🙄

-Whipping girl, page 181

in the interest of full transparency, here's a repost of the original post that started this shitshow from the original OP. to summarize:

he opens by explicitly saying that he wants to discuss the "unique issues" trans men face, and that he isn't trying to have this "be some oppression olympics thing". "It's not that trans men face less oppression than trans women; it's that trans men are talked about and cared about so little that many people don't actually know the shit we go through."

his next point immediately claims that trans men are raped more than trans women based on three studies. one of these studies bases its results on responses from a grand total of 87 binary trans people, and the other two studies are different analyses of the EXACT SAME SURVEYMONKEY POLL (which also happens to have 4x as many trans men respondents as trans women, hm)

his next point is just him getting angry that all the discourse on bathroom bills is centered around the trans women they explicitly target, instead of men like himself. he manages to find two (2) articles supporting his claim that trans men are primarily affected by these bills before giving up and opining that "I'm sure there are more but unfortunately any discrimination trans men face is largely not reported in the media as the news likes to pretend trans women are the only type of trans people there are." mhmm.

his next point finally actually addresses an experience unique to trans men, like he claimed he was going to do at the beginning, instead of just rehashing MRA talking points about how men statistically have it worse than women, like he was doing up until this point! he mentions that testoterone is a controlled substance in the US and that he refuses to DIY it for unspecified reasons. this concludes the only section of the post where he actually does what he promised in the intro.

also OP's only post on r/trans before this post was complaining about the "nobody talks about how the bathroom bills affect US" thing, it's extremely obvious what angle he was shooting here.

1. first we assert as an axiom that only "conservatives" "enforce" male privilege (interesting choice of words and, already, what the fuck are you talking about)

2. "seeing trans men as men" is positioned a binary thing, on or off, no room for nuance. in fact, by clever rhetorical sleight of hand we've just made experiencing male privilege synonymous with passing -- and not just passing, but specifically passing the scrutiny of hostile "conservative" transphobes

3. leaving aside the bizarre (and apparently obligatory because y'all bring this shit up every time, even when it's not relevant, for shock points) reference to corrective rape (and leaving aside, as ever, the implication that corrective rape is the sole and exclusive trauma of trans men which they can wield like a gotcha against other queer people who also experience it) the important rhetorical trick that's actually being executed here is that we're further restricting the "conservatives" from point 1 to exclusively be conservative men, an implication which is delivered via the classic invocation of the penis as the tool and even the synecdoche of patriarchy. (i wonder what else that could imply about how this person views dynamics between trans people.)

4. we have arrived: male privilege is positioned as something that is bestowed -- and exclusively so -- by cisgender conservative men according to personal whim, and a structural view of the problem has been successfully obliterated. furthermore, anyone who questions or opposes this schema is opposing "the LGBT" (nice one) and their queerness is immediately called into question (yeah buddy the transsexual dyke is merely a "presumed" "ally" to "the LGBT" you're very subtle). this is the death of intersectionality. apparently you can't be two things at once. how can have male privilege, if not be cis white man with red politics?? checkmate, women

saying this once: men of all kinds, most of whom experience at least one axis of marginalization, all experience male privilege. additionally, it is not only possible but common for transmasculine people and non-passing trans men to be read & reacted to according to the social scripts that are traditionally reserved for men, and this is not automatically or even usually dependent on their being stealth, or read as cis. anyone who tells you different is terrified that they're going to start being held accountable for their behavior in queer and mixed spaces to which they feel defensively entitled.

---

Within a year a man (so-called), young, nervous, and ex-military, appeared before the Institute with a loaded revolver in one pocket, an overdose of morphine in the other, and elaborate plans to splash her brains on the clinic wall after doctors declined her medical castration. (Suicide was the greatest interwar German art, whose perfection measured in flamboyance; the soul of the new German democracy, raked with war debt and its imputation of guilt, played out in miniature by the will to life of its every civilian.) To her surprise the doctors accepted, foiling her glamorous death. On June 21, 1920, under referral by Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, after extended psychoanalysis from Dr. Arthur Kronfeld, by the hand of Dr. Richard Mühsam – Jews, all three – she received a bilateral orchiectomy.

[...]

Despite all this motive, Dick Mühsam reported, “I could not bring myself to amputate the penis.” Having refused a different patient orchiectomy the prior year, Richard was often a surgeon who could not bring himself to. Arthur, for his part, ran a mean conversion therapy spiced with the new Freudian science, which director Hirschfeld despised; one employee recalled Magnus’s “absolutely personal animosity toward the Professor Kr[onfeld]… He instinctively rejected everything from Kr.’s sphere of activity.” Even Magnus, our champion against psychic conversion, held his early doubts:

“At first I had strongly opposed these [surgical] methods, which I considered disastrous to wellbeing and otherwise deemed unnecessary… but the more I studied these individuals, I realized some were ready to commit suicide in the event their wish for sexual transformation went unsatisfied. So I told myself, I must surrender my hesitation.”

So this once, in compromise, the patient’s phallus was merely “sheathed,” stripped to its columns of raw tissue and guided skinlessly through the body down a surgical canal at the perineum. Strange and painful internal erections followed. Little wonder this “transvestite masturbator,” as her surgeon named her, swore off transvestism and requested detransitional surgery four months later. Yet the Institute’s mission had executed nonetheless: the patient was now reporting in ravenous for life, well-adjusted to castration, a Sexualneurotiker no more! She, or he, had learned to regularly leave the house, then leave the whole damned country, writing from abroad to Dick their only words: “Health’s good. I am at peace with myself, absolutely.”

It would fall to other women of the Institute, dismissively labeled “Hirschfeld’s transvestites,” to receive a vagina, the enduring surgical invention of early trans clinical care. They decided this was possible after seeing the moving pictures. Dora Richter, at least, made appointment with Magnus already familiar with The Steinach Film, an hour-long advertisement from 1922 for a new surgical procedure so deliriously popular it became common all through that decade, on encountering a spry German man, to gossip of the monkey testicle presumed implanted in his abdomen: “He’s been steinached!” This procedure, the film announced, was a “solution” to “the ancient dream of eternal youth.” Such propaganda of rejuvenation, of rebirth and virilization, answered fears of impotent and demilitarized German men.

[...]

More successful, more wealthy, more public than the Institute’s German girls, images of Lili’s body circulated on many news rags abroad. Then, an image of her mind circulated in a 1931 literary biography under the pseudonym Lili Elbe. It is an egocentric text, a defense of Lili and Lili alone. On visit to the Institute she experienced, for the first time, a room full of other trans people: “The manner in which they were conversing disgusted him [sic]; their movements, their voices, the way in which they were attired, produced a feeling of nausea.” This was no editorial flourish. “It did not suit the painter to be compared to little Ms. Dora – a maid!” recalled Ellen Bækgaard, a feminist collaborator with Magnus on sexual reform. “He [sic] did not like the Institute and they knew that down there.” The feeling was mutual and lifelong, with Charlotte sneering in her recollections, “She was a sissy boy,” then invoking the figure of the gay flâneur, “always roaming about the streets.” “Lili Elbe was very unhappy. So she went off with some little gay boy. Very stupid of her. Her former wife was also very stupid, to publish their story.”

[...]

In 1929, Friedrich published his preferred collaborator, “the transvestite named Käthe Karl,” writing of a “group that cannot be addressed as transvestites, though they don the clothes of the opposite sex.”

“They don’t do it out of inner need, but to do dirty business in clothing. I mean those hustlers who offer themselves up as prostitutes in women’s dress. They are mostly normal males, and morally inferior to their female counterparts. We reject all community with them, because the nature of their behavior is dangerous to other, real transvestites.”

[...]

If the Weimar Republic was relatively lax about prostitution, and relatively lax about homosexuality, it was increasingly punitive at their confluence. The German Criminal Code recorded, “Male prostitution must – on this there is universal agreement – be opposed by all means… it is responsible for all the serious harm of same-sex fornication in the first place.” The transvestite sex worker, assumed both most deceptive and most visible, emerged as the paradigmatic subject irreconcilable with the sexuality of a nominally liberal Republic.

[...]

If we end our critique of Berlin’s trans clinic, the first in the world, with a memory of Berlin’s trans sex workers, it is for this reason. Underserved by all but the most radical doctors, dually created by liberal financial precarity and incarcerated by liberal rule, it was they who were foremost targets among trans people for extermination under the Nazi program. Charlotte escaped; Toni escaped; poorer Dora’s fate is unknown, but Charlotte claimed, in a comforting idyll, that years later she used cooking skills honed throughout her time at the Institute to open a restaurant in her rural hometown. Ossi Gades, who worked as dinner escort at Eldorado – she did not escape. Caught outside in women’s clothes twice by Gestapo, she hanged herself in Plotzensee Prison to avoid deportation to labor camps. That is but one example.

[...]

Despite the Institute for Sexual Science’s socialist, even communist tendency, whatever tepid liberalism it absorbed through its governing body made it suicidal as well. Its project for so-called “sexual intermediaries,” to make us social creatures, was split between the disciplinary task of reconciling transgender subjects to the State, and the reformist task of reconciling the State to its transgender subjects. By this tactical split it could stand for neither, and neither came to pass. There is no greater reminder of this failed reconciliation with the Weimar Republic than the Nazi state which freely succeeded it, and there is no greater reminder of the failure of the Institute than the label of the small, black, triangular patches that state assigned in its death camps to some of its trans women, but more of its sex workers: “Asocial.”

---

26 March 2025

In a statement provided through her attorney, community activists said that Ozturk was “ambushed” by ICE agents on the way to an Iftar dinner with friends after leaving her apartment. Neighbors reported that unmarked cars had allegedly been surveilling the location for two days before apprehending her on the street, the statement said. Community activists said they did not know yet where Ozturk was being detained.

In an email statement sent to the Tufts community Tuesday night, Tufts University President Sunil Kumar said the school received reports that the student was taken into custody outside an off-campus apartment building in Somerville, though the email did not identify Ozturk by name.

…

Ozturk does not appear to be a leading figure of the Pro-Palestinian protest movement at Tufts. But according to Ozturk’s attorney, the student’s photo and other identifying information were recently posted on Canary Mission, a website that documents individuals and organizations it considers to be antisemitic. Pro-Palestinian protesters say the site has doxxed and targeted them.

In the videos released on Wednesday, Ozturk is seen walking on the street in daylight when six plainclothes officers approach her, forcibly take her phone and backpack, and place her in handcuffs. The officials, some with badges around their neck, all have their faces covered in the video.

“Is this a kidnapping?” asks a bystander, who appeared to be recording the arrest.

The recorded footage of Ozturk’s arrest began circulating on X, formerly Twitter.

In separate security camera footage, released by local television station WCVB, the agents can be heard responding: “We’re the police.”

The bystander can be heard saying: “You don’t look like it. Why are you hiding your faces?”

Thirty-year-old Ozturk was detained on Tuesday as she left her home in Somerville, Massachusetts, on the outskirts of Boston, on her way to break her Ramadan fast with friends.

“It looked like a kidnapping,” said Michael Mathis, a 32-year-old software engineer whose surveillance camera picked up the footage of the arrest. “They approach her and start grabbing her, with their faces covered. They’re covering their faces. They’re in unmarked vehicles.”

This is under bipartisan agreement ofc.

But do they confused for a trans woman at the doctor’s office? On their drivers license? In their queer friend group? In the cop car? In a courtroom? In a prison cell?

I’m sure it’s painful for people to see you and think you’re a trans woman some of time, unlike trans women who are seen as trans women all of the time.