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