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this is how the internet happened

Hello! I am Jack Puter, senior marketing consultant at Microsoft. Over the past few months we have been studying dynamics in the broad queer community and we noticed a lot of transmisogyny that we believe stems from the harmful stereotype that trans women all use Linux-based operating systems. We here at Microsoft know that that is not true — a lot of trans women we know use Microsoft Windows. That's why we want you to enter our Microsoft Transfeminism Partners program. As part of this program, our team of elite lawyers will protect the interest of TMA people like you in the queer community, and in exchange, you will just have to use and actively promote the Windows OS and other Microsoft products. We are looking forward to hearing from you.

you'll never take me alive.

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TRANSSEXUALS HEX ROBIN MORGAN (1973)

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1975 -- You, too, can be a robot...

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Madonna-Whore Transwomen in the "Transmasc and Trans man" imaginary

In the article Trans Auto-Antonym Theory, Jules Gill-Peterson (JGP) argues that "trans" is an auto-antonym: it contains "two opposite meanings" of "transmasc" and "transfem" while holding them under the same word, "trans" [1]. JGP notes that this "masc-femme dialectic" may be the underlying source of "the ostensible trans battle of the sexes," and so she attempts to use it in a very different way: by focusing on the gender-exchange interactions between transmascs and transfems in Paul Preciado's work and in her own life, the ways "trans masculine people gifted me femaleness" and received manness in return, JGP spins a kind of st4t trans-gender complementarian theory which lays out transmasc-transfem tensions while suggesting "not just more productive but more pleasurable relations" across these gender differences.

On one level this is just "let's stop fighting and make out," but I think there's promise here. I agree with the "transmasc-transfemme dialectic," and I agree with the power people draw from it, and I want to talk about the tensions in that power. More specifically, I want to talk about the way that this "auto-antonym" functions for transmascs who speak with/to "trans" femininity. As Aren Aizura notes [2], North American trans culture holds trans women as "objects of representation or critique" while trans men and trans masculine people "tend to occupy positions of researcher or professional expert." This auto-antonym status, where transmascs produce important "trans" academic and cultural works by studying transfems, results in a critical role for transfems in transmasc becoming. Transfems might "gain femaleness" from st4t dynamics, as they do from sex with cis men, but transmascs gain transness and manness inseparably.

Stone Butch Blues as "Madonna" Trans Auto-Antonym

This is maybe most clear in the way the autofictional work Stone Butch Blues (SBB) frames its trans women. Ruth (transfem) appears well after Jess (main character) has been inducted into lesbianism, after Jess has started T and passed as a man, and after Jess has been repeatedly seen as transfem in medical and non-medical contexts. Two chapters before meeting Ruth, Jess was confused for a trans woman while attempting to get treatment for a vaginal infection -- after repeatedly insisting that she had an infection and wasn't lying (not mentioning her gender), the doctor responds:

You might be a man. But if you are a woman, I don’t want to send you away. It doesn’t cost me anything to write you out a prescription. When’s the last time you had a pap smear?

Then they have a short heart-to-heart and Jess gets "what I needed:" not any material help (she never did come back for that pap smear), but the understanding that she was a person who deserved help and could reach out if she needed it. Then her apartment burns down, and she gets a new one, and she meets Ruth:

I could tell that womanhood had not come easily to her. It wasn’t just her large Adam’s apple or her broad, big-boned hands. It was the way she dropped her eyes and rushed away when I spoke to her.

Jess desperately tries to make friends with Ruth, who really doesn't need "a gender identity crisis on my doorstep," but eventually takes Jess in, cooks for her, and decorates her apartment. Then Jess gets beaten up, and Ruth cares for her on her bedside and calls her work and refers to Jess as "she" on the phone:

Jess, I referred to to you as she. I wasn’t thinking. They heard it. I’m so sorry. I know it means I lost that job for you.

Then they have a chat with Ruth's other transfem friends who all flirt with Jess, show her a book about Indigenous "women like you who lived as men," and talk about not wanting to be lumped into gay. Despite the efforts of Ruth's friends to get some fuck, it's not happening, and Jess ends it with a heartfelt "I've been searching for you all for a long time." Then Jess and Ruth start ?dating?, and talk about fuck, and Jess responds:

“You want more truth, Ruth? There’s a place somewhere inside of me where I’ve never been touched before. I’m afraid you’ll touch me there. And I’m afraid you won’t. My femme lovers knew me well, but they never crossed those boundaries inside of me. They tried to coax me across the borders into their arms, but they never came after me. You’re right there with me. There’s no place for me to hide. It scares me.”

Shortly after, Jess goes with Ruth to visit her family in Buffalo (Jess's hometown as well), and watches Ruth get sirred and deadnamed etc. Jess is supportive, but ends up splitting to visit her lesbian friends, one of whom (Grant) half-excludes her:

“Well you’re sort of stuck now, aren’t you? I mean you’re not a butch or a guy. You look like a guy.” . My anger was greater than the situation called for. I could taste it, bitter on my tongue. I leaned forward. Everyone held their breath. My voice was low and menacing. “How far are you willing to go, Grant? How much of yourself are you willing to give up in order to distance yourself from me?” . Grant’s face betrayed her. She had felt my power for a moment and it aroused her. I knew it had, I could see it in her eyes. I knew a secret about Grant’s desire and I wanted to wield it like a weapon.

Alright, so that was long. Three important things to note here:

The trans woman comes onto the scene well after Jess's lesbianism and testosterone use is established.

The trans woman serves as a solution to Jess's assimilated stealth manhood: first as a disembodied specter that unsettles Jess's passing via random people seeing her as transfem, and then as a Ruth who (1) teaches Jess how to destroy her life for gender (2) performs feminized care labor for Jess regardless of Jess's gender -- whether man or woman, Jess needs flowers and to have people cook for her.

Transfemininity is linked to Jess via "trans" and delinked from Jess's erotic circuits: Jess holds "man" through the attention of Ruth and her transfem friends (who she initially passes to as a man), holds "trans" through the way that "the shades of gender in her [Ruth's] voice were intricate, like mine," and maintains "lesbian" through a preserved AFAB erotic circuit: when Grant calls Jess into question, she affirms herself through the "betrayal" of Grant's own desire. If not lesbian, then why Jess hot?

So to summarize, SBB uses the auto-antonymic quality of "trans" to allow Jess to be "trans," "man" (or at least "stealth"), and "lesbian" all at once: trans is rendered auto-antonymic via simultaneous similarity (Jess and her transfem friends both seen as transfem) and difference (Jess does not actually want to sex them). To admit one half of trans and not the other, "lesbian" then becomes a purely erotic circuit -- and the dimension of Jess's trans auto-antonym is not one of "gender exchange" (as JGP puts it) but of a one-dimensional "consciousness" transfer. Fucking in potentia links Jess to her butch friends just as it distinguishes her from Ruth & co, making "trans" (and the then-nascent "transgender") first and foremost a common circuit of care and political mobilization. Jess is like Ruth because they're both kind of clocky, and she's like Grant because they want to fuck like/as men, and these two links and their corresponding groups absolutely cannot intersect.

This seems very different from the sexy st4t auto-antonym JGP discusses, but I argue that's mostly just a consequence of SBB's transgenderism, which forces the trans auto-antonym to operate firmly on the "madonna" side of the transfem madonna-whore complex. For the whore side, we can turn to Testo Junkie, which takes basically the opposite approach: for Preciado trans is sex sex sex!

Testo Junkie as "Whore" Auto-Antonym

Our first contract is very clear: she’s the whore; I’m the transsexual.

Testo Junkie exists in the constant interplay between "your death, and almost at the same time, VD's love;" here "you" are Preciado's abusive ex-lover, presumably a cis man given the references to sperm and mustaches, but Preciado doesn't especially care. VD is a trans woman, the transwoman, "the queen of the bitches," a partner who "induces me to produce a form of femininity I’ve never allowed myself." Throughout his many sexual encounters with VD, alongside his addiction to testosterone and the aftermath of his ex's death, Preciado exults in VD's ability to make him "alternately occupy two extremes of the gendercultural apparatus," to be a man and kind of suck at the same time:

She’s a mutant virgin crossing the synthetic line of evolution to meet the chief of the clan of the boy-girls. Fucking with her is going back to each knot of my life—the straight girls who kissed me and then left me to go out with cis-guys, the dykes who were disgusted by my dildos; hetero knots, lesbian knots, transphobic knots, androcentrist knots—biting into them until they become undone. I’m her trannie, her monster. I’m not afraid of not being a cis-male.

Compared to Jess, Preciado's interactions with VD are self-consciously powerless: beyond the fact that VD is usually domming (it's a sort of sissy-play), she has much more agency than Ruth does in SBB. VD is taking "lesbianism" from Preciado, and giving him "trannie," and the central metaphor here is not discovery of trans (as with Jess) but a "ships passing at sea" where both parties take tranny/lesbian gender from each other. The truth of this is unclear because Preciado doesn't really do anything for VD but vague at her: his main 'gift' seems to be his submission and his high opinion of VD. Whether Preicado's M or F, VD is doing gender better than he is, so their sex lets him be almost anything he wants.

Most of Testo Junkie assumes Preciado's and VD's relationship as a kind of temporary exchange, a lot of sex in the passing between lesbian and trans, something that will fade with Preciado's growing testosteronization and VD's growing lesbianism. At the end of the book, though, something else happens. Preciado and VD visit his ex's grave, and Preciado decides that VD will be "my future widow:"

VD is standing next to me, in front of your grave. When I feel her right arm against my left side, I realize that, in this crowd of people, she is my future widow. VD, the Lady of Black French Letters, is my future widow. Your burial is our marriage. You, and no one else, will be the officiating ghost who will seal the alliance between your death and our love under the earth.

What was a temporary t4t relationship becomes permanent because Preciado decides that he will die before VD, that VD will not disappear or die before the end of his own life. Again, this has a partial parallel in SBB:

“I’ve been thinking a lot about my life since my jaw got broken,” I told her. “I once read about warriors who resolve before they go into battle that ‘Today is a good day to die.’” . Ruth smiled. “It’s a brave thought, but I don’t want to die.”

Jess repeatedly talks about not being "afraid to die," only ever around Ruth, but this is mostly in reference to overcoming her fear and breaking her stealth as a man. Preciado's death-talk is very different: he's deciding to die before VD, that VD will be "my future widow," a kind of continued trans-man-lesbianism that hinges on taking the figure of the "tranny," devouring it and dying before it breaks into "passing" manhood, making transition forever by cutting off the edge.

This marks the key difference between the virgin-whore auto-antonyms of SBB and Testo Junkie. Jess takes courage from trans womanhood's ability to break passing manhood at devastating cost, but Preciado utterly submits to it -- through sex, trans womanhood breaks through everything in his life, makes every gender he can take small in comparison, and allows him to do anything through a kind of sissified boygirl status. The book's ending at “your” funeral marks Preciado's shift from being devoured by one form of social death (AIDS and "you," its embodiment) to another, the "tranny," which Preciado understands as shattering him. Preciado will die, but VD will not, his "future widow" at the end of his postgender fuck. Of course, IRL Preciado later took "the male gender that transsexual medicine can furnish and that the state will award me if I behave in the right way," started passing, and probably bailed on VD, but the dream…

Conclusion

So both Stone Butch Blues and Testo Junkie use transfeminine characters as powerful tools for trans self-actualization: SBB uses a "madonna" auto-antonym which casts Ruth as a static figure who can heal Jess and teach her how to reject passing manhood, and Testo Junkie uses a "whore" auto-antonym where tranniness spreads through Preciado's Goddess like an STD, allowing him to finally commit to "his future widow." Transfemininity does three main things for these protagonists:

Transfems address the twin anxieties of "passing as a cis male" and "not being a cis male," both sidestepped by transfems not really holding to the deific-horrific status Cis Manhood has in lesbian-transmasc circles. Instead cis/trans men are just kind of cringe, if fun.

Transfems enable genderfuck while also rendering it moot, either by making transfems women-of-women who care for all genders (SBB) or by making transfems deific gender gods who sit above all transmasc genders (Testo Junkie).

Transfems teach people how to live and die for gender: Jess learns how to throw herself off the gender cliff and exit passing manhood, and Preciado learns how to stay in "transition" forever by resolving to die before VD. Ruth in SBB passively notes that she doesn't want to die, but only Preciado reckons with the sharp difference between how he seems to consider trans (dying for gender) and how his transfem partner really does not consider trans as death: his final commitment is acknowledging that he will probably bite it, but VD will not.

What's also striking in each case is the continuity between cisman/egg and transman patterns of interaction with transfems: Ruth initially clocks Jess as a cis man with gender anxiety (egg), and VD and Preciado sort of constantly orbit sissy play. While they both want surprisingly similar things from their transfems, Preciado's submission to VD and to his own sexuality turns his work into a kind of enlightened chaserdom, much more reminiscent of "voluntary lowering into queerness" transamory talk than Jess's paradoxically desexualized take-it-and-shake-it. Common to both is trans as auto-antonym, a kind of devouring transfemininity through the universal "trans," but the internal difference "trans" contains varies between them: for Preciado's "whore" it is JGP's masc/femme dialectic, and maybe also the multigender/supergender dialectic of Preciado's submission to divine transfemininity, and for Jess the auto-antonym is the gap between erotic and non-erotic circuits of trans, a flow of consciousness from the desexualized transfem to Jess in exchange for a love that's, erotic? Jess can't really know: at the end of the book she is nothing but a lesbian, and the breach of that erotic circuit might take her somewhere very strange.

Footnotes

[1] Gill-Peterson also briefly touches on agender identity, noting that trans "produces many more than one pair of ‘opposite’ meanings, considering that trans holds nonbinary and agender significance too;" but this seems closer to her covering her bases than a serious part of her argument. Her paper operates on the trans- masc-femme dialectic as a two-part dance.

[2] Aren Aizura, "Mobile Subjects: Transnational Imaginaries of Gender Reassignment"

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shorturl.at/13cT9

NEW YORK, NEW YORK—On March 8, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian activist and recent graduate student at Columbia University, at his place of residence, an apartment building owned by the university.

The DHS agents said that the U.S. Department of State had revoked Khalil’s green card.

At approximately 8:30 p.m. ET, Khalil and his wife, a U.S. citizen who is eight months pregnant, had just unlocked the door to their building when two plainclothes DHS agents forced their way in behind them. The agents initially refused to identify themselves, instead asking Khalil to confirm his identity before detaining him without explanation. The agents proceeded to threaten his wife, telling her that if she remained by his side, they would arrest her too.

Later, the DHS agents stated that the U.S. Department of State had revoked Khalil’s student visa, despite the fact that he has a green card, not a visa, and is a lawful permanent resident. An agent showed Khalil what he claimed was a warrant on his phone. Khalil’s wife went into their apartment to retrieve his green card while the agents remained with Khalil downstairs. When she returned, advising them of Khalil’s legal status and presenting them with Khalil’s green card, one agent was visibly confused and said on the phone, “He has a green card.” However, after a moment, the DHS agents stated that the State Department had “revoked that too.” Khalil’s wife then phoned his attorney, who spoke with the agents in an attempt to intervene. When Khalil’s attorney requested that a copy of the warrant be emailed to her, the agent hung up the call.

Khalil is currently being detained in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody at 26 Federal Plaza pending an appearance before an immigration judge.

This significant deviation from normal immigration proceedings comes in the wake of increased and abnormal scrutiny concerning the actions of students alleged to hold pro-Palestine views. Axios recently reported that the State Department, Department of Justice, and DHS were launching a “Catch and Revoke” effort to identify alleged pro-Palestinian activists based on artificial intelligence screening of social media.

Khalil has been specifically and discriminatorily targeted by Columbia University for his Palestinian identity and outspoken activism on multiple occasions over the last 17 months. He served as a lead negotiator during the Gaza Solidarity Encampment last spring. He has frequently appeared in media interviews and press conferences. The university suspended him while he was on a student visa and reversed it within the same day.

Columbia University has published guidance on how best to collaborate with federal enforcement, including advising faculty and staff “not to interfere” with ICE agents even if those agents are unable to present a warrant. Over the last few days, there have been several reports of ICE agents approaching pedestrians and students in the neighborhood surrounding Columbia University’s Morningside campus, creating unsafe environments for students (particularly students of color), regardless of their immigration status.

Columbia’s continued acquiescence to federal agencies and outside partisan institutions has made this situation possible. A Palestinian student and member of the community has been abducted and detained without the physical demonstration of a warrant or officially filed charges. Like many other Arab and Muslim students, Khalil has been the target of various zionist harassment campaigns, fueled by doxxing websites like Canary Mission. This racist targeting serves to instill fear in pro-Palestine activists as well as a warning to others.

An activist familiar with Khalil’s solidarity work said, “Mahmoud is foundational to our community. The state has escalated its repression of student opposition to the U.S.-backed genocide in Palestine, in which Columbia and all American universities are complicit.” Despite the chilling effect of this repression, the activist said that students “will keep fighting for Palestinian liberation and against state violence.”

Today, activists in solidarity with Khalil launched a petition demanding his release from ICE custody. The petition can be found at https://shorturl.at/Lm86S.

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35 years of poking trans studies with a stick

In 1990 trans got hitched to a specific Bay Area branch of cisfeminism, seen in "transgender," its attendant NGO shifts [1], and the field of trans studies. This was similar to the lesbian-feminist rapprochement of the 1970s, which claimed lesbian as feminism through the frame of being "women-identified women" [2] -- for trans, founding trans theorists like Emi Koyama argued that we "should have the courage to acknowledge ways in which trans women may have benefited from male privilege" while forming a transfeminist movement that "stands up for trans and non-trans women alike" in order to negotiate trans female access to feminist institutions like domestic violence shelters and women's health advocacy organizations [3]. After around 30 years of threatening feminism externally through the "transsexually constructed lesbian-feminist" (she as the mad god who breaks down boundaries) and internally through anxieties of butch flight, trans would be lesbian would be feminist (one-directional :guitar:), united under a shared project of postgender feminism.

Like in most marriages, this made trans a bit boring. She has two jobs:

To expand feminism beyond the category of woman.

To keep trans from sleeping around!!!!!!!!

First, trans studies is a place for transmascs getting uncomfortable with the whole "gender studies is full of women" thing. Over the 90s and through today famous feminists like Jack Halberstam and Max Wolf Valerio kept becoming men, and so trans studies provides a place to keep them in reach and at arm's reach. Second, trans studies serves as a site of negotiation over its namesake. The trans had essentially founded modern gender studies through the gender-as-performance metaphor [4], and it has been used as theory material in many different ways in sociology, anthropology, and medicine. Sometimes trans is a symbol of "the construction of everyday life" in the modern era [5]; sometimes it serves as a living marker of a past pre-industrial time where they let people get kind of freaky with it [6]. Trans studies worked to localize and claim "trans," and now it works to re-expand trans as raw material for feminist interdisciplinary collaborations. Rather than gender appearing in other fields as a complication born of womyn's wisdom, it can now travel via tranny-powered metaphors like "trans*ecologies," "trans*atlantic," and "tranimal" [7] -- because trans is well-established as an essentially liquid commodity rooted in how it feels to look at, it can travel much more easily than "woman," and with much less risk for women as a group.

The result of all this is that trans studies performs two useful roles for gender studies: it provides an institutional outlet for transmascs to be gender without being women, and it provides an interdisciplinary mode of connecting gender to other fields. Unfortunately, neither of these roles require trans studies to actually write or think any differently than gender/queer studies: all the use is in the name and the assemblage and the power of being not-really-woman, so the guts look more or less the same. Theory-wise, as Andrea Long Chu notes, "trans studies is just an embarrassing redundancy—junk DNA" [8].

So given that trans' job is basically just to sit there and look pretty, the question is -- how do we get it to do something? Emmett Harsin Drager claims that "this project of incessantly trying to prove that we are no longer the medicalized transsexual is the very place where trans studies has lived and will die;" the field has been marinating in the exact same posttranssexual postgender move for the last thirty-five years, and it still displays an incredible lack of theoretical accountability to trans peoples' actual lives. The flagship journal today, TSQ, is mostly full of (1) tguy gender anxieties about not being feminist, (2) oblivious boymoder philosophy, (3) papers by middle-aged feminist scientists published here because of their unparalleled mastery of "trans-" puns like tranimal (the papers usually involve repeating the pun over and over again with bridging words like "assemblage" and "trans joy"). As far as I can tell exactly two interesting things have happened in the field in the last decade: the first is Andrea Long Chu and Emmett Harsin Drager's "After Trans Studies," which remains the most cited paper in the journal and sparked an entire subissue called "After Andrea Long Chu" where a bunch of tenure-track trans folks argued back that trans studies was good, actually (Chu left academia a year or two later). The second was this wild transgender porn issue where they brought on a random academic chaser and got a bunch of backlash and one of the editors (a transfem ph.d student who studies trans porn workers) nearly got forced out of the field (she recently got an award for excellent work in aussie anthropology!). Trans woman says something interesting, they HAL her, repeat 30-40 times. The field's probably going to collapse into a pile of bricks in a year or two: trans women are easy to bus, trans theory is vacuous (it was made to be empty), and trans aethetics probably aren't looking too hot now that the feminist humanities are tightening the belt even further. Or maybe not. Most of the tenured ones are guys anyways, and the field will keep attracting fresh blood from that socially oblivious extended boymoder phase where transfems trust and get used. None of the issues I've described are really new; the only question is whether the word "trans" will still be fun to put on conferences and grant applications. I'd guess the timing of that depends on when Stryker gives up.

[1] See David Valentine, "Imagining Transgender," for a detailed account of this. [2] See Radicalesbians, "The Woman-Identified Woman." [3] Emi Koyama, "The Transfeminist Manifesto," one of the most commonly-cited "background" pieces in trans studies to this day. [4] In Gender Trouble, at least the one part people love to remember (and Judith Butler attempts to correct to this day, oh well, death of the author). See Vivian Namaste's "Undoing Theory" for more analysis of this. [5] Garfunkel, "Studies in Ethnomethodology." [6] IDK there's a lot of third-sexing stuff -- what I am trying to get at here is that anthropology mostly uses trans as a marker of the bounded and immobile Other "culture" they love to capture. [7] See TSQ, volume 11, issue 4 [8] Andrea Long Chu, "After Trans Studies"

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And of course there are other bindings. Being a guy is more than being misogynist; that is just one very powerful social connector, and a very easy one, so most of them use it relentlessly (intentionally or not!). Misogyny is not /hate/, although it contains hate; it is a well-established pattern of social and economic exploitation that men (and women, at times) tap because it is easy. It is the establishment of women as a new commons, an emotional and economic resource that men can use along given social lines.

I've been accused of thinking men are ontologically evil a couple of times, and to be clear, I would never absolve shitty dudes of responsibility like that. Men who are evil have the opportunity to choose otherwise.

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The thing to understand about misogynist “locker room talk” is that it is socially productive — boys bond with each other over hating women, bragging about being little fucking shits. This is not reserved for “real men,” either: nerds do it to compensate and gain some small power, or to bond with more manly men over the one thing (women) they hold in common. Misogyny is easy, and risk-free, and it pays! It is a social current that men tap constantly without even thinking about it, looking and silently laughing with each other at women being a little too loud or angry, leering at them.

This is what we mean when we say that trans women are not “socialized male.” We cannot tolerate this shit, on a conscious or unconscious level, and that means that socializing through “boyhood” is impossible. Maintaining friendships with boys when I was a teenager, when they thought I was almost something like them, required a degree of viciousness that I have carried through to my adult life (it is part of why Mean Trans Girls are the way they are). Women are something all boys and men hold in common; that sense of right binds them together. I would not, so I was not.

I've been accused of thinking men are ontologically evil a couple of times, and to be clear, I would never absolve shitty dudes of responsibility like that. Men who are evil have the opportunity to choose otherwise.

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Even past the blatant transmisogyny, the examples they give here are that:

- “medical science and to some extent social science and our laws are built around catering to AMAB people”

- trans mascs are “being invalidated and seen as inherently inferior due to our AGAB.”

If you want a useful framework for transmasc oppression, you need something that is not *just* (wokely) trans men == AFAB == seen and oppressed as women. This is just feminism 101 with “woman” -> AFAB. How are transmascs oppressed in ways that go beyond just having “female masculinity” or being “seen as AFAB?” This is a serious question with actual answers, and it needs to be the foundation for a transmaculinity that can resist being folded into cis feminism.

As Talia says, a lot of the shit transmascs deal with is because of this regendering as AFAB. But is is one part of a much larger picture, and people need to figure out how to use this “AFAB oppression” rhetoric (implicitly or explicitly, this is omnipresent and likely cannot be avoided) without:

- Simplifying all transmasc issues to AFAB-ness

- Simplifying all misogyny issues to AFAB-ness

While this stuff is frustrating to see from transmascs who should really be our allies, it is ultimately very similar to cis gender shit; it is not a surprise. It is hurting you just as much, and it needs some sort of counterweight that’s not just MRA-ism. Being a gayboy (and in community w them) is one option for this, I think?

On the limitations of 'AFAB' and its attendant epistemic anxieties

Like, let's actually talk about the shortcomings of these linguistic tools, and how we--all of us--have been failed by those at the supposed bleeding edge of gender theory.

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it’s interesting how many people say the term “nonbinary” as short for an identity with the assumption that this is separate and contradictory with a transfem identity, ppl so used to and centered around transmascs that they forget there’s other nonbinary people. like once you realize how many people implicitly see nonbinary gender as transmasculine by default it’s impossible to stop noticing it

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Transfemininity must simultaneously be old and new: old as a marker of an unsettled cultural past prior to proper binary gender, new as a grim herald of a postmodern global consumer gender, the “asphalt spawn of the metropolis.” In the former case, transfemininity is communalized and made a living past; in the latter it is individualized and made a horrific global future of hyper-public women.

You can see this happen on a global scale, as in Talia’s example, but it can also happen on a national level: the Indonesian *waria* is maybe the best case of this, as a nu-transfeminized term that grew out of postcolonial city migration in the 60s, and which has now been progressively indigenized and demedicalized to compare to “transpuan” or “transgender.”

Academics maintain these future // past distictions via twinned separations of urban // rural, medicalized // untainted, global // national-cultural, pornographic ritual // spiritual ritual, hypersexualization // desexualization, binary // nonbinary. These range from oversimplifications to outright lies, and mean that academic theory generally struggles to understand medicalization, city-ness, and sex work in “past” groups, and struggles with cultural influence and community formation in “future” groups.

it’s interesting how many people say the term “nonbinary” as short for an identity with the assumption that this is separate and contradictory with a transfem identity, ppl so used to and centered around transmascs that they forget there’s other nonbinary people. like once you realize how many people implicitly see nonbinary gender as transmasculine by default it’s impossible to stop noticing it

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time sensitive: trans girl needs to escape an abusive ex..... Hi everyone, I created this account specifically to crowdfund since my situation is dangerous & I don't want it attached to my socials. If you want more information before donating, you can reach out to me in DMs and I'll provide it. I thought my bf and I had something good but his anger issues have taken a new turn since I lost my job. It's come to the point that he is threatening me nearly daily. Today when I found out he hid my gender-affirming clothes & estrogen, I knew it was the last straw. I'm just raising enough that I can leave. I know where to go, but he's essentially "trapping" me since he needs the car for work. I plan to call an uber and go from there. Get a motel, etc. Thank you so much for taking the time to read. Here is my fundraiser.

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Help a Trans Woman Move Cross-Country

A close friend of mine is planning to move cross country from the deep south to Portland to connect up with a more solid support network -- she's been dealing with PTSD attacks and a hostile work environment since before the election, and recently it's gotten worse. If you can help her out, please donate below, anything helps!

Her Venmo: WanderingScholar (T G)

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Considering first the thirty-two figures whose genitals were covered, ten of these figures had pre­dominantly “male” characteristics (at least three out of four), ten had predominantly “female” characteristics, and twelve had an equal number of “female” and "male” characteristics. If “female” and “male” gender cues were equally “powerful,” we would expect that 50 percent of the participants would provide a “male” gender attri­bution to the covered-genitals figure, and 50 percent would provide a “female” gender attribution. This did not occur. There were a disproportionate number of "male” gender attribu­tions-sixty-nine percent — to the covered-genitals figure. This find­ing can be understood in light of other data collected. Seavey, Katz, and Zalk (1975) report that adults who interacted with a baby with­out knowing its gender more often thought the infant to be a boy. (The baby used in the study was female.) In another study (Haviland, 1976), men and women incorrectly labeled girls "male” twice as often as they labeled boys “female.” In Chapter 4 we discussed the chil­dren’s drawings study but did not, at that time, present data regard­ing the direction of errors in gender attributions. Kindergarten, thirdgrade, and adult participants attributed “male” to a female figure more often than they attributed “female” to a male figure. Pre­-schoolers, who do not yet participate in the adult social construc­tion of gender, did not show this bias. On the other hand, kinder­garteners, who hold the most rigid and stereotyped ideas about gen­der, erred in saying “male” five times more often than they erred in saying “female.” This predisposition to think and guess "male” irrespective of external stimuli is reflected in other cultural phenomena such as the use of the generic “he.”

-Gender: An ethnomethodological approach (Kessler and McKenna, 1985)

it’s crazy how so many transmascs respond to “it’s easier to pass as a transmasc than it is as a transfem” with stories about how hard it is for them to pass. like i’m sure it’s true i believe you. but we’re talking about wider trends here and there are lower standards for masculinity than femininity in society, period, and testosterone does more to change one’s appearance than estrogen does. instead of saying “ummm but it’s hard for me too?” consider asking yourself if it’s easier or harder for demographically equivalent transfems. because i promise you it is almost always harder

[abtrusion]

Leaving these up for posterity but 1st post is straight up not true nowadays (if it ever was) I was using sources that were like 50 years out of date around south asian and SEA hrt access, which is fucking insane -- second post is also useless because it's all about medical tourism, better would be to talk about historic informal surgery arrangements with trans communities (namaste discusses similar stuff in 90s Canada w/ silicone breast aug rhino etc, and there is anecdotal evidence of similar arrangements in 2000s venezuela by maria ochoa (queen for a day) but that is not very detailed and also literally one country).

These two posts were me making a bunch of absurd statements off the sources of a few USAmerican 80s and 90s anthropologists. People who are actually trans have written actual things that I have not read! Up for posterity, do not reblog.

i dont think its said enough but truly this US/Canada websites mind cant comprehend the situation majority of all humans on earth currently live in

[abtrusion]

The New Couple: Women and Gay Men (or: Fag Hag Theory)

There's a special place in my heart for the proto-queer theorists of the 60s and 70s -- without any gay activists to tell them what to do, and with psychiatry partially wrestled from the very boring men of old-school Freudianism, scholars sometimes developed what can only be described as a sort of rampant academic fujoshiism. The paragon of this kind of work is the (1979) text The New Couple: Women and Gay Men, which advocates "new couples" between (straight?) women and gay men as a fascinating mutation of political lesbianism:

Dr. Les Collins, a sociologist, gave his impressions of women he has known who have been involved in successful love relationships with gay men: The women tend to be rather confident people; they tend not to be homebodies. They have sources of self-validation outside the home and outside their relationship with their mate. They tend to be able to compete reasonably successfully in a man's world. Socially they are more androgynous and ipso facto less "female." They are women somewhere in the middle who can relate to others in rather new, rather androgynous ways. That says nothing about their sexual orientation. A female can be "hopelessly heterosexual," to use Evelyn Hooker's phrase, but still relate to bisexual or gay men and do it in an androgynous fashion.

Sure, bisexuality, but seriously some of these "women" are gay as shit! We've all heard the standard fag hag reasons -- ohhh, I want to party but I don't want to get hit on, etc. Boring! I want to trace the "women" who loved gay guys a little too much. The problem here is that these women are doubly cut from history: there are very few studies of 1960s-80s gay life where researchers were really trusted, and as Warren's (1976) study shows [1], women who fucked gay men tended not to be too public about it:

Noelle: I just like the gay men better. When you're getting older, they are the only men who will really appreciate you, be warm to you. Mildred: The gay men make me feel more like a woman than the straight men, who just grab at you and then go watch TV. Interviewer: Have you ever had sex with one of the gay guys? Mildred: Oh yes, occasionally, but I'd never say anything in front of the group, or indicate anything to anyone. Interviewer: Do you have a straight sex life? Mildred: Yes, but I keep that separate and I don't get too close to the straight men because I know I'll always be disappointed.

These sexual relationships, along with pseudo-incestuous T4T relationships in transfem houses and butch4butch relationships in lesbian communities, occupy a sort of doubly submerged position which makes them very difficult to trace in the archive -- even understanding 'hegemonic' relationships in gay communities is difficult because of how rancid the academic gaze is, and understanding dirty-little-secrets (as with cheating/john cultures in straight society) is even harder. A framework for finding weird things:

We're looking for horniness between women and gay men; the precise form of it doesn't matter.

Many testimonies (like the above) say that gay men make them feel "more like a woman." This says less about gender than you'd initially think, because womanhood is deeply tied into the desirability politic in a way that manhood isn't, and femininity can mean something very different in gay male spaces.

Bisexuality isn't a useful framework here for two reasons:

There's no gay male social equivalent of the 'gold star lesbian,' and the male bisexual had very little social weight pre-AIDS, so bisexuality doesn't matter a ton to most of these people.

Most of these women seem to be particularly attracted to sex/romance through the standards of gay community. While gender is important, the cultural orientation of the community seems to be just as important.

Have fun and fujo out!!!!!

pseudo-appendix of extremely faggy women

Frances talking about her platonic-ish relationship with a gay man, Vincent:

He's so comfortable with his homosexuality. Knowing him has helped me because I was unsure of my sexuality. I was really out of touch with myself. When Vincent and I are together, I find myself to be a more physical person. We have a common interest, the male body. I listen to Vincent talk about certain aspects of his sexuality, details of his sex life, and I realize we are both going after the same thing—men. When we ride the subway we check out men's bodies, their genitals, and we like to talk about it. Before I met Vincent I never would have looked at a man that way. Now I know that the male body is very appealing to me.

Another straight woman, Eva, was a lot better at putting things to practice:

After this had been going on about a year, I started running around pretty exclusively with this one gay man Keith who's just so beautiful. Typical all-American, tan, blond, perfect lips and mouth, just so hot, but really a queen. He didn't dress up in women's clothes but he was very nellie, very effeminate. He said to me, "I don't know anything about women, would you sleep with me? Would you make love with me? I'd like to see how it is." And I said, "Okay." We had been going around together for quite a while, we were pretty good friends and I thought, "Why not?" So we started this affair, but it wasn't really an affair, it was just an experiment. He had a beautiful apartment, he had mirrors around his bed and he had a dildo about the size of a man's arm that he kept wanting to shove up my cunnie. I couldn't handle it. I said, "Man, the thing is too big." He said, "Well, I use it on my boyfriends." They do something called fist-fucking, where they actually get their whole hand up their boyfriend's ass. I can't imagine it. I wonder if butt fucking gives you colon trouble later on? Oh great, I love it. That is one of the things that gays like about me: I do like to get fucked in the ass. I love it; I just go crazy, I don't know why. A lot of women don't, but I love to do it both ways... Well the dildo wasn't working; it was a horrible thing. He couldn't get it in me anywhere so he tried other ways. I had to instruct him that when you're having vaginal sex you can't have anal sex first. You've got to have vaginal sex first and then anal sex or just anal sex. The fact that these guys are probably incredibly diseased never occurred to me. I never once got the clap from anybody, which is a miracle, because it is just rampant. Anyway Keith and I had kind of an affair; we'd sleep together often, and we'd sleep with other men. Sometimes I'd watch him screwing other men, sometimes other men would watch him screwing me. Sometimes we'd just watch each other in the mirror. We were always doing it in really bizarre ways. It was never conventional sex. It was always like over the back of a folding chair, in front of the mirror, hanging over the edge of the bathtub, or up the side of the wall—very strange positions. He was just curious as hell.

Lesbians like Jane also appear readily in these pieces:

All my friends now are gay, mostly gay men. I don't particularly like gay women. Most of the gay women I know who are friends I've met through Gail. But gay bars in this city, women's gay bars, are notoriously godawful. They're just dykes, the old syndrome. They look terrible. I just don't like them. But I have always had a number of gay male friends. Even before I came out, anybody who got close to me was a gay man. Faggots love me. I don't know what it is. When I go out to Fire Island for summers, I'm like a queen out there. Faggots just flock to me. I don't know why. I don't know if I'm outrageous or funny or what. Maybe it's because I accept them. And I'm pretty; faggots love pretty women. My dear friend Rex is a real faggot head. He works as a waiter in a gay bar. He is a gorgeous little boy with a fantastic body and he knows it. He's twenty-six now -- I don't know what he's going to do with himself when he gets to be thirty-five or forty because he can't always be this gorgeous little boy. He is to me the epitome of the gay head, the male gay head. It is strictly body... Rex just loves me, adores me, and I adore Rex. He has a mother-father image for Gail and me. It's like a joke: Rex is our son and we're his mother and father.

Unlike with straight women, lesbians tended to emphasize their dislike of lesbian communities (for more examples see [1]). They sometimes discussed gay relationships as a place where they could be feminine (and not have to see 'dykes,' as Jane states), but other lesbians like Pauline enjoyed a proximity to manhood:

"When my main focal point was men and I wanted men to be interested in me, I gave up a lot of myself to acquire a certain behavior—to be feminine, to be weak, all those things. To dress a certain way, to act a certain way. I gave up a lot of myself. Now Dick is gay and is not at all interested—there is no way I can play that game with him. He's not interested. If I were an automatic female, I would look very stupid to him. I would look funny doing that in front of a gay man"

Also important to Pauline was Dick's acceptance of her "masculine" style: "I have masculine mannerisms, they are just inherent in me. I never liked the role, the act called 'feminine.' I never liked it, so I never learned how to do it."

Footnotes

Women among men: Females in the male homosexual community

Sexual Deviance -- John Gagnon

The Joy of Gay Sex: An Intimate Guide for Gay Men to the Pleasures of a Gay Lifestyle (see intro for brief discussion of fag hags)

The Sexual Outlaw: A Documentary

Fag Hag: A Theory of Effeminate Enthusiasms -- thank you @banamine-bananime!

[abtrusion]

I invite people to take a minute to look at the Web site for the Transgender Day of Remembrance. You'll find four people from Toronto: Grayce Baxter, Shawn Keegan, Deanna Wilkinson, and Cassandra Do. They were all trans prostitutes who were murdered while working. According to the web site, they were killed because of "anti-transgender hate or prejudice." But Grayce Baxter — who was a completely passable, post operative transsexual woman — was working as a genetic woman and was killed by a client who didn't even know she was a transsexual. He learnt it from the newspapers' headlines — "Transsexual Hooker Disappears" — before his surrender. Marcello de Palmo, the man who shot Shawn Keegan and Deanna Wilkinson, also shot a non transsexual prostitute, Brenda Ludgate, that same night. He was out on a killing spree and was targeting prostitutes. He didn't say anything, during his trial, that showed evidence of "anti-transgender hatred." He said, however, that he considered "street people and prostitutes to be the scum of the earth." For Cassandra Do, we still don't know why she was murdered and in exactly what circumstances. All we know is that she was strangled and that some DNA found on her body was linked to the sexual assault and attempted murder of another sex worker, a non transsexual woman, in 1997. So linking, at this point, Cassandra's murder to "transphobia" is ridiculous. But that didn't prevent the organizers of the Transgender Day of Remembrance to use her picture on their 2003 poster, turning her into a martyr for their cause. ... One last thing. Not only are most of the trans people murdered sex workers but they are nearly 100 per cent male-to-females. And that very crucial aspect is completely erased when people frame the issue as one of "violence against transgender people." This is … an issue of violence against transsexual women and against male-to-female transvestites who are mostly prostitutes. … the fact that MTFs are the ones who are almost exclusively attacked and killed is something that needs to be pointed out. [Mirha-Soleil Ross, from an interview in Sex Change Social Change (Vivian Namaste, 2005)]

have you seen the new transmisogyny meta? The large number of trans femicides actually means trans women are seen as men cause the homicide rates of cis men are higher than those of cis women. I think I'm in the twilight zone

ohhhh my god its literally because so many trans women are sex workers how can people be so dense