no men are women

I don’t see this specific problem discussed on radblr. I see so many instances of black fat women EXISTING and men just being the most cruel they can possibly be. I saw an instagram reel of a fat black woman proudly sharing her journey to lose weight and become healthier. A black man dueted this and literally mocked her whilst laughing saying “she gotta lot to lose!”

even when proportion is less of an issue, pre-pubescent and older minors have physical differences taken into consideration - different organ processes, skin issues, lack of strength, and different sleep and nutritional needs.

further, design for the elderly is massive - fragility, muscle weakness, lack of dexterity etc.

all this but still, medical, safety, and health equipment and advice for women is just designed for “small men”. next to no consideration is given to the differences between women and men unless it directly involves reproductive organs.

you may think many of the above are obvious differences, but are women having breasts not also an obvious difference? because regardless, in car design and CPR dummies, breasts are entirely forgotten about. teaching CPR for children is absolutely standard, but for women (50% of the population, mind you) is rare. children have special seats in the car, or may not be allowed in the front seat for safety reasons, but seat belts aren’t designed with women’s breasts in mind, resulting in women dying in more car accidents.

as a child, i was told endlessly that i needed more sleep than adults. I was never told that adult women need more sleep than men. i was told endlessly how children need extra calcium and vitamin D. I was never told women need nearly twice the iron intake as men.

i’d like to ask: how do you explain the physical advantages women have over men, then? how do you explain women having higher body fat, stronger immune system, greater flexibility, higher pain tolerance and endurance? if women are capable of being just as strong as men, then do these advantages make us strictly superior? or would men eating less result in somehow having more body fat and more endurance??

idk why they insist on completely denying sexual dimorphism in muscle mass like it doesn’t make sense that evolutionarily, men evolved to be glass canons since they are less necessary for reproduction, and women evolved to survive. no one is saying women are destined and doomed to be barefoot pregnant housewives, but it’s stupid to pretend evolution doesn’t occur based on survival and reproduction of the species. it might be uncomfortable, but i don’t think feminism is going to go anywhere if we insist on denying science and reality.

men have no advantage over women in STEM, management, education, social sciences, arts, or just about any other non-physical field. lord forbid, maybe women aren’t the best pick for lifting as much weight as possible, but that isn’t particularly relevant in modern life anyways, is it? besides the value men put on their own strength, awarding themselves for lifting, it really isn’t very practical - would you rather be able to lift more or get sick less often, experience less pain and live longer?

The fact is that dicks have been used as a weapon against women and girls for as long as we can remember. Men have raped women and girls with their dicks. They’ve used their dicks to forcibly impregnate women and girls. They’ve used rape, and consequently their dicks, as a weapon of war against women and girls. They’ve found joy in flashing their dick to unsuspecting and unwilling women and girls, whether that be on the street in a trench coat or online via unsolicited dick pic. They’ve threatened women and girls with their dicks—in fact, many of the “trans women” whining about their dicks being viewed negatively are posting about how much they want to rape women and girls they call “terfs”. They’ve used their dicks to violate the corpses of women and girls. They’ve written countless myths, stories, legends, films, etc. And created countless art pieces where women and girls are raped with their dicks. They’ve used their dicks to torment homosexual women and girls with “corrective” rape.

Men and their dicks are the worst nightmare of women and girls: we commonly refer to what men and their dicks do to us as “a fate worse than death”.

It’s not that women and girls are scared of dick for no reason. It’s that we come from a long line of women, stretching back to the beginning of time, who have been terrorised by men using their dicks as weapons. It is so insulting and cruel to reduce this reality to “just being scared for no reason”.

and no, i don't care if its wrapped up in fluff about "showing her a consensual wonderful time ;;;;;))))))" because its still sexual harassment against someone who 99.999% of the time had no part in whatever internet argument you're mad at him about (not that it would ever be okay to sexually harass someone either way obv).

So male privilege exists, right? We all know this, we all agree on it? Men are generally treated better/with more respect both interpersonally and institutionally. Obviously there are many axes of privilege/oppression and this is only one, but all other things being equal, a man is going to have some social/institutional power over a woman.

And then people started having some extremely heated arguments about whether and how transmascs are oppressed as much as transfems are, and I had to question that framework a little. If you stick to that basic throughline, all other things being equal, a trans man should have some social/institutional power over a trans woman. And I wasn't convinced of that. Trans men are generally not considered by society at large to be men at all- not just "the wrong kind of man" like gay or racialized men, not men at all. If they pass well enough, they may be treated better interpersonally, but even then, they might be treated very differently by people who know they're trans- not to mention doctors.

I read a pretty good post going over some statistics and linking to studies that basically found trans men to have it easier in some areas, harder in others, and usually not by a ton. So I revised my concept of male privilege to "all other things being equal, men have power over women- but trans people, who are generally placed in a third category of 'deviant freak', can't really be said to adhere to this, because there's so much variation in how individual trans people are perceived and therefore treated that it's hard to say one group of trans people has concrete power over another".

I was comfortable with this framework for a while. I still really, really want it to be true, honestly. But the arguments kept happening, and I kept reading them, and I couldn't help this nagging feeling that something was really off. I thought the people on the "trans women are oppressed by trans men and trans men should not get to Have A Word because it's insulting to act like they experience the same or more discrimination" side of the argument were just zealously adhering to "all other things being equal, a man is going to have some social/institutional power over a woman" and refusing to acknowledge the nuance because admitting that other people don't view you the way you want to be viewed can be really difficult, and I think maybe some of them are, but there is a vocal and growing contingent that is arguing something else.

The idea that gender nonconformity is more accepted in people perceived as female. The idea that perceived femaleness automatically grants someone an assumption of innocence, harmlessness, virtue. The idea that this aura of innocence or purity can be and often is used to bolster false rape accusations and ruin the lives of innocent people. These are the most egregious points, but I saw it over and over again- the idea that being born with a vagina meant going through life coddled and presumed to be a good person. And people usually stopped short of saying that AFABs(TM) oppress cis men, but it sure was interesting how cis men seemed to get absolutely no shit from this community of alleged misandrists.

I think what really broke me was the issue of forced pregnancy. Trans men brought it up from time to time, usually in their own spaces/tags, but at one point I saw them accused of talking about it to trigger trans womens' dysphoria. As though there could be no other reason to talk about one of the worst things that can happen to a person.

And it hit me: trans women will never deal with that. Ever. Any bad thing that commonly happens to trans women (the ones that get brought up a lot as uniquely transfem problems are murder and prison rape/"V-Coding") can happen to trans men, even if it happens less often, but the reverse isn't true. Trans women cannot be forcibly impregnated as a means to control them. Ever.

"Choking is safe - as long as you're pure of heart! The presence of consent magically gives you the physical rush of oxygen deprivation but without the damage that comes from oxygen deprivation!"

Well no, those two things go together. Oxygen deprivation is what it is.

"Puberty blockers are safe - as long as you're pure of heart! As long as you're really trans, Lupron and its cousins will magically know to only give you cosmetic side effects instead of fucking up your bones and muscles like the thousands of girls before you who were being treated for precocious puberty!"

Well no, the effects of drugs do what they do to your body regardless of your intention.

It's also worth pointing out that TRAs willingly admit just how many trans people are autistic - something not shared by SSA people, whose sexuality is represented across the psychological board.

And I'm not the only one to have noticed this incongruence, by the way; TRAs have begun to try to generate some sense of analogues between trans people and everything else; the classic example is the assertion that following gender roles and having cosmetic surgery is 'gender affirming care'. They've also tried to assert for years now that cis people (especially 'terfs') care about being misgendered just as much, but that clearly hasn't worked very well. We also have their attempts to create analogues between trans women and black women, despite of course how the analogy fails because black women are still transparently oppressed as women; and then there's the whole 'segregated bathrooms' thing, which falls apart because the separate bathrooms are equal in quality and the only oppression division is along sexed lines, which means trans women can still use the bathroom they were assigned anyway.