#degendering and misgendering are not the same thing

[sorin-sunchild]

The 4 types of gendering

Correct gendering: when a persons gender is affirmed through correct use of name, pronouns and other gendered words in positive, neutral and negative situations in the same way it would be for a cis person. e.g. "This is Mandy, my girlfriend." (gf is a trans woman)

Misgendering: when a persons gender is not affirmed and they are instead refered to as their SEG in every possible context. e.g. "This is Mandy, my girlfriend." ('g'f is a trans man)

Degendering: when someone avoids Correct Gendering in a way that also avoids Misgendering, thus giving them plausible deniability. The person will often avoid using the persons name and pronouns where possible and if pronouns are required will exclusively use 'they/them' with the excuse 'but those pronouns are literally neutral' even when aware of the actual pronouns and gender of the person they're speaking about/to. e.g. "Why are you mad I called you they/them those are neutral pronouns it's not transphobic to be gender neutral." "No it's not, but I've told you again and again that my pronouns are 'she/her' and I don't like being refered to neutrally. It feels like you have an issue with my womanhood." "Clearly you're being overly sensitive and just trying to make me out to be the bad guy." "I'm just asking for basic respect and correct gendering." "They/them is neutral though so it counts as correct." ad infinitum

Malgendering: when someone seems to be engaging in Correct Gendering but the Correct Gendering is conditional on the context always being negative and in some situations is actively revoked if the person hates an individual or group enough to start employing Misgendering. Malgendering involves insults, stereotyping, predjudice and bigotry based on the persons gender. However, since it avoids Misgendering, people who employ Malgendering techniques also engage with plausiable deniability about their predjudice/bigotry. e.g. trans men being denied medical care on the grounds of 'being men' despite having the body parts that medical care is designed to help, trans men being deemed suddenly 'unsafe around women' for being men and told 'that's how it is to be a man', a trans woman being arrested for taking off her shirt due to laws against women being topless (when she is in other situations by law considered a man instead), a trans womans lack of ability in male-dominated spaces/hobbies being attributed to her gender.

Disclaimer: Yes, malgendering often crosses over with general transphobia, transmisogyny, misogyny etc it's not a kind of hatred it's an act of hatred based on those other things.

[plaidos]

Didn't want to be that one follower who sucks the wind out of the room with a big addition, so sending this for you to answer or ignore at your own discretion.

Visavis that body slider post, I kind of just feel like we can't and will never be able to depend on AAA games to represent us accurately, or really any minority experience for that matter. These games are all fairly archetypical power fantasy heroes quests or whatever, and especially if they incorporate full character customization, they necessarily will shave off granularity, especially in the name of budget feasibility.

Maybe they could be convinced that transfems are a large enough market to hire a VA for us, and learn the dos and donts of body/gender character creation by rote, but the story will still be roughly the same. They won't add a hundred, maybe thousand, little instances of microaggression, degendering, kneejerk suspicion; completely rewrite the fabric of how every other character in the game interacts with us, because then they'd have to do that for every other conceivable identity.

I'm not saying this is fair, or justified, or that they should be let off the hook for it, but I just unfortunately don't see it ever changing for these types of games. A far more feasible ask, in my opinion, would be to demand that games if anything stop making the character a blank canvas for the audience to craft an effigy of themselves, and instead force them to make narratives that are explicitly transfeminine alongside being power fantasy heroes quests; to ask the majority cis audience to step into our shoes for once, in a way that can't be cordoned off to the side as the overwhelming majority of the audience plays as a character that doesn't force them to challenge their preconceptions of the world.

i agree somewhat, but i’m not necessarily asking for literally every line of dialogue to be restructured for every element of every character — but this is Dragon Age we’re talking about; it prides itself on writing separate dialogues for different character traits, and it literally follows through on doing that with transness as a trait too — that’s actually one of the cooler parts of Veilguard. the problem is that when we come to meet the non-binary character, none of their story makes any kind of sense. theyre closeted and anxious about telling their mom, but… there doesn’t seem to be any transphobia in this world, so why would that be a factor? there’s this great big Very Special Episode feeling cutscene about this character being accidentally misgendered and how all the cis characters should punish themselves for it. but if there’s no transphobia, that’s just a genuine mistake, like i don’t see people forcing themselves to do push-ups when they accidentally refer to their married friend as “miss”, or if you accidentally refer to a cis person who changed their name by their old name — it’s just a “oh my bad, sorry” moment before moving on — and worse yet, this conversation forces your character to be a cis person at the sidelines when it’s a perfect example of just One perfect place you could be inserting different dialogue for a trans character.

i’m not asking for massive vast differences between trans and cis characters, obviously these types of RPGs have to have some element of mushy in-the-middle-ness to be able to have such widely customisable characters. but there’s a mid ground between “literally realistic depiction of being microaggressed by every cis person you meet & totally separate dialogue trees and quests and storylines” and “my trans character is assumed to be cis in the writing of cutscenes interacting with major trans characters about them being trans”. and we’re at the latter right now.

you’re right — we’re not a marketable demographic. that’s not why these things are being added: that’s literally my point, the trans content in videogames is largely aimed at cis people feeling good and progressive for its surface level inclusion. like, “nobody cares enough to represent us because we won’t give them enough money” is part of what i’m complaining about? 😭

[tboyrory]

Also one of my annoyances with “trans men don’t experience degendering to the same extent or as often”, I actually have a story on this.

My first identity was nonbinary for a short period of time although this was before my parents found out. When they found out, I had realized I’m a boy, how they found out is kind of stupid. When I got a phone, and set it up, I accidentally turned on iCloud settings for everything, and I had photos of myself trying very clearly to pass as male and secretly putting on boy’sclothes (which I wasn’t allowed to do), voice training videos, pictures of what type of binder I wanted, memes, just a lot of trans shit, you know how it is when you’re freshly out to yourself and exploring.

So first what happened was yet again, still not allowed to wear masculine clothes, could only wear feminine clothing, which they checked every morning, was once held down and had a skirt forced on me. I endured that for only two more years. And then my mother told me I’m nonbinary (it had been over two years since I identified as such, and she had no clue I ever was). She even made a “coming out” post on facebook with me dressing androgynously. My pronouns became they/them. They even got me a they/them mug. Now this doesn’t sound all that bad, and sure it was an improvement, but I still had to use my deadname, and misgendering was treated like, “well you’re a boy, AND a girl.” Emphasis on girl, because that made she/her still acceptable to use for me. But I couldn’t be… just a boy. I had to be nonbinary. So yet again I was living as nonbinary, at least around my entire family, because the whole Facebook post thing, experienced exorsexism despite not even being nonbinary, and it wasn’t for another year and half that I was finally allowed to just be a guy.

Literally how much more could I have experienced significant degendering? For over a year, I was forced to choose between being living as a girl, or being nonbinary, actually I didn’t even get a choice, my mom woke me up from an afternoon nap and said “come on, you’re coming out as a they/them on Facebook.” She saw it as a compromise or something, idfk what was going through her head, I’m too scared to ask.

I find it funny now and make jokes about it “assigned nonbinary by mother”, but I was fucking miserable throughout this whole ordeal of just trying to live as a boy.

Also this is fairly common for some reason, I’m not the only trans guy to have had this exact thing happen to.

[nothorses]

#idk i have thoughts about the 'binar v. nonbinary' distinction. i think there is a reason#that trans people get degendered when they use binary pronouns#AND wrongly gendered when they use use gender neutral pronouns#for example

i'm intrigued by these thoughts would you like to share more about these thoughts

I think I'd boil it down to like... specifically the idea of "binary trans" people as a class.

I very firmly believe that the oppression of nonbinary people ("exorsexism") exists and is a real form of oppression, and I believe that experiences with it- and the ideological foundation it rests on- are unique and worth discussing. I think nonbinary people have unique experiences with oppression that are necessary to listen to and understand, and that it is to everyone's benefit to include in those perspectives in larger conversations around trans justice.

I specifically take issue with the idea that there is a group of people that can easily & universally be differentiated as "binary trans" in anything but how those people personally identify.

I think that, socio-politically speaking, the only people that are truly classed as "binary" are 100% gender-conforming dyadic cis people. When we're talking about transphobia as a concept, we're talking about a system of oppression meant to punish people who stray from the gender binary. Historically, anyone punished under this system was included under the "trans" umbrella: gender-non conforming cis people, drag kings and queens, nonbinary people, intersex people, you name it. We are all gender outlaws; we all exist outside traditional understandings of gender, and we are all punished for doing so.

Now, we can narrow the scope quite a bit; I do still have the ability to "pass" as my gender, which is not an option to a lot of nonbinary folks. I can get a gender marker that accurately reflects my gender, and I can go "stealth" in a way that doesn't cause me a lot of dysphoria. I absolutely acknowledge that there are experiences I do not have, and oppression I do not face, and I should take care to listen to the people who do face them.

The problem for me here is that like, none of those things are exclusively "binary trans" experiences either. Plenty of nonbinary people are not strictly outside of every binary gender, or outside of comfort with a binary gender presentation. Such is the enormous multitude of nonbinary identities, and the unknowable vastness of human experience.

The other, perhaps larger problem for me is that I also do not strictly have a "binary trans male" experience. I mean, least of all because I have still at this point spent more of my life identifying as nonbinary than I have as a trans man- but also because I'm still trans. In a lot of ways, I'm not actually viewed as "binary"; I am clock-able enough that I'm pretty regularly degendered by even incredibly well-intentioned cis people, for example. My grandma is confused about my gay relationship; she very much does not think it is gay or straight. Anyone who knows I'm a trans man does not think of me as a woman or a man; they think of me as something entirely outside of the binary, and they treat me accordingly.

To go back to the tag you're quoting: I think binary trans people using binary pronouns are degendered for the exact same reason that nonbinary using gender-neutral pronouns are misgendered. People don't want to recognize us as the genders we are. They don't want to validate an experience of gender that lies outside their tidy little gender binary.

Again: this doesn't mean that exorsexism isn't real, or even that "there is no such thing as a binary trans woman/man". That's not what I'm saying. I want to keep having discussions about the unique experiences nonbinary people have, and the unique ways in which transphobic society treats and targets them, and the unique oppression they suffer, and why, and how we can fight that.

I also don't think I'm the first person by far to point out that maybe the idea of The Binary Trans Experience should be problematized a little bit, and I think there's something to be said for the funky space that "binary trans people" occupy on the good-little-gender-conforming-cis-person to nonbinary continuum.

[wolfertinger]

i know *you* aren't transphobic but I think at this point you might have to put a disclaimer in the blog description that's just like. Says no transphobes or just a "do not misgender Salem or Wis" thing bc I have noticed people have they/them'd both of them and just having something like this on the blog can help since people that aren't in the know or ppl that have come on the blog and said they used to think this was just a transphobic hate campaign. It's just really unfortunate that calling out bad people that happen to be trans always seems to attract transphobes

tbh. yeah. i have been getting weird comments, lately.

again. i wish to emphasize something here, i said in comments, elsewhere. "why is it, that people do not degender cis abusers, the same way they will trans people. unless, you think being trans is a privilege you revoke at will."

although it is one thing, to examine salem's attitude towards transness, and the way he speaks about both other trans men and trans women. and it is another thing entirely, to be transphobic toward him as a whole. do not stoop to this level. if you will only respect a trans persons identity, so long as you like them, you are not safe for ANY trans people.

[butterfly-ribbon]

i was thinking about mizuki's gender being listed as unknown again and how everyone else has an explicit mention. people tried to point at that to say she's either not trans OR that she isn't a tgirl (instead a different kind of trans) at some point, but i think that… actively misunderstands the internal intent of the game. like this was done so people wouldn't assume she's a cis girl and i also think there's an active intent in noting that, but not wanting to say "gender = male" bc this would be misgendering (duh) and for a character who's burying so much of her gender struggles bc of how others deny it, i think it makes sense. there's a struggle, i think, in writing and exploring trans narratives that engage with that… question? idk. maybe it would be better if she was just noted as female from the start and i think she's overdue for that especially after ena5, but i also think there's so much nuance in how she's portrayed that i see saying her gender is "?" isn't meant to actually be a declaration of her gender or meant for the reader to question what her gender is.

in many cases, trans girls are already automatically shunted into that expectation of either a fetish or wish fulfillment (which in many ways are the same thing at a certain point) and that's the conceit of her introduction in the main story in terms of how everyone treats her as an exhibition at school - she's fetishistically mythologized and vilified as an Other type of girl, which is something she tries to reclaim by hiding behind the facade of the Mysterious Manic Pixie Dream (Cis) Girl when she's around niigo bc it's the only way she feels like she can be with them without imposing on them or getting close enough to them to the point of having to reveal her secret due to her desire to avoid being hurt. it's wild to me that the consensus in the past about her was that she's anything but a trans girl when the treatment she's subjected to at the school is textbook transmisogyny and this is something we see immediately in the main story.

people are constantly fetishizing her and treating her like an object to be ogled at. she's constantly under the threat of violence. even when she puts so much work into pushing back just through being full of energy and looking "past" it all, they never stop. there's nothing she can do about a society that refuses to recognize her as a person, much like mafuyu can't do anything to change her own mother.

at most she gets told by others that this person is "just not used to her yet". terrible implications all around bc she's made to feel as though people are just putting up with her existence instead of making the effort to understand something that should be simple about who she is, which makes her feel terrible after she's put so much effort into both explaining herself and making herself as palatable as possible?

i think there are some valid criticism to be raised about how marking mizuki as "unknown" and how it might've contributed to people writing her off as "neither a girl nor boy" and the unfortunate parallels with degendering/third sexing therein. if i were to engage in good faith, i'd say the intent is draw attention to mizuki's gender struggles and make the reader interrogate that (and then ideally arriving at the answer being that she's a trans girl), but i still stand by my take that ena5 should've had her refer to herself as a girl explicitly to reclaim the way she was outed previously. it also always felt like the equivalent of mafumom being 'hidden' due to mafuyu's perception of her as a figure of authority rather than a person until kanade saw her for the awful person she is. in this case mizuki's "unknown" is also meant to tie into her own internalized transmisogyny (e.g. referring to herself as an artificial flower in many songs). mizuki herself plays into the degendering she's been subjected to for her entire life in many ways … we know that in the beginning of high school she actually made effort to explain herself to others and they didn't get it? she presumably said that she's a trans girl but she wasn't taken seriously. now she just finds it exhausting to explain anything and she doesn't want to feel like she constantly has to prove that a trans girl is just a type of girl so she's just like "that's me. i do this bc i wanna be me. this is the person i am, why the hell do you think i would do this, why would i dress this way, why would I put up with people like you if it wasn't obvious." i think there's also a lot we can engage with in terms of the presentation of mizuki which is wholly under her own control vs that which is outside of her control... mizuki finds comfort in niigo and connecting with girls over discord bc she can rewrite her life in such a way to as to obscure her own transness like when she narrates her backstory. the fact that the details of her trauma are so carefully hidden carries a strong intent bc it reads as mizuki's renarrativization due to not wanting to get too much into detail about her own trauma? it feels very meta considering mizuki's genre saviness and the fact that most transfeminine narratives tend to indulge in transmisogynistic violence in really voyeuristic ways... we know mizuki had numerous traumatic coming out moments and i think there's so much to read into the ambiguity around this... she's frankly constantly under the treat of SA as well as a trans girl, but i just appreciate that this is something the writing treats respectfully and affords her so much dignity. to be trans in many contexts is to be expected to give over so much of yourself to people who frequently won't care, won't actually understand how much of yourself you're giving over, and will actively rewrite your narrative to define who you are for you based on their own prejudices… and mizuki communicates that well bc she's allowed to be almost wholly in control of her presentation and her narrative.

[this-is-exorsexism]

Treating nonbinaryhood like a dirty thing that good polite people don’t discuss.

It feels like degendering but instead of using they/them for a binary trans person, it’s just stripping a nonbinary person of their gender altogether.

I feel like this takes many forms but the primary one I experience is having people just refuse to refer to me at all when I’m around. Like, they’ll just avoid saying anything that would require them to use my pronouns at all. They’ll still talk to me, and treat me like they accept me, but they’ll tiptoe around my gender when I’m around. And of course the moment my back is turned they use the pronouns associated with my AGAB to refer to me.

this is exorsexism.

this needs to be talked about more. a lot of people think degendering only happens to binary trans people but it happens to nonbinary people too, though it's way more subtle and apparently not as noticeable to anyone who isn't the person it's happening to. i've been out for nearly 7 years and i have family who still haven't used my pronouns, just avoiding them altogether but calling me a gendered term to someone else in the next moment.

when people use they/them for binary trans people, they do this so they don't look bad because "i didn't misgender them, they/them is neutral!"

and when people avoid pronouns or other nonbinary terms altogether for nonbinary people, they do it with the exact same motive, "i didn't misgender them, i didn't even use pronouns!"

it's like people looking in our direction but aggressively looking past us instead of at us. it is very much a microaggression. people jump through wild hoops to avoid referring to nonbinary people.

i know "don't refer to me" is a common joke among our community but it actually really sucks.

[lesser-vissir]

Hey, I'm generally shy and just want to thank you for the post about how there's nothing wrong with excluding binary trans men (just to clarify I do think that bigender people should be allowed in both spaces regardless of if the person is tma or tme, hence the emphasis on binary trans men and not all trans men, I assume you can probably gather that but my brain is currently doing the thing where it tells me to over explain where I can find places to so I am less likely to be misunderstood-sorry if I'm extra annoying right now while typing this because of that) from women spaces, along with move on to a different post. I appreciate it whenever I see someone understanding that transandrophobia exists in some level (the way male spaces exclude not just binary trans men but trans mascs in general is the actual example of transandrophobia and the women's spaces is people misunderstanding like you said) even if I'm understanding correctly that you don't like to use the term at all. Acknowledging that the oppression exists in the first place is just very nice to hear.

The only other post that I really have something to say about after spending my attention span (the person replying is giving off red flags to me and it's triggering the "step away from the discourse alarm" and I am now using up my remaining energy and tolerance for this shit on this to try and leave a more positive feeling and once again I'm sorry if I fail with that) is yeah, TERFs do try and squirm their way in. The only reason I don't see it pop up is because I block everyone I see either sporting TERF rhetoric or being openly transmisogynstic (the vehn diagram for that in the transandrophobia tag is almost a circle). I have also seen a couple posts in the tag calling out bad faith actors-i.e people that fall somewhere on the circle of a vehn diagram.

I do find it a bit odd that you choose to use a post that reads off as a sarcastic complaint about it (in the tags that you included also seem to point out that the OP is aware on some level that TERFs like to try and do this shit although there is context mixing there and I can't bring myself to try and dig it up to double check-I haven't seen any posts that explicitly deny it myself and am even pretty sure I've seen one or two that bring it up if my memory is right but maybe my blocklist is part of why) seems kinda of like you might be overlooking the last two sentences from the TERF. I don't know how to take the sentences "The cause isn't your man LARP" and "It's the fact you're fucking female" as anything other than trying to egg someone in to detransition personally. Especially the bit calling it a LARP. It's the same energy as the misgendering comments I've gotten from family members who insist that I will detransition, down to the "It's the fact that you're (...) female" line. It seems clear to me to be the TERF arguing that every trans man who cares about it is bound to detransition by using vile mis/degendering to do it. It could just be because it isn't overt which is understandable, no one's perfect. There's a good chance I'm just picking up on it because I'm more used to see people try and egg trans mascs into detransitioning, in which case hopefully this ask only fuels some sense of understanding? From what I've noticed with transmisogyny it tends to be more physical violence sometimes even skipping over attempts to egg on detransition to go straight towards the violence so I could understand this being what's going on. With transandrophobia it tends to be reverse, focus on detransition attempts and only use violence as a last resort. It's a detail that makes me unable to remember that trans misogyny will always be worse-there is restraint with transandrophobia because transphobes see more use in trans mascs to further their transphobic but more specifically transmisogynstic rhetoric.

I do think some are much lighter with it, exactly like how you describe, and will not push the detransition bit but the vast majority do. From what I noticed the gentler ones tend to pipeline and essentially prep any trans masc or afab trans neutral for the more explicit ones like the TERF in the screenshot but anything I could dig up on that would be anecdotal at best. The screenshot you choose is not the best to make that point however on account of it not being a gentle one. Also yeah, TERFs aren't undeniably violent towards trans mascs normally-any violence from them towards trans mascs is debatable since it's contained solely to using wording that could be perceived as violent as opposed to undeniably violent wording. That and in regards to violence I have noticed several people in the transandrophobia tag for a while now pointing out that it seems like TERFs are making sock puppets of both trans femmes and trans mascs to try and cause more friction-something that would include violent rhetoric but that's more conspiracy brained about the whole thing. They much prefer trying to groom trans mascs into self destructive actions (i.e detransition/repression) than physically hurting them. It's the cis men and normal transphobes that TERFs get riled up and even encourage who get violent towards trans mascs-i.e the stories of passing trans men following bathroom rules and getting the shit kicked out of them. The TERFs outsource all their violence when it comes to trans mascs and will only get their hands dirty with trans women since trans misogyny (lik with most transphobes) is the core of everything with them. Once again I'm sorry if I'm over explaining my understanding of these things, I just don't want to risk misunderstandings especially seeing how quickly any attempt at discussion fell apart with that other person.

I'm sorry if this ask seems overwhelming or comes off as rude or argumentative at any point. I understand completely if you choose not to engage with it but I figured that it's always better to try and have a conversation even if it's just one single message, especially since the person that did end up replying to you had a short fuse about the whole thing and ended up derailing the topic in a rage with unfounded accusations.

Also if there's anything you feel like you could correct me on if you do want to reply it would be appreciated. Even if I end up not responding because I feel like there's nothing I can probably articulate the effort would be greatly appreciated-especially since you are still in the more vulnerable position no matter how we slice it.

Hey! Thank you for your ask.

So, yeah I'm not huge on the term transandrophobia but mostly because of the people that use it. It's come to describe a fairly specific ideology rather than just being about the ways in which trans men experience transphobia.

I want to start the rest of this by saying I think you were right and I was being both overly flippant and missing the subtext when I said the TERF hadnt told him to detransition. While she didn't say those exact words, it is pretty clear she wants it to happen.

I doubled down on it which I shouldn't have, but I was just so blown away by the insistence that saying bigoted things was the same as being physically violent or otherwise causing material harm.

But yeah, my goal, thought I was more snippy than intellectual, was to highlight that bioessentialism feminism which TERFs subscribe to has specific beliefs, and that when someone with specific beliefs says something, you need those beliefs as context to understand what they are saying.

[nothorses]

same anon coming back to the degendering conversation.

i see your point about degendering as defensible, and misgendering as openly hateful. but i think the bigot can escalate further, switching back to degendering as part of dehumanization. "it", "that thing", and so on. i did make an oversimplification, but it was because your posts made me understand what the difference in feeling between types of transphobia i have experienced was, and i got very eager to share!

i am genderqueer, androgynous, and visibly varsex. i have gotten deliberately misgendered both as my original legal gender and its opposite. i have also been aggressively degendered. and actually the underlying insults were the opposite than in my example. the misgendering tried to cast me as delusional, and the degendering as an abject other, a monster.

but i do think what you described shows traces of these two angles of attack. "slipping", because they haven't actually unlearned as much as they like to think.

but i think it isn't useful to sort this kind of more 'abstract' or high concept transphobia based on target identities. these are frameworks and weapons picked by the wielders, often without consistent logic, and can be used against anyone. the unique experiences are in my opinion more practical and specific, like in most parts of the world nonbinary people having no right legal gender marker to pick. so that's how exorsexism is a thing and imo your discussion doesn't threaten to invalidate it.

thank you for the good conversation. hopefully i managed to express my thoughts somewhat coherently...

That makes sense! Yeah, I def didn't think about "it/its" degendering in that context, and I feel like that specific way of degendering trans folks has different (but overlapping) sort of intention - I don't get the same kind of dehumanization from "they/them", personally.

That said, I totally agree that the usefulness in differentiating these different types of transphobia is more in why people utilize them than it is the group of people they are attempting to target.

To use one example: I think "transphobia targeting transmasculinity" is probably a more accurate definition of "transandrophobia" than "transphobia targeting transmascs", in a lot of ways, because the people weaponizing transphobia against transmasculinity care less about hurting people who are transmasculine, and more about a fight against the concept of transmasculinity itself. They aren't trying to reveal everyone who is transmasculine in order to oppress them, they are trying to force transmasculine people to repress and hide that part of themselves in order to conform.

And I think that's true for transphobia generally, and queerphobia, and a lot of other forms of oppression. Which is also why bigotry itself tends to be fairly undiscerning; the people calling you a "faggot" on the street aren't going to correct themselves and apologize if you tell them you're straight, actually. They don't care whether you are a faggot, they're punishing the presence of faggotry as a concept.

Anyway, I'm kinda rambling here; I think we're on the same page, too, I'm just enjoying seeing & exploring new ideas and connections!

[the-descolada]

tumblr insular effect hilarity is great sometimes there was a post right after armored core 6 came out with someone complaining that all the trans girl mech posting was "misgendering their 621" bc people making memes about how the whole faceless dehumanized degendered pilot thing was thematically relatable for largely the same reason that the attack helicopter short story exists, and is obviously just like lol get a grip

especially funny when the majority of said posts still refer to 621 with they/them pronouns like the game does, while meanwhile you go into any other site under the sun like reddit and you have people obviously defaulting to he despite this

[briearesea]

I think I need to stop degendering myself in an attempt to avoid awkward moments with my family and coworkers. Like, I can't think of one time that a family member has used a pronoun in regards to me (at least not to my face) since I came out to them. Its been almost 5 years. I am referred to as [my name], every comment is phrased in such a way that they just never use she or her or hers. Only the occasional misgender where the only acknowledgment is me correcting them (if i bother) and getting a funny look and maybe a nod for it. No correction, no apology, the conversation just moves on so I just started degendering myself around them.

I don't know, I don't want to seem too complainy cuz I know lots of folx get a lot worse from their families, but it's just so frustrating. Most of my family are fiercely proud of their progressive politics and like to think of themselves as among the greatest of LGBTQ allies. And I'll admit that they do okay with my cis gay cousin and did okay with my other cousin when everyone thought they were just in a gay relationship. Now that that same cousin is trans, they're all fucking piss ass confused about how to address him. Just like none of them seem to know how to address me despite my having told them directly several times. It's just us trans cousins that they seem to struggle with.

I don't know where I'm going with this exactly. I just needed to get some thoughts out of my head rn and don't really have anyone to chat with about this sort of thing atm.

[confessions-official]

im still thinking about nex benedict. because it's like the exact thing im terrified will happen to me if i die early.

at first, newspapers said he was nonbinary and used they/them. his friends say he primarily used he/him... but it's too late. everyone is degendering him. everyones using they/them for him.

im kindof in the same boat - i use they/them with family and at school but they just use she/her for me anyway. i am way more comfortable with he/him, and i use those w my friends and online. they/them feels a bit like misgendering to me tbh. and im so scared if i get killed or something and i end up in the news what if people latch onto the they/them part?

i guess this is also on my mind because like. he was barely older than me. he was literally born in the same year as me. im turning 16 this year. he'd basically just turned 16. everything i find out about him... he was so similar to me. if we'd known each other, we really could have been friends.

he was born in fucking 2008. thats so scary to me.

im so scared.

 

[velvetvexations]

I HAVR A LOT OF THOUGHYS ABOUT "BINARY PRIVILEGE"

a lot of exorsexism-focused blogs really rail that it's a real thing but from my perspective as a transandrogynous, unaligned nb, it isn't any different than saying transmascs experience transmasc privilege, or that theres such a thing as "afab" or "amab" privilege

there are a lot of situations in which nonbinary people struggle uniquely, where binary trans people may not, but this depends A LOT on the binary and nonbinary people involved. when i was a kid, a binary trans boy essentially used my offered friendship for his own coming out/self discovery (to my knowledge i was the only out trans person at my school at the time), dumped me as a friend entirely, and i wouldnt be so irritated if it wasn't for the fact that our schools' gsa treated him like he was the only trans person there. myself and another person that was questioning nonbinary CONSTANTLY were begging to be respected, to not be deadnamed and misgendered, and people were CONSTANTLY speaking over us. but they rarely deadnamed or misgendered him, and corrected themselves when they did.

i think experiences like this are where this idea of binary privilege comes from, but "privilege" implies access to systemic advantages that nonbinary people don't have, which is a slightly different conversation. this ftm boy did not have a supportive family, and much worse dysphoria than me. he was also deadnamed and misgendered and degendered by almost every teacher we shared, same as me. his being binary trans did not give him any actual material privilege over me. he was just treated differently in a certain context, where i was treated worse in that same context

another example people usually talk abt is clinics/doctors offering hrt to binary trans people but refusing to prescribe it to nonbinary trans people. i personally have never experienced this! i am very very lucky that i have access to a queer informed consent clinic with a robust financial aid program. i am lucky that my doctor is able to and willing to prescribe testosterone, and that he trusts my ability to guide my own transition. there are plenty of binary trans people all over that are not similarly lucky and there are a lot of reasons why both nonbinary and binary trans people get denied hrt. this is a case where exorsexism may uniquely affect the transphobia experienced as compared to a binary person experiencing the same transphobia, but it does not actually translate to "binary privilege" imo bc hrt is still being gatekept in this hypothetical. the differences deserve to be talked about, but acting as if binary trans people hold unique power over us is just... it's not true, and it makes it more difficult to actually have these conversations

(this isnt even getting into other factors like gender nonconformity or sexuality, like passing or not passing. my partner is nb transmasc and stealth; does he have binary privilege bc he is comfortable being read as a man and respected by our cis friends where i am not? do they experience exorsexism bc people refuse to acknowledge their nonbinary gender? where do we draw the line?)

hi back again abt binary privilege i DO think binary trans ppl on here especially never grew out of their transmed phases and when u see someone mocking or deriding "binary privilege" they usually end up being super exorsexist in my experience? that depends very heavily on the tone they use when talking about it, like theres a hugeee difference between "i dont agree that i experience privilege for being binary trans" and "can you believe the xe/xir catgenders are saying binary privilege is a thing" (though its often more subtl than that lol)

Thank you for your thoughts anon!

[eddie-roo]

When people are talking about transmasc issues, shut the fuck up and listen.

When people are talking about transfem issues, shut the fuck up and listen.

Not everything has to be about you.

The fact a group experiences a specific type of oppression doesn’t mean the other doesn’t face the same type of oppression.

The fact a group doesn’t experiences a specific type of oppression doesn’t mean the other doesn’t face a different type of oppression.

We can all be about equally oppressed while having our oppression intersect and differ.

Lateral oppression from both is also a thing, because who knew transitioning would add a layer of complexity to your relationship with gender and sexism and transphobia? Who knew transitioning doesn’t make you automatically a good person? Who knew transitioning doesn’t automatically prevent you from being a bad person?

I’m so tired.

Can y’all just shut up and listen?

Like, if y’all just listened to each other you’d see how similar your struggles are.

I just keep seeing people say “I experience XYZ but whenever I try to speak about it [the other group] invalidates and silences me and makes the whole thing about themselves” and it’s all the same fucking issues.

The misgendering, the defeminizing/demasculinizing, the degendering, the infantilization/adultification, the bullying, being erased, being silenced, being labeled “the hysterical mad tranny making shit up to get mad at”, the sexual assault, the suicide, the medical gate keeping (even if T is generally more strictly regulated), etc.

Like, usually all these problems look similar because, since we live in a sexist patriarchal society, these are mutations of misogyny, so our oppression is bound to look similar since it stems from the same core bigotry that is at the root of society.

We all have about the same problems. We can’t solve those problems if we keep fighting about who has it worse or if the problems are real.

Just shut up everyone.

Shut up and listen.

And once we’ve listened, we may discuss.

[heirhonkful]

I would probably argue those are degendering, yes, as forms of misogyny, racism, ablism, etc. Not transphobia, of course.

But, yeah, we agree, I think. My original point was intended to be read as "you can't misgender a cis person in a way that is comparable to doing it to a trans person." The ways you can misgender (or again, maybe more accurately, I think: degender) a cis person are rooted in other forms of oppression. I assumed the person I was responding to was arguing (as I've seen other people do) that misgendering a cis person and a trans person are basically the same thing. But to be fair, they also didn't directly say that, so maybe I was assuming incorrectly.

Anyway, I still feel like it it's good to make that distinction. That misgendering the man in the video (or image I guess) isn't a meaningful form of misgendering and isn't some form of hypocrisy.

[cannibaleather]

Ramble related to LRT cuz i gotta get it off my chest, it's topics of transphobia towards trans men so like if you don't wanna see that don't read.

That post is so real though and i didn't wanna derail in the tags cuz this is kinda spinning off of it rather than directly related, but i have noticed a prevalent push to degender trans men and refuse us our gender from other trans people which SUCKS. I mean, tboy isn't inherently a bad term in of itself (if you vibe w it hell yeah you vibe w it) but because of how i have seen it wielded i refuse to be called it, i hate it applied to myself, because i only ever see it being wielded by other trans people who will refuse to use He pronouns for us or call us men. They use it in 'discourse' to infantilise and refuse us our gender, it fucking sucks! It's just the same shit that people do when they refuse to call trans women trans women and will smash the words together or come up with new ungendered terms all because they're being transmisogynistic, like it's the different side of the same coin and it's NOT okay to talk about trans women that way so it's not okay to do to trans men either.

It's so fucking tiring seeing how any discussion about trans men will make sure to call us tboys or AFAB or whatever acronym replacement people have decided is the bio essentialist replacement for AFAB (that conveniently alienates and hurts all intersex people within our community) now, they will REFUSE to call us TRANS MEN. They will REFUSE to use He pronouns. All of a sudden trans people who know well and good it is still misgendering to call a trans person They when those are not their pronouns will be conveniently forgetting that fact. And the only things they'll talk about are how trans men have male privilege and therefore should shut up and not speak unless spoken to. We are not allowed our own discussions of our experiences, we are not allowed our discussions of the transphobia we face.

Which is misogynistic btw. They're being misogynistic because they see us as girls. It's very blatant if you look at how people talk about us. That's why they think we should be quiet, i swear to god other trans people are more misogynistic towards me as a man than cis people were towards me as a girl sometimes. The constant refusal to let trans men take up any space or have any right to their own individual discussions of self, the constant insistence we shut up, stay quiet, don't speak lest spoken to, the constant over sexualisation of our bodies while refusing us our gender, the deciding we are over sensitive or too loud or crazy if we talk back; yall hear what that is right? You do understand don't you? That's misogyny. We aren't exempt from being effected by it just because we go by different pronouns or transition, people who hate us will still wield it against us if they see us as women. Bigotry doesn't really care what you actually are in many cases, it can be wielded 'wrongly' against you by those who hate you. You can be hurt by misogyny even if you're not a woman.

Which brings us to the male privilege thing. We do not have male privilege. You need to understand how the patriarchy works, we do not gain some superpower that makes us immune to its harm when we start using he/him pronouns because the world does not see us as men. We are not categorised within the patriarchy as men. Even when we quote unquote "pass" (a reductive concept anyway considering it allows no nuance for how differently the concept affects those who are intersex nonwhite or not skinny or able bodied anyway) our position as men is entirely conditional to cis society. Perhaps we could manage to infiltrate the patriarchal structure and find a place in it amongst cis men, but realistically as soon as they know we are trans we will no longer be categorised within the patriarchy the same way as cis men. And it being so conditional and so dangerous to be found out does not sound like male privilege to me. It sounds like we are walking on a razors edge, terrified of being found out, shunned from cis society, shunned by our own fucking community who refuse to see masculine appearance as anything but bad, in constant danger and without support networks. Let me not beat about the bush here, do you think it's male privilege to know that if someone finds out mid intimate encounter you're trans they might kill you. Do you think it's male privilege to know you have to perform a certain way no matter where you are lest someone decide you're a "mutilated girl" and ruin your life for it. Do you think its male privilege to be denied your healthcare at any moment, to have to fight tooth and nail for the tiniest slither of hope to transition, to go through years and years of waiting lists and finally get on testosterone, all with the knowledge that at any point they could snatch it all away from you. I don't think it sounds like male privilege to me. And i am not saying trans men can't act oppressive to others, because i am not a moron who thinks oppression is some easily categorised thing; there are nuances, variables with race and class and any other thing you can think of. Trans men can be misogynistic. But i hate to burst your bubble, so can literally anyone else regardless of identity. If you do any reading at all on the patriarchy and misogyny you will understand that it is a poison that can be wielded by anyone, even those effected by it to get ahead in the crab bucket they're placed in. Trans men can be transmisogynistic. But again, so can literally anyone; and a trans man who's a transmisogynist isn't one because he's a trans man. But because he's a transmisogynist and he should be dealt with as such.

To be honest i also worry how this reductive idea of privilege is being applied to everyone else too; to nonbinary people, to trans women, to cis women, to people of colour, disabled people, the list goes on. Because if your idea of privilege is "if i think you look like a man you have privilege and do not need protection or care" i really worry about who is classified under your honestly transphobic binaristic "looking like a man" category. To bear my soul for a minute let me use myself as an example. I have been tall and broad shouldered with a fairly low voice my entire life. I have never looked like a 'woman' in the eyes of cis society. This did not grant me any privilege. This granted me the experience of walking into a women's bathroom when i was fifteen, before i even knew the word trans, and suddenly having the people in there stop talking and turn to stare at me. It granted at me the sickening feeling of my heart starting to race as i realised they'd started muttering. That they thought i didn't belong in there. That they thought not with kindness towards me, but that they wanted me out. It granted me knowing, for no reason other than what i looked like, i had been perceived as a threat and was now in danger. I was fifteen and i thought a group of adults might gang up on me and beat me because i 'did not look like a woman.' And this was not the only incident like this i have experienced through my life, nor no doubt will continue to experience now as a trans man even if i ever get to transition. Because of experiences like this i can't help but balk at this gender essentialist ideal people wield to hurt trans men and anyone who they class as masculine, because i can see that even if you do not care about us (which you should) you should care about everyone else who will be hurt by it AKA OUR ENTIRE COMMUNITY AND MORE. GENDERED PRIVILEGE IS NOT GIVEN TO THOSE CIS SOCIETY SEE'S AS PERFORMING GENDER WRONG NO MATTER FOR WHAT REASON. GENDERED PRIVILEGE IS NOT GIVEN TO YOU IF THEY THINK YOU ARE A TRANNY OR A FAG. YOU ARE GOING TO LEAVE YOUR TRANS SISTERS BROTHERS AND SIBLINGS TO DIE, ESPECIALLY IF THEY ARE NOT WHITE, SKINNY, ABLE BODIED OR PERISEX, ALL BECAUSE YOU HAVE SUBSCRIBED TO GENDER ESSENTIALISM AND BINARISTIC BLACK AND WHITE FALSITIES.

And of course i recognise all this reductive black and white thinking towards trans men is primarily just an online thing, because the majority of people being this reductive only think about how the internet works and not real life, they don't think about how an actual trans mans actual real life in a cis dominated world works because all they care about is online discourse and how to reduce everything down to simple black and white labels, when real life doesn't work like that. They want to find new ways to reduce us down to genitals now that AFAB and AMAB have fallen out of favour, they want to find new bitchy high school ways to bully people and refuse them from any thought of community in their heads because they don't want those unfavourable trans people in their group because this is a fandom to them not a community. And i recognise i should not care about a bunch of people online who never grew out of high school enough to develop actual grounded real-world applicable thoughts or any solidarity or empathy for people around them. But i live in a town that doesn't even have a pride event. I live isolated from anyone but my immediate family. I do not have a community to turn to that isn't the online one; so having the online community be so toxic and rancid and poisoned by this misogynistic, transphobic, patriarchal, binaristic gender essentialist bullshit upsets me greatly. I have exclaimed near tearfully to my fiancé that i can't look at any discussions of trans-ness online anymore, that i need to avoid interacting with anything to do with trans-ness because it always inevitably ends up hateful and spiteful. That's awful. That's horrendous. I'm cutting myself out of my own community, out of any ability to feel like i belong, like there are others like me. I avoid it all, i do not go in tags, i don't go near pride month stuff or solidarity stuff or positivity stuff anymore. Because i do not feel like i belong nor am welcomed in the community. I feel like i am hated, seen as a stupid girl, not wanted, in danger of being harassed and attacked and shunned, that people want me to detransition more than they want me to be a man. I want community, i want solidarity, and i wish i could just ignore all this shit and brush it off as just stupid highschool bully bullshit; but when so many of us are isolated and alone and the internet is our only fucking chance of community and solidarity i cant ignore it, because i need the community as a whole online to fucking do better for the sake of all of us. I do not want young queer kids to be poisoned by this shit and grow up hating themselves for things they can't change. I don't want trans men scared away from transitioning by their community, i don't want trans women poisoned with self hatred by their own community, i don't want nonbinary people feeling hated at worst or left out at best, i don't want people of colour and intersex people and disabled people and fat people shunned and left out and hurt by our binaristic views. It needs to be fucking better. We need to stop stupid fucking them vs us shit that doesn't reflect the way the real fucking world works. The world wants us fucking dead. We can have nuanced discussions about how to treat each other better without turning it into creating another black and white idea that doesnt reflect how we will be treated offline by the real ass fucking world. We need to love each other, we need to have fucking empathy and love in our hearts; this is not a fucking fandom or a friend clique this is a community born out of survival.

Final note. If you try to level these discussions and critiques i am putting forward here as coming from only one trans group you're a fucking moron and are doing exactly what i am speaking up against. We are all able to be guilty of this and we all need to do better about this regardless of identity. Which is to say: don't come on here going 'trans women are so mean' cuz why are you singling out just trans women fuckass. Fucking anyone can be like this, hell fellow trans men can be like this. This isn't about 'oh which identity is the BAD one and which is the GOOD one' this is about the entire fucking community needs to do better.