#this is about trans men having their manhood policed

[ablueberryblogs]

I don't know what trans man need to hear this but you're allowed to be angry. It doesn't make you evil. You are allowed to experience all possible emotions without apology and still be a good man.

*this is about trans men specifically, do not derail. You are free to make your own post*

#ftm #trans man #trans rights #transandrophobia #anti transmasculinity #this is about trans men having their manhood policed #all the people expressing themselves and saying thank you in the rbs i see you and i love you #trans liberation #do not derail #gender essentialism #bioessentialism #THIS IS ABOUT TRANS MEN DO NOT DERAIL

[doberbutts]

The thing is that, like most trans men I know, I’m more than willing to discuss my relationship with male privilege and manhood regarding the ways I’ve seen a direct benefit on my life.

I work a woman-dominated, and let’s be real an afab-dominated, job. When a known misogynist client- who has been scolded multiple times for his behavior heckles and hassles the women who work there to the point where multiple coworkers refuse to be in the same room as him- glances at me and then looks away and chooses a different target, I know why. It’s because he saw my beard and my moustache and my generally male appearance and decided that it would be far too gay to engage in that behavior with me.

But if I talk about this relationship, then you also need to listen when I say that exact same client treated me exactly the same way he treats the female staff when I was on the phone with him just a week prior, because he heard my voice and decided for me that I was a woman he was going to treat poorly.

If I talk about this relationship, then you need to listen when I say that people have called the police to report a violent black man was threatening them when all I was doing was existing in an area, an area that I have existed in as a black woman and not had people try to get the police to kill me.

If I talk about this relationship, then you need to listen when I say that I experienced terrible antiblack racism as a direct result of being one of three black girls in my entire school system, and that it did not magically get better the moment I realized I was transgender at 13 nor did the misogynistic part of the abuse suddenly stop affecting me or my mental health.

If I talk about this relationship, you need to listen when I say that being pulled over by the police due to a broken headlight takes a very different tone now that I am largely passing in my day-to-day life, and what used to be “let off with a warning” has now become “tickets and points”.

And if you are not ready to listen, then I am not willing to have this discussion, because by focusing only on one part of the equation you ignore the entire rest of my existence.

[genderkoolaid]

hello! i was wondering your take on uh. this.

These kinds of comments have been talked about a lot & the general consensus is that they are Not Great

It's basically the model minority mindset put on trans men. You have a wildly polarized view on gender, but trans men are okay because they're The Good Ones. I know a lot of people's criticisms are that this is degendering & making trans men out to be not real men, and I agree, but it's also telling trans men that their gender is bad and hated by the people around them, and that they are only barely saved because of the idea that being trans makes them more palatable for cis women.

It's trying to marry both essentialist views on gender and pro-trans politics, but the result is that trans men have to play a balancing game of "how much of a man am I allowed to be before I make the people around me uncomfortable?" It allows people to constantly tug around trans men by the leash of "ugh you're being too much like a man right now :/" whenever a trans man gets too emotional, or talks to much, or has an issue with how he is being treated, or doesn't want to do something traditionally feminine, or even dresses typically masculine. It seems positive on it's surface, but it actually serves as a way for people to police trans men & their marginalized manhood by threatening to take way their status as The Exception if they act out of line.

#m. #ask box #examples of transandrophobia

[hyperlexichypatia]

This post reminded me of it, but my partner has observed that in contemporary gender discourse, maleness is so linked to adulthood and femaleness is so linked to childhood, that there are no "boys" or "women," only "men" and "girls."

This isn't exactly new -- for as long as patriarchy has existed, women have been infantilized, and "adult woman" has been treated as something of an oxymoron. Hegemonic beauty standards for women emphasize youthfulness, if not actual neoteny, and older women are considered "too old" to be attractive without ever quite being old enough to make their own decisions. There may be cultural allowances for the occasional older "wise woman," but a "wise woman" is always dangerously close to being a madwoman, or a witch. No matter how wise a woman is, she is never quite a rational agent. As Hanna K put it, "as a woman you're always either too young or too old for things, because the perfect age is when you're a man."

But the framing of underage boys as "men" has shifted, depending on popular conceptualizations of childhood and gender roles. Sometimes children of any gender are essentially feminized and grouped with women (the entire framing of "women and children" as a category). In the U.S. in the 21st century, the rise of men's rights and aggressively sexist ideology has correlated with an increased emphasis on little boys as "men" -- thus slogans like "Teach your son to be a man before his teacher teaches him to be a woman."

Of course, thanks to ageism and patriarchy (which literally means, not "rule by men," but "rule by fathers"), boys don't get any of the social benefits of being considered "men." They don't get to vote, make their own medical decisions, or have any of their own adult rights. They might have a little more childhood freedom than girls, if they're presumed to be sturdier and less vulnerable to "predators," but, for the most part, being considered "men" as young boys doesn't really get boys any more access to adult rights. What it does get them is aggressively gender-policed, often with violence. A little boy being "a man" means that he's not allowed to wear colors, have feelings, or experience the developmental stages of childhood.

This shifts in young adulthood, as boys forced into the role of "manhood" become actual men. As I've written about, I believe the trend of considering young adults "children" is harmful to everyone, but primarily to young women, young queer and trans people, and young disabled people. Abled, cisgender, heterosexual young men are rarely denied the rights and autonomy of adulthood due to "brain maturity."

What's particularly interesting is that, because transphobes misgender trans people as their birth-assigned genders, they constantly frame trans girls as "men" and trans men as "girls." A 10 year old trans girl on her elementary school soccer team is a "MAN using MAN STRENGTH on helpless GIRLS," while a 40 year old trans man is a "Poor confused little girl." Anyone assigned male at birth is born a scary, intimidating adult, while anyone female assigned at birth never becomes old enough to make xyr own decisions.

Feminist responses have also really fluctuated. Occasionally, feminists have played into the idea of little boys as "men," especially in trans-exclusionary rhetoric, or in one notorious case where members of a women's separatist compound were warned about "a man" who turned out to be a 6-month-old infant. There's periodic discourse around "Empowering our girls" or "Raising our boys with gentle masculinity," but for the most part, my problem with mainstream feminist rhetoric in general is that it tends to frame children solely as a labor imposed on women by men, not as subjects (and specifically, as an oppressed class) at all.

Second-wave feminists pushed back hard on calling adult women "girls" -- but they didn't necessarily view "women" as capable of autonomous decision-making, either. Adult women were women, but they might still need to be protected from their own false consciousness. As laws in the U.S., around medical privacy and autonomy, like HIPAA, started more firmly linking the concepts of autonomy with legal adulthood, and fixing the age of majority at 18, third-wave feminists embraced referring to women as "girls." Sometimes this was in an intentionally empowering way ("girl power," "girl boss"), which also served to shield women (mostly white, mostly bourgeois/wealthy) from criticism of their participation in racism and capitalism. But it also served to reinforce the narrative of women as "girls" needing to be protected from "men" (and their own choices).

I'm still hoping for a feminist politic that is pro-child, pro-youth, pro-disability, pro-autonomy, pro-equality, that rejects the infantilization of women, the adultification of boys, the objectification of children, the misgendering of trans people, and the imposition of gender roles.

#youth rights #ageism #feminism #sexism #intersectionality #capitalism #body autonomy #bodily autonomy

[transmascissues]

building off of this post, people love to say that “trans men want to keep going into in women’s spaces after they transition because they just want to have the best of both worlds!” but in my experience, there are four main reasons that a trans man might use a “women’s space” after they transition:

it’s an important resource that’s being arbitrarily gendered and we need to use it regardless of which gender is “supposed to” be using it.

it’s a public facility where we’d be significantly less safe in the men’s version and we have to choose our safety over our desire to not be misgendered.

it’s a social space that we’ve been in since before we transitioned and we don’t want to suddenly be cut off from our friends and support system.

the trans man in question is multigender and is also a woman, or maintains some other kind of connection to womanhood alongside their manhood.

do any of those sound like “evil men rubbing our dirty little hands together making plans for how we’re going to get male privilege without losing access to women’s spaces” to you? they sure don’t to me!

i think it’s pretty reasonable that we want to transition without losing the ability to access the resources we need, keep ourselves safe, keep up the relationships we’ve built, and express all facets of who we are. all of those are really, like, pretty basic parts of having good life and we shouldn’t be expected to give them up when we transition.

and honestly, if you claim to care about trans people, you should not be so attached to the gendering of these spaces that you’re willing to deny trans men those things for the sake of upholding gender restrictions. anyone who prioritizes the sanctity of gender segregated spaces over the safety, health, and well-being of trans men is a fucking transphobe. (yes, even if you’re trans yourself.)

and that’s what really gets me about all of this — the vehemence with which people are willing to defend those spaces being entirely and inflexibly gendered, despite how enforcement of gendered spaces has hurt trans people time and time again. gendered spaces have literally always been set up in ways that force trans people to break the rules; some trans men might break those rules in ways that don’t make sense to you, but that doesn’t mean it’s wrong for us to do so! it just means you might feel weird about it and that’s okay, discomfort won’t kill you.

“but using women’s spaces after transitioning to male defeats the purpose of transitioning! the whole point of transitioning is to be able to live as a man!”

and who are you to tell trans men what the point of our transitions should be? what if the purpose of us transitioning is just to live the happiest and most fulfilled life possible, and forcing ourselves into unsafe spaces or denying ourselves access to important resources or cutting ourselves off from important people in our lives or pushing down the more complex parts of our genders would “defeat the purpose of transitioning” for us? what if being able to go where cis men go is just one part of a much bigger journey, not the end goal?

if you really want to talk about “defeating the purpose,” let’s talk about how policing which gendered spaces trans men can access defeats the purpose of trying to stop cis people from policing which gendered spaces trans people can access, because it allows the policing of trans people in gendered spaces to continue in some form instead of eliminating it altogether. let’s talk about how using “evil men invading women’s spaces” rhetoric against trans men defeats the purpose of trying to stop cis people from using it against trans women, because it allows the rhetoric to continue in some form instead of eliminating it altogether.

the point of saying “let people decide which gendered space is right for them” isn’t to make sure everyone uses the one aligned with their “true gender,” it’s to let people do what’s best for them without punishing them for their choice. sometimes the best choice is one that seems wrong from the outside, and you need to learn to live with that.

i just think we as a community need to be more hostile toward people who think upholding the sanctity of a gendered space is more important than giving trans people the freedom to move through the world without being punished for existing in those gendered spaces. that kind of thinking is fucking dangerous and it’s weird as hell that some of y’all are so comfortable with it being directed at us.

moral of the story: stop giving so much of a shit about where a trans man decides to piss or see a doctor or hang out or whatever else. even if you think he doesn’t belong there, he probably has a good reason to be there anyway, and that reason is frankly none of your damn business.

#im SO tired of this bro #like just shut up why are you so worried about this #i promise the big bad trans men arent here to hurt you. were just living our fucking lives #our mere presence is not a threat to you any more than yours is a threat to us #and even if you dont give a shit about us. this thinking leaves the door wide open for transmisogyny to join the party #so like. if you wont shut up for our sake do it for the trans women&fems who also get fucked over in the end #transandrophobia #transandromisia #transmisandry #virilmisia #virilphobia #anti transmasculinity #transmascphobia #trans men #transmascs

[st-dionysus]

Note from an angry trans man.

Of course, I’m angry. Who wouldn’t be. Dead children, dead teachers, a trans man to blame and the world ready to blame every single one of us instead of a single person -- instead of mental illness -- instead of guns -- instead of all the horrors that surround us. Eager to blame our HRT, our transitioning, our existence. Trans sisters who should be standing up against the abuse and shame put on their brothers – who instead decide to reject us, to blame us for anti-trans legislation, to group us all with Aiden Hale. To further stigmatize testosterone and trans-manhood. To act as though we are the harbinger of doom.

Of course, I’m angry. Dead trans people fill the news and wiki articles. Trans men among the corpses, but we don’t say their names. The bodies of FTM children left on the road, genitals mutilated, and newspapers printed with the wrong name and pronouns. Misgendered in death. Misgendered in rape, assault, and murder statistics. Misgendered in the publication of his horrific crime.

Of course, I’m angry. One of my brothers killed six people – three children and three adults. “Police then killed 28-year-old shooter Audrey Aiden Hale, who investigators said left behind a manifesto and detailed maps about how to carry out the attack. Law enforcement officials have not shared details about a suspected motive.”

Of course, I’m angry. The Nashville shooting was the 128th US mass shooting this year. There were 127 other mass shootings this year (and it’s only the end of March), most of which we did not talk about, most of which we did not address. More than 348,000 students have experienced gun violence at school since Columbine. There has been 89 school shooting incidents in the USA so far in 2023.

I want to rip something apart with my hands. I want to scream. I want to bleed. There is rage in my body, and it’s locked away behind tears and prayers. I consider cutting for the first time in over a year. I think about drinking myself to death or blowing my brains out in protest, but I don’t want to leave my cat alone, I don’t want my friends to cry about me, or to leave my lover heart-broken. I don’t want to be another dead trans man. I don’t want to be another name on the list of FTMs that have killed themselves. I’m already a part of the 50% of the FTM population who has tried at least once, I don’t want to try again. More than that, I don’t want my deadname to be the name I die with. I don't want to be seen as a dead woman.

I watch people die every day. I fear the deaths of my grade-school siblings. I fear the death of my loved ones. I fear walking into a gay bar and being carried out in a body bag.

Of course, I’m angry. It must be the testosterone.

#Saint Speaks #Death mention #nashville shooting #aiden hale #child death #gun violence #transphobia #transandrophobia #testosterone is not evil #ask to tag #self harm

[rthko]

Stirring the pot and disabling reblogs:

Questions for the "cis gay men are the weak link of the community" people:

-What does it mean for the gay men who have been beaten, disowned, fired, incarcerated and raped that somewhere, in far away cities and higher tax brackets, gay men seem to be doing pretty well?

-Why do the wealthiest and whitest members of the gay male community define it in its entirety, and why do so many attempts to critique this only reify the assumption?

-Is it time to address similar disparities within other queer subgroups?

-Was framing kink at pride as "cis gay male entitlement" worth igniting a sex panic that hurt trans people the most?

-Why is transphobia among cis gay men a perennial issue (not untrue) but transphobia among cis lesbians just a mean stereotype to be rebuked?

-Can the apparent triumph of a domestic, academic notion of lesbianism over a working class bar culture be chalked up to assimilation too?

-If gay men are too focused on frivolous things like sex instead of serious things like hating cops, why do you think queers have had such an adversarial relationship with the police?

-Does adding "TERFs don't interact" to your takes on how drag and effeminacy are repulsive and a mockery of women cancel it out?

-Who do fem and genderfluid gay men turn to when they are seen as the ugly ducklings in both broader queer culture and homosocial gay male culture?

-What categories do the gender deviants get grandfathered into when "gay" becomes the domain of uncomplicated, assimilated manhood?

-What service does it do to trans pleasure seekers and leatherdykes to regard promiscuity as "gay male behavior?"

-Why does "punching up" so often play out as going for the easiest targets?

-How can anyone who mocks substance addiction and HIV status make any pretense of "radical intra community critique?"

-Who wins in debates of who is queer enough?

-Why is the question of "gay versus queer" no longer about political tendencies but about identity alone?

-Are people who spend their whole lives online in any position to say "out of the bars and into the streets?"

-Do you ever get tired of tweeting about how Frankie Grande is personally oppressing you? Do you ever miss the feeling of the sun on your face?

[lettucedloophole]

the idea that trans men gain privilege upon transitioning seems to mirror the idea that trans women have male privilege before transitioning. the transmasc-transfem dynamic seems very much like swapping places as inadequate women to inadequate men, and vice versa for trans women.

there's still the truth that trans men are moving towards a position treated better than women, but being inadequate at that position by virtue of transness/queerness makes the upward mobility a lie. the circumstances under which you would experience male privilege are often surface level and don't outnumber the oppressions trans people face.

this is one of the way transmisogyny and anti-transmasculinity are connected, imo. for one example, trans women will be called predatory primarily out of denial of their gender & a hatred of queerness + gnc women, and though the brunt of this rhetoric falls upon trans women, it's also turned the other way when transphobes need to prevent trans men from public existence as well, so they're also predatory men invading women's spaces. same with bioessentialist rhetoric about testosterone-- it doesn't have to be logically consistent to be a conservative argument because bigotry is never logically consistent.

though the form of policing & violence for inadequate manhood & womanhood is different for trans men and trans women, due to the fact one spawns from an incongruence in gender and another in sex, i have to believe they would bear similarities as, You know, Sex is the Gendering of the Body

#transmisogyny #anti transmasculinity #trans inclusive radical feminism #male privilege #radical feminism #tirf

[rollercoasterwords]

I don’t have anyone else to ask, so here I am. What do you think about the term “boy lesbian” ? I just saw a TikTok where a person said they were a boy lesbian not a woman lesbian? I got the same vibe from that as when a lot of people on TikTok tried to say identifying as lesbian was excluding an it should be called non men loving non men?

well my short answer is that i think boy lesbians are cool + sexy + i wish they would all come over 2 my house so we could kiss w tongue <3 however i am sensing from ur message that this is perhaps a concept that u are a bit wary or skeptical about (? might be reading tone incorrectly but that is the vibe i'm getting lol) so i will put a longer answer under the cut:

so i feel like what you're asking when you say "what do you think about this" is essentially "do you think people should be able to call themselves 'boy lesbians'" which. is a source of online discourse that i typically try to avoid because i think discourse about who's "allowed" to identify a certain way in the queer community is basically pointless and does more harm than good. like, at the end of the day, there's really no use in policing who's "allowed" to call themselves what, because people can literally identify themselves however they want and you can't control that, because identity is an inherently personal and subjective experience. and so anytime people do start trying to strictly police identity + draw clear boundaries around who's "allowed" to use which labels, usually the result is just alienating and ostracizing other queer people who we should be in community with, as we share overlapping political struggles.

but. looking specifically at the term "boy lesbian" (and terms like it). i know a lot of people immediately get up in arms going "the whole point of lesbian is that there's NO BOYS!!!!!" but. personally i do not think that's true. every label currently used by the queer community is historically and contextually specific; most labels like 'gay' 'lesbian' and 'trans' are umbrella terms that include broad and varied communities of people who do not all share exactly the same identities or experiences. and the label 'lesbian' as an umbrella term has not always been used + conceptualized historically the way it's used today; it has also not always been 'exclusively women who aren't attracted to men' or whatever other definition people try to claim. many lesbians, especially gender nonconforming lesbians, have complex + nuanced + fraught relationships to gender + womanhood, and there has specifically always been a lot of overlap in (using today's terms) transmasculine and lesbian communities. leslie feinberg's stone butch blues comes immediately to mind as one example of lesbian experience that does not align simply or perfectly with womanhood and is much more nebulously transmasculine. at the end of the day, it's impossible to draw strict definitional boundaries around umbrella terms like "lesbian," because to do so will always inevitably fail to account for certain people who do identify with the term--and what right does anyone have to tell someone else that their personal experience of identity isn't "allowed?"

like - defining lesbianism as either centered around womanhood or positioned against manhood both inevitably devolve into gender essentialism. if you say "lesbians are women who love women," that requires you to provide a strict definition of "woman," something that is essentially impossible without resorting to gender essentialism. if you say "lesbians are nonmen who love nonmen," then you run into the same problem with defining "men." this is because both "men" and "women" are also historically + contextually specific umbrella terms used to define social categories of people, and not some sort of pre-existing inherent natural identities.

so then you might be saying--but wait a second, if all these labels are so fluid and nonspecific and personally defined, then what's the use of labeling anything!!! aren't you just saying that none of it means anything?!

no, not at all! what i'm saying here is that trying to draw strict boundaries around labels that have to do with gender + sexuality is at best pointless and at worst harmful, because gender and sexuality are inherently personal experiences and you can't police someone's own sense of self, nor should you try to. but there are three areas where labels are useful and do matter:

1 - personal value

labels are useful for individuals trying to understand themselves and how they relate to the world. people can find comfort or joy or simple understanding by labeling themselves in relation to the world around them; this sense of labeling is deeply personal and up to each individual in terms of how/to what extent they want to partake in it

2 - community

umbrella terms like "woman" "lesbian" "man" "trans" etc are all useful in socially specific contexts for identifying shared experiences + building community. if i say to someone "i'm a lesbian," and they say "oh i'm a lesbian too," i'm not going to assume that we have the exact same experiences of gender + sexuality that fit some made-up set of rules, but i am going to recognize that this person has certain experiences which overlap with my own, and we can build a community around those experiences. this is the way that basically any label works in a social context--if i say "i'm american" and someone else says "oh me too," i wouldn't just assume that we've had the exact same "american" experiences, because america is a vast country with a huge diversity of people + lifestyles + environments etc etc, y'know? social labels like these are useful for identifying broad overlap in experiences, but because they encompass such broad groups of people it's silly to try and make strict rules about who's "allowed" in the group--especially if your goal is to build community

3 - identifying + naming political struggles + oppression

this follows along the same lines as point 2 -- basically, most queer labels function as umbrella terms meant to bring together people of varied experiences + backgrounds who share common sites of oppression + common political struggles. like, historically, this has been the center of queer community-building--the fact that we are all being oppressed by the same people in overlapping ways. when i tell you "i'm a lesbian," that sentence does not tell you all that much about my own, individual, personal experience of gender. but it does tell you a lot about how i am politically positioned in the world and the kinds of political struggles i might face, and that's what makes that label so socially meaningful. like, the purpose of these labels is not to give everybody insight to the nuances of personal identity; it's to build community + identify our shared struggles with each other.

and i think one reason this discourse gets so heated in online spaces is that people get really angry about the idea of, like, "well what if someone calls themself a lesbian to infiltrate lesbian spaces!!!" which. i mean a lot of that fearmongering is rooted in transphobia quite honestly, but. at the end of the day, if someone is identifying themself as a lesbian, i'm going to assume that they have a good personal reason for doing so, and what matters to me will be knowing that we share a political struggle. i trust that if i encounter someone who's just trolling and "pretending" to be a lesbian or whatever i'll be able to recognize it and just....choose not to interact with that person. but honestly i don't even really think that actually happens--like i said, i think a lot of the fear that drives people to try and create strict definitional boundaries around the term "lesbian" is rooted in transphobia.

and i think something else driving a lot of this online discourse surrounding queer labels is like....this emphasis on identity labels as primarily a personal identifier rather than identity labels as primarily a community-building tool. like, there seems to be an emphasis particularly in online spaces + amongst certain groups of queer people to really want to micromanage identity + create specific rules + definition for each label so that, like, you're getting as much personal information as possible about someone who tells you that label, because you know they're following these detailed rules. but like. a) you truly are not entitled to personal information about anyone's individual experience of gender and/or sexuality and b) that's not the point of these labels!!!!! like i promise you it is so much more important to just accept that these are umbrella terms with nebulous boundaries so that you can take a step back and evaluate the social context in which they're being used in order to then build community. it is okay if there aren't strict rules and definitions! what matters more is being able to look at a specific contexts + the way a broad term can be applied differently in those specific contexts.

anyway. last thing i will say to this whole point is that i personally am someone who identifies to a certain extent with terms like boy lesbian or boydyke, in that my own sense of gender is much more centered around dyke than it is womanhood and i don't necessarily experience lesbianism as something centered around women/womanhood. my lesbianism feels more closely tied to gendernonconformity, genderqueerness, and overlaps a lot with experiences i've heard transmasculine people speak about. but lesbianism is still central to my identity, as i am politically positioned in society as a lesbian and it is the best umbrella term to give people a sense of my identity at a glance, and thus generally the best term for me to position myself within queer spaces + to seek out community. so i understand on a personal level why people might identify as a 'boy lesbian,' and hopefully from this personal anecdote you can understand why someone might too! if u have any questions or anything feel free to shoot me another message; i'm trying to cover a lot of ground in this response so i didn't fully expand on like. every single point bc that would have taken forever lol

#ask #ranting and raving #also this whole response is premised on like. eschewing gender essentialism. so if u believe in gender essentialism then obviously #u will disagree lol #but i'm assuming we're on the same page abt gender being a social construct if u are following this blog xoxo

[moonshinedyke]

I'm a black trans intersex butch lesbian who has hung out in a lot of queer spaces, especially lesbian centric spaces. While the ones I've hung out in have been mostly inclusive, there's sometimes some cis white lesbians who view me as a threat that should be kicked out of lesbian spaces. I am not a man, but strangely enough, I'm being treated like one by these people because I'm black, trans, and present masculinely.

Where am I going with this?

The way that the lesbian label is policed so heavily in online spaces is horrifying. It's horrifying to see the amount of people who are absolutely obsessed with keeping the lesbian label "pure and untainted." It's an insult to lesbian history, the way you all get mad when lesbians have fucked up genders or are gender nonconforming. It's an insult to lesbian history, the way that you all go after any lesbians who have a connection to things commonly associated with manhood.

You see, it doesn't matter that you don't mean masculine lesbians or androgynous lesbians or transgender/nonbinary/multigender lesbians or black lesbians or fat lesbians when you're obsessed with purging all hints of manhood from lesbian spaces. It doesn't matter what you don't mean, what matters is that you're following the same line of thought as the people who do mean all those lesbians when they talk about purging manhood from lesbian spaces. You might see those people as lesbians, but the next person over saying the exact same thing as you doesn't.

When I see you all obsessing over gatekeeping all aspects of manhood from lesbian spaces, I see a cis fem white woman at a lesbian meetup telling me that I don't belong there because I'm a man. When I explain that I'm not a man, she says that I'm "too close" to being a man for her comfort. How are you actually going to tell that someone's a man invading those spaces if they don't tell you that? Are you going to call a butch who presents too masculinely a man? Are you going to tell a multigender girl who likes girls that they're not a lesbian just because they also happen to be a boy? Are you going to start trying to gatekeep everyone who isn't a skinny white fem from lesbian spaces? Where does your gatekeeping actually end?

And don't even get me started on the attraction gatekeeping, because it's literally just regurgitated gold star lesbian shit. You're hurting a lot of people with your lesbian separatist garbage. You're hurting bi people by defending an ideology that violently threatened so many of them, you're hurting lesbian sex workers who have had to have sex with men in order to feed themselves for another week, you're hurting trans people by saying the exact same things that TERFs say, you're hurting black, two-spirit, nonbinary, and multigender people with your binarist "nonmen" garbage, and so on.

TL;DR: Your obsession with gatekeeping the lesbian label is doing nothing to help lesbians and everything to harm the most vulnerable and most commonly erased lesbians. Lesbian gatekeeping is just lesbophobia.

#lesbophobia #transphobia #butchphobia #biphobia #racism #exorsexism #intersexism #lesbian gatekeeping

[pezpenser205]

no other identity is policed as hard online as lesbians are and i think its radfem ideology and ironically, misogyny that causes it. bi men and gay people arent interrogated about their sexuality nearly as much as lesbians and bi women or forced nearly as hard into fitting their labels exactly, and even when they do get policed online the backlash when theyre "out of line" is way less severe.

i have yet to see a mspec gay blocklist anywhere thats actually gained traction or anyone get mad at someone directly for being an mspec gay, but ive been featured on 3 mspec lesbian/lesboy blocklists and still get harassed from those blocklists despite changing my username. this is not a fucking coincidence and im not gonna be gaslit into thinking its just people wanting to keep lesbians safe.

you cant convince me that the lazer focus on making lesbianism pure and free of the evil masculine touch of a man online Is Not directly linked to radfems and lesbian separatists that think womanhood is something pure that needs to be protected from being destroyed by the filth that is overt sexuality and aggression associated with manhood and masculinity, as opposed to the pure sensuality of sapphic love tainted, and obviously lesbian always means woman because nonbinary lesbians are just lite women anyway, so butch and masc lesbians are allowed as long as they openly proclaim theyre still women and not trans men even if they experience dysphoria from being called that.

#op #discourse #mspec lesbian

[transvarmint]

On Transandrophobia and Related Issues

How we define Transandrophobia:

Transandrophobia describes the intersection of transphobia, misogyny, and the marginalization of non-hegemonic masculinity & manhood (that is primarily targeted at transmasculine individuals).

Anyone, regardless of birth assignment, gender identity, gender presentation, etc, can experience transandrophobia at any point. However, it is primarily targeted as transmasculine people and adjacent groups.

Similarly, transmisogyny is the intersection of transphobia and misogyny that is primarily targeted at transfeminine individuals and adjacent groups. It can be experienced by anyone, but it is largely targeted towards transfems.

The same goes for exorsexism (oppression directed at nonbinary people) and intersexism (oppression directed at intersex people).

[More talking points below the cut].

"How are manhood and masculinity marginalized under the Patriarchy?"

Any expressions of manhood and masculinity that do not strictly adhere to white, Christian, colonialist, abled, cisheteronormative, allonormative, (+etc) standards can be harshly marginalized under the Patriarchy.

This is because for the Patriarchy to function, rigid enforcement of these standards is mandatory. Any sort of subversion of the status quo must be punished to maintain White Christian Hegemony. There is no room for self-expression, because that is a challenge to the Patriarchy, and may allow room for other people to challenge it as well.

Some examples of marginalized masculinity include Black men, whose manhood is demonized. They are often viewed as inherently violent or aggressive, especially if they display masculine qualities. This often results in police violence, which is usually justified with the fear that police felt simply by being in the presence of a Black man.

Disabled men, conversely, often experience having their masculinity entirely diminished. This relates to the phenomenon of "degendering" in which those who do not fit into certain standards will have their ability to access manhood entirely revoked.

As for transgender men and transmasuline people, our entire experiences of manhood and masculinity are marginalized. The fact that we express these things at all is a slight against the patriarchy, and our masculinity is transgressive by default.

"But trans men have male privilege"

Having male privilege means that one benefits from misogyny on both an interpersonal and systemic level. Because trans men are unilaterally oppressed by misogyny, this means that we cannot benefit from male privilege, regardless of how well we pass.

Some trans men who pass may receive interpersonal male privilege (i.e. being treated with more respect by strangers), but this is extremely conditional. It is conditional upon staying closeted and that nobody ever finds out you are trans. Because the moment that happens, the supposed "privilege" evaporates, and he is now immediately subject to potential violence.

This is very similar to the argument about trans women experiencing male privilege. A trans women who stays closeted and attempts to adhere to patriarchal standards of manhood may receive conditional benefits, but she will always be oppressed by misogyny on a systemic level. So she does not actually benefit from male privilege systemically.

"Saying that trans men face misogyny is misgendering / it's only misdirected"

Saying that trans men face misogyny is a demonstrable fact, and it only appears to be misgendering because of the assumption that only women face misogyny.

However, trans men deal with misogyny on a regular basis, both interpersonally and systemically. Having our reproductive rights controlled is a key example of this, as even a trans man who passes is still impacted by anti-abortion laws and other reproductive restrictions.

It cannot be misdirected when we are the direct targets of it. People often see us as failed women who need to be corrected and put into line. They very much see and acknowledge us and are disgusted by us, and wish to use violence to correct us.

"Androphobia isn't real"

It is not "trans + androphobia" it is "transandro + phobia". As described above, it is the intersection of multiple things. Words do not just mean the literal definition of their roots. By the same logic, cissexism would mean sexism against cis people, rather than the assumption that everyone is cis.

And besides, marginalization of some forms of manhood and masculinity is very real, as elaborated above. The hatred and fear of our masculinity is an essential aspect of our oppression.

"Trans men oppress trans women / transandrophobia implies trans women oppress trans men."

Trans people cannot oppress each other (on the basis of being trans) as they do not have the systemic power to do so. There are no (or very, very few) trans people in positions of power that are creating and perpetuating the system structures used to oppress us.

Trans men also do not materially benefit from transmisogyny in any way. We do not gain anything from the oppression of trans women - and in fact, any attack on the trans community harms trans people as a whole.

Lateral aggression is absolutely a real thing within the trans community, but it comes from every part of the community, not just one group to another.

"What trans men face is just transphobia, not some special category"

Every trans person faces unique intersections of oppression based on the demographics they occupy.

The argument frequently made is that trans men only face oppression for being trans, and not for being men. This is false, and is incongruent with the experiences of many trans men. We are targeted specifically for being transmasculine / trans men. People notice our masculinity and manhood and are disgusted by it, and choose to use violence to suppress it. To say that people only hate us for being trans, is an attempt to separate us from our manhood / masculinity (which coincidentally, is exactly what transphobes do as well).

Also, the idea that gendered violence against trans men is "just" transphobia, while other types of transphobia are more specific, wrongly centers men's experiences as the default, and all others as deviations.

By creating a word to describe this specific type of transphobia, it now puts everyone on an equal playing field where no experience is treated as the default. Transphobia now becomes the umbrella term that trans people are unified in our fight against, and all the other more granular terms are useful labels to describe overlapping types of oppression.

#transandrophobia #transmascphobia #transmasculine #trans man #transmisandry

[genderkoolaid]

Hello! Non binary here. I'm trying to genuinely understand how saying bi lesbians are a thing are not harmful to the trans, lesbian and bi community. I saw some of the bi lesbians history and this label seems to be something they used to say to identify that they felt mostly attraction to women but could eventually like a man / people that liked men in the past but now go as lesbians. On the first example, Isn't it just bisexuality with a preference to women? and in the second, lesbians with comphet. I understand the need to use those labels in the past, but now it seems harmful to use bi lesbian because lesbians are not attracted men and bisexuals are not lesbians. I have also seen that the use of bi lesbian was a reactionary push to the TERF movement of excluding men from queer spaces as in a way to "purify" women

While someone in either of the groups you described might identify as a bi lesbian, that is certainly not the extent of bi lesbianism.

I think the problem emerges for many people because they are viewing the definitions of queer terms as objective descriptions we discovered. From this perspective, people used to use lesbian in a more expansive sense essentially because they didn't know any better. But I dislike that; our foreparents were not identifying how they did because they didn't know better, their constructions of gender and sexuality are just as valid. And it's important to understand why those definitions formed instead of going “well it's different now so stop it.”

I'm not sure if you are saying you've heard TERFs came up with the term bi lesbian. I wouldn't be surprised, since it's a fairly common rumor. But it's very wrong. To give a very general history, “bi lesbian” came about to describe people who identified with lesbianism– in the sense that they identified with being queer, having some personal relationship with womanhood and loved or desired women– who also were multisexual in some way. “Lesbian” emphasized your love/desire for women as an important part of your identity, and “bisexual” gave nuance to that, creating visibility for bi people within the community. The outrage against bi lesbians came from the same source as the hatred for trans lesbians (of all kinds): radical feminist beliefs in political lesbianism, the insistence that being a lesbian is a political choice to end all personal relationships with men & manhood.

The idea that “lesbians, universally, aren't attracted to men” largely comes out of this shift. You cannot separate the idea that “bi lesbians” don't/shouldn't exist and the legacy of transphobic radical feminism which encourage black-and-white thinking and hostility towards Bad Queers who dared to love or desire men, be men, dress like men, or fuck like men (anything from BDSM to using a strap-on). This divide is artificial and we do not need to just accept it. Bi lesbians are not the source of harm, the ideology that insists on their exclusion is. On top of this, in many physical queer communities bi lesbians & other people with complicated identities are very easily accepted; the idea that it's somehow impossible for these identities to be safely normalized is just queer conservatism.

There are many reasons someone might enjoy the bi lesbian label: personally, I'm multigender and using a single sexuality label doesn't accurately express my sexuality. A lot of times I see people who counter reasons for bi lesbian identity by saying “but that's just being a lesbian/bisexual!” which is another product of this black-and-white thinking. The idea that someone else with a similar experience using a different label than you– or someone with a different experience using the same label– is somehow a threat to your identity is very reminiscent of the way radical feminism relies on patriarchal ideas that everyone in a gender group must self-police that group to ensure homogeneity. Someone with a totally “normal” bisexual experience may still identify as a bi lesbian, or use both bisexual and lesbian in varying contexts, because they feel it accurately expresses their personal sexuality & relationship to queer communities.

There's famously an Alison Bechdel strip about a character being a bi lesbian, but I think my favorite piece of bi lesbian art is this poem by Dajenya. It's a very defiant and wholehearted response to anti-bi-lesbian sentiment and how it harms people within the community far more than bi lesbian identity does. this site is a collection of primary resources on bi lesbianism, including a few interviews from bi lesbians which might be helpful for you.

#m. #ask box

[mogai-sunflowers]

i believe trans men experience specific transphobia but some of y’all are fucking ridiculous the way you talk about it. it’s turned from “trans men experience transmasculine-specific oppression and we should talk about it” into “all men are oppressed for being men and women who distrust men are actually the problem” like WHAT? women’s safety and lives are more important than any man’s hurt feelings about being generalized. I can’t stand this community. y’all refuse to acknowledge that women are in fact an oppressed class. like y’all are more concerned with feeling valid online. y’all are responding to instances of real world misogynistic violence with “well sometimes I see anti-man discourse online and it makes me feel guilty so instead of unpacking that I’m going to tell you your oppression isn’t real” I’m so tired. shut up. trans men are oppressed for being trans men. yes. but manhood isn’t an oppressed class in and of itself and just because y’all have hurt feelings doesn’t mean all men are oppressed for being men.

like yeah I know “not all men” are rapists and misogynists. and most times I won’t generalize random strangers. but when I’m sitting alone and there’s a big group of guys near me, I don’t feel safe. I don’t feel safe in groups of cis men, even with other women. just because there’s a hypothetical possibility that some of them are stealth trans men or that they all could be good people, I don’t feel safe because of lived experiences and that doesn’t make me a bad person. hurt feelings doesn’t equal oppression. people saying they hate men online is not oppressing you and it’s not the serious social issue you think it is. women are not oppressing you by acknowledging our history with men. no you don’t deserve to feel bad for being a man but like. you also shouldn’t make your internalized shit other people’s problem. deal with it yourself instead of talking about how oppressed men are for being men.

genuinely like. the transandrophobia discussion used to be so valuable to me because it was about actual shit. Like medical discrimination, exclusion from shelters, SA and police violence, now I basically only see people talking about how they have hurt feelings from other women saying “men dni” or “I hate men”

#🌌written in the stars ; asks🌌 #tw discourse #discourse tw #rape tw #tw rape

[finalmoment]

there is a specific dynamic of gendered oppression that exists between cis women and trans people, especially trans men, that renders cis women saying something like "i hate all men, including trans men" incredibly suspect. cis women by and large consider themselves to be The Class That Is Oppressed On The Basis Of Gender - they lay claim to that identification, and accordingly term cis men the class that oppresses on the basis of gender. therefore, other classes that experience gender-based oppression - trans women, trans men, and nonbinary people - need to be seen as variations on cis women or in relation to them in order to have their access to the language and discussion of gendered oppression. the average ~progressive feminist~ cis woman might see trans women as having the same gender as herself, but being of a different sex, or she might conditionally term trans women male in order to delegitimize their oppression and valorize her own. but even if she's willing to consider trans women validly women (which she often isn't), that still doesn't mean she has to let go of her identification of women as The Gender-Oppressed Class. trans men make this impossible bc we resist identification with women, but we share all the same experiences as them and then some. a section of cis women square this by rejecting trans women from womanhood, reducing it down to 'sex based oppression' and become terfs. some cis women square it by turning to what i'm talking about, defining womanhood as the gender-oppressed class and thereby accusing trans men of oppressing cis women on the basis of their manhood. by refuting the idea that a singular class of people can lay claim to the experience of gendered oppression, we make it difficult for cis women to maintain their state of perpetual victimhood - a state that masks a lot of violence and policing against trans people, disabled and autistic men, and men of color. kneecapping our resistance to language that posits womanhood=oppression and pushing our experiences out of the discussion is critical to the maintenance of cis womanhood.

#notes #trans #does this make ansy sense. pls

[transunity]

Coming back to this topic to hopefully be clearer about it-

There is a valid complaint to be had about binary trans people who are exorsexist. It isn't acceptable from anyone and it is important to guard against letting exorsexism run rampant in the community.

Lately, I have been seeing a lot of posts made in anxiety about trans men expressing that they have felt pressured to identify as nonbinary by people who found their manhood unpalatable. The posts are anxious that trans men talking about this will cause exorsexists to have an excuse to be more exorsexist.

But as I've said before- this becomes dangerously close to policing what problems trans men can and cannot talk about *just in case* assholes try to co opt that to be exorsexist.

The reason I'd like to draw attention to this is that I haven't seen anyone direct this at trans women. Just trans men. This is interesting as it seems to me that this focus on binary trans people being a problem and only mentioning trans men could be subconscious bias or distrust of trans men. I've seem it suggested that transmeds would be the assholes co opting good faith trans men's discussion of being pressured to identify as nonbinary instead of as men.

Transmeds are majority trans men, but not exclusively. I've been harassed by transmed trans women before. But the focus seems laser focused on hypothetical transmeds who are trans men co opting other trans men's experiences. Why?

Some trans women face pressure to identify as nonbinary instead of as women too, but their experiences don't seem to be being interpreted as catalysts for exorsexist resurgence. So why are trans men's and trans men's alone?

I think, personally, transandrophobic rhetoric buries itself deeper in the mind than is known. Everyone has transandrophobia to unlearn and I think this scaremongering against trans men talking about being pressured to be nonbinary is rooted, in part, in an unconscious distrust of binary trans men. If it was a distrust of binary trans people in general, it would be more general. But it isn't, and we have to question why.

I'm not angry at people who have worried about this. I completely understand why- given how unchecked exorsexism should not be allowed to run rampant in the community. But treating trans men as if we are uniquely predisposed to accidentally triggering resurgences of exorsexism borders on transandrophobia.

Thoughts welcome and kind discussion wanted

#Transandrophobia #Exorsexism #Transunity #Transunitism #Transunitist