You know I was looking again at how TRFs see trans men as just people waiting to detransition and become terfs, and how you and so many others I know CANNOT get them to acknowledge that cis crossdressers exist, and it just struck me-
They think cis male crossdressers are either trans women who still have half the eggshell on, or men making fun of trans women-
They think nonbinary people AFAB are just ~trenders~, and nonbinary people AMAB are just women with one foot still in the closet-
They call forcemasc a malicious knockoff of forcefem and even get territorial about striped socks and shark plushies-
They cannot wrap their heads around the idea that misgendering people is still bad when they do it-
Oh god. They don't think transmascs are actually trans. They think we're cis women who just have such a powerful hateboner for trans women that we're willing to change our entire lives and alter our bodies just to make fun of them. They see anyone but a trans woman saying "don't misgender me" as being exactly the same as "cool and I identify as an attack helicopter" or "stop deadnaming me I'm not Ricky I'm Bobo the Chimp". Of course they don't think we experience any meaningful transphobia, they think we're part of the same fucking conspiracy as any garden variety transphobe. Jesus fucking christ on a cracker. Okay.
And honestly? Emotionally, I get it. I've got a lot of fucked up brain shit going on and the world sure does love to sell willful paranoia as "protection" so I too am always super afraid of how people may or may not be judging me and I've caught myself emotionally spiraling into some REALLY stupid places too - but my sympathy runs very dry, very fast, when they're out here saying that clearly the best and most liberating thing for them would be for me to get hatecrimed more because that emotional crisis is a 100% accurate reflection of reality actually.
Even so, fuck, doesn't it get fucking exhausting to live that way? It seems so fucking miserable.
Just. Fuck. I'm so tired. And I'm especially tired of how popular this view or at least "diet" versions of it have gotten. Sis I am just. I am just sitting here! Cut the truscum shit YOU seem at least as miserable for it as you're trying to make me!!
Yeah, that sums it up really well.
trans women who don't fight for trans men and nonbinary people don't care about all trans people, they only care about themselves.
trans men who don't fight for trans women and nonbinary people don't care about all trans people, they only care about themselves.
nonbinary people who don't fight for trans women and trans men don't care about all trans people, they only care about themselves.
if we want to survive and succeed, the only way is through solidarity. any trans activism that does not include all trans people has failed as trans activism.
Hey y’all; would be real interested to hear from anyone willing to share and discuss, about other people’s experiences of transandrophobia specifically in fandom spaces.
I guess I’m just trying to find some more solidarity about the issue since fandom is such an escapism hobby and when that gets tainted, it really, really sucks.
Some of my own experiences include (tw: sa mention | tw: dv):
- Getting told I can’t write realistic gay mlm sex scenes because I’m a trans gay man not a cisgender gay man (but the cisgender woman who said it to me can write realistic gay mlm sex??? 🤔 make it make sense)
- Getting told it’s fetishistic for me specifically to write about male characters in anything but platonic relationships
- Getting mocked after mentioning not being able to watch an episode of a show because there was a male rape scene and as a rape survivor that identifies as male, it was too triggering. Cue the ‘men can’t be raped’ and ‘you’re not actually a man if you say you were raped’ comments. Then having a gif of the rape scene in question sent to me via PM as a ‘joke’.
- Talked about having some empathy for a character who experienced intimate partner violence because of my own experience. Getting told by someone relatively prominent in that fandom that it’s different because those are ‘two male characters’ and that I ‘deserved’ the domestic abuse I experienced with my ex because I’m a trans man who ‘tricked’ a gay man into being with me. (For the record my partner was bi and he knew I was trans before we got together, but fuck me I guess!)
I can't guarantee that "the one person who understands me [OP]" is a radfem, but with how many I block it's easy to assume
can I say something mean. I think the obsession some guys have with """transandrophobia""" is just like, they thought transitioning would magically make gender not a prison. and then they continue to experience gender (which is a prison) and get confused because they stopped being a woman shouldn't it all be better now??? and it's not (because gender is a prison, even if conforming with it gives you privilege over others) but they lack the introspection and awareness to make that connection. so instead they go "no it must be the trans women who are oppressing me"
Hey can we talk about the similarities between how this literal actual TERF describes trans men talking about transandrophobia and how the “transandrophobia isn’t real you transmisogynist*” crowd talk about trans men talking about transandrophobia?
“You want to be a man but you don’t want to be treated like a man” is something they both say!
“They want access to women’s/female spaces” is a point we’ve been arguing about for months (and none of them have a good argument for “are you talking about ones for reproductive healthcare cause I shouldn’t have to explain to you why we’re there” or “do you expect a guy who’s spent years in a social group and forming close friendships with the members to be forcibly kicked out the second he comes out as trans and not have that read as transphobic”)
“You’re claiming you’re more oppressed than trans women” is still false when a TERF is claiming we’re saying that but hey, they’re still claiming the same thing about us
“Transandrophobia is just misogyny/(transphobia)” is yet another talking point we’ve seen already
This is exactly the kind of rhetoric that those of us talking about transandrophobia have been fighting against and to see it out of the mouth of a TERF I think should be setting off alarm bells in some of you. Cause some of you have been drinking radfem juice either without knowing it or while convincing yourself that you can make it trans friendly by just including trans women as women and trans men as men, and I hate to be the one to break it to you but all you did was trade out bioessentialism for gender essentialism and both are just as toxic.
I’m not asking anyone to self flagellate over this, but I am asking you, if you find yourself agreeing with the TERF, to take a step back and ask some serious questions about what you’ve been believing about trans men and tbh trans people in general cause I can guarantee y’all have been engaging in transmisogyny and exorsexism too.
*If you characterize this group as consisting entirely of transfems and no one else when there are plenty of self identified TMEs making the same arguments and one notorious guy that stalks the transandrophobia tag to make this exact argument, please just don’t say anything on this post.
Average transandrophobe
why are people so willing to throw young transmascs under the bus :( feels like our own community still sees us as hysterical girls that can’t be trusted to make our own choices
the spectre of "transmasculinity as a disease which corrupts the purity of cis girlhood" remains strong I see.
Also "testosterone works just as well at 25" GIRL THE GROWTH PLATES. GIRL THE HIP BONES.
Anything that insiuates that trans men are uniquly capable of misogyny
Anything that claims trans men/mascs transition to gain something, things like male privilege, or to "escape" misogyny
Claiming that trans men/mascs transition for a fetish, anything that says they're fetishizing gay men and are only transitioning to sleep with said men.
Claiming trans men are trying to get into "women's spaces" to rape lesnians(I've seen this a few times from cis lesbians)
Vilifying and fear mongering against testosterone
Anything that claims they are "protecting women" "protecting little girls"
"rapid onset gender dysphoria"
Anything that's claims trans men don't understand their own oppression
Calling trans men and mascs"emotional, hysterical,"
This is also exorsexism, but slurs like "theyfab" and "zippertits"
Claiming that trans men/mascs don't experience misogyny
Claiming that trans men don't actually want to be men, they just "don't want to be women" this was used in the book "irreversible damage" and I've seen it a few times outside of that
Anything from the book "irreversible damage"
Add more if you can think of it
any time i hear the insufferable transphobic athlete arguments i think of that one time in middle school when my boys lacrosse team did a full-contact scrimmage against the girls team (who typically play with limited contact) and i, a six-foot, 180lb defender, got utterly laid-out by this 5-foot-nothing girl experiencing the newly-unleashed animosity accompanied by violent sport and as i looked up at my assailant from flat on my back i experienced a brief bout of heterosexuality and fell wildly in love and then had to be taken to the ER because i had a concussion
okay. so. this is clearly a terf post because no one can be this dense about transandrophobia without swallowing the terf pill, but in case anyone is actually thinking like this.
trans men are not trying to suggest that trans women are oppressing us. why is it that when we talk about a cisgendered society oppressing us, you assume we’re talking about trans women?? trans men talking about how a cisnormative and patriarchal society affects us has absolutely nothing to do with trans women, except to acknowledge that we’re all in the same boat and therefore need to stick together underneath hostile threats towards our community.
no we did not think transitioning would make the “gender prison” magically disappear, and that line of thinking blatantly shows that you subscribe to the terf idea that trans men only transition to “escape” womanhood, while believing that trans women are the only “real” trans people who transition because they have no other choice (huh… where have i heard discourse about what makes someone a “real” [insert marginalised group of people] before?)
trans people and their identities are not a political stance or commentary on gender. a trans man existing is not because they believe they magically have male privilege now or because they think men are better than women. male privilege and the patriarchy were designed by white, cis men for white, cis men. we do not have access to male privilege in the ways that cis men do, and we are accutely aware of this. none of us are whining about not gaining male privilege, because we’re reminded every single day every time our autonomy is violently stripped away from us that male privilege does not and will not include us.
this all also comes down to the problem of trans men being erased from history by historians treating us as “women who dressed up as men to escape the patriarchy” as opposed to actual trans people who existed alongside other trans people. because of this, there’s a subconscious idea that trans men and mascs are a recent phenomenon, almost like a subset of trans people that branched out from trans women, as opposed to being trans people in their own right. when we talk about our experiences and oppression, we’re met with this idea that everything we’re talking about is stuff that already exists for other people and we’re just co-opting it, as opposed to oppression we’ve historically been facing for as long as anyone else, but our erasure means that terms for these experiences do not get spread around nearly as much.
“transandrophobia” may be considered to be a new term, but the actual oppressions that trans men face on the basis of being trans men is not new. we’re just finally talking about it. and if you would actually read through the tag that you’re infiltrating and what trans men are actually saying, you’d learn what those oppressions are. the type of misogyny we face comes from the idea that we’re “defected” women and need to be “fixed”, and it’s the type of misogyny we experience from women, particularly white, cis women, who view Eurocentric ideas of womanhood and femininity as the ideal or men who want our bodies “restored” back into baby machines. our forced detransitioning and sterilisation is an extremely serious issue that deserves to be talked about, especially since forceful detransitioning is practically a death sentence for many trans people. “at least they don’t want to kill you” no they just want us to kill ourselves. that’s better i guess.
all this to say, trans men experience oppression in different ways to cis women and other trans people, because we are different people, and talking about those experiences does not harm trans women in any way. we are not speaking over trans women. we are not suggesting that trans women are in any way a threat to us. cisgender people who are upholding the gender binary and the patriarchy (and yes, that includes radfems) are a threat to us, in the same way that they’re a threat to trans women. we are all in the same boat. we just want to talk about the shit that we face and be listened to for once.
if you see this type of post, assume that it’s a terf. assume that it is a cisgendered terf, even if they claim to be part of the community, who is masquerading as a trans person in order to sow the seeds of discourse. even if I’m wrong, who cares. they’re getting blocked either way. terfs are trying to divide trans men and women right now, in the same way that men want them to divide cis women and trans women in order to distract them with infighting, and make trans men feel that they are not accepted or that their struggles are not real, so that they can groom trans men into detransitioning. people like OP are a threat to trans people. don’t fall for it.
What really ticks me off is how often prominent trans women activists try to silence trans men or dismiss their lived experiences as not as important bc they ‘trans misogyny exempt’. Then when transmen try to create their own terms to describe their experiences they claim they’re just attention seeking. Another phenomena that could be behind this is the weird alt right/misogynist to trans woman pipeline for public figures. A lot of self professed ‘former’ nazis dictating the discourse…
I blame Whipping Girl for some of this. It was basically everyone's trans Bible in the 2010s and it massively, massively shit on transmascs and nonbinary people. I don't think we've ever completely recovered from that.
This incident in particular always haunts the back of my mind.
(Obligatory mention that it isn't always trans women that do this. Cis people, nonbinaries, and even trans men themselves will happily trash trans men.)
Discourse side of @blunt-force-therapy. Pronouns: it/its
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