#the whole 'why are transfems and transmascs fighting when they could be having sex' thing that kinda kicked off this discourse surge was bad

[the-world-annealing]

This isn't meant as a sort of bright side to the predstrogen ban (a woman had her entire online presence blown up for spurious reasons, that's bad), but I do think that her ban... re-focused the surge in transmisogyny discourse that'd been going on for a while?

Like, in the days leading up to her ban you could watch, in real time, as people trying to talk about concrete issues got pushed aside in favor of increasingly contrived scenarios about whether X or Y combination of identity and lived experience counts as 'TMA', people were up in arms about that obviously fake 'Kelly' AITA, there was a renewed push to make TMA/TME standard bio labels (definitely not info that could ever be misused, right?).

And then Avery gets nuked and everything just shifts, all of a sudden there's an archetypical case for the discourse to focus on and all else falls away a bit; like I genuinely don't think I've seen a single person bring up that AITA since. And it's still online discourse, it's not like it's pleasant now, but at least there's now a sort of shared understanding about What Transmisogyny, The Dynamic At Hand, Looks Like, at least there's a specific case that can then be used as a bridge to other specific issues (callout posts, selective application of already-bad anti-kink norms) - issues that are important to talk about.

And the thing is that I'm barely seeing anyone acknowledge this! People just kinda segued into discussing the avery ban when before they were discussing 'transfem afabs' and act like this is The Same Sort of Thing because the same word describes both!