#tme/tma discourse

[necromanceyourgays]

I understand that “TERF” is historically used just for radfem descrimination against transwomen but I believe it should not be used a synonym for transmisogynist. I really think it’s important to include other trans indentites in that ‘T’, as transmisogyny can hit others just as hard. This is also a bit of a critism of TME/TMA labels.

A good example is how a lot of TERFs often campaign against healthcare for ALL trans people, even if it isn’t gender affirming.

As we know, a big part of radical feminism and TERF retoric is that women need to be protected, that they’re weak and fragile and “wombyns bodies are precious so we MUST protect them!” So, since the government recently passed have said the quiet part out loud, we know they don’t want us to have top surgery to prevent us from breastfeeding. JKR has openly supported this on Twitter.

TERFs shoot a bullet at one person and it hits everyone in the room in the process. As much as they preach about protecting transmen from “ruining their bodies” they actively prevent transmen from getting care in “Womens Spaces”, such as OBGYNs. A lot of this is because they want to bar men— what they consider transwomen to be- from all womens spaces since they see them as a fetish.

This hits transmen, intersex folk, and everyone inbetween. “Well if you have a penis you don’t need to go to a gyno” ignores people with both! This includes not only intersex people but folks of any identity that had bottom surgeries such as penile preservation vaginoplasty or no vaginectomy phalloplasty.

I’m saying my quiet part out loud here but if you are a radfem who supports trans women but calls transmen “poor manipulated girls” I’m calling you a terf. If youre a radfem and deny that transmen experience misogyny or say that theyre uneffected by trans misogyny I’m calling you a terf. You are excluding trans identites from your radical feminism, and that is TERFism.

TL:DR: When trying to ban transwomen, people with M gender markers, and people with penises from getting care seen as strictly for women you are actively killing people who need that healthcare. We are a community and we’re all getting fucked in the end

(sorry for the coke rant)

edit: i was not aware that taking the space from “trans man/woman” and turning it to “transman/woman” was transphobic when i wrote this! I apologize!

[boreal-sea]

Why TME/TMA is harmful

It's harmful when people say things like "only trans women are targets of transmisogyny" and "non-trans women are exempt from transmisogyny" and "that wasn't transmisogyny because you're not a trans woman".

Saying things like this weakens legal protections for trans people, because then bigots can go "that wasn't transmisogyny, because you're not a trans woman, so I didn't commit a hate crime".

[nattitopher]

Friendly reminder to all the people using TMA/TME or any other false binary.

[hoping-for-novelty]

Telling the teenage boy who has to adjust his voice, gestures, fashion and interests to avoid seeming gay that he's "homophobia exempt" because he isn't gay

[maria-lukas]

I never feel more alienated from the trans community in general and other transfems in particular than when I see people going after "TMEs" and "transandrophobia truthers" and so on, ostensibly in the name of defending people like me. Or derailing their own perfectly decent points about transmisogyny by including some irrelevant, gratuitous dig at transmascs (or intersex people or "theyFABs" or whoever the target of the day is).

What the fuck are you doing? Do you get some kind of rush from deflecting TERFisms onto targets you've decided are more deserving or privileged than yourselves? What are you trying to achieve? If you want to do some weird 70s separatism tribute act then please just go your own way already and leave everyone else alone.

As a transfem who is not a woman and doesn't pass as one I don't trust "TMA/TME" proponents to have my back in any case. And I'm much more wary of engaging with trans spaces than I used to be because of this bullshit.

I'm so sorry to everyone who has been fucked over by this tendency. I hope we can get over it. Can we please collectively at least try to get a grip and maybe rethink how we're doing things a little bit? Because unless the goal really is self-cannibalization it's not working is it?

[renthony]

It's real fucked up how many queer people dread Pride season due to both systemic queerphobia and queer infighting. Pride season always rockets up my anxiety, and I know I'm not the only one.

This shit sucks, y'all. We gotta support each other more than the queerphobes hate us. I'm not saying we have to love each other, I'm not saying we even have to like each other, but we cannot keep subdividing communities, circulating callouts, and dogpiling each other over who has it worse. That shit will kill us all.

We cannot keep thinking of our individual experiences with bigotry as, "I know [xyz kind of queer] has it worse, but...", and we cannot keep looking at other experiences with bigotry as, "that's bad, but [abc kind of queer] still has it worse," when the reality is that we are all being targeted. It's all bad! It all deserves to be talked about and fought against without trying to put it in some kind of hierarchy! Hierarchies are not fucking helpful here!

Some fucking unity, please.

[maive-the-sheep]

Tme this, tma that.

I'm intersex and i want you to stop being transphobic (yes, using these terms seriously is transphobic, even if you are trans) and intersexist

And stop saying someone talking about issues they are facing shouldnt happen cause you are facing issues. We are all in this together. Or do you want the bigots to win?

[femininefreyanyctophile]

"noooo you cant be lesbian and masculine it goes against my totally not repainted 2 gender role system" you can be whatever you want

[imjunebitch]

hey chat, if you claim to be a progressive activist, and your willingness to show compassion and advocate only goes as far as your own identity, you are bad at activism!

to get this out of the way, i certainly don't consider myself an activist, im not even fully out of the closet, im slightly active in gsa, and I post discourse on tumblr occasionally, that does not make me an activist. a lot of queer people or otherwise marginalized people aren't, or can't be, or just don't want to be, and that's okay! most people shouldn't have to be, in my opinion! but i Poast as I do bc i try to be compassionate and when I see shit I Feel The Need To Address It.

look at all the damn TRFs on this site, essentially. You'll note some things about the group as a whole, and this is a generalization, which is a bad thing, i apologize and promise im not shit talking any of these associated groups, im gonna make a coherent point i prommy! but the vast majority of them are white, perisex, gender conforming, binary lesbian transfems. nothing wrong with that, that's cool! but you'll note that all they ever seem to advocate for is, well, white, perisex, gender conforming, binary lesbian transfems, and they continually shit on everyone else.

(although they might occasionally show some solidarity with nonbinary people. oh, but only "TMA" nonbinary people. grabbing them by their hands and explaining the existence of intersex people I stg, drop your fucking bigoted false dichotomy that inherently forces nonbinary people to reveal their assigned sex to you to even be respected by you and still defines them by that anyway. drop your system that treats intersex people like an unimportant afterthought. collateral damage in your shitty quest to have a short snappy acronym you can drag through the mud because you don't have the fucking guts to just say that you hate trans men with your whole pussy) ⬅️ period of foaming rage over now

so here's the problem. they want to be activists! they really do! but their interest in activism stops where they stop, and they have no interest in forming compassion, alliance, or any sort of bond with anyone outside of that group. and in all to many cases, they have real, actual ire against people not in their group. even groups that have so much in common with them! what else could aphobia in queer spaces be? or intersexism in trans and queer spaces? or racism among queer people, or transandrophobia among trans women and fems? what does all of this have in common? two things really.

it's so fucking stupid that trying to explain it to a friend who isn't online makes you feel like you're just rambling because it is genuinely so fucking stupid. all of you exclusionist assholes are so genuinely cartoonishly stupid and so completely blind to intersectionality and just fucking compassion as a concept that trying to explain your stances and how fucking MANY of you there somehow are makes ME look like I'm just rambling away. had to get that off my chest

they come from a fundamental unwillingness to engage with anything outside of whatever they have defined as the in-group.

it boggles my damn mind that a trans person could say intersexism and exorsexism aren't real, or that a queer person could shit on asexual and aromantic people, or that a transfem person could say that a transmasc person doesn't actually suffer from their own kind of oppression, or that so many white queers are so shitty towards poc queers. but all of this comes from people saying "i want progress, but i only want it for myself, and the groups I relate to and nobody else." tma/tme shit is this at its absolute clearest. let's impose a dichotomy of who is and is not oppressed, let's define "oppressed" as "suffers in a way similar to me" and now let's shit on everyone who isn't "oppressed." (which again is clearly just shorthand for transmasculine, about 70% of the time. work your fucking issues out, trans men and mascs are not the oppressor.)

but look guys. I can go outside. i can read the news. i can talk to and hang around with my friends and partners, and through doing all of this i can see that you're completely full of shit. i can see sexuality being forced on asexual people,listen to stories from ace and around people about being forced into relationships and see that clearly things aren't fucking sunshine and rainbows for ace people! i can see and hear how people dismiss or deride intersex people and see "huh looks like intersex people are made invisible and ignored or otherwise treated as if something is wrong with them, damn, wish we had a word for that, how does 'intersexism" sound?" i identified as nonbinary for a while so i fucking know firsthand how people, even sometimes other queer people, just treat you like your assigned sex, especially if you don't present as androgynous. i can go to queer events and see how fucking unwelcome poc queers are, and I can fucking hang out with my friends and my partners, the "TME queers" you fucking ASSHOLES love to shit all over and see, fucking firsthand, how they are treated. how trans men are simultaneously infantilized and treated like predators for existing, how gnc people are treated like they're subhuman or novelties, how all of us queer people threatened, and hurt, and beaten down by bigotry, transfem or not.

and then I get to come home, and i go online, and i see you fucking vultures tearing apart other marginalized groups. people like them. people i love. because I guess that's fucking easier isn't it. it's easier to blame your problems on a nonbinary teenager who uses pronouns you dislike and say that xe's the cause of your oppression, or to shit on a trans man who can't bind or cut his hair because his parents would kill him instead of actually doing something to help your own fucking community. fuck you.

help your fucking community, at least. if you can't even bring yourself to try to advocate for others, then damn, at least spend your time advocating for your own group and not contributing to the issues of another.

I'm tired, yanno.

[xoxo-ren-xoxo]

Trans posts then: what's in my pants? Erm my phone XD !! This is an anon blog, my gender is none of your business!

Trans posts now: if you don't disclose whether you are tma or tme within the next three seconds I'm legally allowed to call you a nazi mens rights activist to all of my friends. Give me a detailed explanation of what your genitals look like and why so I can decide if you should have a voice in this conversation.

[anti-terf-posts]

i’m really curious as to what “tme/tma” users get out of using those terms. do they feel like they won some kind of oppression competition when they declare themselves as tma? do they feel like cis people like them more? and what is the PURPOSE of using those terms? like genuinely when is it useful outside of discourse? i’m really curious.

[txttletale]

Obligatory "in good faith" premise.

I've seen an argument against tme/tma that focuses on the fact that there's no similar terms for other types of oppression (as in, no terms like "racism affected/exempt"), and how tme/tma aren't good terms because they imply there's people who can't be affected at all by transmisogyny, regardless of whether it would be "misdirected" or not (which I do think it would be, although a lot of people against tme/tma would disagree).

Since tma/tme functionally ends up meaning just "transfem" and "not transfem" (or at least that's how ive seen it used and advocated for), do you think there's something to the idea that we could just say that instead when discussing transmisogyny? Or is there something about these specific terms that adds to the conversation?

I mean, I guess it would be awkward to put "not transfem" in your bio maybe

i mean like. there are those terms, though, those terms dfo exist, they're jsut called 'poc' and 'white'. liike the construction of 'whiteness' is such that it basically literally means 'racism exempt' within the context of white supremacy (which is ofc the context in which most discussion of racism takes place).

i feel like people are really getting caught up on like, 'exempt' and 'affected' as like, total absolutes 100% of the time and bringing up edge cases as though this absolutely refutes them when i think that's not a particularly useful thing to do for what are fundamentally abstractions for discussing a particular set of nuanced and diverse relations to transmisogyny! like obviously every single person has a unique and specific relationship to transmisogyny, but that doesn't make the terms useless an ymore than 'gay' or 'trans' are useless because people have complicated sexuality or gender situations.

& i think that if we started saying 'transfem / not transfem' then all the exact same edge cases and arguments would just start shifting onto the definition of the word 'transfem'. which i don't think is synonymous with TMA. i think that e.g. arguing that drag queens who regularly have their lives threatened by nazi militiamen with guns are not Transmisogyny Affected is kind of sillygoofy, right, but a lot of them don't identify as transfem! & i think moreover that saying 'trans women' and 'non trans women' kind of is the exact same maneuver as people who say 'don't say cis' because like the implicit content of using those constructions is that there are 'default' people who need no descritpor and then there are 'transfems', right?

+ i think TME/TMA are valuable because they articulate exactly what's relevant about the distinction, which is a relationship to transmisogyny. like a trans guy isnt 'TME' because he's a trans guy, but because if he gets into an argument with me he can pull out the classic 'aggressive' 'scary' 'creepy' 'predatory' 'sexual deviant' cards and try to have me socially murdered and have people side with him by default, something he shares with a cis guy and a cis girl in the exact same situaiton. because of the Trans Misogyny that i am Affected by and he is Exempt From and that therefore can be weaopnized against me in any interaction.

[briarpatch-kids]

I wish more people understood you can't "opt out" of experiencing misogyny by being trans. Trans men still have to access sex based care, still get systematic sex based oppression, and still deal with day to day microaggressions. Anyone deemed "failed" at manhood deals with misogyny in some form. We can't just "opt out" like people seem to think we can.

[twobruhsinahottub]

Why is this person all over my dash 😭

The commenter is so right, tme/tma is some bullshit binary that ignores the fact that many people who ARE NOT trans women can and do experience transmisogyny (even if wrongly aimed).

I would go on a huge rant about it but i dont think i could articulate it well so if someone who has the ability and energy could reblog with why commenter is right and op is wrong thatd be splendid (i have the thoughts just cant write em well)

Note: i dont agree with the second comment, this is about the first. Saying the future has zero gender is an odd take, but the first part of commenters take was good and agreeable imo.

[anqueerism]

Is it just me or does “TMA/TME” give off the same rancid vibes as “NWLNW/NMLNM.” Do you understand what I mean. Is this anything

[doodlepede]

so that means we won the war. the ancient war between tumblr and 4chan is over. and we won. we literally won the culture war