cl0ckworkqueerness

[cl0ckworkqueerness]

i thought your user was cockworkqueerness

very good

[cl0ckworkqueerness]

It's finally here.

My thoughts on AFAB transfems.

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An essay on assigned femininity and transgender womanhood.

[cl0ckworkqueerness]

OUR GOALS

- to provide support for our community

- to give new detransitioners hope for a future after transition that includes joy and satisfaction

- to promote solidarity between the trans and detrans communities in order to share resources and so that detransitioning is no longer treated as “betraying” our trans siblings

RESOURCES NEEDED / HOW TO HELP

we currently need information on the following

- which insurances cover detrans healthcare (ex. top surgery for detrans men) and where they are

- which name (and legal gender) change resources also serve detrans people

- discounts for laser hair removal

- detrans friendly support groups around transitioning to another gender

- hotlines/helplines

- posts/articles that give tips for passing as your gender

[cl0ckworkqueerness]

There needs to be a real discussion about how y'all cannot help but dequeer intersex people. It's not intersex kids being forced into/pressured into SRS, its lucky cis kids. it's not a trans woman, its someone who's birth sex is "too close" to being female so they are "basically cis". Some of you queers are allergic to acknowledging intersex people are their own group, with their own diverse experiences, and their own struggles that deserve conversations that do not centre you.

Overemphasizing someone as cis (even if they tell you otherwise) as a way to undermine their voice as an intersex person is erasure. Barring us from queerness is erasure of our struggles. How can you call yourself someone who is a supoorter of the LGBT when you only care about yourself? Your voice matters as much as that of a white feminist's.

[cl0ckworkqueerness]

I need perisex people to understand that the 'corrective' surgeries done on intersex children are nothing like bottom surgeries for trans people. Not just because of the lack of consent, but also because it is literally not the same surgery.

[cl0ckworkqueerness]

"someone with both parts or something like that" tells you everything you need to know about how this person views intersex people

This screenshot is still a great summary of what its like to be intersex online and do intersex activism

[cl0ckworkqueerness]

YOU CANNOT LEGISLATE ME OUT OF EXISTENCE.

you can register me as an enemy, as an inhuman threat to be executed.

you can command how i dress, how i speak, how i identify myself.

you can strip my rights from me, strip my clothes to examine the legality of my body.

you can rip the tongue from my mouth, suck the blood from my body, crush my bones into dust.

but you will never rid the planet of me.

the world will never lose my will to live.

the world will never cleanse my corpse from its soil.

you cannot scrub people's memories of me.

you cannot undo my birth.

you can never fill in the pavement's scars my nails left as you dragged me away.

you cannot kill us in any way that remotely matters.

[cl0ckworkqueerness]

“a penis is Ontologically Evil because it’s technically capable of perpetrating sexual violence” damn, wait till you hear about hands!

[cl0ckworkqueerness]

Being trans doesn't automatically mean a person supports intersex people.

Make no mistake, this is a statement in support of literal actual physical violence against intersex people. Coerced & forced surgery IS violence. And it's purpose is to erase us.

[cl0ckworkqueerness]

oh yeah, i'll also be unfollowing a few people sporadically if i find my impulse to get back into this discussion returns frequently upon seeing their posts. again, nothing against them or their message! i just want to distance myself from the thing that weighs on me most for a while.

hey everyone!

due to some massive impacts recent queer discourse has on my mental health, as well as me now living in a country run by a fascist making me not really want to focus all my energy on how a very vocal and toxic minority of the queer community hates me for speaking about my own struggles, i will be stepping back from discussions of transandrophobia/transmisandry/transandromisia/anti-transmasculinity for the foreseeable future.

transandrophobia is still very real and very alive, inside the trans community and (especially) outside of it. me stepping away does not mean i do not still believe it exists and is a serious problem.

i just feel like it's significantly going to improve my mental health if i'm not spending so much energy focusing on people whose minds i cannot change.

I don't know if I will return to these discussions, nor do i know what kind of posts will be made on this blog from here on out (probably trans unity, gender theory, intersexism, and my own autistic trans experiences).

love you guys, stay safe in this discussion, and promote solidarity in these trying times for trans people

[cl0ckworkqueerness]

hey everyone!

due to some massive impacts recent queer discourse has on my mental health, as well as me now living in a country run by a fascist making me not really want to focus all my energy on how a very vocal and toxic minority of the queer community hates me for speaking about my own struggles, i will be stepping back from discussions of transandrophobia/transmisandry/transandromisia/anti-transmasculinity for the foreseeable future.

transandrophobia is still very real and very alive, inside the trans community and (especially) outside of it. me stepping away does not mean i do not still believe it exists and is a serious problem.

i just feel like it's significantly going to improve my mental health if i'm not spending so much energy focusing on people whose minds i cannot change.

I don't know if I will return to these discussions, nor do i know what kind of posts will be made on this blog from here on out (probably trans unity, gender theory, intersexism, and my own autistic trans experiences).

love you guys, stay safe in this discussion, and promote solidarity in these trying times for trans people

[cl0ckworkqueerness]

something that really needs to be discussed more under transandrophobia is this very insidious emotional sexual abuse that cis mothers inflict on their trans(masc) sons/children. this gross almost incestuous enmeshment and entitlement that they have to our fucking bodies and how anything we do with our bodies is an attack on them and their body somehow

its such a vile and disgusting form of abuse and its genuinely hard for me to talk about because its something that i went through myself, on top of other abuse

[cl0ckworkqueerness]

honestly if I was transmasc I would be so much meaner about all this than you guys have been

(I keep holding myself back in case I get accused of being you and held up as an example of something - but seeing it and saying nothing is part of the problem as well)

I've been impressed and moved by how few of you are taking the anti-solidarity bait that the "TMA" supremacists (and/or TERF trolls) keep throwing at you - it is very much appreciated and gives me something to hold onto when the behaviour of (some of) my alleged sisters is driving me to despair. I wish certain people could let themselves recognise this. you've also made me reckon with my own proto-transradfem tendencies and assumptions which were (on reflection) hurting me as well

there is an openness and generosity to the transandrophobia theory I've seen so far which is lacking in the very reductive, identity-determinist, exclusivist interpretations of (trans/)misogyny that are being weaponised way too much atm - it will be transfeminism's loss if we can't accept these experiences and insights and challenges because they're theoretically inconvenient (and expose our online pissing contests and harassment campaigns for what they are).

it would be nice if we could become less reactive and dogmatic in general but this is where we are right now and we can face it honestly and work on it together or we can go into our little factions to fight about who's dying faster. the cis establishment has made its preference clear enough. it would be a shame to agree with them.

[cl0ckworkqueerness]

“I wish transandrophobia discussions were more focused on external stuff as opposed to being so focused on intracommunity harm.”

I kinda wish the same as well.

Unfortunately when there’s a movement from inside the trans community to shut up the discussion, a lot of the discussion of broader issues get sidelined by intracommunity issues not because the people speaking about the movement don’t care about the societal aspects, but because it’s damn near impossible to speak about those societal issues when people from within the trans community start denying your experiences when you try to talk about them, and so the focus needs to be somewhat taken up by addressing that intracommunity stuff.

[cl0ckworkqueerness]

average tumblr queer discourse experience

[cl0ckworkqueerness]

Maybe this is just me being too general about things but like personally alongside/rather than thinking of transandrophobia/transmisogyny as purely the transmasc vs transfem aspects of transphobia, I sometimes think of them as the ways transphobia affects people it tries to force into masculinity/femininity who are instead feminine/masculine. Like how transmisogyny is often (though far from entirely) about "we expect you to be a man and do all the things that come with it how dare you be a woman/feminine" and transandrophobia is often similar in reverse. Transmisogyny encompasses the social view that due to agab someone "should" be a man but isn't and the sides of forcing someone into masculinity and away from femininity whereas transandrophobia encompasses expected/forced femininity and punishes masculinity, as a very very broad generalization.

Like I think transandrophobia absolutely affects trans women who are butch/ otherwise masculine in any way (as deemed by society in which femininity is extremely strict and gatekept) intentional or not because while society does not want trans women to be feminine, it equally does not want anyone who says they are a woman to not conform to a certain form of femininity. Like on top of transfem butches claiming feminine gender/womanhood, they are simultaneously dismantling the idea that womanhood means performing femininity in a specific way which generally leads to transandrophobia (betrayal of womanhood claims, degendering, combo of weak woman dangerous man) alongside already existing transmisogyny.

I also think feminine trans men similarly experience transmisogyny in many ways on account of the rhetoric of "how dare someone we consider to be a man/someone who claims to be a man/looks like a man/etc act in a way that is not masculine in a specific patriarchal way" etc

Like I don't think that these examples fully encompass all possible instances of course nor do they show the full breadth of transmisogny/transandrophobia but I think there's a benefit to acknowledging that a lot of transphobia of different forms is punishment for not living up to the expectation of womanhood/manhood that is either forced due to agab or expected due to "well you claim you're x gender and x gender acts/looks like y". Its one way to analyze how various groups share gendered oppression

I'm not wording this as well as I'm thinking it in my head but it's kind of how transmisogyny and transandrophobia share a demonization of things considered masculine and things considered feminine, but different parts of those things. Like how transmisogyny posits trans women as sexual predators due to association with men/male bodies/penises as something that is socially constructed as sexually aggressive but also incorporates the sexual objectification of people who are associated with womanhood in society. Whereas transandrophobia has the embodied misogyny of people who are expected to give birth, for example, as well as the aspects of masculinity that are praised in white cishet perisex etc men but used to demonize marginalized men such as danger to women etc. They're two sides of the same coin is kind of what I'm trying to say? A Venn diagram of experiences and aspects of oppression that overlaps a lot.

Like part of misogyny is faced more often by trans masculine(ized) people (as a broad generalization) (ie reproductive issues, erasure, etc) another part is faced more often by trans feminine(ized) people (extreme sexualization, etc) and there's a bunch faced by both groups.

And all this is very general and doesn't get into how exorsexism influences both or other intersections and all that, and it's gotten away from me a bit... But tldr transphobia is a multi edged sword and no matter which side you're being hit with, it's the same weapon

people will say "that's still just transmisogyny" but demonizing a butch trans woman for being butch would be like the exact opposite of the definition Julia Serano gave it lol

[cl0ckworkqueerness]

I saw your post that said that if you could help a trans boy unlearn what he's learned about how men suck and how trans men aren't discriminated against that it would make you happy.... I don't struggle with that but instead with something that's kind of adjacent in a way? I'm no trans boy, I'm too old for that, but I've only been on testosterone for about a year and been socially transitioned for a couple more before that, and lived in harsh denial for all of my life before that. My problem lies in this feeling that in spite of the fact that living this way makes me happy, I do have this unshakable thought that the transphobes are right about us, about all of us, that we're delusional and mentally ill and that we really are just forcing unwilling participants to play a game of make-believe. I do definitely think that men and women and everyone in between should be allowed to express their gender identity however they want, but if sex and gender are not the same and if what we're looking for is to change our outward gender expression, then why do so many of us feel the need to change our bodies and especially our genetalia? I've seen trans people retort to "you are your born sex and nothing else" with "this isn't about sex it's about gender" and then also lament that they don't have a penis or boobs when they feel they should. I don't want to feel like this. I feel like I'm a woman in a trenchcoat that says "I'M A MAN" when what I want is to just be a man. I was born into the wrong body and I believe that with everything I am but that is what I always will be at this rate, and I hate that. I do wish I could change my sex. I know what I am on the inside will never match what I have on the outside, and it makes me feel like I could never be a real man. Just a trans man. An impostor at best and a psychotic at worst. Is there even a way to help someone like me that isn't just going to therapy?

i've been reading this ask over and over in attempts to solidify my many thoughts about this topic. because i do have many thoughts, because this is something i myself struggled with for a very, very long time. and don't worry, i believe telling you simply to "just go to therapy" is dismissive and doesn't address the main point that this and so many other problems stem from.

allow me to propose this thesis: there is no one way to be human. thus, there is no one way to be trans.

i have heard people say "well, saying XYZ about trans people is actually a misconception! in REALITY, trans people feel like ABC!" about plenty of things that resonate with me: one thing in particular being the notion you mentioned of "being born in the wrong body". i understand the sentiment people have when they say things like this, but the truth of the matter is all different people feel all different ways about their gender and their body. this is simply because we are all different, and no one person's experiences exactly mirror another's. there are some trans people who may truly feel XYZ, even if they are a minority, and dismissing them as nonexistent or even exceptions is wrong and overgeneralizing.

this is the basis of my personal theory of gender, by the way. i won't go too in-depth into it here for the sake of brevity, but basically it's "there is no one way to define gender because everyone's gender is just as unique as they are".

it may not help you to hear me say something well-meaning and factual but ultimately dismissive like "well, you ARE a real man, simply by virtue of saying you are". instead, i will tell you that manhood, womanhood, and any other gendered category you can think of are far more fuzzy than you may expect, even when you don't take into account trans people: there is no one way to be a cis man, no one way to look like a cis man, no one way to act like a cis man. by that logic, there is no one way to be a man in general. the benefits, pitfalls, comforts, and discomforts of manhood are only to be defined by the individual, not by some Big Lord Man Council who reviews applications of manhood from every aspiring man. this view of the world-- that there is something inherent about any gender that makes them what gender they are-- falls apart at the slightest prodding. thus, i do not abide by it, and i think it would help you a lot to learn and understand just what makes a man, a man (and by that virtue, what DOESN'T necessarily make a man, a man).

but i must mention something: you can change your sex. the very act of taking HRT, having sex change operations, etc do change your sex because they change your physical bodily characteristics associated with sexual development. to claim that my sex is unambiguously female would simply be a lie, even if i were completely perisex and had gone through a typical female puberty. sure, i am not and will never be the same as a cisgender perisex man, but one day, i will be closer to that than i will be to a cisgender perisex woman.

your desire to have been born a cis male, though, is not only understandable but resonating. and while it's true you cannot transition yourself into becoming a cis man, that doesn't necessarily mean you'll be unhappy with your body forever, even after any medical procedure(s) you want or need in the future.

transphobes will never be "right" about trans people, though. their perspectives on sex and gender drastically oversimplify the human experience, and they simply wish to push everyone into little boxes that not even cis people can fit comfortably into 100% of the time. if we were all truly just forcing everyone to play in our little pretend game, then there would be no reason for us all to feel so strongly about ourselves, dysphoric or not. even those of us who are uncertain about our gender feel very real feelings. after all, the human mind is best at knowing itself. instead, they want to pretend as though humans are simple and easy to understand, that gender is entirely deterministic based on sex, that sex is entirely binary, and that anyone who doesn't fall neatly into this simple world of 1s and 0s is just an outlier, someone who's sick, either in the head or in their body.

sex and gender are not the same, that much is certain. however, for some, certain sex characteristics play a HUGE role in their gender and how they wish to present/appear/feel (for example, a trans woman might desperately need to be on estrogen to alleviate her dysphoria, but may not feel especially strongly about having a penis). to say that the way someone's body exhibits certain sexual traits has NO impact on their gender is absolutely ridiculous. after all, if humans are so deep and complex, surely gender dysphoria can play a part in that complexity.

trans people are a hugely varied group of individuals, and each person will be different from every other, whether in subtle or greatly impactful ways. hell, i'm sure there are many ways in which even you and i differ despite how similar your story is to my own feelings. everyone's thoughts, feelings, and stories have no bearing on anyone except themselves. to me, that is the beauty of gender as a social construction: it can be anything. it can be messy, it can be complicated, it can be very simple, it can be agonizing, but above all, it will always be you. all of that applies to every single trans person, regardless of their body, their gender, their life.

as for what i can tell you in terms of advice, don't listen to what transphobes tell you, no matter what kind of pretty or nasty language they decorate their thoughts with. their words are infantilizing at best and downright violent at worst. they don't take us seriously not because they don't want to, but because they don't feel like they need to. to them, "feelings" are some frivolous whimsical thing that only childish people take seriously, and thus deserves no respect whatsoever.

me, personally, i've taken a liking to the term "transsexual" for myself, seeing as it seems to encapsulate my feelings and my relationship with my body quite nicely. it may not suit you, but in that case, you might find more happiness in some other word, or with no words at all, simply "I am a man who was born in the wrong body". there's nothing wrong with labeling yourself that way (so long as you don't apply it to anyone else, of course).

thank you for baring your heart. i appreciate your ask a lot, and i'm sure someone else silently going through a similar journey will as well.