when transfems talk about how we live in a society, we mean that US culture only recognizes two sexes and two genders, and then equates them. male = man and female = woman, and its despises anyone who steps outside of those bounds (intersexism and transphobia). so when we talk about how you cant be perisex afab and then call yourself a transfem, what we mean is that society has (whether you like it or not) treated you as a girl/woman because thats what it said on your birth certificate. you cannot transition to be a gender you already a part of. and there are already plenty of nonbinary labels for people who have a feminine gender but dont feel 100% like a woman. and to imply that you can suggests trans women are not the same gender as women. so at best third-gendering us or at worst saying we're not real women. and when it comes to intersexism, listen to tma intersex people about it and not tme perisex people. and i mean actually listen, dont just use them as hypothetical talking points.
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"what if the genders were reversed???"
they are. like an overwhelming majority of the time and you say nothing. get real or stfu
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Feeling upset at people believing Julia Serano over trans men and mascs about how people respond to our manhood/masculinity. Our expressions of it are never ridiculed? You're certain? I guess all those caricatures of us I've seen as fat and balding with patchy facial and body hair and T needles sticking out of our bodies weren't real. Definitely not intended to imply our masculinity is fake and ugly.
Yes, there is a difference between how trans femininity and masculinity is treated. When people mock trans femininity, they are mocking femininity in general. When they mock trans masculinity, they are not mocking masculinity in general. But they do mock trans masculinity, because it is seen as artificial, disgusting, and offensive on our bodies. Masculinity is inherently gender non-conformity on us, and our masculine expressions themselves are in fact used as a joke. Do not ever try to tell me transmascs don't get made fun of for their masc clothing when that literally happened to me last fucking week.
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what i can't help but think about in regards to dylan mulvaney's horrible song is not only how privileged he is as a man but how privileged he is as a well-off man. every single aspect of "girlhood" that he talks about is based in consumerism and requires a bourgeois background to access. i wonder what he would say if someone reminded him that there are millions of women around the world who don't have the means to find their womanhood in prescription drugs and healthcare, club life and one night stands, new clothes and makeup, etc. many women live day to day, struggling to make ends meet. are they excluded from "womanhood" or "girlhood" as dylan defines it?
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I've been scrolling through your blog, and I saw your post about discussing the racialized nature of gender. As someone who has several transmasc POC friends, and someone who's a nonbinary POC themself, I wanted to give my 2 cents.
It's important to understand that "woman" in the "man vs woman" gender binary is a colonialist, white supremacist construct, especially in Western countries where you are the numerical minority. My trans friends aren't on T, they haven't gotten top surgery, we are all quite young. But they all have numerous stories about being addressed as "sir" which brings them euphoria but as one person said, while we were making fun of the amount of white people in our club, "Due to my race and skin color, I get masculinized."
And again I'd like to emphasize, that since we're young, none of us really have medically transitioned due to financial and familial barriers. Their hair is long, our binders we definitely have notable chests, and even if they dress masculine, it's notable that no one in our communities would ever gender us properly. It's often white people calling them "sir." Again, I think this reflects how gender performances in mainstream queer communities are deeply White. Like, trans boys talk about having haircuts, but only one of my friends has that wavier, more manageable hair that will help them pass. When you've got curly/kinky hair, the standards are different. For a white person, what's the difference between a "girl" Afro and a boy "Afro"? White cis people have a harder time identifying us, and literally talk to any black girl, and they'll tell you about being mocked, dehumanized, and called "manly".
I don't have much else to say. These are just my personal experiences. But if you want to be an ally to POC in the queer community, this is why it's so fucking important to bring in colonialism/imperialism/white supremacy into discussions of queer liberation. My biggest gripe with ignorant white queers is when they ignore their white privilege, and act like "cishets" (AKA the patriarchal system regulating sexuality and gender) is the only enemy. Because cishet POC deal with plenty of shit with being infantilized, masculinized, feminized, seen as brutish & dangerous, the list goes on. Doberbutts had a post saying, "Believe me, your family's going to care more about me being black than my queerness." towards his white partners. Acknowledging and creating a framework that centers these intersections of queerness and race into your beliefs is true allyship. This is why if you're not anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, ACAB...I do not think you care for queer liberation. None of us are free until all of us are free.
Please don't view this post as an attack. But this is my perspective, and I thought you'd be receptive to me sharing my lived experiences.
Oh I absolutely don't view this ask as an attack, and I really appreciate you bringing these things up because you're right! Like, just very plainly: You are right and your and your friends lived experiences are extremely important to the conversation on the racialized aspects of gender.
It gets me thinking about where Misogynoir and the social White Fear of Black manhood intersect for Black trans men in particular. Because Black women and Women of Color in general are masculinized by White gender standards and the ways in which Black trans masculine people are gendered in alignment with their identity is absolutely not always done with gender affirming intent. In fact, it's often actually done with racist intent or is fueled by racist bias when it's coming from White people or even from non-Black POC.
That's kind of restating things you've said but differently, it's just such a topic worth highlighting explicitly since it's extremely relevant to the conversation that's been happening about Male Privilege here the last few days.
I do think I know exactly what @doberbutts post you're talking about and yeah. It's just truth. It's something Black queer people have been talking about for ages in both theory and in pop culture (my mind immediately goes to Kevin Abstract and "American Boyfriend") where Black queer/trans identity is both materially different from (neutral) and is treated differently from (negative) White queer/trans identity in multitudes of ways and those differences are worth sharing and exploring and talking about.
Genuinely, thank you for sharing! I try really hard not to lead these kinds of conversations outside of explicitly referencing back to non-White theorists because I don't particularly feel like it's my place to do so, but I will always provide a platform for them because they're extremely important conversations to be had.
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sorry im gonna aut out for a second going off these tags
this book is so fucking aggravating because the author's (cis man. ofc.) reasoning for why the P.U.F isn't trans is because they didn't seem to struggle with their gender before becoming the P.U.F (we have no way of knowing this btw. not only do we have limited information on their personal life before transitioning, but whose to say they ever showed signs of being trans openly? whose to say their near-death experience didn't awaken something inside them?) and since their rebirth was due to "spiritual factors" instead "some long-term struggle over [their] identity" (because it would have to be a struggle, right?), we should only view them in the context of women's history and not trans* history.
which makes me want to rend flesh with my teeth!!!! sir you CANNOT separate spirituality from identity like that. were the priestesses of inanna not trans* despite taking on women's clothing, names, language, because they viewed their gender as a spiritual event? its so ridiculous to take someone who literally changed their entire identity because of this spiritual rebirth, and then call them by their birth name and she/her pronouns and be like "well since SHE didn't struggle with HER gender before, then SHE isn't trans!"
and its not like this is some "ohh we don't know what they would have wanted," the P.U.F made it very clear they were not Jemima, they would not tolerate being seen as her, they dressed androgynously on purpose, their followers considered them a neutral spirit. They identified as the Public Universal Friend, it doesn't matter whether you think they really were a spirit from Heaven. They did everything possible to express "I am not who I used to be and my gender is not the same as it was," how is this not trans??????? Because they weren't the fucking textbook transsexual that is the only True Trans allowed to exist???????? god forbid a trans* person's gender be more than some hellish struggle. god forbid other parts of our identity affect our gender and be inseparable. and god forbid a trans* person assigned female do literally anything because if they aren't a cis woman somehow their defiance of the patriarchy is no longer radical. paul moyer meet me in the fucking parking lot i'm gonna break your nose what is this shit. can't trust a cis to do a trans' job.
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