this is the taste of love and i will choke on it.

Just hours later, I was hospitalized for my pain, which was now accompanied by a fever and a heart rate of 160 BPM. I was confused and disoriented, and every blood test pointed towards high levels of inflammation. The doctors, in their report, attributed my symptoms to sepsis.

That wasn't my first time experiencing transphobia in American healthcare hell, but it is by far the most obvious example. My doctor didn't care that I was in pain. She only cared that I, a nonbinary teenager with an F on their birth certificate, didn't meet her expectations of femininity.

Trans men's accounts of their struggles with poverty, from "Pathyways into Poverty: Lived Experiences Among LGBTQ People" by UCLA's Williams Institute

It's very odd to me, because transgender people specifically are not allowed to be queer or acknowledged as queer by their own community. In comparison to cisgender queer people, transgender people have to prove their sexuality so much more in my opinion? ESPECIALLY if they aren't hetrosexual, because God forbid somebody has more than one queer identity.

You're a gay transgender man? Okay straight cisgender woman or gay cisgender man. You're a straight transgender man? Okay straight cisgender man or lesbian cisgender woman. You're a bisexual transgender man? Okay bisexual cisgender man or woman. You're a asexual transgender man? Okay asexual cisgender man or woman. And so on

Like are trans men allowed to be queer at ALL?? Transgender men cannot be gay men. Transgender men cannot be straight men. Transgender men cannot be bisexual men. Transgender men cannot be asexual men. Transgender men cannot be transgender. Transgender men cannot be queer at all. I guess transgender men cannot be literally anything.

ultimately the problem (i think) is that the rest of the queer community feels extremely comfortable dictating how trans men define ourselves.

many people are very insecure in their identities and feel threatened by trans people as a Concept because we force them to reevaluate language, but the thing about identity is it’s entirely self-determined and ultimately however someone else identifies is not a matter of public debate.

i’m a lesbian and that makes some people mad but it truly doesn’t matter because my identity cannot alter or dilute or diminish someone else’s.

There simply isn’t a cultural idea of what a ‘transmasc’ could be, not in and of itself, not even a negative one. There’s various other cultural ideas that people read transmasculinity through (anon names some of them) but none of them are culturally readable as ‘native’ to transmasculinity. They’re ‘external’ ideas, represented rhetorically as having been created to describe other people - not us, never us - that are imposed on us as a sort of ‘next best thing’ and that, to add insult to injury, we are sometimes even accused of wanting to co-op or ‘appropriate’ merely by existing.

And I do not believe for a second that this is by accident, that basically all other manners and flavors of queerness, gender non conformity, and whatnot have managed to ensconce themselves in culture - again, even if partially or mostly as negative stereotypes and cautionary tales - and somehow WE are the only people who left no semiotic trace on history.

Hey fun fact, when women speak as little as 30% of the time or more, they are perceived as dominating the conversation.

I'm not saying you're treating us as women dominating the conversation, but if the shoe fits...

I don't think going back into the closet is a privilege for any trans person and you as a trans person should know that.

Also if detransitioning and pretending to be cis is a privilege than wouldn't trans women actually be privileged over trans men in that regard? You know, since if a trans woman detransitions then she will gain the conditional male privilege of being perceived as a cis man?

But oh no, detransitioning is only a privilege for trans men because they aren't real trannies like trans women

is as useless of a statement as,

"Lesbians aren't as oppressed as gay men! Look at all these laws targeting gay men but not lesbians!"

I'd be rightfully chastised for saying the latter, but apparently the former is just "transfeminism 101" to some people.

And to be clear, there are STILL places in the world where male homosexuality is punished but female homosexuality isn't. Would you say that queer women are privileged in these places? NO! You would recognise that the methods for oppressing queerness often differs based on the gender one is socially imposed upon birth.

The oppression of transmasculine people is often enacted in ways similar to that of cis women, especially cis queer women. These include tactics such as corrective rape/forced pregnancy and being dismissed as "confused" and "delusional," but also "predatory Evil Women who are going to Corrupt Your Daughters."

Unfortunately, this means a lot of trans men must be considered "not real men" in order to have their experiences validated. Transgender theory and mainstream transfeminism has failed in this regard. Since the idea of "a man being oppressed for being a man" is counterintuitive to decades of feminist thought, it is rejected outright.

Some say, "you're not oppressed for being a man, you're oppressed for being trans" as if those are distinct categories in this context.