*sighs Like An Old Dog Who Narrowly Dodged Euthanasia Yet Something About Its Demeanor Makes You Feel

''trans men wont suffer as much if you forcefully out them'' could you say that to an actual trans mans face though or can you only say it online? could you say any of this hateful shit if you had to actually articulate it face to face with a real person or are you only comfortable when its wrapped up in comfy internet discourse buzzwords?

Something I hope and wish for a lot of trans men is for them to realize that like many other things, masculinity is a spectrum. Speaking as someone who grew up hanging around men for over 20 years, and still do to this day, there is a wide range of ways that cis men express themselves and their masculinity. Furthermore, many men tend to have a very muted form of masculinity.

What I mean by this is that a good portion of men don't feel like they have to be macho dudes, with big muscles, driving trucks, drinking beers with the bros, etc. Most men quite literally will just simply exist, and don't feel like they need to prove their masculinity. It's just a given.

By all means, if you want to be a guy who body-builds, works on trucks, drinks beers, and all that stuff, that's perfectly valid and you won't hear shit from other men about it.

But you're not really under any pressure to do this. There's a lot of men who have typically "feminine" interests, or act more androgynous, and their gender is never brought into question.

If you want to knit, bake, read books, or do any other "non macho" activity, you can.

You're masculine purely by the fact that you're a man.

None of the men in my life have been "macho" dudes, and their gender or heterosexuality are never, ever, doubted.

So to all you trans dudes out there, coming from an ex-dude, with a shit load of male friends, remember this: there's absolutely no rules to being a man. Be yourself, and people will act accordingly.

DONT MIX BUSINESS WITH PLEASURE IT CREATES AMMONIA GAS !!!!!!!!!!!!

I believe it was the work of legal scholar Florence Ashley where I first encountered this term (it might have also been Serano), but I’m becoming more and more committed to saying “degender” as opposed to “misgender.” like I think the term ‘misgender’ fails to properly identify the mechanism behind the process it describes: misgendering is not an act of attributing the wrong gender characteristics to a trans person, it is an act of dehumanisation. I think the term ‘misgender’ especially gives people much easier rhetorical cover to argue that trans women are hurt by misandry by being ‘mislabeled as men,’ or that they are in fact ‘actually men’ and benefit from male privilege, because the (incorrect) assumption underlying this is that when trans women are ‘misgendered’ they are being treated like men - to follow this line of thinking to its natural conclusion, this denies the existence of transmisogyny altogether, because any ‘misgendering’ of trans women is done only with the intent, conscious or otherwise, to inscribe the social position (and the privileges this position affords) of men onto them, as opposed to stripping them of their womanhood (and thus, their humanity).

The term degendering, however, I think more accurately describes this dehumanising process. Pulling from the work of both Judith Butler and Maria Lugones, gender mediates access to personhood - Lugones says in the Coloniality of Gender that in the colonial imaginary, animals have no gender, they only have (a) sex, and so who gets ‘sexed’ and who gets ‘gendered’ is a matter of who counts as human. She describes this gendering process as fundamentally colonial and emerging as a colonial technology of power - who is gendered is who gets to be considered human, and so the construction of binary sex is a way of ‘speciating’ or rendering non-human the Indigenous and African people of colonized America, justifying and systematising the brutal use of their land and/or their labour until their death by equating them to animals. Sylvia Wynter likewise describes in 1492: A New World View that a popular term used by Spanish colonizers to describe the indigenous people was “heads of Indian men and women,” as in heads of cattle. By the same token, white men are granted the high status of human, worthy of governance, wealth, and knowledge production, and white women are afforded the subordinate though still very high responsibility of reproducing these men by raising and educating children. Appeals to a person’s sex as something more real, more obvious, or ‘poorly concealed’ by their gender is to deny them their gender outright, and therefore is a mechanism to render them non-human. Likewise, for Butler, gender produces the human subject - to be outside gender is to be considered “unthinkable” as a human being, a being in “unliveable” space.

Therefore the process of trans women going from women -> “male” is not “being gendered as a man,” it is being positioned as non-human. when people deny the gender of trans women, most especially trans women of colour, they invariably do this through reference to their genitals, to their ‘sex,’ as something inescapable, incapable of being concealed - again, this is not a process of rendering them as men, it is the exact opposite: it is a process of rendering them as non-human. there is not a misidentification process happening, they are not being “misgendered as men,” there is a de-identification of them as human beings. Hence, they are not misgendered, they are degendered, stripped of gender, stripped of their humanity

it is hard to explain but there is something so unwell about the cultural fear of ugliness. the strange quiet irradiation of any imperfect sight. the pores and the stomachs and the legs displaced into a digital trashbin. somehow this effect spilling over - the removal of a grinning strangers in the back of a picture. of placing more-photogenic clouds into a frame. of cleaning up and arranging breakfast plates so the final image is of a table overflowing with surplus - while nobody eats, and instead mimes food moving towards their mouth like tantalus.

ever-thinner ever-more-muscled ever-prettier. your landlord's sticky white paint sprayed over every surface. girlchildren with get-ready-with-me accounts and skincare routines. beige walls and beige floors and beige toys in toddler hands. AI-generated "imagined prettier" birds and bugs and bees.

pretty! fuckable! impossible! straighten teeth. use facetune and lightroom and four other products. remove the cars along the street from the video remove the spraypaint from the garden wall remove the native plants from their home, welcome grass. welcome pretty. let the lot that walmart-still-owns lay fallow and rotting. don't touch that, it's ugly! close your eyes.

erect anti-homelessness spikes. erect anti-bird spikes. now it looks defensive, which is better than protective. put the ramp at the back of the building, you don't want to ruin the aesthetic of anything.

you are a single person in this world, and in this photo! don't let the lives of other people ruin what would otherwise be a shared moment! erase each person from in front of the tourist trap. erase your comfortable shoes and AI generate platforms. you weren't smiling perfectly, smile again. no matter if you had been genuinely enjoying a moment. you are not in a meadow with friends, you're in a catalogue of your own life! smile again! you know what, forget it.

we will just edit the right face in.

Interesting trend among transmascs & how terfs apply rhetoric to them that I've noticed:

If you are conventionally attractive and discuss taking hormones or getting surgery, terfs will lament that they can't keep losing beautiful women to the brainwashing of gender ideology and that you shouldn't transition because you're so beautiful and so good.

But if you're conventionally ugly and discuss taking hornones or getting surgery... terfs usually cut right to the "well you're just mentally ill and can't make decisions for yourself" or more immediately to the "well you just want to get ahead because being a woman is hard and difficult and being a man would be easier, gender traitor"

Why are pretty people afforded the "gentle*" rhetoric? Because terfs find them inherently more worth "saving" than the ugly people? Perhaps because terfs think that pretty people are inherently more "moral" and willing to listen to "reason?"

I just find it interesting that conventionally attractive people are treated differently than conventionally unattractive people. has anyone else noticed this? am i just crazy?

*this rhetoric is not gentle and is an act of violence against transmasculine people regardless of its intent. trying to detransition any transmasculine person for any reason that isn't that person's own desire to detransition is an act of violence.

I think people need to be more comfortable with illegalism and I’m not kidding. Of course the more legal something is, the safer and easier it is to do, but the more people who disregard the law, the harder it is to enforce. There are plenty of laws on the books that people just ignore and are never or rarely policed.

Becoming more comfortable with little illegal activities makes you more comfortable with bigger more important illegal activities. Additionally, it is crucial to build a wall of silence. Nobody talks everybody walks.

People who give out food without a permit, hold a march without a permit, grow a garden without a permit, are more likely to be people you could turn to to work with on preventing an eviction, or keeping people out of cop hands, or helping your friend Jane get crucial healthcare when it’s not legal in your state.

Communities comfortable with these acts won’t call the cops, and then nobody knows that it’s happening.

People have got to shift from both the idea that lawful = good/ illegal = bad, and that the illegality of something means that’s the end of it, and the only fight left is to make it legal again.

anyone else Metaphorically chained to a pipe in the saw bathroom of Life

huge shoutout to boys who have been referred to with she/her for so long that it doesn’t bother them anymore

huge shoutout to boys who have fully embraced femininity for whatever reason, be it they have to in order to survive the misgendering or because they think masc presentation doesn’t look right on them

huge shoutout to boys who stop and stare and think for a moment when the document/application asks for their name and gender. huge shoutout to the ones who fill it out with their deadname and assigned gender.

huge shoutout to the boys who grow up to be men who die and are remembered as women.

huge shoutout to boys who never made it in life, who never had the friend group they wanted, the job they wanted, the wardrobe they wanted. who would have succeeded if they just had that injection sitting in a box under their bed.

huge shoutout to the boys who physically can’t transition, whose bodies can’t handle recovering from a surgery or who can’t wear regular clothes.

huge shoutout to boys who associate masculinity with abuse, hate, anger, who would rather die than be what that masculine figure was to them

huge shoutout to boys who don’t have the money to transition, who can’t afford a trip to a clinic or the shots that come afterward, who have to work every day for twelve hours at multiple gas stations to get by, with help.

huge shoutout to boys who don’t live in a safe place, who can’t afford to be known around town as Clarissa and morph into Henry. who had long hair all his life and then didn’t. who painted his nails until he didn’t. who wore lace and skinny jeans until he didn’t. who would be assaulted for it, and even be killed for it.

if youre any of these people it should be made clear that you are and always will be men. it doesn’t matter what your outside shows, or what youre told, or how youre forced to behave or look. your manhood is stored in the heart, it always has been, that’s how youre aware of it, and its always there, and it will always show, be it in the way you talk or the things you like or the job you have. and if it doesn’t, that’s okay too. your manhood is something you just are, and you always will be as much of a man that Max who started transitioning at 13 is. none of the rest matters. if you need a guy to spraypaint your name onto your gravestone, i have a guy. you will make it.