The least perverted girl you know

Formal / Procedural Problems:

Let's set aside the political question of whether "feminism" is an unqualified good to which trans women should readily and uncomplicatedly attach ourselves. In English we often use the word feminism interchangeably with "women's liberation" and "women's radicalism," and I'm not sure that necessarily expands our power to act as trans women. (Compare "womanism" and "mujerismo" for an example of what I'm referring to there, though those bring their own conceptual problems.)

"Transfeminism" necessarily implies some relationship with "feminism without a prefix." If you're going to meaningfully participate in transfeminist thought, you will need some familiarity with both feminism and transgender social thought alike. You don't have to be an expert but working knowledge of the two realms of thought, and their uneasy relationship, will get you way farther than being a total novice.

But because of the forum problem, if ideas are going to find purchase with a Tumblr audience, they have to be easily digestible, they have to be narratively or rhetorically compelling, and they are often going to argue that disagreement with conventional wisdom proves or creates some sort of moral rot or potentially even danger (see this anon I received for an example of this rhetoric). If you want your essay to get attention on Tumblr you can't be overly academic or conceptual or complex (though you might want to appear that way), you need to keep your readers excited. It's not necessarily fun - or easy - to carefully find and engage with current literature on the things you're talking about (which is why probably the most common transfeminist book recommendation is a book from 2007 by a now nearly 60-year-old woman). Here we have the engagement with political and social thought as a form of play, which I'm not necessarily opposed to. But I dislike the way it's approached.

Now, you can produce simplistic, logically and emotionally shallow content while also doing the reading. People did it a lot back in the day when this site was basically the town square for Radical Grad Students. But it's much, much easier to churn it out without doing so. There's a whole mode of writing that is conducive to these things, actually: polemic. And much of the writing that I have seen in this vein is closer to polemic than it is to the careful structural analysis its authors act like they're making. "Dump Your Puppygirl" was illustrative - it had no substance because it was largely an embellished personal anecdote, so you could project whatever theoretical meaning you wanted onto it.

There are uses to polemic. The continued preoccupation with Andrea Dworkin is revealing, because although Andy talked a ton of stupid bullshit throughout her career, what many of her fans remember is what resonated with them emotionally. The ways that she managed to summarize their pain, their resentment, their mistrust of men, their feelings of objectification and exploitation and disposability. That isn't something without social value. This is why people are so defensive of Dworkin in particular and use her as a synecdoche for a defense of "radical feminism" as a whole. But polemic as an exclusive or even primary ingredient in an intellectual diet is going to influence the way you interpret, read, think, and write.

Trans women have extremely good reasons to be resentful, socially isolated, and mistrustful of people that are not trans women. That is a typical outcome of transmisogyny as a political force, especially in a moment where multiple societies are deadset on using us as a scapegoat for their social decline. Another consequence of being oppressed is frequently being denied a good political education or having somewhat limited political consciousness. So, circumstances being what they are, a lot of trans women - who, anecdotally, seem to skew younger either in terms of transition timeline or literal age - are trying to find an outlet for their resentment, isolation, and mistrust. This is, on its own, fine, or even good. It's better than festering. But, many of us find that outlet in low-effort, low-quality content, whether that be Tumblr posts or Substack essays. This content is being largely produced by the aforementioned clout demons.

So we have writers who are producing low-effort content because that's what's easy to produce and easy to find an audience, and an audience that resonates with that content because it appeals to their emotional instincts and offers easy methods for articulating their very real pain. In turn, the trans women who are weaned on this stuff - wanting to feel like they are participating in something meaningful and worthy of social attention - turn around and produce their own low-quality, low-effort content. Potentially with even less substance now, because they learned this stuff not from sustained, reflective engagement with complex material, but from memes, slogans, discourse posts, polemical essays, and anecdotes. All of which are fine, in isolation, but again, not as the only ingredients in an intellectual diet.

This isn't unusual or even unique to trans women - transmasculine grievance politics ("transmisandry," "transandrophobia," etc.) or even arguably "heteropessimism" is just the same impulse dialed up to eleven, where people that are oppressed in some way channel their feelings of resentment and frustration and bitterness into a malformed, unproductive anti-politics. What we are seeing, across the board, are the results of trying to do social and political thought in the era of algorithmic capitalism. It results, largely, in more superficial understandings of subjects, more ideological stagnation, and decreased ability to act, as people are constantly fed concentrated and intensified doses of what they're already reading, watching, listening to. Confirmation bias on an industrially generated scale.

Additionally, many of the Tumblr transfeminists are correct that this website is chockful of wannabe KiwiFarmers who are parasocially obsessed - to a prurient degree - with trans women. This is an environment that is practically designed to make trans women dig in their heels to bad or underformed ideas, just by virtue of all the willful and overt social terror that being an outspoken trans woman online can subject you to. This fact is also useful for the clout demons, however, because you can use it to insist that disagreement or pushback against them can only exist maliciously or carelessly due to the inherently increased vulnerability of being a trans woman. This has an overall silencing effect on people with good intentions. It is, explicitly, a demand for people not to exercise their powers of judgment or skepticism because to do so would put others at risk. (And, to be fair, sometimes our powers of judgment should say to us "okay this is stupid, I'm logging off." Dare to dream.)

Substantive Problems:

Because of these formal problems - a starting line of resentment, polemic, and superficial engagement with theory - I don't think transfeminism's Tumblr variant actually has any coherent body of ideas beyond "trans women are women" and "cis women and other queer people incl. trans men/nonbinary people also perpetuate transmisogyny against us." Which, while true, are not the most interesting observations - I know them because I go outside.

Nobody can really agree on what the *point* of all this is. It ends up looking a lot like either begging* people that aren't trans women to listen to us for once or, when that inevitably fails, walling ourselves off into a form of trans-pessimism. The latter is particularly odious to me because it feeds into every isolating impulse we already have because we live in societies that structurally discourage our agency and our modes of expression. It encourages us to close ourselves off to the possibility of meaningfully connecting with people different than us and thus primes us to be taken advantage of.

* (or impotently demanding, which is the same thing)

This lack of substance is reflected in how a lot of transfeminists adopt a hodge-podge of radical signifiers, a slurry of Marxist/feminist/liberal lingo without a cohesive framework to hang them on.

A couple of my least favorite writers in this vein often make reference to being "materialists," but what this word is doing for them is basically left open for the reader to project onto. Calling yourself a "materialist" gives you some radical Marxist chic but is so nebulous and often misunderstood that you don't have to commit to any thornier theoretical work.

Some of them will also invoke "radical feminism" quite frequently. But again, what ideas are trans women actually supposed to take from radical feminism? It is rarely specified! When it is, it's something vague like "the concept of abolishing patriarchy through radically restructuring society” (which, I would note, is not a radfem-exclusive belief). Because, if you specify, then you have to 1) engage with and discuss complex theoretical material, and 2) be able to articulate why radical feminism declined and became what it is now - which is, funnily enough, a means for (mostly) cis women to channel their resentments and endlessly backbite each other. I wonder if this is sounding familiar.

Because it's Tumblr, there's also a lot of talk about intersectionality and male privilege and performativity, which are treated like unquestionable concepts that are totally congruent with the two other aforementioned frameworks rather than rejections or at least weighty modifications of them. Our transfeminists aren’t reading Ashley Bohrer.

The result, to me, is that it inherits all of the weaknesses of these frameworks without retaining any of their strengths.

To me the substantive failure is the failure to ask, what is transfeminism meant to do? Is it meant to make a few specific women personally better off through publishing deals or Ko-Fi accounts or glowing comments from feminist academics? Is it meant to raise consciousness, or to merely define and outline transmisogyny as a social force? If it is a form of political thought, what *politics* are actually entailed by it? What/who are we in conflict with, who can we act in concert with, what specific values animate us and what strategies and tactics will allow us to make those values real?