#you don't have to be “more opressed” to claim a label

[a-faggot-with-opinions]

After reading through so much "transandrophobia discourse" I think people need to seriously reframe how they view transmisogyny.

If you (general "you") believe that transmisogyny is "the intersection of misogyny and transphobia", then you need to admit what you're describing isn't exclusively and only primarily targeting transfemmes*. So many other people have been vocal about frequently experiencing what this definition is describing, or at the very least have it purposefully weaponized against them. Notably intersex people and cisgender women of color, especially black women (but this includes transmascs* and butches too, whether you believe it's targeted or not). According to that line of thinking, transmisogyny is simply a specific form of misogyny that is rooted in transphobia— which ironically is what so many people claim transandrophobia actually is, rather than a unique struggle.

Alternatively, if you believe that transmisogyny is "transphobia uniquely targetted towards transfemmes*" then you need to admit that many of the things that are labeled as "transmisogyny" are not specifically or exclusively transmisogyny at all, and they fall under a much bigger umbrella of collective oppression. Obviously trans women experience unique opression. Of course they do! If bigots know you're a transfemm* they'll more than likely treat you differently than someone they know is a transmasc*, at least in some aspects; but if you agree that a transfemme* would be treated uniquely then you've ought to admit that a transmasc* would be treated uniquely, too. In this case TME or TMA labels still wouldn't make any sense because that's essentially the equivalent of me (an intersex person) calling myself "intersexism affected" or calling a perisex person "intersexism exempt". Like yeah, no shit. It's entirely redundant.

The point is that these two lines of thinking can't exist without contradicting eachother. It's disingenuous to claim these experiences directly affect other groups of people as a specific form of misogyny AND they're exclusive to or only primarily targetting transfemmes. Otherwise you're just painting the experiences of intersex people, women of color, butches, and other trans people as "collateral damage".

In either scenario, labeling transandrophobia as "misdirected transmisogyny" or "a unique combination of transphobia and misogyny" doesn't make any sense. Either transmisogyny can be experienced by people of all identities, including cis people; or, transmisogyny is uniquely targetted towards transfemmes*— meaning transmascs* also experience uniquely targetted transphobia by default. You can't have both.

*"transfemme" and "transmasc" here are being used as very broad generalizations purely for the sake of conciseness.

Many transfeminists like to label a very broad form of oppression as transmisogyny. What I mean by that is that they'll see a very legitimate concept, which is that society has a very strict, rigid box that it expects every female body to fit into, and any female body that does not fit into that box is discriminated against, and they will say that it's based in transmisogyny. When in reality, this is literally just misogyny, and it's something that intersects with other marginalizations.

Intersex women who were assigned female may experience interpersonal transmisogyny but they don't experience it on an institutional or systemic level. What intersex women assigned female experience on a systemic level is an intersection between intersexism and misogyny, which is caused by them not fitting the rigid societal standard for what a female body has to look like.

Here's the thing, though: there are rigid societal standards for what a male body has to look like, too, and while this isn't evidence of systemic misandry (which doesn't exist for cis men), this is a way that marginalized men are punished. Men of color, intersex men assigned male at birth, fat men, and GNC men are among those who experience oppression due to not fitting the stereotype of an ideal male body.

Trans men, however, are the demographic that flips all of our understandings of how systemic oppression works on its head, because no matter which commonly accepted framework you use to view our marginalization, it just doesn't make sense. Our lived experiences, instead of being considered to help build a new framework under which we view oppression, are erased, treated as outliers, and never spoken about. And when we do speak about our experiences, we are called transmisogynists. This is because a lot of theories in modern transfeminism and trans inclusive feminism literally do not address trans men, and if they do, they are very patronizing and don't address our lived experiences.

I'm just one guy, but here's my imperfect and incomplete view of how transandrophobia and transmisogyny work. Transandrophobia and transmisogyny are intersections between the same types of oppression, namely, transphobia and misogyny, but they target two different demographics and work in very different ways. The way that transmisogyny maintains its systemic influence and oppresses transfeminine people is by making transfeminine people hyper-visible. Transfeminine people are put on a pedestal and fetishized while at the same time being dehumanized and used to fearmonger about the collapse of society. Obviously, a lot of transfeminist activists have already addressed a lot of this.

However, transandrophobia is a much sneakier, more invisible form of oppression that affects transmascs. Just like transmisogyny, it is present on a systemic and institutional level, but the way that it targets transmasculine people is by making society believe that we do not exist, while at the same time fearmongering about the possibility of our existence. Because of this, transmasculine people are targeted with violence often, but because our experiences are erased, it's a lot harder for people to identify specific instances of transandrophobia, and a lot harder to actually dismantle.

Hyper-visibility like in the case of transfems definitely isn't a privilege, but neither is hyper-invisibility. And us transmascs should not be expected to use our "privilege" due to being hyper-invisible in order to make a hyper-visible group even more visible. Transmascs devoting our time to advocating for transfems is good, but it's not reasonable to expect all of us to do that, especially when the transfems that expect us to advocate for them don't advocate for us or ever call out transmasculine erasure.

#asks #transandrophobia #transmisogyny

[yardsards]

being trans makes you lgbt. But being aspec doesn’t. If you were cis, straight, and not dating someone who’s trans or otherwise lgbt, you wouldn’t be part of lgbt. It’s more of a descriptor like calling yourself a girl or a boy, not that you would. Being ace and trans or ace and bi or ace and gay would keep you in lgbt. But being just ace or aro isn’t quite as qualifying as a lot of aspec think it is. Unfortunately We’ve seen a lot of aspec people say things against trans and gay from perspective that cannot truly give them say. Unfortunately we’ve seen aspec admit to believing in “drop the t” while screaming acecourse and wanting to stop feeling oppression. A lot of the problems with acecourse are that aspec still receive worlds more respect and validity from outside communities because from those outside perspectives at least they aren’t gay or trans degenerates and perverts. We believe this is the true reason acecourse garnered a cringe history, because it was playing with the fact that straight people were identifying themselves as ace to put themselves within the community because it was in fact trendy and all of a sudden they could reap the benefits of attention coming with being seen as valid by a large part of the tumblr community, while also spreading hate and opression and preaching drop the t or claiming transmed arguments against a community that actually deserves support. Read or don’t it’s all good, but have a nice day regardless

i'm probably wasting my time replying to this but i'm gonna go over some of your points in case you're actually willing to learn. i may come across as angry at times, but i am just so tired of this kind of thing and i struggle to express myself with complete calmness and patience in regard to this kind of thing:

"being trans makes you lgbt. But being aspec doesn’t."

you don't get to tell me which parts of my identity are queer and which ones aren't. i have the lived experience of being trans. i have the lived experience of being aroace. using that knowledge and those experiences, i can wholeheartedly tell you that they are equally queer identities. i identified as aroace before i identified as trans, and i was just as queer in that period as i was after i realized i was also trans.

"If you were cis, straight, and not dating someone who’s trans or otherwise lgbt, you wouldn’t be part of lgbt."

okay this is gonna veer off topic from the ace thing but I just gotta say: WHAT??? you think dating a trans person makes you part of the lgbt community??? if a completely straight man dated a trans woman, that would not inherently make him lgbt: to say otherwise is to imply that his girlfriend is not a real woman and that is, y'know, pretty transphobic. jesus christ.

"But being just ace or aro isn’t quite as qualifying as a lot of aspec think it is."

who are you to come up to me and say you know our experiences better than we do??? who made you the expert on what it's like to live as an aspec person???

it's very ironic that you are talking about what you think our experiences are without actually having the perspective of what it's like to be us, immediately before claiming that we do that to the rest of the queer community.

"Unfortunately We’ve seen a lot of aspec people say things against trans and gay from perspective that cannot truly give them say."

this is not unique to aspecs; unless you are somehow every single lgbtq+ identity all at once, there are gonna be some experiences you don't understand and can't speak on. like, cis gays say shit about trans people despite not knowing what it's like to be trans all the fucking time. and some of them are, in fact, extremely fucking transphobic! you would (hopefully!!!) not say that all lesbians should be kicked out of the queer community just because some individual lesbians are terfs; after all, why should an entire orientation be kicked out the community just because a few assholes happen to also use that label?

"Unfortunately we’ve seen aspec admit to believing in “drop the t” while screaming acecourse and wanting to stop feeling oppression."

again, a few shitty individuals does not mean an entire orientation is bad. and honestly i saw A LOT less transphobia from the ace and aro community than i did from cis gay men and lesbians. and many of those shitty "ace people" were very obvious troll blogs but yinz were too blinded by your search for reasons to hate us that you missed it. this is not to say there weren't ANY shitty ace people, because every label with more than a few dozen people using it is gonna have some horrible people, but this problem was not uniquely bad in the aspec community.

"preaching drop the t or claiming transmed arguments against a community that actually deserves support."

(lumping this one in with the previous two) again, in my anecdotal experience, the aspec community actually tended to be more accepting about that kind of shit than a lot of the general lgbt community was. a lot of cis gay people were transphobic and a lot of binary trans people were transmeds/hated nonbinaries (and again! this does not mean that gay ppl and binary trans people are bad! a few assholes does not make an identity bad!). asexuals, aromantics, nonbinaries, (and sometimes bi/pan/etc. people) were often all lumped together as cringy trendy tumblr identities and spat on by the rest of the community. i, in my anecdotal experience, saw very few ace inclusionists (let alone actual asexuals) be shitty about nonbinary people. almost all of the transmedicalists i have come across have also been exclusionsists.

"A lot of the problems with acecourse are that aspec still receive worlds more respect and validity from outside communities because from those outside perspectives at least they aren’t gay or trans degenerates and perverts."

show me where the fuck that respect and validity is. cuz i sure as hell haven't received it. i've been told i was going to hell for "ignoring gods plan" because i didn't plan to get straight married and produce children (and this was before i realized i was trans!). i tend to hide my sexuality from bigots just like i hide my gender, but sometimes i bare myself to the wrong people and i get backlash for BOTH of those things, treated like i'm broken or a freak or degenerate. and you might say "but doesn't the bible encourage celibacy?" but the thing is, most bigots don't actually care about what their holy text says and really just use it as an excuse to persecute minorities that they already find repulsive.

"because it was playing with the fact that straight people were identifying themselves as ace to put themselves within the community because it was in fact trendy and all of a sudden they could reap the benefits of attention coming with being seen as valid by a large part of the tumblr community, while also spreading hate and opression"

straight people can also just straightup lie. like, a cishet girl could log on here and pretend to be a bisexual trans woman and no one could prove that wrong. it's the internet. lying like that to spread hate would actually be A LOT easier than claiming to be an identity that was already facing scrutiny. like, asexuality is not the only orientation a cishet person could call themself online.

not to mention how similar a lot of your sentence sounds to the shit people have said about nonbinaries. i lived through the "nonbinaries are just cis girls lying for attention" era on here. this is a recycled argument.

-----

read this and take it to heart. then read some of the notes of that post and listen to the aspecs there talk about the bigotry they have faced, both offline and online, from lgbt+ people and from cishets. don't act like you know our experiences better than we do.

#eliot posts #aphobia #acephobia #asexual #aroace #trans #nonbinary #transphobia mention