Kojiroll

honest to god i feel like the concept of identifying as "TME" needs to be put up on a very high shelf until people can prove they're not going to use it to be shitty to people for no damn good reason.

the real (scary?!) solution to all this is to consider the people around you as human beings who deserve respect and not just something you can take your anger out on.

(catching up with the Situtation- brave of you to put yourself out there like this. get em sunny)

I regularly see trans men on Tumblr tell other trans men that if they use any words that might imply trans men face specific issues they're:

• being transmisogynist by implying trans women are their oppressors
• being misogynist to all women by implying systemic misandry is real
• setting feminism back to the dark ages
• basically MRAs and incels who hate women, including cis women but especially trans women, and just want an excuse to pretend they're more oppressed than women
• inherently allying themselves with Zionists b/c there are popular trans masc bloggers who use those terms and are also Zionists (or other call-out worthy political and moral issues)
• probably white, and if not white then white-aligned
  So I think "should a term that refers to this kind of harassment exist" is unfortunately a losing battle.

I'm worried that this situation is the result of smaller pockets of folks that are causing a rift as a whole. Like, I've mostly been getting the transfem perspective, but I really want to not instantly assume the worst of people especially not other trans people. A large number of fairly visible transfem folks, such as Predstrogen, have been getting bombarded with harassment, and the frankly constant nature of it kinda screams a small group of very obsessed stalker types just using any ammunition they can against those on the receiving end. Not only that but the prevalence of sea lioning makes it impossible to tell if someone is honestly confused or just trying to make the situation worse. I haven't seen first three points you described in any transfem circles I've been in, but considering how transmeds, those hyper toxic 4chan transfem communities, and Blaire White exist I'm dead certain that you're dealing with abuse for being transmasc in ways specific to it. The remaining four points you made seem to be the result of the very visible victims of the harassment becoming very wary of transmasc folks and the resulting echo chambers where neither of our communities are able to talk civilly about these issues. It feels like a giant wedge is getting driven into the trans community as a whole, with the combo of miscommunication, small groups of very cruel people, and echo chambers.

thank you for writing this. i would also ask why transmascs arent allowed a word to describe the nature of their constant invisiblity and erasure, a thing that tends not to happen to typically hypervisiblized trans women and femmes, and is thus best understood as its own form of intersectional oppression

this is such a great way of putting this thank you

this is one of those subjects that digs into my brain like a burr and drives me nuts, so this was very validating to read. the "tma/tme" distinction seems to be mostly useful to allow trans people to go at each other's throats, and neatly elides that trans people writ large are not in structural positions or positions of privilege over other trans people on the basis of sex/gender (race, class, etc. are different matters). they're just not! The last trans survey I dove into was in 2015, but there were very similar statistics of violence and discrimination against all kinds of trans people, something i imagine is pretty true to most of our experiences as well (as i recall, nonbinary people had much worse mental health, which was interesting) (https://ustranssurvey.org/download-reports/). while there may be unique dynamics or struggles faced that are useful to talk to, it's just not productive to pretend we're not all in the same boat facing the same enemy, which is patriarchal oppression as a system of domination, which is not the same as just "cis men evil." Perceived maleness is just as much a site of violence and exclusion as perceived femaleness, and trans people writ large experience both. Trans male invisibility shouldn't necessarily be understood as the opposite of the hypervisibility of trans women, but as its own phenomenon stemming from the contradiction of trans men being male without any of the structural privileges of maleness - victims with no claim to victimhood, at least not one that is easily summarizable ("trans men are men" doesn't really help on this front).

Moreover, all attempts to categorize gendered oppression on the basis of assigned sex get very weird very quickly. Most notably is the bizarre position in which it puts nonbinary people (and frankly, this is my pet theory for why there's been a strange uptick in people identifying as afab/amab, at least in part. i'm sure it's multifactorial). if one's assigned sex can't be interpreted from your gender because you fall outside any relationship to maleness or femaleness, is one meant to identify oneself as your assigned sex out of some sense of "positionality"? and how the hell is that liberatory? this seems like a tremendously bad idea, and this is setting aside the absurdity of believing that one can know how individuals are perceived in any given context.