the way people use the word “femme” drives me fucking goddamn coocoo bananas. what is the point of that word if you use it in ways that makes it clear you think “men” and “femmes” are not overlapping categories. its just like with people using TMA supposedly to include people who aren’t trans women & then just defining TMA as “trans women and transfem nonbinary people” like. at this point just be OPENLY exorsexist it will make everything so much more straightforward

thing about misogyny no one talks about is that when “good” womanhood and femininity are defined around sexual chastity and purity, and when manhood and masculinity are associated with sexual desire and sexual action, being seen as a slut/whore crosses the line into gender nonconformity and the violence directed at such people has a lot of similarities with, and in many cases is inseparable from, anti-transmasculinity - specifically how the violence is justified by this idea that as a “fallen woman,” one has forfeited one’s claim to being something vulnerable which is owed protection from men in some way, even out of pity - you have forced yourself into the masculinized public world while failing to be a “real man,” and so have made yourself deserving of violence from “real men.” its the “well if you say you are a guy, then i get to beat you up” mindset. post with examples for those curious

i just think we should talk about this more. people find it really easy to talk about how failing masculinity moves one towards being seen as feminine, because women are the antithesis of men under patriarchy. but people are very reluctant to acknowledge the reverse, that failing femininity moves one towards masculinity, that men could be the antithesis of women. and ironically i feel like this reluctance stems from the very idea that “woman” is defined by lack, is just a negative reflection of manhood, that there isn’t any complicated substance to the category and how it is socially constructed. “woman” and “female” are concepts that people put a LOT of work into making seem natural and inevitable, and that influences how certain forms of misogyny (like that which lead to anti-transmasculinity) are erased.

reminder that i, as an anarchist and an agnostic, am firmly against anti-theism (the stance that religion is inherently bad and should be abolished). spirituality and religion are normal parts of humanity. they are things that we make and will continue to make. some people do really just have an innate sense/desire for Something Beyond Them and that’s not just going to go away Because Marxism. if anything you are throwing away a powerful organizing force that can and has been used for leftist goals, yes, even christianity. there is no part of human society that cannot be used to harm people, there is no social system that cannot be used to exploit people, there is no social construct that cannot be used to justify that harm and exploitation.

the ways in which we think of religion as a concept have been fundamentally shaped by systems of exploitative power. that does not mean this is the only possible way to think of or engage in religion/spirituality. religion has been a major push factor for many to socialism and anarchism. im so sick and tired of y'all. it’s not my revolution if i must sever a core part of how i understand myself and the world or else be named an enemy.

This viewpoint of invisibility as a privilege is a display of one function of antitransmasculinity that rewards people for upholding the idea that most transmasculine people are white, cis-passing, hyper masculine, educated and able-bodied, as these are the only configurations of a transmasculine person that would receive an invisibility that would be more rewarding than it would be isolating and suffocating. […]

Invisibility as a term for this dynamic is a fallacy in and of itself as what transmasculine people are suffering from is not invisibility, which suggests accident, but is instead deliberate erasure. Trans men, transmasculine people and transmasculinities have historically been intentionally erased (through not just expunging records but by creating new records entirely) explicitly so that violence against this marginalized group can continue to be ignored.

This ignorance creates a dynamic where transmasculine people who actually do rise to any level of power are then made hypervisible (cough, buck angel, cough) and the general perception of a transmasculine person remains an image of a privileged, white, cis passing transsexual, who ‘acknowledges biological reality’, who has lived flawlessly as a man 6 months into t or instead an impressionable young (white) girl who has been infected by a social contagion.

This cycle of highlighting only a few different stereotypes of trans man / transmasculine person further contributes to the erasure and harm done to trans men and transmasculine people who do not fit into those very niche groups that attain all the visibility and are said to represent the entire demographic. This deliberate erasure of the actual majority of trans men and transmasculine people exists primarily so that violence can continue to be enacted against them behind closed doors. It is so often not only transmasculine people themselves that are made invisible, but rather it is anti-transmasc violence, including militant state violence, interpersonal violence and a medical + psychiatric violence, which makes transmasculine people, through a process of essentialization, aggressors without aggression and victims without words.

from “Not transmasc invisibility, but erasure: Antitransmasculinity as erasure” by S.L Void

i think genuinely one of the biggest political weak spots on the trans community in terms of actually pursuing liberation is people’s aversion to meaningfully challenging the gender binary because it is personally gender affirming for them. so much reactionary bullshit in this community is intimately tied to exorsexism and transmedicalism/

and like. i also don’t want to downplay why people would feel like that. you spend your entire life suffering because of being denied your gender. it impacts your identity and your relationships and your work and your everything. and then when there’s finally a chance that you may actually be able to cross the great divide that separates the group you are forced to be to and the group you have always felt you belonged in, there is all of this talk about how we should dismantle the groups entirely, when you have barely - if at all - gotten a chance to even exist in a way that doesn’t make you want to kill yourself, when the groups are still influencing everything about the world all the time.

but the thing is! we feel this way primarily because in our present culture, to be gendered as cis-binary is to be made human. it is to socially exist, to be seen, to be loved, to have existential, ontological meaning as a person. and nonbinary people do not get to pursue gender euphoria that also makes us human, you understand? nb/gq/gnc people do not have the option of pursuing being socially recognized as you truly feel you are and not wanting to kill yourself. some people can be happy on either side of the chasm and carve out space for themselves there, but too often only on the precarious edge. and the rest of us can only jump off or wait to be shoved off.

do you understand? we don’t have the option. our insistence on fighting and deconstructing the binary is not an abstract political choice based on what we speculate would be the most #radical. it is as much a choice made out of trans survival as any binary trans man or woman’s pursuit of a passing and stealth life. and plenty of us also do not want the concept of “man” or “woman” to be erased entirely; many of nb/gq/gnc people are men and women! sometimes both at the same time! others want to see new concepts to gain acceptance and social recognition!

but that is the problem with the community’s exorsexism when it comes down to it. it is binary gender ideology which provides the foundation for patriarchal ideology and power as a whole, and so as feminists it is the binary we need to challenge (early radical feminists circled this realization, although they failed to develop it productively; intersectional feminism leads us to challenging the gender binary by challenging the related privileged oppressor/powerless oppressed binary). nb/gq/gnc people strain under a binary system and binary culture, and so tend to be more conscious of the binary and the need to challenge it, just like cis perisex women are more likely to be conscious of patriarchy than cis perisex men because they experience a lot more direct and obvious strain under it. all trans people are ultimately oppressed by gender binary ideology and exorsexism, and it goes against trans people’s class interests to support it. but a lot of trans people who identify strongly with the binary have, for decades at this point, actively decided to sacrifice the pursuit of trans liberation and liberation from patriarchy as a whole, in favor of keeping the binary in place so they can experience being the ones who benefit from it and wield it against others. like lower-middle class people being fierce defenders of capitalism and taking great pride in self-sufficiency and financial sense and not relying on handouts.

the thing about “trans guys have it easier” is that when you look into it its really more of a folk myth than anything. people come up with all sorts of stories to explain this “fact.” people will tell you that people seen as men are gender-policed much more harshly than people seen as women and every little deviation towards femininity is noticed and punished, and that’s why trans guys have it easier. but you’ll also hear people tell you that people seen as men have so much more wiggle room, men can be all kinds of sizes and shapes meanwhile people seen as women have to fit into this tiny little box, and that’s why trans guys have it easier.

these are two entirely contradictory lines of logic, but they lead to the same conclusion. because the conclusion is the point. its a backformed theory of gender. people believe, for whatever reason, that “trans guys have it easier” is an objective fact, and then storytell an explanation for why that is that sounds right to them. and this isn’t necessarily something that’s done maliciously, which is key. its not about people twiddling their fingers and thinking about how to contribute to a massive conspiracy against transmascs. its about people just feeling, on a gut level, that trans guys must have it easier, by which they really mean, transmasculine suffering isn’t socially visible, and it isn’t natural for me to imagine it, therefore it must not exist; yet, trans suffering in general clearly exists, so there must be some reason that transmasculine suffering feels so abstract and immaterial to me and others.

this is why anti-transmasculinity theory is so important. all kinds of people come to this conclusion, and the best explanation for why this strange thing happens and why no one talks about it is anti-transmasculinity & erasure as a social force which people internalize.