Please Stop Forgetting Nonbinary People!

women (including trans and/or queer women) have the capacity to be misogynistic towards trans men. we are being treated as if we are little girls on this app. the word "transmisogyny" is something i see a lot more than the word "transphobia" recently. while it's okay and encouraged to talk about transmisogyny, i feel like trans men are being excluded for no reason on many posts. experiences that are actually had by all/most trans people are said to be exclusive to trans women. so then we try for transandrophobia and get shut down because trans men can't be oppressed, apparently. usually, i try to educate myself and listen as much as possible, but it's been monthssssss of this on tumblr. i feel like i'm being spoon-fed lessons on my own oppression, and i can't get down from the high chair...

You will never buy your legitimacy by selling out trans men

You will never buy your legitimacy by selling out trans men

You will never buy your legitimacy by selling out trans men

You will never buy your legitimacy by selling out trans men

You will never buy your legitimacy by selling out trans men

"Men aren't oppressed for being men"

Trans men are real men. Trans manhood is real manhood. Trans men are oppressed for being trans men.

You're just a transphobe who hasn't actually internalized trans manhood as real manhood.

You only view manhood as an oppressive force rather than a real, genuine identity someone can feel connected to. This is transphobic.

You don't value the full scope of trans men's experiences as we define them for ourselves. You want us to sit down, shut up and let others make the decisions for us. Something most of us have been told all of our lives but is somehow progressive now that we're men....huh. Our voices are lifted up by feminist language for the misogyny we experience before we transition and then we're thrown out on the curb when we transition. We're "on thin ice" while we're pressured to self flagellate and be ashamed of our identity and when we begin to talk about the complexities of our issues we have our experiences flattened and dismissed.

You can't say trans men are men and try to dissect the trans part from the man part. You are inclined to do this because you have anti-transmasculine biases. Our experiences are the experiences of men, marginalized men who are not valued by the system.

Rat from Pathologic Classic HD on a Transgender flag background

i’m starting a new ideology called poonerism that’s all about how trans men and transmascs are the most oppressed people in the whole world and other trans people but especially trans people amab are so so privileged over us and barely feel transphobia compared to us so literally anything we say or do to them is punching up. we’re called poonies and will exclusively identify ourselves and our beliefs that way but NOBODY besides us is allowed to say that word EVER because it’s a SLUR and if you say it you’re being transphobic towards us and admitting you think there’s an evil underground network of scary abusive trans men trying to take over the world. because I said so.

/satire. you know what about.

"Privilege to be feminine" genuinely just sounds like bitterness and jealousy that our bodies inherently have traits that they covet that they think we are "wasting". Which would be transphobic as fuck if trans mascs did it to trans femmes, so idk why it's seen as acceptable to trans femmes to say that kind of stuff to trans mascs other than this misguided idea that somehow "choosing femininity" is inherently a more radical gender to be. Like when TERFs decided the most radical sexuality to have was political lebnianism.

You know. As though your gender and sexuality are things you get much of a choice in.

Transandrophobes need to start telling us where our privilege is instead of just telling us that we have it.

Like, actually, we don't have it. Nobody told us where to pick it up from-- is it at some kind of kiosk, or what??

So much pointless LGBT+ discourse could be avoided if people just stopped assuming they knew everything about the oppression OTHER identities face.

For example, if you’re nonbinary, you can absolutely talk about the struggles you’ve dealt with as a nonbinary person, and speak of the issues your community is dealing with. But if you’re not transfem, it’s not your place to comment on how transfem issues compare to your own.

And if you’re a trans woman, you should absolutely not be talking about how trans men “have it easier” or what transitioning is like for them, because you fundamentally don’t know! You’re not a trans man!

And it goes both ways- trans men shouldn’t speak on trans women’s issues! Binary trans people shouldn’t claim to know what it’s like to be nonbinary!

It even hearkens back to older varieties of discourse, like ace discourse. You saw non-ace people talking about what THEY thought being ace was like, because they believed that being LGBT+ themselves made them the arbiters of oppression.

Or hell, gay men claiming that lesbians had it sooo easy compared to what they went through! Like, man, how the hell would you know, you're not a lesbian!

Just. Stop! Stop talking about the assumed experiences of other people! Being one flavor of queer doesn’t mean you’re the expert on ALL queer oppression! LISTEN to other people, stop talking over them!

I think if people accepted this, 90% of stupid online identity discourse would vanish overnight.

So I guess I was making things up or pretending 10 years ago when trans masc and nonbinary people who didn’t pass or express their gender in societally accepted ways were called “trenders” and “theyfabs” by the same people who would gladly accuse someone of being a blue haired liberal/sjw/feminazi/etc….Just another example of trans men not being respected as reliable narrators of their own experience!

trans men who talk about how much ~male privilege~ they have are fucking class traitors lmao. like congrats on your extremely fucking conditional shield from violence but a lot of us don't pass like that and even if we do we're still at risk of violence if anyone figures out we aren't actually what cis society considers "real men". stop throwing other trans men under the bus just because You Specifically have managed not to be clockable in cis society, lol.

i think words like transandrophobia and transmisogyny are useful in theory, but in practice they drive division and end up harmful to the wider trans struggle. (explanation in simple words at the bottom)

i think it can be useful to have words to describe different flavors of discrimination we face depending on how we are percieved by society. the problem occurs when these words stop being treated as descriptors, and instead get used as labels.

i'm sure you've seen the TMA/TME discourse. TMA = transmisogyny affected, TME = transmisogyny exempt. in practice, these terms are used as "trans women and fems" (TMA) and "everyone else who is trans" (TME). there's a few problems i have with this.

first, as a transneutral person, i would be labeled TME. but the group of drunk dudes who chased me down screaming that i'll never be a real woman, they don't care about that. they see me, a trans person, they assign their own interpretation to my gender presentation, and decide to intimidate me based on their interpretation. i have faced transmisogyny many times, despite some tumblr users insisting i am exempt from it.

second, it puts people back into a rigid binary. as a nonbinary person, i'm well aware of how restrictive and oppressive binaries are, and this one is not any different. even if it's repackaged as trans-friendly, it still denies many people the entirety of their experience and only allows a little, specific part of it.

and third, i simply do not think that any of us in this community are exempt from transmisogyny. in my experience the difference between experiencing transmisogyny or transandrophobia is what the other person percieves me as. if you really wanted to call someone exempt, make it cis people - but also keep in mind that not all of them are. think GNC people, butches, drag queens, the list goes on. i find it difficult to call these people exempt, even if they aren't trans. and i acknowledge that if you're read most of the time as your binary gender (as in you pass, but i strongly dislike that word), you will face much more of one flavor of opression than the other. but taking the experience of only binary trans people who are read as their gender and calling it universal is incredibly exorsexist. most of us will have experienced both.

all these flavors of discrimination, transmisogyny, transandrophobia, even exorsexism and intersexism, it all stems from the same narrow bioessentialist understanding of sex and gender as strictly binary.

in conclusion, i think words like transmisogyny and transandrophobia can be useful to describe experiences with different flavors of anti-trans bigotry. however some people have started treating them as a strict binary of affected-exempt, and that is not rooted in reality or helpful. i'm inclined to say at this point, these terms create infighting instead of being helpful, and make us forget that the root cause of all the discrimination we face is the same.

explanation in simple words: transandrophobia (discrimination against masculine transness) and transmisogyny (discrimination against feminine transness) can be useful words to describe own experiences. but some people use these words to divide trans community into boxes. i think that is not good. it makes us forget we all want to fight transphobia. makes us fight each other instead, and that is not helpful.