education socially imposed as female, are at heightened risk of physical harm and neglect, their educations are deprioritized or completely stripped away, and more, because they are expected to fall into the category of homemaker/babymaker/husband-pleaser, starting from when they are too young to even consciously articulate their opinion of this gendered role.

obviously, a trans man is not female if he does not identify with the term, but the circumstances of his early childhood long before he could articulate his true gender are in fact shaped by this social imposition and expectation. certainly, it does not account for all of the discrimination he faces upon transition -- because then it is compounded with other forms of bigotry -- but it is a general starting point of disprivilege on the very basis of this false category constructed by the patriarchy.

somehow you have fallen into the impression that fighting for an ideal -- the abolition of asab, the liberation of all trans people (all of which, obviously, I desire as well) -- means that talking about how asab is used as a justification for the stifling of half the world's population is now taboo.

i refuse to concede this rung of feminism to the t*rfs because i think we are all perfectly capable of understanding that significant harm is done to trans women, and harm is also done to all people cis or trans forced into socially imposed girlhood/womanhood from childhood, and that the reason for the latter is in fact, largely dictated by this arbitrary sorting of infants that the oppressor has latched onto, regardless of it being a social construct. race, too, is a social construct (there is no significant physiological Brain Difference between races), but we understand perfectly well that going around claiming to be colorblind does not actually fix the existing oppressive structures that punish marginalized races.

ah i see so one day when we get the Time Window and are able to see what people look like in their futures we're all gonna point the Time Window at the babies that have been autoclassified as Inferior Group by birth and go:

future you is a woman? ah yes you're allowed to access the human rights that "female empowerment movements" (feminism) won you!

i have read some of her work. she has well written academic discussion about her experience as a trans woman and the Hijra community in india. her social media presence also shows she is ridiculously willing to weaponize other axes of privilege to win an argument.

so forgive me if i do not concede to her as the Intersectional South Asian Gender Expert.

which is. a mind-boggling accusation to level at an entire group of marginalized people, that they are so covetous of privilege that they are all merely angry at being "mistakenly" marginalized (unlike the people who, what, "should be"?) this is how you get the rhetoric of "misplaced misogyny," that whatever trans men get is just splash damage compared to what the REAL women (both trans and cis, because i have seen trans and cis people of all stripes saying this) get. psst, don't look at the pile of dead bodies buried under female deadnames for daring to step outside the woman box.

it is a frighteningly increasingly prevalent argument used against trans men. Men Cannot Face Misogyny (never mind the fact that the patriarchal system is trying its level best to retain trans men afab in a class of controllable docile breeding stock), therefore you're an MRA incel pitching a fit at not being able to oppress anyone properly. Men Cannot Face Misogyny, therefore actually YOURE the t*erfs rubbing your uteruses in people's faces for bringing up the fact that you tend to have/have had a certain set of reproductive organs (never mind the fact that the reproductive oppression of those organs was born from misogyny). Men Cannot Face Misogyny therefore YOU'RE "inevitable detransitioners" upset that lesbians won't "make themselves sexually available to you" just because "we are actually being so pro-transmasc by reminding you you're a man and therefore can't be a lesbian" (never mind the fact that a trans man id'ing as a lesbian has nothing to do with compelling YOU, SPECIFICALLY, to partner with him. never mind the fact that i have read a post like this with the follow-up tags "he/him lesbians are different, of course." what fucking of course? while their internal landscapes and genders are different there are plenty of he/him lesbians and trans masc lesbians who, lined up side by side, would be virtually indistinguishable. and somehow i am supposed to believe that misogyny only targets one of them by understanding The True Crystal Of Gender within?)

hell, even jude doyle implies (in his essay titled "transmasc misogyny and the red six of spades") that the misogyny and transmisogyny exhibited by some trans men claiming to be feminists must be because these trans men simply must inherently rankle at being misogynized like Those Nasty Girls and have to take it out on them. this by no means is me excusing misogyny or transmisogyny from trans men -- plus i agree with much of the essay otherwise -- but this interpretation of their motives continues to imply "X Group Of Trans People have some kind of Patriarchy Contamination within them that may be activated like a sleeper agent." some jealous covetry of the ways cis men wield power, and therefore some inherent danger, greater than any other marginalized gender group, as if we have not also suffered under it the same as you (but of course, any argument as such is "misgendering ourselves".)

the net effect of this spreading claim is that the trans man who tries to carve out a space where he can also be supported in feminism, saying "we are also victims of misogyny," is automatically characterized as being in the tone of a whiny crybaby, footnoted by "but im a boyyyyy!". as if shadowboxing the "tboy distressed that he Simply Cannot Oppress" is a relevant use of time when discussing the fact that trans men very much face misogyny and us talking about it isn't some kind of hissy fit at "losing out on privilege." rather it is us making a very necessary loud noise at no one else seeming to raise the alarm for the types of oppression we DO face just like our sisters.

however. these progressive feminist allies then go on to exclude trans men and transmascs, to say shut up and stop speaking over women, to say stop making women's experiences "about men". how dare trans men say they sometimes experience harsher punishment than cis women in high-control patriarchical environments! all people afab have it bad in those contexts, how dare you say you might have an additional axis of oppression and suffering to contend with (even though for some reason we recognize that asab-non conformance invites harsher treatment for those assigned male, but oh don't you stupid tboys realize, you actually had it good compared to everyone else of your asab!)! this is also a glaring mistake. we have successfully and goodly recognized misogyny can target people regardless of asab, but for some reason we are overcorrecting and forgetting the coexisting reality that misogyny can target people regardless of actual gender modality.

i keep saying this but there are two broad umbrellas of misogyny, one that developed out of the other. misogyny did not originally develop to to target some abstract notion of femininity (not in the least because such a concept is entirely societally dependent and does not account for the similar ways sexism has developed across multiple societies with different norms of femininity). misogyny originally developed to subjugate people afab in a bid to control reproduction, and out of this, all things commonly associated with people afab -- things now recognized as "feminine", ranging from domestic care all the way to (in many but not all societies) long hair -- became stigmatized and belittled so as to prevent this designated reproductive subclass from trying to regain any power. thus we have the two umbrellas of misogyny: targeting the body afab, and targeting those who come into association with this subclass by means of association with femininity or womanhood. both are exerted with violence and cruelty. while as trans people we must understand asab is not the measure of a person and does not taint a person forever with "Original Gender Sin", so long as societally enforced asab exists in the world, then yes, it precisely remains an axis of misogyny experienced by people predominantly-afab, which includes transmascs and men, even those with completely masculine gender expression. it does not diminish the manhood of a perisex trans man afab to acknowledge that he is oppressed by at minimum this form of misogyny. it does not diminish the womanhood of a perisex trans woman amab to acknowledge she is not oppressed by this particular form of misogyny (though very much is targeted by many other forms of misogyny that target her femininity). anyone, then, who is "tarred by the brush of woman-ness" (for lack of a better phrasing) -- whether that is feminine gender expression, identity as a woman, or even former (imposed or not) identity as a woman is affected by various combinations of misogyny. the two umbrellas overlap but are not the same. trans women can and should and must be given space to discuss the misogyny they experience in common with other misogynized peoples, as well as the specific transmisogyny they face. trans men can and should and must ALSO be given space to discuss the misogyny they experience in common with other misogynized peoples, as well as the specific asab-targeting misogyny they face, also warped by transphobia, whatever name you want to give it.

yet we have eager feminist allies who diminish the voices of trans men, many of whom not only do have (at the very least, prior) equivalent experience in everyday "feminine-expression-targeting misogyny", but also are predominantly affected by things like uterine reproductive oppression, like the mistreatment and medical neglect of pregnant people. it's a knee-jerk "in the name of 'these are women's issues,' it just looks bad to involve men in the conversation!" is it so hard to simultaneously recognize trans women and transfems suffer under misogyny, and that trans men and transmascs ALSO suffer under misogyny, and in some cases the former more than the latter, and in other cases the latter more than the former? is it so hard to recognize a label past or present cannot automatically save a trans person from the misogyny all trans people face on various sub-axes?

but probably this is not even a mistake on the parts of these feminist allies. this is a punishment unconscious or conscious imposed on the transmasc for daring to "align themself with the oppressor," even though they share in the same disprivileged position of being violently and constantly misogynized by society. a trans man or transmasc's identity is not a tool for erasing or denying the effect misogyny may have had on them, and it is certainly not a punishment or "natural consequence" for the fault of winding up an oh so terrible man. i refuse to concede that my voice somehow suddenly matters less in feminist conversations just because how i perceive myself has changed, because that does not immediately and automatically change how the rest of society, for the majority of my life, has perceived me.

the thought terminating cliche is "you're a man, so you have male privilege," and now it is rapidly metastasizing into "you're a man, so you cannot be a primary target of misogyny." but of course, we're ignoring the "trans" part. "stop whining about mpreg jokes", though those directly belittle an actual medical reality for transmascs in which they are threatened with impregnation via rape to "put them back in their place", and even in the case of consensual pregnancy, in which they face significant increased risk of transphobic violence, not to mention the "regular" risks to the body that pregnancy engenders. "stop claiming that being called ugly and unrapable doesn't actually protect you from being raped!" even though it's a basic feminist tenet to understand rape is a tool of violence also employed against undesirable persons. "stop saying not all men!" except trans men and mascs have never been, throughout "thousands of years of tme history" as that one fucking post says, been in a position of power or had the tools to architect the patriarchy that, for the majority of human history, oppressed and killed us as misogynized peoples.

and to all the trans men who claim this is a problem of whiny tboys "clinging to their afabness" in some apparent bid to oppress trans women, does it hurt you to accept the fact that other people who share your identity do, in fact, experience lasting consequences from misogyny imposed at a young age? that perhaps your financial situation, or your position in the western imperial core, or location in a community where feminism has had at least enough of a foothold where you can wear jeans, is a position not of trans male privilege, not gender or sex based, but of financial/race/locality? does it hurt you to reckon with the fact that so long as societally imposed asab exists what oppressive power you do have has never come from your gender but more likely your race? there are forms of systematic deprioritization and oppression that leave people who are misogynized from birth due to their asab with lasting effects that many can't just discard and leave behind after transitioning -- forms of physical violence, being denied education, healthcare, for the fault of being someone expected to grow up into a woman.

i would argue yes of course, trans men who pass completely and are regarded in society and at work as men access male privilege in some aspects (wages, having their voices prioritized) even when they face medical misogyny or interpersonal misogyny from doctors and people who knew them pre transition or disadvantaged by prior loss of educational or career opportunities through sexism. i would also argue trans women boymoding, and trans women who go through large parts of life before realizing who they are and transitioning, also experienced male privilege (wages, voices, the priorities of modern medical research) even though also grappling with dysphoria or the toll of absorbing transmisogyny, and later on being disadvantaged by more blatant stripping of resources once they are out. moreover, the privilege/loss of privilege dichotomy also depends on timing of said transition. i did not realize i was trans until i was in the middle of my twenties, already finished grad school, already in a career. all else being equal, if there was an identical person to me who lived until my exact age thinking they were aligned with their asab -- and in their case, as a male -- they still would have experienced privileges over me to date, because my input and voice has been belittled perceived as a woman in STEM, because i have been faced with direct suggestions from people i know that i should stop focusing on my education and get married already, and more. i have been targeted with forms of misogyny that a woman whose womanhood was not recognized until date structurally could not have -- just as that woman would have borne the brunt of other forms of misogyny that i, as a non-transmisogynized person, structurally could not have.

BUT. what i am saying is, simple access to male privilege does not an evil person make. popular transfeminism has backed the whole community into a rhetorical corner with "x has never experienced male privilege = and therefore checkmate, TERFs, they ARE 'safe' to allow into crucial 'women's resources'". however our argument should be no matter if someone has or presently still can access male privilege, this should not exclude them from accessing these very same -- non-gender-locked resources. if you are the victim of rape or misogynistic harassment or seeking safe shelter, you are in need of safety. moreover, a marginalized gender is one that the patriarchical system has not set itself up to support, and that includes every trans and nonbinary person, because the patriarchy is built to favor the pericisgender man. we have backed ourselves into an indefensible rhetorical corner, excluded any trans woman or transfem who doesn't wholly conform to the Good And Proper Victimized Femininity this argument demands, and in the mad dash to try and defend it, are purposefully and cruelly cutting out transmascs and trans men from safe avenues where they can discuss the lasting misogynistic trauma they've also faced. this is unsustainable.