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[jacksbookstack]

Experiences of Male Consciousness Raising

Found in the arseend of the Glagsow Women’s Library. I forget the exact title. Fascinating book. If only for the frankness with which they talk about same sex activity (early 70s) even as admittedly straight men, and the self-admitted reserved stupidity of most of what they said. Good contrast but completely useless for doing transfeminist CR. I guess useful for that person off Lex that wanted to do a queer CR group but like, god preserve you my friend, you will have a difficult time with such a broad group. 

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Abolish the Family, Sophie Lewis

Good. Tentative. Holds herself back, self-admittedly. 

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Trans Care - Hil Malatino

Misogynistic drivel. 

Cites trans women to get quota, and cites women like they cant think. Transfeminism is completely absent. Everything is framed within or with a centre on transmasculinity. An entire 10% of this book is dedicated to how young trans mascs like fall out boy, but like, it is truly awful. The thesis is ‘young trans men should be able to enjoy this misogynistic music and they should be gentle criticised by trans (implied male) elders for it’ such that they can “unlearn toxic masculinity.”

I want I really do not enjoy listening to FOB, but I do my best to empathise with this baby trans masc. [...] I want them to have their clueless and self-involved boyhoods. I want them to take the long road through navigating toxic masculinity to sloppily grapple with it the way that other boys get to do. I want them [///] to maintain the kind of wide eyed silliness and unabashed enthusiasm that we associate with childhood but in fact oly the most [some] experience. [...] I want them to have have trans elders to turn to, and I want them to have a chance to become trans elders themselves. 

Hil argues, to put a blunt point on it, that trans boys should get normal boyhoods, and develop normally, with the support of older trans people. Two problems: (1) this is a contradictory argument.  (2) why would you argue that through literal rapist music? Like the reason this music is misogynistic drivel is because its written by a statutory rapist. If the women are one dimension its because its written by a misogynist, a word Malatino refuses to pin on anyone in particular really in this entire book. Rape is not wideeyed sillieness. 

Lets sit with the inside of his argument for a moment. First, remove the child. That’s arbritrary. We’re discussing young men, let’s not infantalise that. So, you can either say that young trans men, pre-transition, have the internalities of young men, and hold women in the same regard of other men, but lack the same ability to do much with that, OR you can say that trans men are generally innocent and learn toxic masculinity as they transition. HM heavily implies the latter, but demands that we consider them in the former. He demands that we consider teenage trans mascs, who are explicitly centred on a white suburban sort, as simultaneously as learning misogyny, but innocent of it until they age by implied virtue of their having been assigned female at birth transness. It is this fascinating combination of assimilationist politics and exterminatory sympathy that makes a gendernonconforming trans adulthood impossible.

What Malatino implies is that trans men take circuitous i.e. learnt routes to toxic masculinity, and they should, rather, take normaller routes. An assimilationist misogyny. Misogynistic drivel in ink. Men should have the balls to rape a woman bashed out of them, and any man who thinks he’s above bashing, bashed again.