#transphobia is discussed

[transmechanicus]

I know some people have unfathomable beef with the term but i really don’t see the issue with transmascs describing their specific experiences with societal mistreatment and persecution as “transandrophobia”, like i think it’s good to be able to discuss specific experiences and articulate the problems you’re facing actually.

[txttletale]

Does transmisogyny have a specific meaning besides "bigotry towards transfeminine people"? It's strange to me to answer "what are your thoughts on transmisandry" [which admittedly doesn't feel like a good faith question] with "misandry isn't real." You're obviously not saying "men aren't institutionally discriminated against so there's no point in discussing bigotry towards transmasculine people" but I can't tell what you ARE saying.

do you think that the 'misogyny' part of transmisogyny is just a fun false cognate we put in there for kicks

[thebutchtheory]

the more i read about transandrophobia as a concept from 'transandrophobia truthers', the more i just end up feeling like these specific experiences are better explained under things like 'gender essentialism' or 'oppositional sexism', or that at the very least these terms need to be brought into discussion of transandrophobia more, but they aren't.

a lot of transandrobros end up coming off like MRAs because they're trying to describe experiences that they don't have proper wording for, and then go on to speak in ways that clearly shows they haven't unlearned [internalized] misogyny/toxic masculinity, gender essentialism and oppositional sexism themselves. often because they haven't read any theory on the subject, and because a lot of them outright refuse to read up on transfeminist theory or understand transmisogyny as a systemic force outside of 'misogyny that trans women experience' or 'transphobia that trans women experience'. then they go on to try and talk over trans women about transmisogyny, or speak about trans women discussing transmisogyny in some extremely bigoted ways because of it.

like, the amount of trans women discussing transmisogyny who have read or even written entire books about transmisogyny, transfeminism and feminism in general seems to be astronomical compared to the amount of trans men discussing transandrophobia that i KEEP seeing. i've seen trans men who have read theory, but they seem to be the bigger popular bloggers that others base their opinions off of, if that makes sense. as if other people in the community are trying to theorize on what people who have actually read theory are saying, without reading any theory themselves.

so much of what transmascs experience is related to misogyny, but it's also related to gender essentialism, oppositional sexism, and toxic masculinity--all things which the trans community has taken from cisgender heterosexual society and applied it to themselves in a way that is Queer Inclusive This Time, yet they never question it.

i'm BEGGING transandrophobia truthers to read books about trans oppression, and to bring this language into your vocabulary when discussing your experiences. when i started doing that with my experiences as a butch on T, it gave me a new perspective on all of it, and the queer community itself.

[not-terezi-pyrope]

Words cannot express how disinterested I am in litigating "transfem vs transmasc oppression Olympics" or what words people are allowed to use to describe their experiences of discrimination.

The fact that this would be even a category of discourse distinct enough to have a strong opinion about is just fairly repellent to me. Who looks at transfem and transmasc experiences and instead of being like "yes solidarity in the trans experience" is like "my team has to win out over the other one and stake our exclusive territorial claim in the oppression discourse wars".

Just never something that would occur to me, sorry I just don't think like that. Trans dudes are based. Of course there are different struggles if you're transmasc and transfem, that's self-evident, but like, it frankly just seems in fucking poor taste to try and rank that and try and find things to hold over one another, no?

[trans-androgyne]

“All transandrobros talk about is trans women” — way to tell me all you’ve seen from us is the worst screenshots posted on transandrophobic trans women’s blogs complaining about us. If you would actually look through our tag or check out blogs you’d know the only oppressive and primary perpetrators of transandrophobia are perisex cis people; it just hurts more when it comes from other trans people.

We cannot talk about transandrophobia without mentioning trans women right now, we are simply not allowed it. Whenever we try, we are told wanting and using our own words to discuss our oppression means we inherently hate and want to silence trans women, that we are transmisogynist oppressors just trying to claim trans women oppress us. I would love for this not to be the case.

[nightmarish-fallen-angel]

I just watched a news video about new guidelines regarding pain with IUD insertions.

The entire video framed this as a "women's rights" or "women's healthcare" video.

I am a trans nonbinary guy who had an IUD insertion. Using gendered language regarding reproductive rights and healthcare is so frustrating because I need these health guidelines and laws to apply to me too. And the more people stay in the habit of framing it as a "women's issue" the more likely I am to get denied the care I need.

Trans, nonbinary, and intersex people deserve to have a voice in these things as well. We deserve to have gender neutral language surrounding the procedures we might undergo at the very least.

I want the health codes and guidelines that may be written to protect me and my trans siblings if they pursue this kind of birth control or any other reproductive healthcare.

[nonbinarymlm]

The thing is, most people (in the US and Western countries at least, that’s where my experience is from) have some forms of privilege some forms of oppression. This isn’t saying everyone is equally oppressed and privileged, but most people have privilege in at least one way and oppression in at least one way.

And if you experience oppression in some ways and privilege, it’s much easier to see your oppression then you privilege.

Privilege is largely invisible to those who have it. Oppression grates against you all the time. So it’s much easier to see the forms of oppression you experience then the forms of privilege.

That’s why it’s so important for us all to listen to each other and not play Oppression Olympics. You can face very real oppression that really affects your life, and still learn a lot from other people who face other forms of oppression that you don’t. We have to listen to each other. In the queer community especially I think this is important, because there’s so many different ways to be oppressed and to be privileged.

[myfandomrealitea]

That post you made about Harry Potter and how to not financially support and fund the franchise and put more money in Joanne's pockets felt like a lie because I swear I got the impression that even that wasn't allowed when the whole thing started

To be clear; I stopped. Completely. I compartmentalized it all and just stopped interacting with anything Harry Potter online whatsoever. But I always wished it would be fine to still be able to do certain fandom things without supporting her, but people were saying that even using the tag or reading the fanfiction or making fanart was still supporting the ip and not letting it die completely as a topic on the internet was indirectly putting money in her pockets.

It wasn't until I came across a post from a queer woman from somewhere in the global south with heavy OCD and intrusive thoughts or something like that, commenting on how hostile of a thing it became for someone of her affliction; the way people were treating it like do or die. Pointing out that no matter how much trans people and allys cut off their support of her, she has other large means of income that we won't be able to touch, and there will still always be transphobic homophobic Harry Potter fans that will continue to support her actively, putting that money in her pockets. Another thing she mentioned was the treatment of Harry Potter and Joannes bigotry in contrast to the treatment of FNAF and the creators bigotry. And lastly something about the USAmericanized nature of it? I don't really remember that part but I think I understood it at the time I read it (maybe it was something about all the other countries the IP is popular in who are probably more conservative and unaware or caring of the issues with her who will still put money in her pockets, or maybe it was something about American fans fixating and posing the support of her as the ultimate battlefield of Trans Rights to other queer and trans individuals trying to be quiet fans who are facing Much Worse in their countries)

Anyways after that I briefly started reading ao3 fanfic again, just put a filter for anything before 2019 or so, and then my interest more gently fizzled out.

I can't remember what my point is anymore, maybe just to bring these arguments to your attention(also I am not arguing against the financial boycott or ending of support for this woman through her ip).

Harry Potter will never stop earning money. That's just the flat reality of it; I mean, look at the likes of Elvis and the original Sherlock Holmes books and every other 'dead' media that's still earning money. Short of making Harry Potter an illegal piece of media, yes, there will still always be a number of people giving her money.

The goal is to give her less money. To turn Harry Potter from a prominent, profitable cashcow into a defunct piece of media that only select groups are still clinging to. To make it so that JK Rowling has to choose between paying her bills and funding anti-trans movements.

When something stops bringing in a certain amount of profit, studios start looking elsewhere. When a cashcow starts drying up, they stop trying to milk it as hard. Which in turn means less productions for JK Rowling to collect her pocketmoney from.

What would you rather; JK Rowling getting $100,000 or JK Rowling only getting $10,000?

Something is better than nothing. Damage reduction is better than open exposure. If everyone just rolled over and gave up because "things will keep happening anyway" the world will literally be a rancid, fetid wasteland of bigotry and violence.

I'd much rather watch JK Rowling fizzle out into a bitter old wench sustained only by the dogged support of other stubborn bigots than watch people willingly disregard and condone bigotry because its "easier" and "she'll be a bigot anyway."

I'd much rather JK Rowling only have $10,000 to donate to shitty movements over $72,000. Shitty movements can do a lot less with a lot less money.

[faelapis]

the more "intellectual" terfs have tried to claim for a while that they toootally support intersex people. that it's only ever trans people who "use" intersex people... but now my whole feed is them immediately transvestigating an intersex woman for participating in sports, calling her a "man." would be funny if it wasn't so horrifying.

[ratbastarddotfuck]

I'm a trans dude and I'm sick of all of the transandrophobia truthers out here. you're using the exact same arguments as menenists, instead of just acknowledging that specific men will face oppression over things that aren't their manhood, and that doesn't mean we are are uniquely opressed by some cosmic power that trans women are magically exempt from. they face all of the same stuff we do. plus also misogyny.

am I missing something here ?

it's literally just about the concept that trans men and mascs face certain types of oppression that are specific to (not necessarily exclusive to, but common among and often exacerbated by) being transmasc, and we deserve space and language to talk about those things without being told that we're talking over anyone. nobody* is saying that transmascs are like... more oppressed than trans women. if you are thinking in terms of more or less oppressed, you've already lost.

if you don't think that there are certain experiences with transphobia that trans men and mascs in particular are more likely to have, then I don't know what to tell you.

trans men and trans women are not opposites. trans masc and trans fem are not opposites. we are sides of the same coin. we are community. we are all gender minorities. I don't understand why there is so much harshness around the idea that transmascs deserve language and space to discuss our unique experiences. I'm not silencing anyone else by speaking about my own experiences or sharing those of other tmascs.

some of you people are starting to talk like you think transmascs are an oppressor class. please remember we still live in a cisheteropatriarchy, and that the cis part of that is still very much well and alive. we don't just opt into unfettered privilege when we pick up the he/him pronouns.

*nobody engaging in good faith anyway. there are bad faith actors in every group. don't take them as the face of anything.

[viciouslyrobotic]

Radical feminism buys into white supremacist cisheteropatriarchy and requires gender essentialism and exorsexist ideals to work. That's why it operates under the "man vs woman" framework we already live under. That's why Rowling and other radfems are called trans exclusionary, why they're so often racist, and why their communities are so often white, and why the attempt to rebrand it as trans inclusive will never work.

It functionally can't be trans or even gnc inclusive without ignoring several intersections of oppression.

[genderkoolaid]

I'm not of the mind that all marginalized men are oppressed because of their gender, but rather that gender always plays a role in oppression and it's irresponsible to only focus on that when discussing marginalized women. gender is a huge way of exerting control over people's bodies, personal identities, and personal relationships, so it's always going to be shaped by marginalization + marginalization also gets shaped by the gender of the person experiencing it in any given situation

[rebellum]

nooo i wrote a whole RESPONSE to this but then tumblr app crashed and then I had to type the whole thing out AGAIN on my computer and then in that time period the op turned reblogs off. Since they turned reblogs off, I decided to cover up their name, in order to kinda respect that.

my response:

No. It is important to create new words in order to discuss specific phenomena. That’s why words like homophobia, lesbophobia, transphobia, misogyny, transmisogyny, exorsexism, and transandrophobia were invented. 

Sure, lesbophobia is covered under “homophobia”, but lesbophobia is an important word for describing how misogyny and homophobia affect women’s experiences of homophobia. Transmisogyny is covered under “transphobia”, but it’s useful to have a term that specifically describes how trans fems experience the intersection of transphobia and misogyny, not just for being trans, but for being specifically trans feminine, and the ways that expectations of womanhood, femininity, manhood, and masculinity factor into their oppression because of their assigned sex at birth, their presentation, and their gender. Exorsexism is covered under “transphobia”, but it’s useful to have a term to describe how transphobia affects specifically people outside of the gender binary. Misogynoir is covered under misogyny, but the term was created to specifically describe how Black women experience the intersections of racism and misogyny. Of course my explanations here are a little reductive, each one of these examples has much more to it than what I listed. 

In a similar vein, transandrophobia is useful for understanding how transphobia, homophobia, misogyny, and the meta-epistemologies of those discourses affect trans mascs, not just for being trans, but for being trans masc. Oppression, both systemic and on individual levels of discrimination and prejudice, works differently for people depending on the intersections of their identity (assigned sex at birth, assigned gender at birth, presentation, gender identity, race, culture, ability, etc). 

So transandrophobia is useful for discussing specifics like:

The idea of “lost lesbians” and “the trans cult tricking little girls into mutilating their bodies”

The rhetoric of violence around testosterone-based HRT. There is the incorrect idea that people who take T become more violent because they are becoming more masculine. 

This association of masculinity with violence, and how that affects trans mascs. For trans people regardless of gender, proximity to masculinity puts people in danger in queer spaces. People are treated worse if they are trans masc, trans fem and don’t pass well enough to the surrounding people, or nonbinary and not sufficiently ‘safely’ androgynous (skinny, hairless, and white, with no prominent secondary sex characteristics). 

How trans mascs are treated differently when they come out, or when they start to transition. Many people find that people are colder to them, they experience higher rates of abuse, and if they are trans men they are told to not talk about their experiences because ‘they are men and can’t possibly understand misogyny’. The voices of people who aren’t trans masc often end up being listened to more about trans masc experiences, than the people who have actually lived through those experiences. Like, people are shitty to trans people that are masculine specifically because they are masculine.

Corrective rape 

Many people, even in feminist and trans spaces, believe that a man’s gender cannot factor into his experiences of oppression. Eg believe that the fact that they are men is irrelevant to trans men’s experiences, believe that a Black man’s masculinity has nothing to do with how he experiences racial oppression, etc. There are even some vocal people who believe that men cannot be oppressed, and that trans men cannot be oppressed, specifically because being men means they CAN’T experience oppression. 

The idea that trans men transition in order to try to escape misogyny 

Discrimination in reproductive healthcare 

A lot more, it would take ages to list the different kinds of transandrophobia

I also noticed you said “continue to feel its effects if they don’t pass”. But that idea is part of the issue: trans mascs continue to experience oppression for being trans masc when they DO pass. Even if someone is well passing, and stealth, they still directly experience discrimination for being trans masc through things like access barriers to reproductive healthcare, higher rates of abuse, sexual assault, etc. 

So transandrophobia (trans andro + phobia, not trans +androphobia as some people against the concept seem to believe) is, like other specific terminologies of oppression, really useful as shorthand for the specific forms of oppression people face not just for being trans, but for being trans masc.

[transmascpetewentz]

"It's just transphobia" and "it's just misogyny:" two sides of the transandrophobic coin that tries to force trans men into binaries that we do not belong in

[luidilovins]

What i wish cis people would understand about trans people and like... why we can't just keep being cis is that we already tried that and you didn't like it because we were BAD AT IT. Before i came out as nonbinary i made a terrible woman and every cishet under the sun had an opinion on my gender performance because they could tell i wasn't really a woman. I don't know how to explain it better.

[trans-androgyne]

To get a proper picture of modern trans oppression, you need to recognize the ways trans issues have varied across history and still vary heavily across places. I made a post the other day about how things have changed in my country for trans people over the past 50-100 years, but it was incredibly US-centric, a huge issue when trans discussions on here tend to be western-centric in general.

I feel most folks recognize that where things are bad for queer people generally, they're terrible for trans women and similar groups. It's illegal to be queer in one-third of all UN member countries, and in 13 cross-dressing is explicitly criminalized. Such laws have often targeted transfeminine expression specifically. And of course, Trans Rights as we know them (such as access to medical transition, ability to change gender markers, anti-discrimination laws) are a struggle in even relatively accepting countries; there are plenty of trans and other gender non-normative folks that don't have access to the most basic rights I do as a trans person in the United States. Problems trans folks face here, like trans women being forced into sex work, are even more prevalent and severe elsewhere in the world.

But fewer people seem to recognize that where things are bad for cis women, they're terrible for trans men and similar groups. There are so many places where those considered women are put under much heavier appearance and behavior restrictions than here and I can guess that trying to undergo any amount of masculine transition would not turn out well for them. Where I live, we may have gotten better than 50 years ago about not treating women as babymaking property, but there are 46 countries where marital rape is not a crime, while 40% of folks globally live under restrictive abortion laws. I know forced pregnancy as a form of controlling and detransitioning trans men and mascs happens enough where I live, and I cannot imagine what it would be like to live a transmasculine life under these conditions. I'm privileged by where I was born, and hope to find more stories of trans and gnc lives in other places. If anyone has any stories to share or somewhere to point folks towards to educate ourselves, it would be incredibly welcomed and appreciated.