Unsolicited Opinions

Instead of working together to erase it, we see too much of either:

Making ones status as "oppressed" an identity to cling to instead of an injustice to resolve...

OR

Seeking only to switch places between oppressor and oppressed, continuing the same dynamic while self-righteously pretending that this vengeance is justice and that the crime is any different depending on the identity of the perpetrator and the identity of the victim.

This is a great example of incredibly sloppy thinking passing itself off as insight on Tumblr.

Before anyone comes at me for fisking this:

Gender-affirming care should be available to those who seek it, people should be called what they wish to be called, and everyone should have full bodily autonomy. If you want to call me a transphobe over this, you'll have to fight the trans people in my life first - and they fight dirty.

I don't have a problem with trans people. I have a problem with bad arguments that end up hurting trans people.

"Privilege and oppression are descriptions of actual, material conditions, not ontological positions."

Keep this in mind so you recognize when the post completely abandons this position.

"The trans community has decided (generally speaking), that gender identity is personal and autonomous."

Hang on. I thought gender was a social construct.

A social construct is something society collectively builds and defines. Saying gender identity is also "personal and autonomous" (decided by the individual, not society) is nearly the opposite claim.

Sure, you can hold both positions. Plenty of trans theory does, by arguing the categories are socially constructed but the individual is the authority on which one fits them. That's a real position, but it's a separate argument that has to be made. This post skips it and treats "constructed" and "self-determined" as interchangeable. They aren't.

"We agree that gender identities, roles, and presentation can be opt-in."

Identity can be private, sure - it lives in your head. But "role" and "presentation" are inherently social. A role only exists in relation to other people, presentation only exists if someone perceives it.

Neither can be purely "opt-in" by definition.

The post bundles all three together as if they work the same way. They don't.

"However, society… believes that gender identity, roles, and presentation are decided for you upon being assigned a sex."

The post treats society's official belief as the thing that determines who gets privilege.

Here's the thing - That's not how privilege works, not even under this post's own materialist logic.

Privilege isn't distributed by rulebook, it's distributed by how you're perceived, in the moment, by whoever's standing in front of you.

Take the conditional whiteness of some Ashke Jews. Plenty of "official" American and European thought did/does not consider Jews white under any circumstances - but an Ashkenazi Jew who isn't visibly identifiable as Jewish in a given moment still gets treated as white in that moment, because they're perceived as white right then.

That's (conditional) white privilege.

I have that in some rooms and not in others, depending entirely on whether I pass as a non-Jew in that moment.

Innately social perception is what sets the terms for when the privilege collapses.

The same logic applies to a passing trans man.

In a room where nobody clocks him as trans, he's getting treated as a man. He's less talked over, more presumed competent, all of it.

That's (conditional) male privilege.

The post dodges this obvious truth by reversing its former position and swapping "privilege = how you're actually treated" for "privilege = what society's official theory says," directly contradicting its own opening line.

"This is the fundamental premise of transphobia, and sexism more broadly."

Sexism has existed for thousands of years, long before anyone was debating whether gender identity is self-determined (or even distinguishing sex from gender at all).

Wage gaps, property law, control over reproduction, and domestic violence didn't require a theory about gender being assigned versus chosen.

Pinning all of sexism on one specific 2020s belief about gender identity is absolute nonsense. It mistakes a recent culture-war framing for the root of something far older and much bigger.

"…the material conditions of trans men (as a class) are that of a class oppressed by misogyny, and not benefited by male privilege."

"Trans men as a class" do not have uniform material conditions.

A closeted, passing trans man in Minneapolis and an openly trans man in Yehupetzville, Tennessee are living completely different material realities.

If privilege really is about material, lived treatment (as the post itself claims) then privilege depends on the actual situation a person is in, not which identity box they check.

"In short: you can genuinely believe trans men are men while also acknowledging they don't experience male privilege. Not a contradiction, because the hegemony has different standards than we do."

"...the hegemony has different standards than we do" states that a disagreement exists, and that's all. It doesn't give any reason the post's own definition is correct. IT's not a conclusion, it's just an unsupported assertion.

"Hegemony" here refers to cultural hegemony, a specific term from Marxist writer Antonio Gramsci.

It implies that a dominant group maintains power not through force but by getting the dominated to accept the dominant ideology as common sense, as just "the way things are." It's a precise concept about how consent is manufactured.

None of that is what's happening in this sentence.

The post isn't describing how misogyny gets people to internalize their own subordination, it's just saying "most people think gender is assigned at birth."

That's not hegemony, that's majority opinion.

Swap the word for "society" or "most people" and you lose zero meaning, which tells you the fancy word wasn't adding a concept, it was adding a pretentious pseudo-intellectual Marxist costume

It's there to make "people disagree with us" sound like it comes with three decades of critical theory behind it, when the sentence would be exactly as true, and exactly as weak, in plain English.

OP is using an academic term to disguise a shrug and hopes nobody checks what the word actually means.

What makes bad arguments like this so exasperating isn't that the conclusion is wrong, but that the argument is lazy in a way that actively hurts the cause.

Trans rights don't need a redefinition of privilege that collapses the moment anyone pokes at it, and they definitely don't need a five-dollar word standing in for an argument that OP never bothered to make.

The real material picture is that trans people, including passing trans men, face genuinely elevated rates of violence, discrimination, and precarity. Whatever situational privilege exists is mostly conditional and can vanish the second someone is outed.

That's a strong, defensible position.

It doesn't need to be propped up with sloppy definitions and academic costume jewelry. Every time an argument like this gets passed around and applauded instead of critiqued, it teaches people that the sloppy version is the only version - and this hands ammunition to bad-faith critics who'd rather debate the shitty argument than the real one.

So, who is this sloppy sort of argument actually for?

It's not for people on the fence who might be won over to supporting trans rights.

It's for the people nodding along and reblogging it because it appeals to them emotionally.

If you want to eventually make the Charlie Kirks of the world grapple with something real, you have to stop performing pseudo-intellectual masturbation to collect social reinforcement.

Eventually, you have to formulate arguments that hold up under a little scrutiny - as this one utterly fails to do.

Some trans men unquestionably do experience conditional male privilege. Denying that isn't material analysis and it isn't clever - it's just refusing to look at the evidence because it's inconvenient and doesn't suit one's self-image as unconditionally oppressed.

Material conditions don't care about anyone's self-image. That's the whole point this post claimed to be making...and then abandoned the second it got inconvenient.

So I think you're missing the larger context of this discussion, that it's more broadly a defense of trans men against transandrophobes---and to that point:

You say oop's post is

not for people on the fence who might be won over to supporting trans rights.

and I agree with that. You're right, it's not. And I don't think it was intended to be. I don't think this post was intended to be for your average person on the fence about supporting trans rights. If it was, the focus on trans men not having male privilege would be weird, because the thing we as trans advocates are always having to start with is the very simple position of trans men are men. Trans women are women. Nonbinary people aren't man- or woman-lite. I can definitely see that if you're walking into this discussion from the perspective that that's transphobia we're fighting, it is unhelpful and maybe hurting the cause.

But I'm almost certain this is a response to a different type of transphobe, because I've seen very similar responses in the transandrophobia tag pushing back against them: people who believe woman is the Good Gender and man is the Bad Gender (the standard radfem position in my experience) and trans men should sit down and shut up within the trans community because trans women's problems matter so much more, and actually trans men aren't really even oppressed anyway, or at least, so much less than trans women that it hardly matters, because earning rights for trans women will naturally make things better for trans men, since trans woman is an intersectional identity and trans man is not. (I've left out nonbinary people because these people almost always do too.) They are called trans inclusive radical feminists (tirfs) (as apposed to terfs, trans exclusionary radical feminsts, who hate trans women and trans men), or trans radical feminists (trfs, these ones are specifically trans themselves, as opposed to tirfs who tend to be cis, and not only trans women and transfems but nonbinary people, trans men, and trans masculine people too).

Now, I think tirfs and trfs need to read Kimberle Crenshaw again, becuase I don't think they understand intersectionality, since it isn't about overlapping oppressions, it's about overlapping identities that are affected by different kinds of oppression. Black women are used as the example, but intersectionality also extends to Black men, because they experience a specific form of racism informed by the fact that they are men, just the way that trans men experience a form of transphobia informed by the fact that they are men.

Here's a rundown of transphobia as it specifically manifests for trans men verses trans women, with the understanding that there's lots and lots of overlap I'm not mentioning, which is why transphobia is a useful term, and there's not just different terms for different trans identities (though there still are).

Transandrophobia (in the sense of transphobia against transmascs, not the sense of the intersection between transphobia and hatred/fear of men):

whiny, defective girl

infantilization

"corrective" rape

being barred from women's spaces for being men (you might scare the women here who have trauma around men, which is positioned as "gender affirming" because it's so affirming to be barred from a space for your gender), i.e denial/restriction to gynecological care because it's for women or shelters that only take women

erasure, i.e murders/violence being classified as femicides, violence against women, transandrophobia being classified as just misogyny (which many trans men and trans masculine people consider misgendering) or just regular transphobia that doesn't need its own word because it's not really distinct, but never transmisogyny* as trans men are exempt from it, and if they aren't it was misdirected

*transmisogyny is defined in this specific case as the intersection between transphobia and misogyny, which can apply to all trans people, just as the intersection of transphobia and hatred/fear of men can apply to all trans people; not the specific transphobia transfems face. This is a sticking point in a lot of intracommunity discourse because when people use the term 'transmisogyny,' and say 'trans men are exempt from transmisogyny' they don't define their terms, leading to confusion because of the multiple meanings. Still, transfems deserve to be able to use the term transmisogyny to describe their specific opression, and i don't want to take that away from them, so I will use it here as such but clarify)

Transmisogyny (in the sense of transphobia against transfems specifically):

dangerous predator groomer man

demonization

being seen as hypersexual

being barred from women's spaces for being men (because you're not actually a woman) i.e some of those same shelters that only take women

hypervisibility, i.e that most people think of trans women as The Scary Transes That Are Going To Trans Your Kids, and not trans men (because of the erasure)

One of the arguments that tirfs and trfs use to justify their transandrophobia (because they're fine with trans women if they toe the party line) is that it's okay to hate trans men just as much as they hate cis men (which to me is also unjustifiable, because that's just. bigotry too.) because trans men have male privilege when they come out so they're basically the same as cis men. Some tirfs and trfs even think trans men are worse than they think cis men are, because trans men chose to be men (I guess we're abandoning the position that being trans isn't a choice) and cis men could turn out to be trans women, so we shouldn't be too mean to them, we wouldn't want to hurt a trans woman (but trans men are 'birthday boys' and 'transandrobros' and 'bitching' (all actual things I've seen tirfs and trfs call transmen and transmasculine peoplefor objecting to being hurt.) (again tirfs are generally cis and trfs include non transfems, I'm not trying to say the average trans woman feels like that, plenty are defending transmascs.)

I guess the reason that I'm responding to you is because I respect your analysis and nuance and research on I/P and Jewish topics, I'm Jewish myself and follow you because of how much I like your posts. I just think you might be missing some important context on this one, and it's something I'm sensitive to, considering my positionality.

You're entering into an extremely hot button issue within the trans community, and some may percieve, as I did initially (though after I reread your post and sat with it I changed my mind) as you implying, though perhaps unintentionally, support for the transandrophobia that the oop was written to push back against, and I feel you're doing it without the full context, and from outside the trans community, which is not something I think either of us like seeing with a non-Jew and non-Palestinian talking about I/P.

I also feel, or at least hope, that your intention here was to support trans rights, and try to help the trans community advocate for ourselves in better ways, but I think that you've missed the mark, as somebody who deeply understands the way that trans people, trans masculine and nonbinary people particularly, are actually trying to advocate for ourselves, and as somebody unfortunately very familiar with the transandrophobia discourse.

I think it’s good to be thoughtful about rhetoric, and make sure we’re not being disingenuous or misleading when we talk---I love precise language and I think a lot of problems would be solved if we all just said what we meant as opposed to using buzzwords, which is a failing of the oop (I think you can talk about trans men not inherently having male privilege as a class without using terms like 'material condition' or saying it overconclusively, but those are hallmarks of the wider discourse).

Yes, some trans men have male privilege. I do think it's untrue to say no trans men hold male privilege.

So we agree that OOP's point and argument are both nonsensical.

However, you're walking into a a much broader...discourse....within the trans community about whether trans men...deserve a word to describe discrimination against trans men...as opposed to their transness generally.

Yes, and I'm saying it's ridiculous to have an intra-comnunal hair-splitting...discourse...about whether a subset of a community deserves a word while the whole community is under very real and immediate attack from a historically aggressive, hostile administration. Being obsessed with a subset deserving a word when there's real work to be done is far-left purity policing at its worst. The community's misapprehension of (or apathy towards...?) political realities and it's inability to perceive and measure the associated threats are dangerous liabilities - and they're now so normalized that you don't realize how ridiculous it sounds when you describe a debate over deserving a word.

I am begging the trans community to stop talking about its feelings and its linguistic purity policing to focus instead on its material and legal conditions.

Collectively, y'all are re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic and aren't politically or historically literate enough to realize there's a #&*$ing iceberg ahead.

...the thing we as trans advocates... always...start with is the very simple position of trans men are men. Trans women are women.

That's the same linguistic purity policing and an incredibly foolish place to start.

It would be a much easier lift to convince others that "trans people should be regarded with legal/social equality, dignity, and safety."

The world won't, however, get behind "trans women are women" because this can only be true with a radical redefinition of "woman" - and that argument hasn't been made to the broader world, let alone won.

It's an incredibly stupid hill on which to die.

It takes an ingroup point of faith and demands that the outgroup embrace it as gospel.

Try this: name a time in history that a small minority ingroup has successfully extracted concessions from a majority outgroup this way.

You can't.

It has never, ever worked for a minority to demand ideological compliance from a majority. In addition to failing, it also antagonizes the majority. For some reason, y'all are more interested in being acceptably militant and ideologically pure than in being effective at securing the rights and safety of trans people.

I know that y'all think Judith Butler makes sense, but even if they did, most of the world hasn't read Butler - and most of the world that has read Butler doesn't buy Butler's redefinitions because their arguments are full of postmodern pseudo-intellectual fuckery that doesn't move most people. They're badly framed, poorly reasoned, and produce militance, not social or legal change.

Butler only preaches to the choir. They don't explain for the outgroup, they don't make compelling arguments the outgroup can embrace.

The ideological bubble of the trans community is so all-encompassing that the trans community can't see the world in which it lives. That bubble is no less absurd and no less reality-distorting than the Fox News MAGA bubble.

Seek legal protections, seek legal equality, seek social acceptance - but stop trying to change the dictionary - it's a losing battle that works against your aims.

Trans women are trans women, trans men are trans men, and trans people are fully human, utterly deserving of all human acceptance. Demand that! You can sell that!

But demanding "trans women are women" accomplishes nothing while alienating potential allies Its the wrong place to start. It is a losing position. Brianna Wu is right that the backlash is undoing decades of progress.

I implore you to put down Butler and pick up books on history to see how civil and social rights have been effectively gained in the past.

Set ideology aside - read history.

it's more broadly a defense of trans men against transandrophobes

From here it looks like poorly-reasoned linguistic purity policing as a competitive event in the Oppression Olympics. This segment of trans people is more oppressed than that segment. This segment is more valid than that segment. This segment deserves a word. This sounds, unsurpisingly, like nonsense to most people.

I just think you might be missing some important context on this one, and it's something I'm sensitive to, considering my positionality.

I appreciate that context and your efforts to lay it out - but it changes nothing about how bad the point and the argument are.

That was my thesis: This argument is terrible and works against interests of trans people.

I stand by that thesis and your context hasn't changed it in any way.

I also feel, or at least hope, that your intention here was to support trans rights, and try to help the trans community advocate for ourselves in better ways

100% correct.

The actual threat to trans people isn't trans people with different ideological purity standards.

The actual threat is coming from outside the house, and intra-conmmunity language/purity battles are ignoring the actual threats in favor of competitive righteousness and unrealistic expectations of policing the language/behavior of others. It's incredibly foolish and it makes me fear for the trans people I know that the community is so thoroughly engaged in this comparatively unimportant horseshit and making such awful, poorly-considered, logically-incoherent, politically-irrelevant arguments in public, providing endless ammunition to those who want to rhetorically assassinate your humanity.

I desperately want the trans community to get its collective head out of its a collective ass. The ideological purity policing must be replaced by engagement with the political realities of the broader world.

If it did that, it might stop allying with groups that would/will gladly murder it (look up the track record of communists and Islamists towards anyone who isn't cishet), and could make real, measureable, enforceable gains. The political segment of the West that has always been supportive of LGBTQ+ rights is liberals - the very segment I keep seeing trans people villainize on social media.

To date, the movement has largely given up on measurable political goals in favor of ideological/linguistic purity battles.

There's a tank outside your door, but those of you inside the house are arguing over whether that piece of furniture in the living room should be called a couch or a sofa.

...but I think that you've missed the mark...

Thought experiment: Imagine that, in the context of historically spiking antisemitism in the US, the vast majority of loud, visible US Jews online were fixating on some finer point of difference in religious ritual observance instead of working to protect all Jewish communities.

You get how stupid that would be, right?

THAT'S THE MARK.

It's fine if you disagree - disagreeing is great. But instead of disagreeing, the trans community seems to need to tell people like me that I'm wrong, that I'm a transphobe, and that not everyone is allowed to have an opinion about the political efficacy of the movement's priorities, rhetoric, strategies and tactics.

However, I also think if you read oop's post with the context I have provided, it might seem more acceptable, either because some of the premises make more sense to you

I truly appreciate the context, but It's still a garbage argument making a point that is, as you've explcilty agreed, obviously false on its face

Worse, it wastes energy on intra-community bickering about ideology and language that should instead be spent in defense of the whole community against a wildly hostile administration.

-----

I was living in a very Catholic place and commented to a Catholic friend that it amazed me to see Catholic churches and schools for each national origin. Polish Catholic Churches/schools, Italian Catholic Churches/schools, and Irish Catholic churches/schools.

My Catholic friend: Jews don't differentiate synagogues by national origin?

Me: The Reform congregation I grew up with was mostly various sorts of Ashkenazim (like most Jews in the US), but any Jew who came by was immediately welcome. It was the only Jewish community for at least a hundred miles in any direction. There are so few of us. It would be petty, weird, and self-destructive to not embrace every Jew who wanted to participate.

Your splitting up the Catholic community by national origin proves that there's no sense at all of Catholic universalism here. Just tribalism.

-----

Intra-community ideological/linguistic battles might survivable for the numerous and the strong, but they're insane for the few and the threatened to attempt and it's exasperating to witness this.

The trans community seems rhetorically self-destructive and is falling for the same purity traps that have destroyed many far-left movements, picking the wrong fights with the wrong people over the wrong issues and prioritizing performance over progress - and I hope it course-corrects in time to avoid disaster.

You don't have to agree, but my point is that the priorities, mindset, ideology, language, infighting, and tactics of the younger trans movement aren't just foolish, but dangerously counterproductive.

Thank you for the context you've shared- I learned things from it - but nothing I learned shed new light of any sort on my position.

This is a bad argument in support of an obvious falsehood from a community that can't effectively advocate for itself because it hasn't bothered to understand the world it seems to believe it can reshape through militance.

I'll unquestionably (and irrationally) be called a transphobe for saying this, but I feel neither fear nor hatred towards trans people.

Mostly, I feel anxiety for trans people because the loudest among you are deliberately steering all of you towards a cliff they don't see coming in the name of ideological purity and emotional resonance...because maps are the propaganda tools of oppressors!

Read. Learn history. Get out of your bubble. Learn how politics work. Learn how civil rights have been expanded in the past. Stop wasting energy and time on deserving a word.

leaving behind the context of the oop the narrow points I am making are: some trans men have conditional male privilege but it is untrue that all trans men have unconditional male privilege. There are people who have decided that trans men and transmasculine people are basically the exact same as cis men and basically aren't oppressed, and therefore leave them, and often nonbinary people like me, out of their activism. Just because we are being threatened with tanks at our door does not mean it hurts any less when somebody inside the house stabs us.

this is not an argument I am making to people outside the house. I don't think the op was making an outside the house argument. you say that we're hurting our movement by having 'hair-splitting' intracommunity discussions. I say, like I said before, you don't get to make that decision for us.

Edit to add: The reason I responded to you in the first place is because I think your response to the oop was disproportionate. You're commenting on an intracommunity discussion of a community you're not a part of, and still went extremely hard fisking this post and basically claimed that because it overstates it's claim (trans men don't have male privilege ever vs yes, some trans men conditionally have male privilege when people don't know they're trans but the vast majority of trans men are oppressed because they're trans men, not cis) that it's doing real harm to trans people and trans activism. You don't think trans men and transmasculine people should care about having a word to describe their oppression. I think that's one of the first steps to activism. but frankly whether I agree with you or dont, you are, or at least are coming dangerously close to, speaking over trans people by telling us what you as a cis person think is important for trans people to care about, and telling us---telling me, in particular, in your response to me---that I am doing something wrong by caring about the way some people in my community are treating other people in my community, since it isn't the biggest problem we are facing.

...what I'm telling you is that as trans people we can care about both

Of course they can. Show me who said otherwise?

I just don't think you should be policing intracommunity discussions or deciding what intracommunity discussions we should be having.

Did...did someone give me the power to do that?

Of course not.

What you mean is that you're policing the topic - and that you have decided who is permitted to have an opinion on bad rhetoric and bad strategy.

I actually predicted that above:

But instead of disagreeing, the trans community seems to need to tell people like me...that not everyone is allowed to have an opinion about the political efficacy of the movement's priorities, rhetoric, strategies and tactics.

...some trans men have conditional male privilege but it is untrue that all trans men have unconditional male privilege

Wholly agreed. Multiple times. Look at what OOP claimed, though. You're making an argument they did not.

There are people who have decided that trans men and transmasculine people are basically the exact same as cis men and basically aren't oppressed, and therefore leave them, and often nonbinary people like me, out of their activism.

I imagine that hurts one's feelings.

Just because we are being threatened with tanks at our door does not mean it hurts any less when somebody inside the house stabs us.

Bullshit analogy. Hurt feelings aren't a loss of rights or a loss of safety. You can only make this argument by misrepresenting the stakes.

...you are, or at least are coming dangerously close to, speaking over trans people by telling us what you as a cis person think is important for trans people to care about, and telling us---telling me, in particular, in your response to me---that I am doing something wrong by caring about the way some people in my community are treating other people in my community, since it isn't the biggest problem we are facing.

Again, I have absolutely no power over your speech and am not talking over anybody.

My expressing my view on bad rhetoric and foolish priorities neither takes anything from you nor damages your position in any way- but you seem to wish it did so you could be a righteous victim in this exchange.

You're not. Nobody has harmed you in any way.

You just don't like the differing opinion and your only method for dealing with that is claiming it's illegitimate and somehow oppressive.

You're again attempting to police who is permitted to have/express an opinion about garbage rhetoric and foolish tactics.

Imagine if Jews told the trans world they weren't allowed to have opinions about Jews or Israel because they're neither Jewish nor Israeli?

Can you imagine the deafening silence...?

You don't think trans men and transmasculine people should care about having a word to describe their oppression.

You're dishonestly putting words in my mouth. They should care about whatever they want to care about.

I think it's incredibly naive and foolosh, but it isn't up to me. Y'all should do y'all.

You don't have to read my unsolicited opinion, you don't have to agree with it, you don't have to take it to heart, and you certainly don't have to take the advice it offers. That's all up to you.

But instead of engaging on the merits of my argument, you're deciding I'm not allowed to have an opinion and that my opinion somehow harms you.

In reality, what yoiu don't like is my criticizing the priorities displayed.

You want to pretend that disagreement has done you some sort of harm because it permits you to righteously condemn.

The problem here is that you've experienced no harm at all from encountering a differing opinion from someone who relentlessly supports trans rights and has admonished others to do the same.

But that doesn't matter to you because your positions are so fragile they can't weather honest disagreement.

You're not approaching this with moral clarity - you're approaching it with a fear of thinking too hard and a determination to play the role of a victim when someone with the wrong identity dares to disagree with you.

You've been very clear that if I was trans, my differing opinion would be acceptable.

Are you unable to see how utterly fakakta that is?

___

If you'd like to debate the merits of my argument, that'd be great - but I really don't have much patience for dishonest claims of harm or the ridiculous idea that only members of the ingroup are permitted to have opinions on the best ways to serve the interests of the ingroup.

This explainer is long (even for me) because it needs to be. There's context and nuance without which none of this makes any sense.

On July 30-31, 2026, between 50,000 and 60,000 people, mostly young, male, Moroccan citizens, crossed from Morocco into the Spanish city of Ceuta in about 24 hours, adding roughly 60-80% to Ceuta's population in one day.

To put it mildly, the idea that this could have been spontaneous strains credulity. This wasn't organic.

Ceuta is a Spanish city sitting on the Moroccan coast, an exclave entirely surrounded by Moroccan territory except for a strip of Mediterranean coastline. Spain controls both Ceuta and Melilla, another enclave further east, making them the only land borders the EU shares with Africa.

Ceuta and Melilla, unsurprisingly, have some of the most fortified borders on earth, with six-meter fences, thermal cameras, and armed forces policing their own citizens on each side against exactly this.

Still, thousands of mostly young Moroccan men waded in through the breakwaters, cars burned on the Moroccan side, Spanish troops deployed, and the death toll seemed to be 67-86 the last time I checked - but Spain's government and Ceuta's regional authorities don't seem to agree on the count.

This wave of 50-60k was not made up of the sub-Saharan African migrants transiting through Morocco who usually dominate Ceuta stories.

With sub-Saharan nationals, home countries sometimes refuse to take them back - but Spain and Morocco established a bilateral readmission agreement in 1992, so returning Moroccan citizens was comparatively simple and quick.

Why did 50-60k mostly young Moroccan men choose to do this in one spot at one time?

Organic pressure builds gradually and gets absorbed in smaller waves, the way Ceuta had actually been experiencing it for months, with 300+ arrivals per day. 60k young Moroccan men converging on one stretch of coastline in one day doesn't fit that pattern. This is different.

Some of the Moroccan migrants reported seeing posts on social media calling people to gather at the border, and this seems similar to a 2024 incident where Moroccan intelligence arrested people for "inciting a mass migration attempt" over Facebook.

The New York Times has reported that Moroccan police didn't just fail to stop Moroccans from crossing into Ceuta on July 30th-31st of 2026 - they actively urged people to cross.

That's not at all an unreasonable thing to suggest...because there's some precedence.

In May 2021, about 9,000 people crossed after Moroccan police eased controls and opened the fence gates, prompting a European Parliament resolution. Two months before this most recent late July incident, Morocco again loosened controls and let roughly 10,000 people into Ceuta.

Why now?

A Spanish court had recently narrowed summary-return rules to migrants physically breaching the fence, excluding those caught by cameras beforehand. Spanish President Sánchez himself has publicly said smugglers exploited that ruling to sell migrants on this moment.

If we take that explanation at face value, it could account for individual motivation, but it doesn't really account for tens of thousands acting on it in the same 24-hour window when Moroccan security actively encouraged it.

So who/what is really behind this?

The leading theory (for reasons noted above) is that Morocco created this situation as a deliberate pressure play.

Morocco doesn't recognize Spanish sovereignty over Ceuta and Melilla and regards them as occupied territories.

Spain's counter-claim is that it has held Ceuta since 1580 and Melilla since 1497, both predating the modern Moroccan state, which didn't exist in its current form until centuries later, making these historic Spanish territory rather than colonial carve-outs from a pre-existing Morocco. (That's Preisdent Sánchez's view, but he doesn't extend the same argument to Israel - we'll come back to that shortly.)

Morocco argues that geographic proximity to Africa should override that history.

This dispute is not settled international law.

Morocco also has a live dispute over Western Sahara, a former Spanish colony Morocco annexed in 1975. The Polisario Front, representing the Sahrawi population there, still wants independence. In 2022, Spain broke with four decades of policy and backed Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara instead, a reversal widely believed to have come from precisely this kind of border pressure from Morocco.

Rabat has used this same play twice, opening and closing Ceuta's border as leverage over Madrid.

There's a recent potential trigger, too. Sánchez made an official visit last month to Algeria, Morocco's rival and the Polisario Front's main backer. The timing supports the impression that this wasn't a spontaneous mass migration, it was a message sent from Morocco to Madrid.

If this is Morocco flexing it's ability to over-run Ceuta's borders...what does it hope to gain?

It's likely Morocco seeks to reassert the occupied-territory framing on Ceuta and Melilla. Sánchez has repeatedly called Gaza and the West Bank occupied territories, and it isn't only Moroccans and Israelis who think he's a hypocrite and an asshole.

They're also probably punishing Spain for recently warming up to Algeria and reminding Madrid that Morocco controls the migration tap. This seems to set the stage for Morocco extracting future concessions from Madrid (and the EU)...which seems to be just what Morocco did in 2022.

Why wouldn't Morocco just...say this?

States don't announce leverage plays like this, it's more effective, instructive, and motivating to create facts on the ground and let everyone else draw the predictable conclusions.

To date, though, Spain's government has publicly declined to draw the widely-held conclusion that this is a Moroccan flex, calling Morocco a reliable partner.

That might be a genuine (foolish) assessment, but that seems unlikely. More likely is that it is diplomatically neccessary for Spain to publicly state what it privately knows to be false...because Spain needs Moroccan cooperation on migration and trade and they know damn well Morocco can turn the tap back on at any time and flood Ceuta with Moroccans.

Why/how exactly are Jews being blamed...?!

When aren't Jews blamed for things they have nothing to do with?

Despite Israel having no role at all in the Spain-Morocco disputes related to Ceuta, Melilla, or Western Sahara, conspiracy theorists from Alex Jones to Candace Owens have started blaming Israel.

A tweet from Bibi's son Yair Netanyahu in 2019 is often cited:

I think the Netanyahus are assholes, but Yair's claim of hypocrisy here is neither baseless nor incitment (unless one wants to suggest that the Moroccan street cares deeply what Yair Netanyahu thinks they should do).

Assume for a moment that this was a Moroccan flex. Assume that Spain can't call Morocco out for it. Assume it's obvious to informed parties that this wasn't spontaneous. How can attention be drawn away from the hypocrisy and powerlessness of the Sánchez government?

If you strip a messy, multi-causal event of its actual state actors and motives and insert the actor everyone's primed to blame through centuries of conspiracy theories instead...that might deflect some scrutiny into the actual causes and delay accoutability. That's how antisemitism has most often been historically deployed by state actors.

And, it must be mentioned, all sorts of online influencing creatures collect clicks through antisemitic conspiracy theories. It's a grift.

Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Danny Danon did something other diplomats might find unwise when he pointed out what he (like Yair Netanyahu) sees as colonial hypocrisy from Spain's government...the same Sánchez government that routinely accuses Israel of being a colonial, occupying European usurper.

"Spain, which never misses an opportunity to lecture Israel, has declared a state of emergency in Ceuta following the crisis over its immigration policy...Maybe before it continues lecturing us, it's time it explained to the world why it still maintains colonial enclaves in Africa."

It is arguably a fair point and the antisemitism of both Spain and the Sanchez government are undeniable.

As of today, Spanish officials say most of the people who crossed are back in Morocco, many voluntarily after finding no food or shelter waiting for them in Ceuta.

If this was a deliberate pressure play (and I think it was), how should we read the remarkably speedy way Morocco took its citizens back? Doesn't that read less like Morocco trying to permanently offload people onto Spain and more like a short, sharp demonstration of its capability to flood the border and scare the mierda out of los Españoles.

If this was Moroccan flex, they either expected the death toll or accepted it as the cost for their power play.

The connection with Israel is flimsy and conspiratorial, but there is something to the fact Morocco is a strongly pro-US country, and US has long sought Abraham Accords expansion. This has nothing to do with Yair Netanyahu's keyboard patriotism though, it's silly, it's more about the MAGA administration's animosity to Spain's policies.

Morocco has also presented itself as a reliable partner, which is laughable, but they've prosecuted a lot of people almost as human traffickers basically. The main problem now is unaccompanied minors, of which there could be around 2 thousand.

EU countries which are all harsher on immigration than Spain have backed down from unsolidary positions and fearmongering (bc Ceuta wasn't Schengen area), but the end result will be Frontex (European 'ICE') toughening up on migration as well as tougher Spanish oversight.

PD: I'd also like to add that anticolonial rhetoric on this subject, especially by American progressives, is not just naive but hypocritical. Moroccans at Ceuta are there because they don't want to be in Morocco, not because they want it to be Moroccan, no matter the pipe dreams of Rabat's monarchical dictatorship. Some countries are transcontinental, Spain is one of them, the Canary Islands also are in Africa. they've never been colonies but plazas de soberanía. Ceuta and Melilla were never Moroccan (Morocco didn't exist then), in the medieval period the Maghreb and Al-Andalus were both islamized as part of Arab imperial conquest.

Ask Haviv:

I kid you not. That's in UNGA Resolution 34/65.

(Transcript:

1. Notes with concern that the Camp David accords have been concluded outside the framework of the United Nations and without the participation of the Palestine Liberation Organization, the representative of the Palestinian people;

2. Rejects those provisions of the accords which ignore, infringe, violate or deny the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people, including the right of return, the right of self-determination and the right to national independence and sovereignty in Palestine, in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations, and which envisage and condone continued Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories occupied by Israel since 1967;

3. Strongly condemns all partial agreements and separate treaties which constitute a flagrant violation of the rights of the Palestinian people, the principles of the Charter and the resolutions adopted in the various international forums on the Palestinian issue;

4. Declares that the Camp David accords and other agreements have no validity in so far as they purport to determine the future of the Palestinian people and of the Palestinian territories occupied by Israel since 1967.)

There must be an ulterior motive, because there's no evidence against Fauci.

He's definitely screwed up. He definitely had massive communication failures and he didn't have much basis for the six-feet-of-social-distancing thing, but there's no sign of dishonesty, corruption, or bad intent.

Nobody has shown any verified evidence (documents, sworn admissions, or established facts) showing Fauci broke a law, committed an ethics violation, or engaged in professional misconduct of any kind.

There's a shitload of allegations, but not a shred of evidence for any of them.

None.

So...why are Republicans trying to villainize him?

These are the plausible motives I could come up with.

(A) Fauci became shorthand for "the expert class" telling ordinary people what to do during a period of real economic and social disruption (business closures, school shutdowns, mask mandates). Attacking him lets Republicans channel diffuse anger at pandemic-era government overreach into a single, recognizable face rather than an abstract policy critique. It's a populist move, playing to their base.

(B) Fauci is a proven fundraising and turnout driver. He reliably generates small-dollar donations and media coverage. Investigations, subpoenas, and hearings featuring him get attention in ways that dull policy fights don't. Again, this manipulates the MAGA base.

(C) Going after Fauci is a way to attack the CDC, NIH, and public health bureaucracy more broadly without having to make a technical case against each agency. He's the personalized face of institutions Republicans want to delegitimize and that's useful heading into future public health debates (vaccine mandates, WHO relations, etc.) since a discredited Fauci makes future guidance from those institutions easier to dismiss.

(D) Keeping focus on "what Fauci lied about" shifts scrutiny away from the Trump administration's disastrous early pandemic response.

(E) Since Fauci is out of government, going after him carries little practical governing cost. It doesn't risk of disrupting current policy, but it still generates investigative hearings, media cycles, and material for 2026 midterm messaging about "accountability." Which is weird, because Fauci served in all of Trump's first administration.

(F) Successfully damaging a former official's reputation post-tenure signals to current civil servants that politically damaging decisions could carry personal consequences later, which may have a chilling effect on how agencies behave.

The Republicans hounding Fauci know damned well it's theater performed for an electoral audience.

The only question is which motivation drives the dishonest effort to demonize a man who helped save, with bipartisan support, more than 25 million human lives.

(Anon is talking about this post)

This is a great example of incredibly sloppy thinking passing itself off as insight on Tumblr.

Before anyone comes at me for fisking this:

Gender-affirming care should be available to those who seek it, people should be called what they wish to be called, and everyone should have full bodily autonomy. If you want to call me a transphobe over this, you'll have to fight the trans people in my life first - and they fight dirty.

I don't have a problem with trans people. I have a problem with bad arguments that end up hurting trans people.

"Privilege and oppression are descriptions of actual, material conditions, not ontological positions."

Keep this in mind so you recognize when the post completely abandons this position.

"The trans community has decided (generally speaking), that gender identity is personal and autonomous."

Hang on. I thought gender was a social construct.

A social construct is something society collectively builds and defines. Saying gender identity is also "personal and autonomous" (decided by the individual, not society) is nearly the opposite claim.

Sure, you can hold both positions. Plenty of trans theory does, by arguing the categories are socially constructed but the individual is the authority on which one fits them. That's a real position, but it's a separate argument that has to be made. This post skips it and treats "constructed" and "self-determined" as interchangeable. They aren't.

"We agree that gender identities, roles, and presentation can be opt-in."

Identity can be private, sure - it lives in your head. But "role" and "presentation" are inherently social. A role only exists in relation to other people, presentation only exists if someone perceives it.

Neither can be purely "opt-in" by definition.

The post bundles all three together as if they work the same way. They don't.

"However, society… believes that gender identity, roles, and presentation are decided for you upon being assigned a sex."

The post treats society's official belief as the thing that determines who gets privilege.

Here's the thing - That's not how privilege works, not even under this post's own materialist logic.

Privilege isn't distributed by rulebook, it's distributed by how you're perceived, in the moment, by whoever's standing in front of you.

Take the conditional whiteness of some Ashke Jews. Plenty of "official" American and European thought did/does not consider Jews white under any circumstances - but an Ashkenazi Jew who isn't visibly identifiable as Jewish in a given moment still gets treated as white in that moment, because they're perceived as white right then.

That's (conditional) white privilege.

I have that in some rooms and not in others, depending entirely on whether I pass as a non-Jew in that moment.

Innately social perception is what sets the terms for when the privilege collapses.

The same logic applies to a passing trans man.

In a room where nobody clocks him as trans, he's getting treated as a man. He's less talked over, more presumed competent, all of it.

That's (conditional) male privilege.

The post dodges this obvious truth by reversing its former position and swapping "privilege = how you're actually treated" for "privilege = what society's official theory says," directly contradicting its own opening line.

"This is the fundamental premise of transphobia, and sexism more broadly."

Sexism has existed for thousands of years, long before anyone was debating whether gender identity is self-determined (or even distinguishing sex from gender at all).

Wage gaps, property law, control over reproduction, and domestic violence didn't require a theory about gender being assigned versus chosen.

Pinning all of sexism on one specific 2020s belief about gender identity is absolute nonsense. It mistakes a recent culture-war framing for the root of something far older and much bigger.

"…the material conditions of trans men (as a class) are that of a class oppressed by misogyny, and not benefited by male privilege."

"Trans men as a class" do not have uniform material conditions.

A closeted, passing trans man in Minneapolis and an openly trans man in Yehupetzville, Tennessee are living completely different material realities.

If privilege really is about material, lived treatment (as the post itself claims) then privilege depends on the actual situation a person is in, not which identity box they check.

"In short: you can genuinely believe trans men are men while also acknowledging they don't experience male privilege. Not a contradiction, because the hegemony has different standards than we do."

"...the hegemony has different standards than we do" states that a disagreement exists, and that's all. It doesn't give any reason the post's own definition is correct. IT's not a conclusion, it's just an unsupported assertion.

"Hegemony" here refers to cultural hegemony, a specific term from Marxist writer Antonio Gramsci.

It implies that a dominant group maintains power not through force but by getting the dominated to accept the dominant ideology as common sense, as just "the way things are." It's a precise concept about how consent is manufactured.

None of that is what's happening in this sentence.

The post isn't describing how misogyny gets people to internalize their own subordination, it's just saying "most people think gender is assigned at birth."

That's not hegemony, that's majority opinion.

Swap the word for "society" or "most people" and you lose zero meaning, which tells you the fancy word wasn't adding a concept, it was adding a pretentious pseudo-intellectual Marxist costume

It's there to make "people disagree with us" sound like it comes with three decades of critical theory behind it, when the sentence would be exactly as true, and exactly as weak, in plain English.

OP is using an academic term to disguise a shrug and hopes nobody checks what the word actually means.

What makes bad arguments like this so exasperating isn't that the conclusion is wrong, but that the argument is lazy in a way that actively hurts the cause.

Trans rights don't need a redefinition of privilege that collapses the moment anyone pokes at it, and they definitely don't need a five-dollar word standing in for an argument that OP never bothered to make.

The real material picture is that trans people, including passing trans men, face genuinely elevated rates of violence, discrimination, and precarity. Whatever situational privilege exists is mostly conditional and can vanish the second someone is outed.

That's a strong, defensible position.

It doesn't need to be propped up with sloppy definitions and academic costume jewelry. Every time an argument like this gets passed around and applauded instead of critiqued, it teaches people that the sloppy version is the only version - and this hands ammunition to bad-faith critics who'd rather debate the shitty argument than the real one.

So, who is this sloppy sort of argument actually for?

It's not for people on the fence who might be won over to supporting trans rights.

It's for the people nodding along and reblogging it because it appeals to them emotionally.

If you want to eventually make the Charlie Kirks of the world grapple with something real, you have to stop performing pseudo-intellectual masturbation to collect social reinforcement.

Eventually, you have to formulate arguments that hold up under a little scrutiny - as this one utterly fails to do.

Some trans men unquestionably do experience conditional male privilege. Denying that isn't material analysis and it isn't clever - it's just refusing to look at the evidence because it's inconvenient and doesn't suit one's self-image as unconditionally oppressed.

Material conditions don't care about anyone's self-image. That's the whole point this post claimed to be making...and then abandoned the second it got inconvenient.

So I think you're missing the larger context of this discussion, that it's more broadly a defense of trans men against transandrophobes---and to that point:

You say oop's post is

not for people on the fence who might be won over to supporting trans rights.

and I agree with that. You're right, it's not. And I don't think it was intended to be. I don't think this post was intended to be for your average person on the fence about supporting trans rights. If it was, the focus on trans men not having male privilege would be weird, because the thing we as trans advocates are always having to start with is the very simple position of trans men are men. Trans women are women. Nonbinary people aren't man- or woman-lite. I can definitely see that if you're walking into this discussion from the perspective that that's transphobia we're fighting, it is unhelpful and maybe hurting the cause.

But I'm almost certain this is a response to a different type of transphobe, because I've seen very similar responses in the transandrophobia tag pushing back against them: people who believe woman is the Good Gender and man is the Bad Gender (the standard radfem position in my experience) and trans men should sit down and shut up within the trans community because trans women's problems matter so much more, and actually trans men aren't really even oppressed anyway, or at least, so much less than trans women that it hardly matters, because earning rights for trans women will naturally make things better for trans men, since trans woman is an intersectional identity and trans man is not. (I've left out nonbinary people because these people almost always do too.) They are called trans inclusive radical feminists (tirfs) (as apposed to terfs, trans exclusionary radical feminsts, who hate trans women and trans men), or trans radical feminists (trfs, these ones are specifically trans themselves, as opposed to tirfs who tend to be cis, and not only trans women and transfems but nonbinary people, trans men, and trans masculine people too).

Now, I think tirfs and trfs need to read Kimberle Crenshaw again, becuase I don't think they understand intersectionality, since it isn't about overlapping oppressions, it's about overlapping identities that are affected by different kinds of oppression. Black women are used as the example, but intersectionality also extends to Black men, because they experience a specific form of racism informed by the fact that they are men, just the way that trans men experience a form of transphobia informed by the fact that they are men.

Here's a rundown of transphobia as it specifically manifests for trans men verses trans women, with the understanding that there's lots and lots of overlap I'm not mentioning, which is why transphobia is a useful term, and there's not just different terms for different trans identities (though there still are).

Transandrophobia (in the sense of transphobia against transmascs, not the sense of the intersection between transphobia and hatred/fear of men):

whiny, defective girl

infantilization

"corrective" rape

being barred from women's spaces for being men (you might scare the women here who have trauma around men, which is positioned as "gender affirming" because it's so affirming to be barred from a space for your gender), i.e denial/restriction to gynecological care because it's for women or shelters that only take women

erasure, i.e murders/violence being classified as femicides, violence against women, transandrophobia being classified as just misogyny (which many trans men and trans masculine people consider misgendering) or just regular transphobia that doesn't need its own word because it's not really distinct, but never transmisogyny* as trans men are exempt from it, and if they aren't it was misdirected

*transmisogyny is defined in this specific case as the intersection between transphobia and misogyny, which can apply to all trans people, just as the intersection of transphobia and hatred/fear of men can apply to all trans people; not the specific transphobia transfems face. This is a sticking point in a lot of intracommunity discourse because when people use the term 'transmisogyny,' and say 'trans men are exempt from transmisogyny' they don't define their terms, leading to confusion because of the multiple meanings. Still, transfems deserve to be able to use the term transmisogyny to describe their specific opression, and i don't want to take that away from them, so I will use it here as such but clarify)

Transmisogyny (in the sense of transphobia against transfems specifically):

dangerous predator groomer man

demonization

being seen as hypersexual

being barred from women's spaces for being men (because you're not actually a woman) i.e some of those same shelters that only take women

hypervisibility, i.e that most people think of trans women as The Scary Transes That Are Going To Trans Your Kids, and not trans men (because of the erasure)

One of the arguments that tirfs and trfs use to justify their transandrophobia (because they're fine with trans women if they toe the party line) is that it's okay to hate trans men just as much as they hate cis men (which to me is also unjustifiable, because that's just. bigotry too.) because trans men have male privilege when they come out so they're basically the same as cis men. Some tirfs and trfs even think trans men are worse than they think cis men are, because trans men chose to be men (I guess we're abandoning the position that being trans isn't a choice) and cis men could turn out to be trans women, so we shouldn't be too mean to them, we wouldn't want to hurt a trans woman (but trans men are 'birthday boys' and 'transandrobros' and 'bitching' (all actual things I've seen tirfs and trfs call transmen and transmasculine peoplefor objecting to being hurt.) (again tirfs are generally cis and trfs include non transfems, I'm not trying to say the average trans woman feels like that, plenty are defending transmascs.)

I guess the reason that I'm responding to you is because I respect your analysis and nuance and research on I/P and Jewish topics, I'm Jewish myself and follow you because of how much I like your posts. I just think you might be missing some important context on this one, and it's something I'm sensitive to, considering my positionality.

You're entering into an extremely hot button issue within the trans community, and some may percieve, as I did initially (though after I reread your post and sat with it I changed my mind) as you implying, though perhaps unintentionally, support for the transandrophobia that the oop was written to push back against, and I feel you're doing it without the full context, and from outside the trans community, which is not something I think either of us like seeing with a non-Jew and non-Palestinian talking about I/P.

I also feel, or at least hope, that your intention here was to support trans rights, and try to help the trans community advocate for ourselves in better ways, but I think that you've missed the mark, as somebody who deeply understands the way that trans people, trans masculine and nonbinary people particularly, are actually trying to advocate for ourselves, and as somebody unfortunately very familiar with the transandrophobia discourse.

I think it’s good to be thoughtful about rhetoric, and make sure we’re not being disingenuous or misleading when we talk---I love precise language and I think a lot of problems would be solved if we all just said what we meant as opposed to using buzzwords, which is a failing of the oop (I think you can talk about trans men not inherently having male privilege as a class without using terms like 'material condition' or saying it overconclusively, but those are hallmarks of the wider discourse).

Yes, some trans men have male privilege. I do think it's untrue to say no trans men hold male privilege.

So we agree that OOP's point and argument are both nonsensical.

However, you're walking into a a much broader...discourse....within the trans community about whether trans men...deserve a word to describe discrimination against trans men...as opposed to their transness generally.

Yes, and I'm saying it's ridiculous to have an intra-comnunal hair-splitting...discourse...about whether a subset of a community deserves a word while the whole community is under very real and immediate attack from a historically aggressive, hostile administration. Being obsessed with a subset deserving a word when there's real work to be done is far-left purity policing at its worst. The community's misapprehension of (or apathy towards...?) political realities and it's inability to perceive and measure the associated threats are dangerous liabilities - and they're now so normalized that you don't realize how ridiculous it sounds when you describe a debate over deserving a word.

I am begging the trans community to stop talking about its feelings and its linguistic purity policing to focus instead on its material and legal conditions.

Collectively, y'all are re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic and aren't politically or historically literate enough to realize there's a #&*$ing iceberg ahead.

...the thing we as trans advocates... always...start with is the very simple position of trans men are men. Trans women are women.

That's the same linguistic purity policing and an incredibly foolish place to start.

It would be a much easier lift to convince others that "trans people should be regarded with legal/social equality, dignity, and safety."

The world won't, however, get behind "trans women are women" because this can only be true with a radical redefinition of "woman" - and that argument hasn't been made to the broader world, let alone won.

It's an incredibly stupid hill on which to die.

It takes an ingroup point of faith and demands that the outgroup embrace it as gospel.

Try this: name a time in history that a small minority ingroup has successfully extracted concessions from a majority outgroup this way.

You can't.

It has never, ever worked for a minority to demand ideological compliance from a majority. In addition to failing, it also antagonizes the majority. For some reason, y'all are more interested in being acceptably militant and ideologically pure than in being effective at securing the rights and safety of trans people.

I know that y'all think Judith Butler makes sense, but even if they did, most of the world hasn't read Butler - and most of the world that has read Butler doesn't buy Butler's redefinitions because their arguments are full of postmodern pseudo-intellectual fuckery that doesn't move most people. They're badly framed, poorly reasoned, and produce militance, not social or legal change.

Butler only preaches to the choir. They don't explain for the outgroup, they don't make compelling arguments the outgroup can embrace.

The ideological bubble of the trans community is so all-encompassing that the trans community can't see the world in which it lives. That bubble is no less absurd and no less reality-distorting than the Fox News MAGA bubble.

Seek legal protections, seek legal equality, seek social acceptance - but stop trying to change the dictionary - it's a losing battle that works against your aims.

Trans women are trans women, trans men are trans men, and trans people are fully human, utterly deserving of all human acceptance. Demand that! You can sell that!

But demanding "trans women are women" accomplishes nothing while alienating potential allies Its the wrong place to start. It is a losing position. Brianna Wu is right that the backlash is undoing decades of progress.

I implore you to put down Butler and pick up books on history to see how civil and social rights have been effectively gained in the past.

Set ideology aside - read history.

it's more broadly a defense of trans men against transandrophobes

From here it looks like poorly-reasoned linguistic purity policing as a competitive event in the Oppression Olympics. This segment of trans people is more oppressed than that segment. This segment is more valid than that segment. This segment deserves a word. This sounds, unsurpisingly, like nonsense to most people.

I just think you might be missing some important context on this one, and it's something I'm sensitive to, considering my positionality.

I appreciate that context and your efforts to lay it out - but it changes nothing about how bad the point and the argument are.

That was my thesis: This argument is terrible and works against interests of trans people.

I stand by that thesis and your context hasn't changed it in any way.

I also feel, or at least hope, that your intention here was to support trans rights, and try to help the trans community advocate for ourselves in better ways

100% correct.

The actual threat to trans people isn't trans people with different ideological purity standards.

The actual threat is coming from outside the house, and intra-conmmunity language/purity battles are ignoring the actual threats in favor of competitive righteousness and unrealistic expectations of policing the language/behavior of others. It's incredibly foolish and it makes me fear for the trans people I know that the community is so thoroughly engaged in this comparatively unimportant horseshit and making such awful, poorly-considered, logically-incoherent, politically-irrelevant arguments in public, providing endless ammunition to those who want to rhetorically assassinate your humanity.

I desperately want the trans community to get its collective head out of its a collective ass. The ideological purity policing must be replaced by engagement with the political realities of the broader world.

If it did that, it might stop allying with groups that would/will gladly murder it (look up the track record of communists and Islamists towards anyone who isn't cishet), and could make real, measureable, enforceable gains. The political segment of the West that has always been supportive of LGBTQ+ rights is liberals - the very segment I keep seeing trans people villainize on social media.

To date, the movement has largely given up on measurable political goals in favor of ideological/linguistic purity battles.

There's a tank outside your door, but those of you inside the house are arguing over whether that piece of furniture in the living room should be called a couch or a sofa.

...but I think that you've missed the mark...

Thought experiment: Imagine that, in the context of historically spiking antisemitism in the US, the vast majority of loud, visible US Jews online were fixating on some finer point of difference in religious ritual observance instead of working to protect all Jewish communities.

You get how stupid that would be, right?

THAT'S THE MARK.

It's fine if you disagree - disagreeing is great. But instead of disagreeing, the trans community seems to need to tell people like me that I'm wrong, that I'm a transphobe, and that not everyone is allowed to have an opinion about the political efficacy of the movement's priorities, rhetoric, strategies and tactics.

However, I also think if you read oop's post with the context I have provided, it might seem more acceptable, either because some of the premises make more sense to you

I truly appreciate the context, but It's still a garbage argument making a point that is, as you've explcilty agreed, obviously false on its face

Worse, it wastes energy on intra-community bickering about ideology and language that should instead be spent in defense of the whole community against a wildly hostile administration.

-----

I was living in a very Catholic place and commented to a Catholic friend that it amazed me to see Catholic churches and schools for each national origin. Polish Catholic Churches/schools, Italian Catholic Churches/schools, and Irish Catholic churches/schools.

My Catholic friend: Jews don't differentiate synagogues by national origin?

Me: The Reform congregation I grew up with was mostly various sorts of Ashkenazim (like most Jews in the US), but any Jew who came by was immediately welcome. It was the only Jewish community for at least a hundred miles in any direction. There are so few of us. It would be petty, weird, and self-destructive to not embrace every Jew who wanted to participate.

Your splitting up the Catholic community by national origin proves that there's no sense at all of Catholic universalism here. Just tribalism.

-----

Intra-community ideological/linguistic battles might survivable for the numerous and the strong, but they're insane for the few and the threatened to attempt and it's exasperating to witness this.

The trans community seems rhetorically self-destructive and is falling for the same purity traps that have destroyed many far-left movements, picking the wrong fights with the wrong people over the wrong issues and prioritizing performance over progress - and I hope it course-corrects in time to avoid disaster.

You don't have to agree, but my point is that the priorities, mindset, ideology, language, infighting, and tactics of the younger trans movement aren't just foolish, but dangerously counterproductive.

Thank you for the context you've shared- I learned things from it - but nothing I learned shed new light of any sort on my position.

This is a bad argument in support of an obvious falsehood from a community that can't effectively advocate for itself because it hasn't bothered to understand the world it seems to believe it can reshape through militance.

I'll unquestionably (and irrationally) be called a transphobe for saying this, but I feel neither fear nor hatred towards trans people.

Mostly, I feel anxiety for trans people because the loudest among you are deliberately steering all of you towards a cliff they don't see coming in the name of ideological purity and emotional resonance...because maps are the propaganda tools of oppressors!

Read. Learn history. Get out of your bubble. Learn how politics work. Learn how civil rights have been expanded in the past. Stop wasting energy and time on deserving a word.