Reblog If You Stand Against Order, Civilization, And Goodness Itself

I love you trans men . You're not alone . We have community and connection and we can get through this time<3

Don't let the haters and transandrophobes get you down, you are valid, and loved, and your lived experiences should be recognized and respected

I keep meeting transfem(me)s IRL who genuinely believe that transmasc erasure is a real problem and that we transmascs have it just as bad as they do. Today I spoke to a gal who actually thought transmascs have it worse. I responded to her that I believe everyone in the trans community shares a deep pain, beyond quantifying, that there's not really a hierarchy to our pain. There are so many amazing women out in the world who get it, who cherish and love us and feel our pain with us, just as we (transmascs) cherish and love them and feel their pain with them.

The haters and the division-mongers are the outlier. They're just louder in online spaces. Hate and division will always lose. Love and unity is the way forward.

it kills me how much people love to speculate on the trans male experience. transphobes and even other trans people will conjure up ideas of what it must be like for us to live, how hormones affect us, and especially what society treats us like. they love to tell us how we live our lives; strawman after strawman about fictional trans men who started hormones and became "evil and ugly", completely fabricated stories about about how every trans man they know suddenly "gained male privilege" and never deal with misogyny or transandrophobia.

people who tell you how your transmasculine experience will go have no idea what they are talking about. even if they sound confident, they are not correct- each and every transmasculine person has a different experience in life- we do not automatically gain the societal privilege of cishet white men once we decide to socially transition. they cannot see what your future holds. you don't deserve to have someone telling you how you will experience your own life, it is yours, you are allowed to live your truth, pave your own way and prove that we have varied lives that transcend what transphobes think the trans male experience is.

Some of the main points I see used against aromantic and asexual people are narratives that go like:

You can't know you're aromantic or asexual if you've never tried dating or having sex. (Translation: you should date someone you aren't attracted to and have sex with someone you aren't attracted to just to be sure you aren't attracted to them).

You can't be asexual or aromantic if you've dated and had sex. (Translation: the actions of dating someone and sleeping with someone can only ever be motivated by attraction, directly opposing what was demanded in the first point.)

If you date or have sex with someone despite not being attracted to them then you are manipulative and deceiving your partner. (Translation: dating/sleeping with someone without attraction as a motivation is inherently Bad and Evil)

And like, I've come across people who believe all three points at once without seeing the hypocrisy of it all.

Anyways, you don't need to try out all possibilities in order to figure out your orientation. Most people don't go around demanding that straight people sleep with and date the same gender before being allowed to call themselves straight, and yet they'll demand that of aspec people without hesitation. At the same time, there's nothing wrong with trying stuff out. While certain actions can be motivated by attraction, they don't always have to be. People have sex without being attracted to each other all the time, for all sorts of reasons. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, and it doesn't necessarily determine your sexuality either.

And I think the last opinion comes from a) people's tendency to tie attraction to a bunch of other feelings that just sum up to caring about someone, and then translate the absence of attraction into the absence of even liking a person and b) the tendency to see romantic attraction as the highest emotion one can have for someone and seeing any other feelings as inherently lesser, therefore making such a relationship "unbalanced". And with the way most people view aromanticism it's very easy for them to jump to the conclusion that the aro person is obviously being dishonest and just using their allo partner for their own evil little plans. It's all bullshit and I wish people would realize how easily these arguments fall apart when looking at them critically.

i love you bears i love you butches i love you trans men i love you transmascs i love you drag kings i love you masc queers of all persuasions the world is so much better and brighter for the existence of queer masculinity

re: that other post. i HATE HATE HATE the modern trans discourse thats just "boys versus girls but Progressive this time I Promise ^_^" like you have GOT to be kidding me. its so so so odd to me that people can Be transgender and still come to the conclusion that Bioessentialism is Good actually, cis people are just doing it wrong. come the fuck on. does anyone remember when it was considered STUPID in the trans community to be policing peoppe based on agab. remember when it was embarrassing to Ask what gender someone was before transitioning. im walking in circles i feel ill Hello

It is so annoying when people respond to "the queer community has an anti-masc problem" with "well society loves and praises masculinity!" Okay... yes... but that's not what we're talking about 😭 The queer community ≠ society as a whole. Also? The society that praises masculinity does NOT praise queer masculinity. Cishet society does not praise butches, masculine trans people, or anyone who is masc in a queer way. And unfortunately, many queer people have this same problem.

"the best way to screw jkr over is by making her characters queer!" actually. The best way to screw jkr over is to stop engaging with the property she still profits off of and read a different fucking book

we do not "love" to bring this up. it is traumatic. it is dysphoria inducing. it is capable of taking the lives of trans men/mascs that are forced to bring a child into this world against their will. stop fucking invalidating our trauma and oppression you absolute fucking transphobic asshole.

no one is fucking saying this is a privilege for trans women/fems. you are making up arguments in your head because you cannot handle the fact that you are being so disgustingly transphobic toward us so you have to pretend we are saying shit that was never said.

i will not be fucking silent about this. no trans men/mascs should be forced into silence when bringing up our very real systemic oppression. if it bothers you, then look inward.

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.