#transunitism

[katrafiy]

I think about this image a lot. This is an image from the Aurat March (Women's March) in Karachi, Pakistan, on International Women's Day 2018. The women in the picture are Pakistani trans women, aka khwaja siras or hijras; one is a friend of a close friend of mine.

In the eyes of the Pakistani government and anthropologists, they're a "third gender." They're denied access to many resources that are available to cis women. Trans women in Pakistan didn't decide to be third-gendered; cis people force it on them whether they like it or not.

Western anthropologists are keen on seeing non-Western trans women as culturally constructed third genders, "neither male nor female," and often contrast them (a "legitimate" third gender accepted in its culture) with Western trans women (horrific parodies of female stereotypes).

There's a lot of smoke and mirrors and jargon used to obscure the fact that while each culture's trans women are treated as a single culturally constructed identity separate from all other trans women, cis women are treated as a universal category that can just be called "women."

Even though Pakistani aurat and German Frauen and Guatemalan mujer will generally lead extraordinarily different lives due to the differences in culture, they are universally recognized as women.

The transmisogynist will say, "Yes, but we can't ignore the way gender is culturally constructed, and hijras aren't trans women, they're a third gender. Now let's worry less about trans people and more about the rights of women in Burkina Faso."

In other words, to the transmisogynist, all cis women are women, and all trans women are something else.

"But Kat, you're not Indian or Pakistani. You're not a hijra or khwaja sira, why is this so important to you?"

Have you ever heard of the Neapolitan third gender "femminiello"? It's the term my moniker "The Femme in Yellow" is derived from, and yes, I'm Neapolitan. Shut up.

I'm going to tell you a little bit about the femminielli, and I want you to see if any of this sounds familiar. Femminielli are a third gender in Neapolitan culture of people assigned male at birth who have a feminine gender expression.

They are lauded and respected in the local culture, considered to be good omens and bringers of good luck. At festivals you'd bring a femminiello with you to go gambling, and often they would be brought in to give blessings to newborns. Noticing anything familiar yet?

Oh and also they were largely relegated to begging and sex work and were not allowed to be educated and many were homeless and lived in the back alleys of Naples, but you know we don't really like to mention that part because it sounds a lot less romantic and mystical.

And if you're sitting there, asking yourself why a an accurate description of femminiello sounds almost note for note like the same way hijras get described and talked about, then you can start to understand why that picture at the start of this post has so much meaning for me.

And you can also start to understand why I get so frustrated when I see other queer people buy into this fool notion that for some reason the transes from different cultures must never mix.

That friend I mentioned earlier is a white American trans woman. She spent years living in India, and as I recal the story the family she was staying with saw her as a white, foreign hijra and she was asked to use her magic hijra powers to bless the house she was staying in.

So when it comes to various cultural trans identities there are two ways we can look at this. We can look at things from a standpoint of expressed identity, in which case we have to preferentially choose to translate one word for the local word, or to leave it untranslated.

If we translate it, people will say we're artificially imposing an outside category (so long as it's not cis people, that's fine). If we don't, what we're implying, is that this concept doesn't exist in the target language, which suggests that it's fundamentally a different thing

A concrete example is that Serena Nanda in her 1990 and 2000 books, bent over backwards to say that Hijras are categorically NOT trans women. Lots of them are!

And Don Kulick bent over backwards in his 1998 book to say that travesti are categorically NOT trans women, even though some of the ones he cited were then and are now trans women.

The other option, is to look at practice, and talk about a community of practice of people who are AMAB, who wear women's clothing, take women's names, fulfill women's social roles, use women's language and mannerisms, etc WITHIN THEIR OWN CULTURAL CONTEXT.

This community of practice, whatever we want to call it - trans woman, hijra, transfeminine, femminiello, fairy, queen, to name just a few - can then be seen to CLEARLY be trans-national and trans-cultural in a way that is not clearly evident in the other way of looking at things.

And this is important, in my mind, because it is this axis of similarity that is serving as the basis for a growing transnational transgender rights movement, particularly in South Asia. It's why you see pictures like this one taken at the 2018 Aurat March in Karachi, Pakistan.

And it also groups rather than splits, pointing out not only points of continuity in the practices of western trans women and fa'afafines, but also between trans women in South Asia outside the hijra community, and members of the hijra community both trans women and not.

To be blunt, I'm not all that interested in the word trans woman, or the word hijra. I'm not interested in the word femminiello or the word fa'afafine.

I'm interested in the fact that when I visit India, and I meet hijras (or trans women, self-expressed) and I say I'm a trans woman, we suddenly sit together, talk about life, they ask to see American hormones and compare them to Indian hormones.

There is a shared community of practice that creates a bond between us that cis people don't have. That's not to say that we all have the exact same internal sense of self, but for the most part, we belong to the same community of practice based on life histories and behavior.

I think that's something cis people have absolutely missed - largely in an effort to artificially isolate trans women. This practice of arguing about whether a particular "third gender" label = trans women or not, also tends to artificially homogenize trans women as a group.

You see this in Kulick and Nanda, where if you read them, you could be forgiven for thinking all American trans women are white, middle class, middle-aged, and college-educated, who all follow rigid codes of behavior and surgical schedules prescribed by male physicians.

There are trans women who think of themselves as separate from cis women, as literally another kind of thing, there are trans women who think of themselves as coterminous with cis women, there are trans women who think of themselves as anything under the sun you want to imagine.

The problem is that historically, cis people have gone to tremendous lengths to destroy points of continuity in the transgender community (see everything I've cited and more), and particularly this has been an exercise in transmisogyny of grotesque levels.

The question is do you want to talk about culturally different ways of being trans, or do you want to try to create as many neatly-boxed third genders as you can to prop up transphobic theoretical frameworks? To date, people have done the latter. I'm interested in the former.

I guess what I'm really trying to say with all of this is that we're all family y'all.

[transunity]

I wish people remembered that one way men are oppressed for being men when they are men who date other men.

Saying men can't be oppressed for being men is homophobia. Gay men who love other men, their status as men is central to the oppression they receive!

Ergo, trans men are oppressed for being men. We are men who are transgender. The transphobia against us is because we are men who are trans. If you take away the man in trans men, you take away the trans! The two are inseparable. Just how gay men's sexuality is inseparable from their gender as they are interdependent.

This is aside from the oppresion disabled men and men of colour face.

Men are oppressed for being men. Its just that the most visible men in society usually aren't.

[genderkoolaid]

the more i think about it the more i feel transunity is vital. i dont mean this hatefully and theres no way to say this that wont be misconstrued by someone but. i feel like so much trans activism has been focused on aligning trans women with other women in feminism (itself not a bad goal) but that as the end all be all of trans activism intrinsically hurts other trans people. so much baeddel rhetoric relies on "there is no trans community/trans people it should only be about trans women" and i think its extremely extremely important to talk about transness as its own class, and fully embrace how trans liberationism must involve completely deconstructing cis-centric analysis of gender/the patriarchy to include the full extent of trans oppression. the idea that transphobia is fundamentally and exclusively based in misogyny & is ultimately a part of women's oppression is just fitting transness into the cis-centric binary system we've always had. transphobia has to be seen as its own thing and transness as its own class, for the better of all trans people and especially transmascs & transneutrals who are otherwise forced to choose between misgendering/detransition or being left out of class analysis/treated as oppressors even while being oppressed. transness is not just a subsect of womanhood it has to be seen as its own thing. transunity or death

[nothorses]

Thinking about how much I love it when transfems add their experiences to my posts, contribute invaluable perspectives I could never predict, add nuance and new angles and new ideas that make the ones I offered more whole, more complete, and much closer to describing an authentic and comprehensive reality.

I want yall to know that it's not derailing to add to a conversation, even if your addition challenges me or takes the conversation in a new direction. I appreciate it when other transmascs do this, when nonbinary folks who don't fit into either category do this, and when transfems do it, too.

No trans theory is complete without the inclusion of all trans people. & I really hope this is something we can all think of as collaboration rather than competition.

[a-polite-melody]

“Transunity theory is bad because it says trans women are men/trans women are oppressed because of hatred toward men!!!”

Who taught you people how to read?

Transunity theory looks at the oppression of all trans people through the lens of the fact that we all—regardless of gender or AGAB—are subject to the multi-framing of transness that portrays us as “big, mean, scary, privileged men”, “weak, shrill, whiny, emotional women”, and “gross, confused, wishy-washy, freakish people who can’t be neatly sorted into binary gender,” depending on the context. That hatred of men, women, and androgyny all are components to every trans person’s oppression.

If your takeaway from that is just “trans women are oppressed because of hatred of men”, I guess you also think people love saying tumblr users piss on the poor.

[mist-sterious]

this is who infighting benefits btw.

theyfab and theymab are literally t/rf terms, we shouldnt be weaponizing them.

[quark-nova]

Transunitism as an idea is one of the best things that happened to the trans community. It's literally a framework to unite our experiences. Understand each other and work together. Fight transphobia instead of fighting each other.

[transmascrage]

TW for discussion of eating disorders and body shaming

Since I had this exchange with @krispykrememothnuts I thought I'd look more into this:

And yeah, the fashion industry has an issue with making clothes that fit short men and fat men.

This is something that affects transmascs and cis men.

The fashion industry isn't friendly to any fat person but I think it tends to be more lenient towards short women because it's more acceptable for them to be short.

Meanwhile, men should be tall according to the beauty standard.

We know that eating disorders are extremely common among cis men and transmascs (Cis men: Source 1, Source 2, Source 3. Trans men: Source 1, Source 2. Gay men: Source 1, Source 2, Source 3.)

And it doesn't help that all the representation in fashion that we get are tall dudes with abs that can (usually) only be achieved through dehydration, restricting diets and intensive work-outs. And that it's considered acceptable to make fun of people for their height, weight, hairline, face, as long as it's men.

And as I mentioned in the comment, not being able to find men's clothes that fit me I have to buy women's clothes that make me dysphoric and usually show my bra or binder straps, which immediately clocks me as not-a-man.

It's also important to note that a TERF talking point is that transmascs transition because of eating disorders. While it's possible that gender dysphoria and eating disorders have a link, it's not a cause-effect situation, i's more of a comorbid condition.

Looking into transmasc eating disorders could disprove this TERF theory but alas no one cares enough about transmascs to do a research only about our experience with eating disorders and trans people are usually treated as a homogenous group.

[aronarchy]

[notebeans-galaxy]

someone on twitter genuinely just said to me that they think transmascs are born with male privilege. i dont think I've ever taken more psychic damage in my life

[katrafiy]

It's simple, if someone says "die men!" 200 times and each time they say it they hit a trans woman instead of a cis man, then they clearly don't actually hate men. Clearly something else is happening here; "hating men" is a false pretense, not their actual motive.

I've seen people from the transunity blog talking about how people shouldn't believe terf rhetoric regarding trans men/transmasculine people, but they apparently are totally willing to believe them when they lie about the reasons they hate trans women.

People who hate trans women aren't doing it because they "hate men". If they did, they would treat cis men the way they treat trans women, but they clearly don't do that. Instead they buddy up with fascists like MW and put out calls for cis men to go into women's bathrooms with guns to protect them from the evil r*pist tr**nies.

"Transmisogyny relies on anti-masculism/misandry" is a statement that is completely out of touch with the realities of trans women's oppression, and this should be obvious to anyone who knows better than to take our oppressors at their word, and think they are being honest about their motives.

"Hating men" is a pretense, their actual motive is trans women being an underclass of "girls they can hit".

So why does transunity continue to believe what fascists say about trans women instead of the trans women who are telling them that they are lying? Until transunity can reconcile with that, I simply cannot trust that this 'movement' is willing to or capable of seriously representing me or my sisters best interests.

[transunity]

Just something I saw on twitter the other day. It's worth reiterating that if you believe TERFs over trans men you ain't a trans ally.

When you see terfs calling trans women "violent males" you know that that is transphobic and deliberately misgendering.

But when terfs call trans men "confused girls" for some reason everyone reads that as-is and don't twig that like "violent males" it's a derogatory dogwhistle to refer to trans men.

Hence, when people try to tackle transandrophobic terfs, they go about it all wrong because they take terfs at their word they are actually talking about girls and not trans men. Leading to people assuming that trans men don't get hate from terfs.

This is why transunitism is important! Sure, you can identify when a terf is targeting trans women, but can you tell when they target trans men and nonbinary folk?

If you somehow managed to stop every terf from being transmisogynistic overnight, you haven't stopped terfism. If you eradicated all homophobia against gay men overnight, that doesn't eradicate lesbophobia.

It all has to be tackled together, with each other.

[kindyu]

i just had an argument with a trans activist who's a trans woman. she publically said that trans women are controversial in society while trans men are not. that people don't like when a woman has a penis but no one cares when a man has a vagina. i argued with her because to me, that's transandrophobic - minimizing our struggles and the transphobia we face.

her argument is that trans women generally don't pass well whereas trans man usually fully pass, resulting in trans women being more often a subject of harrassement. and that's why trans women have it harder.

i'm pretty much lost. i don't know what to do and what to think and my insecurities and fears are playing hard into me feeling really shitty right now. it also feels like the whole world is telling us that our problems aren't real and our feelings aren't valid. thoughts?

[nothorses]

If you're a non-transmasc who supports use of the term "transandrophobia":

(Or any alternate terms for anti-transmasc bigotry)

It can feel really isolating for transmascs to be surrounded only by other transmascs who support them; I get a lot of asks for recommendations from folks who really need to see that we're not alone.

Even if you don't talk about it or reblog about it often, please reply to or reblog+tag this!

I'm going to make a follow rec list so folks can feel a little bit less alone.

(You're also welcome to rec someone else, as long as they're okay with that!)

And don't be afraid to reblog just to spread this; I'll just go by tags/replies.

[a-polite-melody]

To the people who criticize transunity who say that there is no part of transmisogyny that comes from hatred of men:

TERFs????

None of us are denying that trans women are also oppressed as women; that part of transmisogyny comes from hatred of women.

But uh. TERFs very much base their oppression of trans women primarily on viewing them as invading predatory men (actually, basically all of their oppression of trans people comes from bioessentialism—in other words literally viewing us as or DGAB and nothing else.)

I don’t understand where people are getting the idea that by saying part of trans oppression comes from viewing us as failed versions of our DGAB means that we think it’s the be-all-and-end-all of it? Especially if you’ve actually read more than a singular sentence from the teansunity manifesto. It really feels like people saw a screenshot of one sentence and based their views on transunity on that and only that.

[rombastic]

god it sucks to see post getting thousands of notes shitting on transandrophobia. like I’m sorry we need a word for the unique oppression we experience. I’m sorry you can’t muster the compassion to step in another persons shoes, to try and listen when people say they are hurting. I’m sorry you’d rather characterize us as whiny and mean and delusional for acknowledging that we have struggles that are often over looked. I’m sorry you are making this a nitpick about words instead of a discussion about concepts. I’m sorry you don’t understand why we feel ignored. I’m sorry you haven’t listened to all the people of all identities who have been helped by this discussion.

maybe some people haven’t acted perfectly in this discussion, but people aren’t perfect, and their mistakes don’t make the entire concept inherently tainted. I’m sorry we get upset when you insult us, call us stupid, hysterical, ugly, annoying, bitchy, and selfish. not to mention all the other ways you’ve demeaned and misgendered many of us as individuals and as a group. 

But I’m not sorry for talking about how I’ve been hurt. I’m not sorry for trying to find solidarity on equal footing with all trans people. I’m not sorry for trying to up lift my siblings and create the language to make a better path forward. I’m not sorry for any of it. I’m just angry and sad that you can’t come with us.