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samanthaistyping
@samanthaistyping

i need to write something more coherent eventually but in the interest of getting this out of my head so I can finish my work day: "transmisogyny exempt" is, i continue to contend, a fucking nonsense phrase that should have been retired years ago but now we have cis people using it to "defend" trans women against scaaaaary transmascs within a labyrinth of twitter grievances i will never be able to sort out. it has made me so angry and disappointed in so many people i thought knew better, and it is actively standing in the way of meaningful community building, all for the validation of the mean-girl transsexual class. stop flattening Whipping Girl and read another book


samanthaistyping
@samanthaistyping

my most obvious problem with the idea of dividing people into either "transmisogyny exempt" and "-affected" buckets -- aside from the part where it only kinda works as long as we ignore nonbinary and intersex people -- is that this use of "exempt" doesn't make any sense. its actual intended meaning is "not the intended target of," but that is, in my opinion, illegible to a lay reader. "exempt" carries a much heavier set of functional synonyms, and contains the assumption that the subject is not meaningfully affected by something.

this is not the praxis some folks seem to think it is.

bigotries do not operate within this framework in any material sense. transphobia and transmisogyny obviously are not the same thing as ableism, various forms of racism and xenophobia, etc., but it would be absurd for me to describe myself as -- for example -- "ableism-exempt" just because I do not presently have a disability.1 ableism has played a huge role in our governments' responses to the COVID pandemic; ableist ideas warp doctors' assessments of all their patients; the flip side of the "accessible spaces benefit everyone" coin is that inaccessible spaces are to the detriment of everyone, often in ways we don't see. I do not need to center myself as the "real" victim of an oppressive system to comprehend the ways it causes me harm.

I feel like some trans women2 have developed this idea that their status as the primary target of a bigoted manner of thinking/acting means that unintended targets don't matter, at least not in a way that deserves serious attention. everyone suffers as a result of regular-degular misogyny. why would transmisogyny, the space where traditional and oppositional sexism meet, work differently? we're seeing paranoid "transvestigation" conspiracies lead to heavier policing and violent behavior against anyone they think is clocky. Megan thee Stallion is currently the subject of a conspiracy theory that claims she is secretly trans (she isn't) and that's why she "lied" (she didn't) about getting shot by Tory Lanez. I assure you no cis woman with so much as a visible trachea is "transmisogyny exempt" in 2024!!

I have seen some cogent critiques of Jules Gill-Peterson's A Short History of Trans Misogyny but this from the introduction sums the situation up well (emphasis added):

In truth, everyone is implicated in and shaped by trans misogyny. There is no one who is purely affected by it to the point of living in a state of total victimization, just as there is no one who lives entirely exempt from its machinations. There is no perfect language to be discovered, or invented, to solve the problem of trans misogyny by labeling its proper perpetrator and victim.

lashing out at trans men en masse bc what, r/traa made an "assumes transfem" flair for memes? so you3 concoct weird infantilizing inside jokes like "birthday boy"? is not dismantling patriarchy. it is not fighting for our fucking liberation. you are not freeing your sisters in the quote retweets. this shit might make individual people feel like they're Queen Bitch but it does not build community, it does not make people safer or wiser, it feeds into an artificial ingroup-outgroup schism that directly serves forces you claim to oppose. please stop getting high on theory and engage with other marginalized people as people instead.


  1. EDIT 7/28: After sleeping on this I realized this is maybe inaccurate. I have been taking ADHD medication for almost a year and am pretty sure I fall somewhere ambiguous on the AuDHD continuum but haven't received a diagnosis. When diagnosed this is legally considered a disability but for various reasons I have a very hard time reading myself as "being disabled" in this context. Arguably, this reinforces my point in this paragraph.

  2. there's an implied "white" here but we don't have a patent on it or anything; we are just very susceptible to flattening concepts like this, bc as a demographic we don't tend to have as much direct lived experience on the receiving end of bigotry prior to transition

  3. in a general sense, unless you do this, in which case yeah, you


lightbringer
@lightbringer
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in reply to @samanthaistyping's post:

"some people are too busy looking for the cheese to see the mousetrap" / "when you see a wedge why is your first instinct to push it harder?"

but also it shows just how much we need to do as a movement in terms of having better resources for new people than the people only slightly in front of them. The endless September only stops when onboarding catches up to the overwhelming success of community growth but everyone is so tired.

Personally, I see that as an opportunity, but I'm not sure we're collectively prepared yet for bootstrapping the new-web, so to speak.

Actually having typed that out, I think we are. The last 18 years of being involved in queer communities and 12 of left activism under fire, we've been building webs without the help of the internet the last two decades, and the century before that too.

A flat playing field has it's benefits.

Thanks for this, as one of the mentioned ignored-nonbinary-people. Been confused by these terms since Idk if I'm TMA or TME , as someone whose presentation is very masc but enjoys she/her , woman, etc. I don't see people like myself discussed as TMA people, but then what is it when people hear im trans/nb and automatically shift from he/him to he/they , or find my use of she/her to be funny or incongruent?
Almost like it's not a dichotomy (again) trying to make it into one is going to let a lot of transmisogyny go unnoticed...

Yeah tbh first time I saw discussion of transmisoginy it was filled with hate for transmasc, got hit really hard with some cognitive dissonance and I think this post helped me sort through my thoughts on it...

thank you! i think i could've been more clear towards the end but i got irritated lol. it's less a response to a specific iteration and more a general yawp about everything i've seen sprawl out of this kind of linguistic framework. the few times I've tried to discuss this with folks who are invested in the tme/tma framework, they've basically rolled their eyes at my argument in graf 2, so i have resorted to venting my spleen rather than trying to map out the individual grievances that made them think this stuff is in any way coherent

Appreciate this post so much! My friends and I talked about this subject a lot when we read A Short History of Trans Misogyny together. What did you think of her use of โ€œtransfeminizedโ€ in similar contexts to which TMA/TME might be used?

I think this is one of the lines I've seen the most cogent critique of (along with "subjected to transmisogyny"). I'm a nonbinary trans woman and "transfeminized" feels very correct to describe how I relate to the gendered world, but it has the same pitfalls as "transfem" -- I know some butch trans women don't feel like forms of "femme" or "feminized" are accurate descriptors for how they relate to the gendered world, especially when they're being policed for not being femme enough to be considered "really trans" etc. I can definitely see why someone would still feel excluded by the etymological implications there.

ultimately I think it's a more generally useful/applicable concept to lean on for sure, but it does go back to Gill-Peterson's own reminder that despite what writers like myself might fantasize about at night, we're not going to find the Right Word to define the "proper" target and thereby end transmisogyny as a system/project. Jack Halberstam talks about this impulse to categorize in his book Trans* , and argues that it's part of a Eurocentric and white supremacist model of scientific research that demands everything be strictly defined. I am not an absolutist in that sense (maybe I just need to unlearn more shit!) but I view tme/tma as a reactionary example of that mode of thinking, whereas "transfeminized" feels to me more like a genuine attempt at non-exclusive umbrella terminology. "close enough for jazz" as we used to say in high school band practice

all that being said I do think it's impressive in its flexibility. one can transfeminize oneself, but people can also be transfeminized by the gaze of another/society, and those can occur in different contexts, including categories of people that are now lumped into the Western "trans women" category despite not necessarily agreeing with that on a cultural level. i think that flexibility may be its greatest strength.

from Gill-Peterson's NPR interview:

I wanted to create this term just to give us something that would allow us to talk about groups of people or individuals who experience transmisogyny without being trans women, either because it's not obvious that they are. We don't know that they are, because they're not out, they haven't transitioned or because they're genuinely not trans women, right? They're just treated like they are.