#trans people can enact lateral oppression but not systematic oppression

[tandoori-frost]

I just want to make it super clear to everyone that follows me, transandrophobia/isomisogyny/transmisandry (I personally use transandrophobia), is real.

It does real meaningful harm to people, including me, every day. There are people who have made wonderful essays, I am not going to be one of them, but please seek them out and read them.

If you do not thing that trans men deal with our own specific form of oppression, or your think that the words involved matter more than the bigotry being talked about, I would prefer you block me and move on, because if I find out you hold those beliefs I'll be doing the same.

And just to ward of the worst of the bullshit, transandrophobia does not mean trans women oppress trans men, that's called lateral oppression. It doesn't mean trans men are more oppressed than trans women, thats playing oppression Olympics.

Whatever you want to say, I can promise I've heard it, please just be kind the the trans men in your life and online.

Putting my DNI on here cause I anticipate This breaking containment, DNI: terfs, sysmeds, transmeds, queerphobes, people who think transandrophobia isn't real, and people who believe in Narc abuse. I block frequently and at will. Your anon hate will not be posted.

[rabbitindisguise]

I really have a lot of problems with "lateral aggression" especially in the overlap of identities. Like, physically disabled people use it to downplay how, in disabled communities they effectively were given control over by able bodied neurotypical people, it's "less bad" when they do ableism (for example, calling mentally ill people not disabled, gatekeeping mobility aids, etc) because they don't benefit from ableism- since it absolutely boosts their respectability which . . . confers . . . benefits? In how they're treated in comparison to other people of their oppressed group. Obviously it's worth pointing out these benefits are chump change and vanish the second an ABNT has a problem with you (especially in regards to deincentivizing), but these benefits¹ exist nonetheless. And acting as if it's a given rather than a conscious choice to deprioritize this as a problem. This creates incentive to able sanist and ableist in disabled communities which disproportionately impacts one group of disabled people over another because there's no consequences for this behavior since it's assumed a given, a natural state of the world. That is worth pointing out.

This is especially true in inverted communities which create reactionary hierarchies of power. TERFs for example would not have the control they do in academia (conferring the ability to erase trans women from queer history, or erase queer history altogether) if the LGBTQ+ and feminists communities weren't built in opposition to a cisheteropatriarchal society. So, for example, holding up the idea that "because women are oppressed in society as a whole, women in these communities must be centered" is the exact line of reasoning being exploited to harass, murder, and enact violence on trans women. It's not anything special about being trans or being a women but it's a product of the communities we have created ourselves.

And, I cannot emphasis this enough, the point of activism isn't to do justice by creating a parallel reality where the other group(s) are oppressed so they know first hand how much it hurt . . . the point of activism is to dismantle the very act of oppression itself at the root. The root being oppression, not the patriarchy. Not ableism. This is too small a picture. It will create the sociopolitical equivalent of a slapfight between two groups that fundementally don't have power anyway. It's monumentally stupid to keep going on this track of "lateral aggression." Lateral aggression is oppression done by a bootlicker.

And most importantly, the people who freely use lateral aggression are often perpetrators of this violence because they cannot recognize these inverted power structures and think how things are outside these communities determine how much of an asshole they can be to everyone else. That is a whole other problem with this concept: it's just self justification. We came to lateral aggression much like we came to biphobia, transphobia, LGBTQ+ and many others. The idea of "monosexism," "exorsexism," and "MOGAI" is too threatening and called lateral aggression, when if anything, the actual affected parties of lateral aggression are the very coiners of the word. What use is a concept so frequently coopted by the most powerful in the community? That uproots the framework of systematic oppression to make marginalized people invulnerable to criticism when they hurt other marginalized people? It doesn't work.

¹ I'm using benefits instead of privilege because the impact of these things are not universally positive and sometimes the "benefit" is being more easily erased or visible- a benefit to bigots outside of the inverted community in that case.

[positive-lesbian-vibes]

Idk if this is helpful or not but I understand the whole monosexual privilege and biphobia stuff kinda like racism. So white people have privelige but poc aren't a monolith and an Asian person can be racist (not in the systemic oppression meaning of the word) towards a black person right? But that doesn't give Asian people privelige. So in this situation "monosexual privelige" is that nonexistent Asian privelige - none of this denies biphobia is a thing

yeah this is one way to look at it. I’m white so i tend to shy away from using race metaphors because racism and homophobia are fundamentally different, but this is a good oppression example.

I can offer up a personal example: I was with my friend at my old university and we were walking to the bookstore. My friend is a Canadian immigrant who is half Japanese. As we were walking, a black man started shouting at her calling her an illegal immigrant who was culturally disrupting the United States and stealing peoples’ jobs. What he was doing was racist, yes, but he wasn’t oppressing my friend. That’s not to say that what he was doing wasn’t shitty or anything, but he doesn’t have to power to kick Asian Americans out of the country. Sure, he, a black man, was being racist to my Asian American (Asian Canadian?) friend, but that’s lateral aggression. The source of racism (in particular, anti-Asian racism), the cause of racism, isn’t black men on the street harassing half Japanese college students. It’s the history of (white) America systematically barring Asian immigrants, historically denying Asian immigrants their human rights, throwing Japanese Americans in internment camps during WWII, holding Asian Americans to higher standards, culturally appropriating and misunderstanding Asian Americans and their culture, and denying that it all happens. That black guy on the street received the same messages I did growing up about Asian Americans, and his anti-Asian racism is still shitty, but it doesn’t come from the same position of power as it would from me because he is black and I am white.

The different between being complicit in someone’s oppression (an Asian person being anti-black or a lesbian being biphobic) and enacting and contributing to someones oppression (Matthew Shephard’s murder, violence against trans women of color, police brutality) is whether or not you have systemic power over that person based on race, sexuality, gender, etc.