Helpful Venn Diagram Of People Who Are Against The Term Transandrophobia For Those Of You Who Arent Aware

I’m not gonna lie, the whole “what if a big, hairy trans man started using the women’s bathroom? what are TERFs gonna do then?” thing kinda pisses me off being used as some checkmate, because it insinuates that passing trans men would have any kind of power in that situation. If a passing trans man is forced to use the women’s bathroom, you know what will happen? Security will be called on him, he’ll be thrown out, and he’ll be forced to out himself as trans in order to avoid punishment, which will put an even bigger target on his back. He’s still going to be harassed. He’s still going to be forced into an uncomfortable and potentially dangerous situation, and he probably won’t avoid punishment anyway because the current laws in place are never going to favour any trans person’s defence over a cis person’s.

It also completely ignores trans men who aren’t “big and hairy” and don’t pass enough to be mistaken for a cis man. Non-passing trans men (or even men who look or sound effeminate enough to be suspected) who are forced to use the women’s bathrooms are still at a huge risk of harassment or even violence, especially young trans boys who are forced into their assigned bathrooms at school. Nex Benedict was literally murdered in a girl’s bathroom. Girls and women aren’t these inherently non-violent, peaceful and submissive beings (for one thing, that’s misogynistic). Trans men and boys get beaten up by them too, because most of us pre-T aren’t considered a threat, and we fucking die.

That’s not even to mention the trouble we already have in men’s bathrooms, because if we don’t pass, cis men will interrogate us on whether or not we’re “real men” and then sexually assault us if they discover we’re trans. Corrective rapes that trans men face is not something to be ignored, and I have trans male friends that it’s happened to who are lucky to be alive right now.

Bathroom laws will affect us just as much. The violence that trans women face is something that trans men can also relate to, and both need to be talked about without people categorising all trans men as “big, hairy, strong men able to beat up anyone who tries to threaten them” when that’s not the case like 90% of the time. Acting like passing trans men are just there to make TERFs look stupid, when TERFs are the ones who are violent towards us no matter how much we pass, is just diminishing our experiences.

А'л ду юѵ ѵън бетер!

òkei, ai krieitìd ei nu orþografi for (mai daielèkt ev) iŋlìx sò nau ai kan enoi pipel mor

Often posts would go:

*describes a bad thing that many people may go through* (Okay. Nice. Good discourse.)

*adds an addendum about how it disproportionately affects trans women* (Excellent. Important to say. Good addition.)

*adds an addendum to that addendum that specifies I'm a stinky TME and calls trans men a slur* (Why. Why did you have to say that. I get that you hate yourself. I get that you're in a competition to be the feministest. But it's so unnecessary. It also detracts attention from the group whose voices you were trying to boost.)

Galaxy brain genderfuck call yourself whatever you want cryptid neurogender fagdyke throwing up pissing and shitting himself at the transfem butch that goes by she/her

imagine a politician that fight for equal payment, for women rights and protection, bodily autonomy and just because the politician did a pro trans policy this very same person is thrown under the bus and now is suddenly against women by the TERF crowd, even to a point of appealing to the conservatives against the pro trans law

I wasn't making shit up

This was 2022/23 Nicola Sturgeon hate campaign, TERFs all around britain were campaign against her because she was kinda pro trans, to a point of appealing to Rishi Sunak and the Tories themselves

When we say that TERFs would work with the right wing and throw any pro trans person under the bus, even the ones who are actually helping women, we aren't making shit up

They do

An incredibly pernicious anti-transmasc argument that keeps making the rounds is that everything we do was plagiarized from trans women.

Coining a term to describe our unique and gendered experiences of oppression? We're just copying trans women.

Complain that we're often rejected from queer circles for our perceived violent maleness? We're just parroting what's happened to trans women.

Forcemasc fetish blogs? We're just copying One Specific Trans Woman-Run Blog that got popular.

These claims are annoying on their own, but together they paint a clear picture of what transandrophobes want you to believe: that trans men and transmascs are incapable of creating anything ourselves, or if we did, it would have nothing in common with what trans women and fems are doing. The function of these claims is to convince you that trans people of seemingly opposite identities are equally opposite in experiences, and any evidence to the contrary is actually cultural appropriation fueled by jealousy.

This is gender essentialism. It's fueled by the radical feminist belief that "woman" and "man" are not so much terms that get abused to justify people's oppression as they are positions in a class conflict, one where All Men seek and/or directly benefit from the oppression of All Women, and that indeed, manhood and womanhood themselves are defined by this relationship to one another. To be a man is to be an entitled parasite; to be a woman is to be an overworked victim.

That notion is racist and transphobic on the face of it, and that is equally obvious in these arguments about trans men - all of which are predicated on the idea that the average trans man is white, well-off, and able to go stealth whenever necessary, and therefore benefits from the maximum amount of male privilege a trans man can be afforded. Following from that logic, any trans man or that you encounter online can be reasonably assumed to share that experience, and any mention he might make of trans men who fail to meet those qualifications is nothing more than a rhetorical cudgel that we use to deny our own privilege.

I'm sure you can see the problem there.

It's not surprising that I typically see these claims made by white women, frequently about Black and Indigenous men. Speaking from the perspective of a white person, it can be very easy to fall into a trap of thinking that our specific experiences with oppression makes us general experts, and grow defensive when someone provides knowledge that shows we were wrong. It can like we're being victimized on the basis of the oppression we do have, and it can be incredibly hard to stop, listen, and admit that we fucked up. This is doubly difficult when the person criticizing us is a member of a demographic that seemingly contributes to the oppression we face.

But just because we think it's happening doesn't always make it so. Yes, there are times when people are acting in bad faith, or overlooking their own areas of ignorance - to err, as they say, is human. But often, we're the ones in the wrong, and need to recognize that fact before acting. So where do we draw the line?

The thing that I've always found crucial is to stop, breathe, and think. We have to honestly ask ourselves whether the other party is saying "your experiences are not real", or just "your understanding of these issues isn't as all-encompassing as you assumed". Simply asking yourself "am I really being harmed, or do I just feel like I'm being harmed?" can often save you from a massive foot-in-mouth situation.

It's necessary to remember that people whose identities are different from our own have their own experience and knowledge. Unless they are coming out and telling us what problems we do or don't have, we need to trust that they're coming from a place of good faith and genuine knowledge, and be willing to listen and change our minds if necessary.

We have to make ourselves comfortable with the fact that we are not always the most, or only, important voice in the room.

That's something that a lot of anti-transmasc women love to remind us, and I wouldn't say they're always wrong. Simply being a man can and often does incentivize people to engage in misogyny, to talk over women and disregard their experiences, when we find them uncomfortable or irrelevant. Again - everybody fucks up sometimes. But it crosses a line when you start demanding that courtesy from others while refusing to extend it back to them; when you treat any information they offer as automatically inferior or entirely invalid, based solely on their perceived relationship to privilege.

In fact, doing so is literally an ad hominem argument.

Aside from that, I must point out that these arguments are being employed specifically to silence trans men's and mascs' voices. This is not an honest misunderstanding; it's an act of profound self-centeredness at best and outright malice at worst. How do I know this? Well, stop me if you've ever heard one of these before:

"Women don't have real interests; they just like silly frivolous things. Men's hobbies are real and meaningful."

"Women are inherently wired to be emotional. Men are logical and level-headed. I'm not sexist, it's just science."

"If you hear a woman say anything smart, you can bet she learned it from a man."

These, too, are silencing tactics, historically (and currently!) used to devalue and silence the voices of women. In fact, they're things that I have personally heard and been affected by, as a trans man who has spent the vast majority of my life being seen and treated as a woman.

I didn't fall for it then, and I sure ain't falling for it now.

"also please consider your intention when centering yourself using language like "equally threatened"" IM KILLING YOU WITH HAMMERS DO YOU HEAR YOURSELF RIGHT NOW

If transmascs were saying "erm transfems being v-coded is just as bad as my dysphoria over not having balls" then people would lose their shit about it (as they should, because it's objectively not true and also an incredibly transmisogynistic thing to say), but somehow it's okay for TRFs to pull out the pitchforks when transmascs say that forced pregnancy as a form of detransition is worse than womb dysphoria???

The double-standards in this community baffle me.

hate people wanting to shut down conversations about transandrophobia say that trans men and mascs "measurably" experience less violence than trans women and fems

one of the core aspects of transandrophobia is erasure. the rates of violence we face cannot be "measurably" different than anything, because the rates of violence we face are deliberately not measured and erased whenever posssible

@unsolicited-opinions

Realizing I didn't answer why the context matters-

A white christian swedish man burning the Quran to express his hatred of it is presumably motivated by the desire to maintain the status quo/protest equal treatment of other religions.

An Assyrian man burning a Quran is an expression of defiance. He said- look at me: for over a thousand years you have tried to make people like me be respectful of this book, on pain of death. Now I am in Sweden, where I am free to tell you exactly what I think of this book by setting it on fire, and you can't stop me.

And then Sweden proved him wrong.

Sweden said: actually, no- no matter where you go in this world, you will never be equal to a Muslim.

BBC News

Man who burned Quran 'shot dead in Sweden' - BBC News

Salwan Momika, 38, is reported to have been killed in an apartment in Södertälje, Stockholm.