#TME just feels like it's... a label to slap on with really no meaning

[intersexfairy]

The terms TME (trans misogyny exempt) and TMA (trans misogyny affected) are strange to me bc I feel like it lacks a lot of nuance, especially in regards to intersex people. These labels are just slapped onto AMAB trans fems and AFAB trans mascs, and I really don't think it's that simple. I'm intersex but AFAB technically speaking, however, I honestly feel I have experienced quite a lot of trans misogyny throughout my life. I was bullied my entire life as I was seen as a "boy pretending to be a girl", and was treated as such by everyone around me. I still get people often confused by my gender and assuming I'm a trans woman, and treating me very poorly. I regularly get worried about my safety and abt getting assaulted due to all this. Yet i am technically AFAB. Idk your thoughts on these terms, but it's been on my mind a while now. I just think experiences aren't as simple as slapping a label onto someone purely due to their assigned sex at birth.

Yea, I basically agree. Im struggling to explain my thoughts right now, but I don't like how a lot of trans terms are linked to AGAB, or how ASAB is often ignored (except when dyads bring up the abuse of intersex infants while arguing with bigots). Or how forced (re)assignments occuring later in life are completely and utterly ignored.

Gender and sex are complex social constructs, and because of that I personally define transness as any deviation from the gender/sex related expectations that are forced onto someone, at any point in their life. If you're transgressing norms, you're free to be trans in my book.

Like. What we've been assigned definitely shapes our experiences, and results in differences in experience compared to those with a different assignment. But it isn't the end all be all, or mean there can't be important similarities.

And above all, I'd rather define my transness by my actual identity and expression, rather than who people tried to force me to be. I'd like to be perceived less as who I'm not, but more as who I am. But bigots judge me for both - through their perception and my reality. Being trans and intersex makes that complicated.

I dunno if any of this made sense but yea. Nuance. Important.

[doberbutts]

What do you think about the term transmisogyny exempt (tme)?

In honesty it's a New Term for me because I do not engage with the majority of the trans community online, and thus only learned about it just halfway through May. Admittedly my understanding is still fairly minimal and I do not claim to 100% Get It, but...

From my understanding, it rebrands transmisogyny to only apply to trans women and transfems, and thus those who are trans men and transmasc are somehow "exempt" from transmisogyny.

This is a really bizarre way of thinking for me. People who are transmasc are not exempt from being affected by misogyny, nor are they exempt from the specific form of transmisogyny that transfems are subjected to. In fact, I can recall a relatively recent gross interaction with a chaser/fetishist that specifically was talking to me because he thought I was a trans woman and did not understand the difference between trans men and trans women. I had to explain to him several times before he finally got it, and then he expressed that he thought I was really gross for "wanting to be a homo". WTF, dude. You're just as obsessed with sucking cock as I am, just because you're straight for wanting a woman's penis does not mean I'm wrong for wanting a man's, but okay I guess.

Trans men may not be killed at the same rates of trans women, but that is because trans women are hypervisible (which is not great) and trans men are invisible (which is also not great)- meaning when someone "clocks" a trans man they usually think he is either a trans woman or a butch lesbian, and comes under fire for that assumption because it's not like those identities are safe at all in larger society either. Trans men are still killed for being trans, as well as subjected to beatings and rapes and homelessness and drug addiction and more, for similar and yet different reasons that trans women are.

In other words, I think all transgender identities are more alike than they are different, and I think pitting ourselves against each other to try and claim that one is more oppressed than the other will get us no where. I think recognizing that we all come under fire because of our gender expression and that while these things may affect us in different ways, the problem is not that one identity or gender has "more danger" than the other, but that these problems manifest in different ways because we still live in a very gendered society and are marginalized from the getgo.

Caitlyn Jenner may not be TME due to being a trans woman, and I may be TME due to being a trans man, but she has more privilege in this world than I will ever have, while still having a target on her back due to the simple fact that she is a trans woman. I don't think it's fair to erase others' struggles and oppression simply because one group's problems are more visible than the others'.

Additionally, transmisogyny was coined to include both binary genders and nonbinary genders and how it was misogyny and the closeness to women that fueled violent acts of transphobia. The idea being that trans men are women, trans women are men who want to be women, and nonbinary people are a mix of soyboys and confused tomboys, and thus it's all bad because it all relates back to women in the end, and thus our fellowship in misery because the world cannot accept that we are what we say we are.

At some point, there was a gear shift, and transmisogyny was put fully on trans women and transfems, which entirely erased trans men and transmascs from the discussion. If I were to hedge a bet on exact timing, I would say likely whenever the idea that all men including marginalized men are bad also spread, and trans men and transmascs began to be attacked and forced back into the closet and made to feel ashamed for being male or male-adjacent. This is also about when the argument to use the words transmisandry or transandrophobia came about, to differentiate the struggles between the two "sides".

As an aside I really wonder where peopble who are gender neutral or agender get sorted in this discussion, and whether those nonbinary who do not claim "transmasc" and "transfem" as a term to describe themselves feel similar or different regarding this discussion. I have always been very binary so I really can't tell you, but I do find that these discussions tend to leave this group out to argue on a gender binary level.