#like yeah most people who are trans men lesbians are really transmasc or non-binary or what have you

[bulldog-butch]

the hilarious thing about people who are super anti trans men lesbians is that they consider themselves the arbiters of when someone has become too much of a man to consider themselves a lesbian. like please get over yourself. you can actually just trust people to make that decision for themselves jfc

[totaldrama-showdowns]

Submissions for Most Transgender that didn’t make it into the bracket!

Duncan (2)

Idfk transmasc Duncan who also happens to be misogynistic is hilarious to me and makes him such a better character

Look,

Sammy (2)

How to make poorly-developed characters infinitely more interesting: transgenders them. That is a nonbinary egg

Demi-girl. fuck it, gives her cool gender juice

Crimson (2)

transmasc crimson

She's got that transfem swag. to me

DJ (2)

nomebinary. he likes lemonade

dj is so transgender in all ways but ive recently become rather fond of transfem dj. people keep telling her to man up and she's like huh? :(

Mal (2)

agender. He's been he/it

Yeah I know I just submitted svetlana but mal is also trans...

Wayne (2)

Wayne

Raj (2)

gay AND trans because i said so

Geoff (2)

He is canonically dickless. (That one moment in X-Treme Torture where they did not censor between his legs despite him lacking pants). Also he’s totally the type to display his top surgery scars proudly.

katie and sadie (2)

changing their names to be similar to eachother. its cute.

cody (2)

t4t coderra please please please

he's got toy cringe

Chase (2)

ripper do you think I'm transgender

he's rep for trans guys who are assholes!!!

Justin (2)

nobody will get it but me but trans girl justin please...

Intern Girl / That one intern that wayne helped (2)

Mike (2)

Tyler (2)

T4T LYLER SEE MY VISION..... he could go any way for me i love transmasc tylers i love transfem tylers....... i love you tyler

Jen (2)

You know Bulletproof heart... yeah Johnny/Jenny

she just gives transbian

Staci (2)

She's got that "just started transitioning" haircut

actually her great great great great great great grandparent invented gender. mhm. yah.

Junior (2)

i like to think the reason dwayne sr is all "man men manly men" is because he's trying to bond with his recently out son and supporting him in his transition. he's just being weird about it

Sam

She’s just an egg!!

Emma (2023)

Wanna know why we got another Emma after ridonculous race? It’s because TD Emma named herself after RR Emma during her transition

millie

nonbiney swaggr

transfem ennui

Chris McLean

Trans rights, sure, but Chris supports trans wrongs

scarlett

the mtf creature ever

all of them

none of these fuckers are cis

Dakota

both shawn and dave together

maybe its just all the fanart but they really bring out each others transmascness

Kitty

she is just so non-binary to me

Axel

Ripaxel can also be yaoi

Eva

Blaieneley (is that how u spell it??)

divorced trans swag

Me

Nichelle

Courtney

i can see it

Gwen's face

Gwen is trans therefore the boat "Gwen's face" is also trans. In this essay I will

Beardo

he has fucking voice dysphopria

Dave

failcore

Leonard

cant grow his own fucking wizard beard

rodney

stupid lesbian

topher

he transitioned just to rival chris

Caleb

i need to give him a redeeming feature

Emma tdr

transfem swag

brody

Kelly

milf and also trans. the whole package

Mary

that is just a trans woman in stem

tammy

she'z cute

[not-poignant]

This is the anon the said 'safe'. Your tags hit me hard, since I'm actually starting a transition but am avoiding hrt. I've been getting pushback on it, and been told I'm not really trans without it. I know what I want to change to feel like myself. Also what I don't want to change. That's probably why 'safe' was my choice. It sucks when you think you should belong, but still feel like you aren't good enough. It helped to hear you have felt the same. I just want to give you a big virtual hug.

Ahhh I have a similar story, anon <333 I'm so sorry you went through it too.

Under a read more because it contains transphobia towards a nonbinary person from a binary trans person. My experiences are from a nonbinary lens, anon, so take the bits that are useful to you and ignore the rest, depending on where you sit on the trans spectrum <333

When I started realising I was transmasc (I'd known I was non-binary for a while) I remember that I talked to a trans man about it, he'd been going through the process for a couple of years at that point and we'd talked about that too at different points.

And I remember mentioning that I'd thought about hormones, but I was still on the fence because I'm nonbinary, not like 'binary trans' (i.e. I'm not going from point A to point B, where you move from AFAB to man or AMAB to woman), and I was talking about wanting they/them pronouns and maybe he/him pronouns at that point.

And he said: 'Oh cool, yeah, hopefully that helps until you decide for sure with testosterone and surgery.' I had this moment of like ??? and he was like 'when you realise and can be brave enough to commit to being a guy, I hope that goes really well for you.'

It was one of the most transphobic things I'd ever heard, not because it was said from a hateful place (it really wasn't, I'm still friends with this guy), but because it came from a friend, I was being very vulnerable during the conversation and it left me feeling like I didn't have a right to consider myself trans at all for about two years after that. It pushed me into this space where I'd been defined by a fellow trans person as a 'coward until I decided to be officially a man.' And then for two years I kept looking for that inside of myself, denying my non-binary-ness in favour of looking for a very clear and decisive 'I'm a man!' moment. It was a horrible period of time, gender-wise. Because being identified exclusively only as a man or a woman is dysphoric to me, so trying to do it to myself was like cutting at myself with an axe.

It's also very much like when gay and lesbian folk would say to me - back when I identified as bisexual - 'get back to me when you pick a side / become a real queer.' There's a real phobic bent among folks who are 'one or the other' (sighs) towards people who are in the liminal with this stuff and that's where they belong. And it hadn't occurred to me that I'd hear a version of that from a fellow trans person. You'd think I'd have learned, right?

He and I are still friends, but I stopped talking to him about all of my experiences as a trans and nonbinary person. It was clear to me, in that moment, he saw me as a much lesser version of an identity he'd embraced and was living. You know, how so many people think of nonbinary transmascs. (It's also frustrating, because trans men also don't need to have hormones or surgery to be trans men, and it makes me furious when people take this attitude with binary trans folk too, but I'm mostly focusing on my own experience here, of the myriad ways we encounter transphobia in the trans community).

I never heard anything quite like that again, but I've had one other trans guy be like 'when you're ready for testosterone, I'll support you' like he was waiting in the wings for me to 'fully make a decision to be 100% a man' which isn't a decision I can make, because I'm not 100% a man, lmao, I'm like 80% of one, and 20% something else, and 0% woman, lmao, which is why I call myself nonbinary transmasc.

I was lucky that through research and listening to voices in nonbinary transmasc spaces and more open-minded trans spaces that I realised that I'd encountered transphobia, and that this specific kind of transphobia is particularly common in the trans community, especially in cases where a trans man or woman has a period of being nonbinary as an experiment to see what transitioning feels like before they fully commit to the surgery and/or hormones and name etc. that they often wanted all along. So they often project this onto other people, because for them being nonbinary was a midway point, or the middle of an evolution. But being nonbinary isn't an experiment for most nonbinary people, it's literally our identity and it always will be. (And any binary trans person reading this, don't ever use this rhetoric with your nonbinary friends, or your fellow binary trans friends who have elected not to use hormones or surgery - it's transphobic.)

These days, I'm proudly trans and proudly part of the trans community, but I'm also aware that there are a lot of binary trans people who will treat me and other trans folk as 'other' because I haven't suffered through the same surgeries or adjustments that they have. That's...their transphobia, and it's not me expressing my identity wrongly, or being 'lesser', it's just straight up transphobia. It belongs to them, not to me. I don't believe we have a unique word for nonbinary transphobia, it all comes under the same umbrella, but that's definitely what it is.

When you start to feel like you don't belong, anon, remind yourself that this is internalised transphobia, not to punish yourself, but to remind yourself that it's not true. Those feelings belong to the people who gave them to you, but they're not innately or inherently true, they actually have nothing to do with how valid you are at every stage of your transition.

You're fully a trans man if you don't take hormones, and you're fully nonbinary if you do. Whatever you need (or don't need) to affirm or express your gender for you, is what you need, and that deserves to be respected and fully validated no matter what, at any time. Whether it's binding or not binding, hormones or not hormones, hormones and then 'not for the next few years' and then hormones again, surgery or not surgery, etc. Whether you're a trans man, woman, nonbinary, agender etc.

People have this idea of what it is to be a 'proper' trans, bi, gay, lesbian person (like the 'gold star lesbian' which is horrendously disgusting as a term and concept), but all you need - literally all you need - re: these things, is to just... know you're these things. That's it. That's how a gay person can know they're gay without having sex. That's how a bi person can know they're bi without sleeping with someone of the same sex. And it's how a trans person knows they're trans without looking perfectly androgynous or perfectly binary trans (depending on what they desire) on the outside. (Don't get me started on fatphobia in androgynous and nonbinary spaces, and the equation of true 'nonbinary androgyny' with thinness, because that's a whole other rant for another day, lol).

I'm sorry you've experienced that pressure to be 'more' of something from society / particular people. I can specifically relate on the hormones front because I actually went quite far into looking into taking T, to the point where my doctor was ready to sign off with an endocrinologist, before I realised that it wasn't the right decision for me. It might be one day, but right now I know I'm transmasc without it, and I'm concerned about some of the side effects with my neuroendocrine tumours. There are other ways I affirm my gender that work great for me. But I did have a moment of knowing that would impact how other people see me, and it's one thing when it comes from all the cis people, but it's another thing when it comes from the trans community as well. :( Thankfully most people are really validating now, use the right pronouns, and I just don't confide nonbinary vulnerabilities with folks who saw being nonbinary as a midpoint of their own evolution/journey, just to be safe, lmao.

Wishing you fortune and strength and much validation, anon <3 You are amazing as you are, whatever you decide to do or not do in the future. :) *hugs*

[nefariousfool]

I have no direct goat in this game but I will yap anyways

I don't think tme/tma is, like, precise language in almost any form especially in the casual usage I've seen it used and was curious why this push was being made for its usage. transfem/transmasc have been far more useful and far less reductive for a very very long time. I know this may come off "all people are affected by oppression" but saying your definition of Trans Misogyny Affected doesn't apply to a cis gay man who has been regularly treated with the same tools of oppression for not acting in line with society's conception of gender, then suddenly deciding he is "affected" by transmisogyny the second he identifies as non binary seems entirely useless. The obvious retort would be that, of course, all the punishments he faced for behaving femininely are retroactively now also transmisogyny, but this implies if he never came to this conclusion on his gender that violence he faced would not be the same hammer of transmisogyny but just uhhhh misdirected transmisogyny or transphobia. Your life cannot be affected by misdirected oppression after all! This feels like a functionally useless set of terms when more useful ones exist, and reducing criticism of this to exclusively being from afabs is not only entirely untrue but a bad if nonexistent defense of their use. also if I'm going to nitpick the term doesn't really function to differentiate itself from afab and amab if you're only going to use it when talking about situations that all but explicitly exclude cis men if not cis people all together, which seems to be the case but whatever that's about use and largely separate from the issues I have at the heart of this

The reasoning for the change I've seen that has been the most consistent and makes the most sense is "annoying transmisandry-truther afab dweebs call themselves transfem on tumblr (obviously because theyre gender edgelords the weirdest gender they can conceive of is a trans woman) thus making the term lose all meaning" and that feels like. OK. first, what's going to stop them from claiming to be tma. They will do that. They are already, probably. second, this is like claiming bc a bunch of annoying 4chan plants start identifying as cis male lesbians it makes the term lesbian useless so we gotta pivot to wafiia (woman and feminine identified individual attracted) and yeah that's more loose and ignores a lot of obvious issues but it's more direct about the axis of oppression wafiia face (their love of women (and feminine identifying individuals but not feminine cis men and also-))

If you disagree greatly feel free to do so, after all I might be fully misinformed, but idk I've read a lot of discussion and am yet to be fully convinced and since I just feel kinda "eh" about the term and don't personally write posts about the tma/transfem experience (obviously) your efforts may be better done elsewhere. Who knows maybe in a few it'll become the only term people use and all dissent will be moot anyways.

[molsno]

I can actually see why some transmascs may talk about "hatred of masculinity" in a good faith (and still be wrong).

Before realizing that they were men they were probably identifying as women heavily dissatisfied with being women and probably also heavily gender non-conforming. Neither of those are considered fully acceptable by wider society, but totally accepted by feminist movement, at least here where I live. And the most prominent feminist organisations here are radfem-adjacent.

Now, saying that those organisations at large are "anti-men" or even "against masculinity in men" is wrong, considering how they tried to portray their enemies as effeminate as some kind of own. And, though I have never witnessed it myself, how straight girls who use radfem rhetoric are willing to invent new definitions of lesbianism to call their cishet boyfriends "lesbians", men for them have higher priority than lesbians at least.

Still, running into people there who did just hate men was a daily occurrence, and many more were parroting their rhetoric ("feminine energy" as some kind of fix for civilisation and so on). If some transmascs allied more with people like this, discovering that they are what they considered to be some ontological evil might have been traumatic.

Still, posing misandry as big societal problem and not fringe worldview that they internalized is silly at best (I am using misandry here as personal attitude, not system, hence no quotes). And I always assume that people who talk about it as something important are either doing it in bad faith or repeating someone's bad faith arguments without analysing it.

(Now it's up to question how many transmascs actually joined those organisations in any way, considering how for unrealised trans girl that I was any idea about how good men or masculinity are even (in not ridiculous form) was an instant "no" on all levels, but who knows)

yeah, that's pretty much my understanding of it, too. basically all transmascs who believe in transandrophobia display at least some level of internalized gender essentialism underlying their entire ideology.

and like, I get it. the feminist wave of the 2010s was so deeply entangled with radical feminism that for a good while, anyone heavily involved in the movement was exposed to the biological essentialist worldview central to radical feminism that declares that men are ontologically evil, and I have no doubt that many young, repressed trans people at the time internalized that idea to an extent. I certainly did, and it only amplified my dysphoria as a teenager. it was traumatizing to me, and I can completely understand why it would be traumatizing to transmascs to come to terms with the fact that they were something they had always believed was inherently bad.

it's just like you said though, it's a mistake to frame misandry as a society wide issue when really it's a very small minority of people. but a lot of trans men never question or challenge the worldview they developed in their youth, so when they start getting read as men when they're adults and inevitably face transphobia, they start attributing it to a societal hatred of masculinity instead of recognizing that the actual cause of their oppression is a society that seeks to protect the concept of the immutable gender binary that enables the patriarchal hierarchy of power at all costs.

I don't really have any sympathy for them, though. like yeah, it sucks to be made to feel like you should hate yourself just for existing, but like, that isn't unique to them. the gender essentialism so many of them have internalized is a big reason a lot of transandrophobia truthers start aligning themselves with terfs, and I don't think I need to tell you how I feel about that. 😑 they have an alternative, they can just reevaluate their beliefs until they come to realize that man and woman are completely neutral categories entirely devoid of value judgment and don't say anything meaningful about any given person other than what they like to be called. I'll admit from experience that accepting that truth can be difficult but it's not impossible, and challenging your worldview is something you're going to have to do a lot in life if you actually want to meaningfully change how you interact with people and the world around you.

but why do that when they can demand trans women bend over backwards to appease them? it must feel good to get a taste of that male privilege when a few trans women are actually self-hating enough to listen to them. that is, at least until they get too much backlash from the rest of us who have enough self esteem to stand up for ourselves and they recede into the open arms of terfs for comfort from the mean trannies.

[billgenbrough]

Being closeted is so funny (sarcasm) but so is gender in general

I've known I was non-binary since I was 15, thought I was trans-masc since sixth grade. I very rarely wear dresses (mainly because of sensory and weight issues, but also because most dresses I find fit horribly for my body type) and like wearing makeup and nail polish, but don't do it often (the effort is too much for what little talent I have).

My family (mainly just a few relatives, actually) call me a butch lesbian—and the slurs that go with that—because I wear a lot of men's clothes (the cuts fit better because they're made for thicker and broader bodies) and don't really present "feminine" besides having long hair (my face is round as fuck, so I'm nervous to cut it) and the stereotype of "big chest = super feminine".

I've given up on telling my family I'm not a lesbian because it usually only gets responses in the same vein as "Sure, Jan". It doesn't help that I've had one "boyfriend" that I pretend never happened and never even liked because it was less than a month, and he has a shitbag. I only dated him because he asked me to the school dance and every other "girl" in school talked about guys non-stop, so I wanted to fit in (spoiler: never happened).

I've been strictly non-girl online for 9 years, and it is so freeing. The only person who knows irl is my therapist. One of my sisters vaguely knows (she snooped on my computer a LOT when we shared a room together, it turns out) but she thinks it was "just a phase" (just like her pretending to be transmasc for 7 years so my youngest brother "could have a male role model," but that's a story for another time).

But yeah. I hate it. I've always hated hearing my legal name, even before I heard about trans people being a thing. I hate my body, but I always thought it was because I was heavy. I was in a class of all boys for three years before transferring schools in the middle of fifth grade, and when the teachers would generalize us students as "boys," it felt wonderful. I was in third grade when I started feeling weird about being a "girl".

Gender is a funny thing, even when it's an inconvenience

[mariaiscrafting]

yo i saw your post to canon about gender studies and stuff and i ran out of asks ages ago so I couldnt send this until now, but feel free to go off about gender and stuff, i would love to hear it- maybe tag me in it if you do? - evilglitter (canon's canonical spouse)

Heya, @evilglitter! Lol yeah, I saw canon’s reply and I was just gonna ask, like, what exactly y’all would like me to go off about. It was kinda an open-ended sorta reply where I can really talk about anything y’all are interested in/questioning about, I guess.

If y’all don’t have any specifics you wanna know about for now, that’s cool, too, I can go off about what’s been bothering me lately and helping me along my own journey to pin point my gender identity. 

The first thing my brain’s been hung up on is the difference between gender identity & expression. So, just as people say pronouns /=/ gender, I’m of the belief that expression /=/ gender, either. To explain this to people and better-conceptualize it myself, I always return to the kind of example this trans lady on Youtube (Contrapoints) goes back to. She brings up various examples of people who wear makeup: First, there is a cisgender man who might be mistaken as a woman when he wears feminizing makeup but is still a man nonetheless, whether wearing makeup or not. Then there’s a cisgender man who uses he/him pronouns when out of drag but she/her pronouns and a female name when in it, but still identifies as a man in and out of drag, almost like he’s playing a character. There are non-binary, genderfluid people who will identify as men and use he/him pronouns out of drag, while identifying as women and using she/her pronouns in drag; they identify themselves as women and men depending on their expression. And there are transgender women who identify as women in and out of drag, regardless of their expression. I’m not sure if I’m articulating this example too well - it’s much better-articulated in video format, I think - but that’s basically how I see gender identity and expression. They are two separate things that draw from each other and might have links to each other, depending on each individual’s view on their own gender, but don’t have to match at all. Butch lesbians can have a more masculine gender expression, and yet identify as cisgender women. Transmasc people can also have a masculine gender expression, and yet identify as trans men, non-binary, or anything else. Gender identity does not have to equate with expression, and that’s a really difficult box that I’ve had to learn to break out of, for my own sake, and through the gen & sexuality studies I’ve been doing at uni. Like, as a presumed cis woman my whole life, I’ve just assumed that to be perceived as a woman, I need to express myself femininely, and that if I fit into that feminine gender expression, I do not deviate from the identity of a woman. But lately I’ve been grappling with the idea that maybe I don’t identify as much as a woman as I once thought, that when I look inside myself and question the role I want to fit into in society, how I want my peers and colleagues to treat me, and my own characteristics/tendencies, I might not be as binary a woman as I always was taught to believe, and none of these things are affected by the fact that I’m curvy or wear skirts and heels or wear makeup; I can be as feminine or as masculine as I like, but to me, those do not equate my gender, and it’s okay if they don’t.

Lol the other thing I’d like to rant about for now is different theories of gender. First, I’d like to say that I’m by no means an expert. I’m literally just some second-year G&S minor who’s watched a lot of videos from trans people, learned a lot from Tumblr over the past 7-8 years, and read a couple texts here and there. I don’t know nearly as much as I’d like to pretend, but I’ll give my take on what I do know a little about. There are lots of different theories on what exactly gender is that overlap and contradict each other, at times. There’s the biological perspective that I’m sure we’re all familiar with - the belief that gender = your sex assignment. The problems with this theory are obvious, in that it doesn’t account for intersex people/people with chromosomal/hormonal discrepancies, or binary transgender people. Basically, the theory that XY = man and XX = woman is pretty... antiquated and flawed, imo. Then there’s the theory that gender is a bunch of performances, which I think came from Judith Butler, this well-known 2nd Wave feminist. This theory basically states that gender is this, like, specific, stylized series of actions that we perform everyday to fit into what our society’s roles for our genders are. Butler would probably disagree with me about expression versus identity, because to her, gender identity doesn’t go beyond the performance of one’s own gender. Basically, what we perform everyday, whether it be to act feminine, masculine, or androgynously, is telling of what our gender identity is. If we perform the actions of being a woman, then we are a woman, etc. Finally - and I’m sure there are many more theories on gender, but these are three I’m most familiar with - there’s the theory I personally most agree with - gender as a social construct. This is the idea that gender is constructed by societies, that gender roles are imposed onto us from the external, and that we are then socialized into whatever gender. I don’t totally agree with this theory because I do believe that gender goes beyond just the social roles we try to adhere to to fit into society, and the socialization we undergo from childhood; I do believe there is something at least a little innate about one’s own gender identity. The road social construct theory goes down is this one where, if we created a society free of hierarchies and gender roles and such, gender would cease to exist, which... is that true, I don’t really know. But I do think that gender is at least somewhat of a construct that society first created because it was useful for the creation of an efficient society, but is now just used to justify oppression, and that beyond that, gender as it functions in society is just this illusion that we could 100% do without if we want to obtain equality or whatever.

But anyways, lol I dunno if any of what I’ve just ranted about makes sense or is what y’all were looking for, and honestly at this point, I’m just using this as an opening for me to rant about something I’ve had bottled up for quite a while. I apologize for not being totally coherent since I’m not very experienced in actually talking about gender theory. If y’all want to chat about something specific, feel free to ask anything. :) Hope your journey to figure out your gender goes well, @canonurl

[butyouvealwaysbeenthecaretaker]

I actually have a lot of feelings about this, like....

a lot of label-based community-building is about positioning. Like, as a trans man, you have basically three options:

You can align yourself with women, as a kind of butch-continuum/female-sex-disprivilege/spiritually still a lesbian/dysphoric woman thing

You can align yourself with men, as a kind of a - trans men are men are real men like other men like all men a kind of man thing. Maybe in a transmedicalist way, or not; maybe in a queer or straight way.

You can align yourself with trans people, centering solidarity with trans women and non binary people, as well as perhaps seeing transness and transition as the most salient or politically

None of there are right or wrong; I think most of us do a combo throughout our lives, and there’s no one good outcome here because bodies are weird and people find different ways to make peace with themselves.

BUT one thing about transmasc specifically is, the amount of pressure you are under not to do number 2. As in, there’s a lot of pressure to identify with or center the needs of cis women, and then there’s also a lot of pressure to identify with or center the needs of trans women and other trans people (and often, those pressures in conflict with one another)

So what OP is pointing at here is like, trans women who lean really hard on aligning with women over aligning with men or with transness, and I’m not unsympathetic to that because trans women are under especial "threat” to not be perceived as too male or transsexual, it’s really hard to get and stay in that girls club.

But ultimately, it’s still a problem, you know? Back to that tug-of-war, where - I do feel a lot of value in these models of transmasculinity as female genderweird, I follow a handful of blogs that do that. But what draws me back from it is thinking - ultimately, the people I know myself to be in true solidarity with are trans women. We’re in the same boat. And I can’t commit to an ideological stance  which always ends up hand-in-hand with a transmisogynist position.

So part of the disappointment in the dynamic OP describes - and I’ve encountered it a lot! - is trans women not returning that favour. Requiring trans men to constrain the possibilities of how they might align themselves due to trans solidarity, but then at the first opportunity retreating into the imagined comfort of an all-women gendered space, abandoning trans solidarity towards others, and hoping that picking on the mascs is going to win them access to a community they know to be precarious

& it’s a messed up scenario in a lot of ways. Because that access is conditional, I center trans people in my politics over either men or women as gender groups because at any moment I might need to retreat there. And because, as trans men, there’s a demand that we stay trans-identified, that either leaning into male or female gender too far is some kind of a problem.

I’ve met those cis queer femmes and they suck. I’ve also met these trans women, and actually, I met one just last week who just went off on one about how trans mascs are such a problem in a general sense and it was like...why are you telling me this, why are you so comfortable with your power in this scenario that you feel OK to say this without a moment’s hesitation or compassion? 

So yeah. The way that “woman is the good gender” as a subconscious community belief sucks and harms everybody.