Anyone Else Think It’s Kinda Weird To Say “why Would You Choose To Be A Man??” To Transmasc/transmen

trans man: exists

TERFs: obviously SHE'S been groomed by the evil queers to hate herself and to seek an escape from the patriarchy by becoming the patriarchy

"trans friendly" radfems: no, he's a MAN and he was always a man because that's how gender works. which meanssss he's inherently an aggressor and part of the patriarchy and cannot relate to real women and thus an inherent danger to them unless proven otherwise!

trans man: 😐

Part of the harm of invisibility for transmen is being bombarded with a million "emergency HRT" resources by a hundred different well meaning groups and absolutely zero of them mention testosterone. If they do it's basically a footnote. Testosterone is necessary HRT medication too, believe it or not. It is harder to synthesize and it is federally restricted and I think that's EVEN MORE REASON TO RESEARCH AND LINK EMERGENCY TESTOSTERONE HRT‼️

excellent names on the enemy team tonight

what if whales in minecraft!

STOP INFANTILIZING TRANS MEN AND TRANSMASCS. ITS DISGUSTING AND EXTREMELY TRANSPHOBIC.

i clicked on the original tweet just to see if anyone else felt as weird about it as i did because at this point i’m just tired of seeing people going on and on about trans men dating cishet men who try to convince them not to transition as if it’s a funny joke about a trans man doing something silly and not a manipulative and generally very unhealthy relationship dynamic that can hurt the trans man involved really deeply (as forcing someone back into the closet tends to do.)

did i find anyone else feeling that way? no. there were a few people pointing out that it was weird in general, and plenty saying it’s a weird thing to say about a cis woman, but nothing expressing any sort of concern about the tired stereotype it’s perpetuating.

but you know what i did find? replies like the one in the second screenshot, using the tweet as their chance to tell the world how much they hate trans men and how repulsive they find the idea of ever being compared to us. and replies like the third one, shaming trans men in relationships like that as if the fact that they’ve found themselves in an unhealthy relationship makes them deserving of public shaming, as if their relationship is hurting anyone other than them.

stereotypes like this just feel like yet another way of indirectly calling us stupid little girls who don’t know what’s good for us, and the fact that a picture of a woman is being used (even jokingly!) as an example of what trans men “like that” look like should make the implications of rhetoric like this all the more obvious.

it’s relationships like these that keep us miserable in the closet for so long and drive up our sexual assault rates even more. they’re not funny and if anyone is going to be making jokes about them, it certainly shouldn’t be people who have never been in that situation. if you actually cared about us you’d be looking for ways to support the trans men you know who are in relationships like that instead of hopping on twitter to joke about how stupid they must be.

i don’t care if it’s a joke. if it victim blames trans men for the transphobia we face in our personal relationships, adds to the common idea that we can’t be trusted to make decisions about our own lives, and invites even more blatant transphobia against us by people who unabashedly admit they see all trans men as “disgusting and phony”, it’s not fucking funny.

(i also want to note that the people making these jokes never like to mention that this also happens to trans men in relationships with queer women. they also hate those trans men, of course, and are happy to express that when they get into fights about trans men who date lesbians, but they’ll never talk about it in the context of this particular stereotype. it’s always a man being manipulative in a relationship and pressuring trans men to not transition, as if a woman would never be capable of such a thing.

they also like to conveniently ignore the existence of older trans men who transitioned after already being in a committed relationship with a cishet man and were able to make that relationship work despite their transition, because acknowledging that would require recognizing that trans men can be in seemingly contradictory relationships and genuinely be happy with their partner. who needs nuance when you can simply choose to judge all trans men for our relationships regardless of what they’re actually like?)

do you think they also would call me “a trans man being purposefully misgendered” with this kind of vitriol because i’m still living with parents who don’t recognize my gender instead of moving out before i’m ready to be financially independent? at this point, i’m starting to feel like they might, with the way every decision a trans man ever makes is the subject of a public debate and people have decided that trans men are secretly using being misgendered as a weapon to somehow hurt other trans people.

as a general rule, i’d say the only people who should be making “X looks like a trans man” jokes about literally anyone/anything are trans men, and posts like this show exactly why those jokes being made by anyone else (even by other trans people) just isn’t a good idea.

I’ll say it again, please just grit your teeth and vote for Biden…

I gotta outline the problems I have with terminally online people being so damn adamant about putting terms like “TME” or “transmisogyny exempt” in their bios, because as much as I just wanna yell “fuck off with that shit” at the people who insist on making this a thing, I haven’t really found a post wrapping up all the problems with this in an easy to understand way. And that’s a problem of its own, because people are so fucking afraid and otherwise discouraged from questioning any new “progressive” online discourse stance that gains traction and risk getting ostracized from the communities they’ve come to depend on.

For those people, have some food for thought.

Firstly, aside from like some people of color denoting that they’re white-passing (which is an entirely different bag of worms), the vast majority of abouts, bios, what have yous that denote your identity Do Not contain a disclaimer list of your privileges. Saying shit like “transmasc, TME” is about as “redundant” (I’ll get to that) as saying “able-bodied, able-minded, ableism exempt” and therefore unnecessary. Except it’s not just unnecessary - and this is likely why some people so deep into discourse culture insist on using it - it serves to downplay your experiences as a trans person and feeds directly into oppression olympics politics.

If your marginalized identity has to constantly be paired with “I don’t actually have it as bad as these other marginalized people though”, you’re creating an unconscious divider between yourself and people who are actually in a decently similar boat that you are, as well as creating a reminder of “I don’t actually have it that bad” which very quickly evolves into “my experiences as a marginalized individual aren’t valid enough” and that can lead to “so it’s okay if I start getting excluded from communities I thought I was supposed to belong in”. It’s a divisionist, exclusionist method of thinking and serves to weaken our community, whether the people participating in this practice aim to do so or not.

And even if all that wasn’t an issue, the practice shouldn’t even have legs to stand on because no the fuck you’re not exempt from transmisogyny because that’s not how bigotry actually works. Bigotry, in real life, does not attack based on how you identify, for the most part, it attacks based on how you are perceived. Believe it or not, cishet and straight trans people are not exempt from being affected by homophobia. Cishet and cis gay people are not exempt from being affected by transphobia. There are many more examples I could give but I’d start derailing. Point is, marginalized people, ESPECIALLY queer people, have SO many overlapping experiences based on how they’re perceived by their oppressors - and it’s why dividing up the community so staunchly is a bad thing.

If you’re transmasc and visibly aren’t performing your gender properly (which HEAVILY varies from bigot to bigot so don’t even bring passing privilege into this) and are attacked for it, you don’t actually know if it was transmisandry or transmisogyny at play just because YOU know how YOU identify. And your online discourse buddies don’t know, either, no matter what they try to tell you. That’s just the reality of how marginalization works.

Please, just stop drinking this koolaid. For the sake of yourself and others. For the sake of being real about how the world works. Just label yourself as transmasc and literally anyone who is capable of critical thought can then go “hm, it’s probable that they don’t have the exact 1:1 life experiences a trans woman does” if that thought’s even applicable. I’m begging yalls to give this one some more thought before digging your heels in.

Being trans does not make you immune from being called out when you say the literal exact same things about trans men and transmascs as TERFs do.

I’ve seen TERFs call “he/they females” “grossly misogynistic” and would you look at that, trans folks also use “he/theys” as a noun meaning “misogynists.” As though not wanting to be called “she” makes us sexist instead of, yknow, just transgender. Transmasculinity is not misogyny. People act as though transmasc transitions mean climbing up the gender ladder and kicking women on the way down, when in reality so many of us including myself have it worse than before.

It is not true that there is no way for us to transition without Joining The Side Of The Oppressors. We are still marginalized for our gender identity, just in new ways now; we do not suddenly stop being oppressed under misogyny once our egg cracks. Nobody is saying trans men and transmascs can’t weaponize misogyny, everyone of every gender can, but we are saying it is not required for our manhood and masculinity. We are saying we do not categorically benefit from misogyny the same ways cis men do. Please stop believing the radfems when they say the only way for men to exist is in opposition to women.

ok quick question

why does shinigami eyes (browser extension that tells you who is trans-friendly and who is anti-trans) mark people who LITERALLY deny that transmascs and intersex people are oppressed as trans-friendly? since when transandrophobia and intersexism are a trans-friendly thing to spread?

if that's what's going on then this extension is very much useless. maybe it always has been useless.