#we are trans first and men second

[alistairian]

I just think transmen/transmasc/transandro/afab people need to accept that society views them as men now and so they benefit directly from male priviledge***. Any instance of a trans masculine person speaking with any kind of authority about the mysoginy they've faced or currently face is clearly them just misgendering themselves in order to weaponize their femininity against more marginalized queer people in order to silence them 🙄

***Except with regards to anybody who knew them pre/early transition such as parents, relatives, neighbours, old colleagues, family doctors, and other community members. Not applicable to transmascs who are early/pre/no transition, including transmascs who can't transition due to medical concerns or laws in their country/state. Exemptions also made in situations where ID or medical history may need to be presented such as with police, doctors, other medical specialists, employers, school enrollment, airport security/international travel, and so on. Access to priviledge also contingent on whether the cis men in their lives see them as fellow cis men/equals, priviledges may be revoked at any time if the transmasc decides to live outside the closet or demonstrate any pride in their identity (like using pride banners or pronoun pins). Transmascs who pass all the previous requirements and are living "stealth" may also be subject to outing/losing priviledges if they share anything about themsevles or their experiences pretransition. Discussing pretransition may also run the risk of alienating any transmasc person from otherwise progressive/trans inclusive spaces where their masculinity is unquestionably recognized and viewed as dangerous.

TLDR; stop saying male priviledge when you really mean cis priviledge. Trans men do not have cis priviledge. Simple.

[slowwshoww]

went on a terf blocking spree as i am wont to do and i saw one of them try to "gotcha" the rest of us being like "oh you'll see our posts and then be like op is a terf and take them over so you must agree w us and know we're right" and it's like sure maybe you did make a point about womanhood or whatever but when you say it you're excluding trans women and when i say it i'm including trans women and that is the entire difference

[daggersandarrows]

Hey. Actually. I hate dating apps

[werewolfbneimitzvah]

vent post. There are two stories i was told in my teenage years that even before i had a real concept of trans issues made me uninterested in discussing the supposed sacredness and safety of separated sex-based spaces.

First, when i was like 13 or 14 my PE teacher told us about a time she went to a women's public restroom, some guy was hanging out outside the bathrooms, she didn't think anything of it, went to the bathroom, and he walked in after her and like, creeped on her over the top of the stall. She was ok, she wasn't telling us this to scare us, just telling us what to do in situations like that (and iirc she was telling the whole co-ed class this, not just girls, bc it's useful for everyone), but this taught me immediately and forever that there's nothing actually keeping these spaces separate really, that anyone can be a creep in any space, and that establishing a space like that as for women only isn't actually particularly useful for safety.

Second, when i was 16 i was at an anime convention, a friendly acquaintance of mine and i ended up in conversation outside, and he showed me his bare wrist and told me he'd been kicked out. A female friend of his had stepped in dog poop outside, and between that and the stress of the convention she'd had a bit of an emotional breakdown, so being her friend, he started comforting her and ushered her into the women's restroom so they could wash the poop off her shoe together. And because he was a man who went into the women's bathroom, he got kicked out, no matter that he was doing something that was actually beneficial to a woman. Punishing a woman's friend for supporting her was supposed to... protect her somehow? This made it clear to me that a no-exceptions rule separating the sexes like that wasn't actually inherently good for everyone.

And this isn't even getting into me as a child needing to accompany my younger sister to the restroom when we were out with just my dad because she had certain support needs past the age he felt comfortable bringing her into the men's room with him. And what if I'd been born a boy, or she'd been the first born? Who's helping her then?

And of course even putting all this aside, we should always prioritize compassion and support anyway. But i never even needed to meet a trans person to know that "keeping men out of women's bathrooms" is silly nonsense. But trans people also need to pee anyway and as humans they have that right, so leave them the fuck alone. your precious women's restroom is just a fucking room with a door, holy shit give it a fucking rest, if someone is attacking you in the bathroom that's bad and if someone is in there to pee that's good and it doesn't fucking matter what their junk is or was when they were born.

a woman could have done the exact same thing to my PE teacher and it would have also been bad no matter how "supposed" to be in the restroom she was, and no one should ever be punished for helping a crying friend wash their shoe.

Anyway i know I'm speaking to like-minded folks here, i just think about those two stories literally every time bathroom gender shit comes up and it pisses me off.

[gor3sigil]

Before starting T, when I socially transitionned, I was surrounded by radical feminists who saw masculinity as gross and inherently evil, something to avoid, something to make fun of, something to destroy. The other transmascs in my friend group, sometimes, told me that they didn’t knew if they really were non-binary or if they just were scared shitless of saying “I am a man”. Because they saw this as a betrayal to their younger self who had been SAd and abused.

I saw many of my masc friends and trans men around me hate themselves, not outing themselves as men because it would imply so so much, it was like opening the Pandora Box. Even when we were just together, talking about our masculinity was always coated with bits like “I know we’re the privileged ones but…”, “I don’t want to sound like I have it bad but…”, “Women obviously have it worse, but last time…” and we were talking about terrible traumas we experienced while taking all the precautions in the world in the case the walls were a crowd of people in disguise waiting to get us if we didn’t downplay the violence we faced, or like crying and being upset and being traumatized and afraid and scared and to say it out loud would make us throw up the needles we were forced to swallow every second of every day living in our skin.

Most of us weren’t on T yet, some of us were catcalled every day and harassed in the streets or in abusive relationships nobody seemed to care to help them get out of because they were “strong enough” to do it by themselves.

I was using the gender swap face app and cried for ours when I saw my father looking back at me through the screen. The idea of transforming, of shedding into a body that would deprive me of love, tenderness, and safety, was absolutely terrifying. I knew I couldn’t stay in this body any longer because it wasn’t mine, but I also knew that if I was going to look like my dad, my brother, my abusers, it would be so much worse.

5 years later and I’m almost 2 years on T, and almost 2 months post top surgery.

I ditched my previous group of friends. I was bullied out of my local trans community. But let me tell you how free I am.

I was scared that T would break my singing voice: it made it sound more alive than ever.

I was scared that T would make me less attractive: it made me find myself hot for the first time in my life.

I was scared that T would make me gain weight: it did. But the weight I put on is not the weight I used to put on by binging and eating my body until I forgot that it even existed. It’s the weight of my body belonging to me, little by little. The wolf hunger for life.

I won’t tell you the same story I see everywhere, the one that goes “I started going to the gym 8 times a week, I put on some muscles, I started a diet and now I look like an action film actor”, in fact if you took pictures of me from 5 years ago vs now I’d just have more acne, I’d have longer hair and still look like I don’t know what to do with myself when I take selfies.

But the sparkle in my eyes, my smile, tell the whole story way better than this long ass stream of words could ever.

I want to say some things that I wish someone told me before starting medically transitionning.

It’s okay to take your time. It’s your body, it’s your journey, if you don’t feel comfortable taking full doses and want to go slow, the only voice you need to listen to is your own. Do what feels right.

If you feel overwhelmed, it’s okay to take a break, it’s okay to ask for support.

Trans people are holy. Everyone is. You didn’t lose your angel wings when you came out because you want to be masculine. You are not excluded from the joy of existence, from being proud of yourself, from being sad, from being scared, from being angry. The emotions and feelings you allowed yourself to feel while processing what you experienced when you grew up as a girl and was seen as a woman are still as valid as before. Nobody can take that from you. If someone tries to, don’t let them.

It’s perfectly normal to grieve some things you were and had before you started to transition, like your high soprano voice or even your chest. Hatching is painful. You can find comfort in things that don’t feel right, so making the decision to change can be incredibly scary and weird and you deserve to be heard and supported through this. Wanting top surgery doesn’t make the surgery less intense, less terrifying, less painful to recover from. When it becomes too much you have the right to take a break and take some deep breaths before going on.

You don’t have to have a radical, 180° change for your transition to be acceptable or valid or worthy of praise. Look at how far you’ve come already. It doesn’t have to show, you’re not made to be a spectacle, you’re human and it is your journey.

Oh, and last thing, you know when some people say “Oh this trans person has to grow out of the cringy phase where you think that you can write essays about being trans or transitionning or just their experience because it’s weird” ? If you ever hear this or see this online, remember all the people whose writing you read and, even if they were not professional writers, helped you more than any theorists did ? If you want to write, do it. It won’t be a waste. It can help people. Or it won’t, and even then, if it helped you, that’s enough.

Love every of my trans siblings, take care of yourselves. You deserve the world.

[star-anise]

Disclaimer: I like Anita Sarkeesian.

But also, I just saw a writeup of a Youtuber whose content has come a long way from his Gamergate days, and to explain that, the wiki says, "Anita Sarkeesian is a radical feminist who created a webseries about sexist tropes in video games"

AHAHAHAHAHA ANITA SARKEESIAN, RADICAL FEMINIST

HOO HEE EXCUSE ME THAT'S A GOOD ONE

Radical feminist. Feminist extremist. Anita Sarkeesian.

Anita Sarkeesian did her Master's Thesis in Social and Political Thought in 2010 on the trope of the "Strong Woman" in fantasy and science fiction TV shows, and produced Tropes vs Women, a series of online videos breaking down her work in a way that was accessible to a lay audience. She found a ready audience in geek feminist circles, since this was exactly the kind of thing we wanted and needed right then.

Tropes vs Women was extremely bog-standard cultural critique, what you'd find expressed in discussion between scholars of literary theory or media analysis anywhere, and exactly what 99% of feminists were saying at the time. It certainly talked about patriarchy as the complex system of sexism fused into our cultural matrix, so it's not like it wasn't radical feminism from that viewpoint, but it wasn't "radical" by way of being especially militant. Sarkeesian frequently pointed out how individual occurrences of a trope weren't harmful in themselves, but that a media landscape completely saturated with only that trope and nothing but that trope is, in the aggregate, a big feminist issue.

And the internet

HAAAAAAAATED

her for it.

Like, geek feminists got flak a lot anyway, especially when we wanted things like properly enforced policies against sexual harassment at science fiction conventions. And yeah, there totally were toxic keyboard warriors who said stuff about all men being scum - but Sarkeesian wasn't one of them.

It's probably because of her succinct, matter-of-fact, "this is not a debated issue, feminists have decades of theory and research to back this point up, sources abound if you google for thirty seconds so I won't stop to baby you through all the fundamental concepts" approach that she got such a big reach. She was calm, concise, coherent, and rational, everything feminists are told we need to be.

Unfortunately that just made her seem... attackable, I think. A good target, not actually scary or impassioned, unlikely to respond to violence with violence. The perfect kind of person to play five seconds of, and then spend the next five minutes yelling into your mic because IF ANITA IS RIGHT ABOUT VIDEO GAME SEXIST YOU MIGHT AS WELL SAY THAT EVERYTHING IS SEXIST AND SEXISM IS SYSTEMIC AND ENDEMIC TO ALL OF WESTERN CULTURE AND OTHER CULTURES TOO, WHICH IS CLEARLY RIDICULOUS, ANITA LADY BAD.

She literally spent five solid years as Enemy #1 in online geek spaces. It was completely insane. I am so sorry she had to take the brunt of it, and yet grateful that she did. She held the line and took the shit and kept doing good decent feminist work for years after, though she did admit to burnout and closed up shop on her nonprofit org Feminist Frequency in 2023. I hope to hell she's having a good day.

But even now, more than a decade later, dudes talk about her as though she were Geek Feminist Godzilla, the biggest baddest woman in the universe, off to lay waste to downtown Video Games and cut everybody's balls off.

When people (mostly dudes, but not all) talk like this, it's just very funny and unintentionally revealing because of the absolute averageness of her third-wave, trans-inclusive, western-centric, intersectional feminism. It makes them look absolutely pathetic.

Because it just makes it clear that she is probably the first and last self-described feminist the speaker has ever paid attention to.

[velvetvexations]

People argue trans men have male privilege and making jokes about them is Fine and Okay because the rest of society is set up to cater to men. And we can get into how society catering to cis men is not the same thing as it doing that for trans men, which should be obvious if you think about it for five seconds and aren'tin denial of the fact that mainstream society will treat you as your AGAB before anything else, but like.

Why do you even want to be aggressive towards men in the first place? Genuinely why is that part of your politics? How is that a good, okay impulse to have? Stop being hostile towards people based on parts of their identity they can't control, oh my God, even if it caused no structural harm that's still not a way to live your life.

[catboybiologist]

I absolutely agree that transmasculine people face different problems than transfeminine people, hmm I wonder if we could come up with a word to specifically describe the transphobic issues that transmasculine people have to deal with, perhaps something including the word trans and, like, a greek syllable meaning masculine, or something

surely such a word would be seen as a good thing to have at ones disposal to talk about one's own oppression

hmmm

This is a bad faith ask, but I guess it's as good a place as any for a ramble. I hope it's coherent.

First off, I feel like my blog is getting lumped into a lot of other blogs as a "trans woman who talks about transmisogyny" and points are being ascribed to me that I never really said. I respect them a lot, and I follow them. But I'm an individual person with my own nuanced opinions on the topic.

Also, yes, this will largely be a nitpicky terminology post. It's a a rambling societal analysis from someone with a STEM background. Don't call this "infighting". To be blunt, if you get riled up by this, that's on you.

Here's what you need to understand: transmisogyny is not called transmisogyny because it's transphobia affecting trans women. Transmisogyny is called transmisogyny because it's the manifestation of existing misogynist biases and talking points, applied to trans women. Creating the term "transandrophobia" as an equal foil to it is implying existing, pervasive androphobia against cis men.

Per the original use of the terminology (I'm literally just poorly summarizing Whipping Girl here, which is basically transfeminism for dummies), transmisogyny exists because of two related, but distinct deeply ingrained biases of misogyny:

One, the societal belief that male/man and female/woman are separate categories with a MASSIVE, uncrossable rift between them, and are intrinsically different as completely separate biological or theological categories (this is termed oppositional sexism)

Two, with respect to these two categories, men and masculinity are superior to women and femininity.

Transgender women assault both of these points to create a massive reflexive disgust reaction in a misogynist. One, they break down the barriers between men and women. And two, they provide examples of somebody "choosing" womanhood, and being uplifted and empowered by it. The first point is something we share with trans men, but let's hold on to that point for a moment.

As I've said before, transmisogyny then manifests as a property of this reaction. The second point leaves people scrambling to think of "alternate explanations" for a trans woman's transition- leading to false accusations about why trans women want access to women's spaces, that trans women are fetishists, and that trans women want to "cheat" in women's sports.

Does this mean that trans men don't have unique struggles, or that we shouldn't fight for transmasc's struggles? Of course not. However, these struggles are not an emergent property of a societal hatred of men.

Instead, a lot of what trans men face feels to me like repackaged misogyny. THIS IS NOT SAYING THAT TRANS MEN ARE NOT MEN, OR THAT ALL TRANSMASCS ARE ACTUALLY WOMEN. This is an acknowledgement that misogyny is a system of biases that aims to create a patriarchy. Those biases have the goal of male superiority, and oftentimes, hit trans men as well- because a system that needs to tell men that they're "biologically superior" is one that can never allow an "inferior" person to put themselves in that category.

Eg: trans men are often forced into positions where they're treated as women, often violently. This is to maintain the separation of men and women, and to assert men as superior. Trans men are affected by reproductive health regulations written to suppress women, sexual violence intended to suppress women, etc.

Some of these mechanisms often also affect trans women. Particularly sexual violence and sexualization.

And some don't. Some are genuinely unique to transmascs. And if you want to use the word "transandrophobia" to describe all of them in one go, then sure I guess. It's not a huge deal, but you have to acknowledge that we're talking about something almost entirely different at that point. But, if you're portraying trans androphobia as the genuine one-to-one equal of transmisogyny, with the same roots and same usage, you're also saying that societal androphobia exists. Which, to be frank, it does not- as a societal force. I'm sure you have a cousin or a great aunt that genuinely believes in some kind of matriarchal state, but c'mon. They're not mainstream in any political movement, no, not even TERFs.

Talking about transmisogyny isn't about erasing trans men's issues, it's about recognizing the misogynist roots of transphobia to more accurately hold fast against it, find solidarity with other feminists, and restructure communication to people outside of our movements.

And yeah, I am going to uplift trans men, and talk about issues affecting them. Saying I don't is ascribing a lot of things to me that I'm not saying.

This is the dignified part of my response. I'm typing my more irate, hysterical thoughts here, but I genuinely hope this opens some respectful discussion.

Part 2 of this post will be what I'm mad about, and what my frustration is.

[dianight]

Let's talk about transandrophobia. And by that I mean let me monologue about my findings browsing the tag and checking related blogs.

For context, most of my (second hand) interactions with it are from additions to the posts of transfeminists where random people antagonize them. Also from knowledge about how a certain user who helped popularize the term and gets referenced on posts about it (and other adjacent pawns) just happens to be a piledriver for callouts that just happen to target trans women. So you will excuse me for being biased and not going into this with a naive mindset.

And I will say that I've engaged with this in significantly more good faith than it deserves. My hope was that perhaps most people using the term were doing it out of ignorance and not malicious intent. I haven't really "counted" or done any actual note taking for this, it's more of a general observation that coalesced over a few days after I did all that digging so numbers are rough estimates and not accurate numbers. I checked about 50 pages on both "latest" and "top" on the tag, aswell as checking the recommended blogs.

Ignoring certain users who use the tag to highlight how absurd the mere concept of it is, since it's just mainly one woman having fun(?) cluttering (neutral) the tag and a few others mocking posts about it; we can roughly put the people who talk about transandrophobia in 3 groups. There is potential for overlap and I reiterate, my good faith is going to skew this toward a more positive vision than reality.

The first group are mostly trans men and a few trans women who would define transandrophobia as transphobia targeted at trans men, which is not at all what the term means nor what its history or actual use is. This group was around 30-40% of the posts, but one has to keep in mind that this was from going over the posts with the tag on their blogs. Posts that would talk about their experiences being the targets of transphobia and calling it transandrophobia.

Not to sound condescending, but getting treated differently to your cis peers (before coming out OR even knowing you are trans), pushback against your transition and toward the closet, bureaucratic hurdles and general hostility to being "the other" is not a transmasc exclusive thing and it's in fact "just" transphobia. Even the supposedly unique to trans men experience of having issues with reproductive health... also happens to trans women, it's the general transphobia of medical professionals. It manifests in different ways, that's it.

Most of the transmascs on this group seem to be under the impression that transandrophobia is an analogous term to transmisogyny that simply describes the targeted transphobia to transmascs and transfems respectively. I understand their posts and it was painful to read many of them, but ultimately what they describe is called transphobia. Most of the (few) transfems on this group were making additions in defense/support of trans men on those same previous posts.

That's as good as it gets though. I really hope the 30-40% estimate is real because the alternative is grim, and as a disclaimer I have (over time) blocked a massive amount of those users who go on posts about transmisogyny to start fights. Those hostile users are very likely to use the tag and be part of the second or third groups, which means that accounting for all the people I've blocked the first group percentage is likely to be <30%.

The second group are cryptoterfs. Or alternatively, people with ideas so bioessentialist that they are indistinguishable from cryptoterfs. I have found only two blogs that were openly "gc" and straight up interacting with open terfs, but many of them had their rethoric and semirelated posts all over and sometimes even the recommended blogs would give it away. Possibly 10% of the tag users belong to this group.

The main giveaway beyond the previous ones seems to be a really transphobic view that what trans men experience as transphobia is really just misogyny. So when they experience that misogyny as trans men it's called transandrophobia. Don't ask me what logic this is, but I've seen it repeated on their blogs so whatever is going on in their brains they seem to commonly agree that trans men are "just" experiencing misogyny. The obvious implication always, always being that trans men are women, a very transphobic idea.

There were some users who are part of the previously mentioned overlap. They will have some posts that tangentially allude at that trans men = women idea but never quite reblog or interact or expand those transphobic views. But they would also be part of the third group.

The third group are transmisogynists. No other way to put it. And I don't mean it in the casual way, we are all kind of transmisogynistic due to society and that's it; I mean it in the openly in opposition to transfeminists and actively spreading hateful and harmful rethoric kind of way. More than half the users of the tag are part of this group.

It's a key difference but a very telling one; where the first group talked about their experiences and how they are affected by transphobia (incorrectly labeling it) the third group engages in reactionary behaviors, always blaming/harassing/critizicing transfeminists posts. It's a genuinely weird feeling to see a post you agree with, along the lines of "men benefit from patriachy" and the "critique" from these users being "how dare these [insert misgendering term] insinuate that trans men are oppressing them".

Reading anything in bad faith, calls for "unity" while at the same reblogging from and interacting with known callout spearheads, honestly shocking hostility to trans women all over their posts and a general very open opposition to any transfeminist theory. Like I was genuinely speechless at some of the posts.

Literally calling random trans women transphobic. Screenshots without context to make it seem like the OP is saying the literal opposite of what she was saying. Congratulatory posts about getting people banned. Straight up callouts.

And I was hoping that the first group would be the majority, with a few bad apples and the expected bad actors.

My conclusion is very simple. Stop using the term transandrophobia. It has no good faith uses, what trans men experience is transphobia since misandry is not a real structural force and misogyny is. Most of its users are hostile to and a danger to trans women in this website, and somehow terf rethoric is generally accepted by them.

Transandrophobia doesn't exist.

[lalaithion]

Fundamentally I believe that writing about the rich and varied human existence is so important, and authors who do this end up seeming prescient in ways that naive analysis often rejects.

Two examples. First; a lot of people ship Frodo/Sam or Legolas/Gimli (or more obscure gay ships like Maedhros/Fingon), and some people say stuff like “well, Tolkien was catholic, he clearly didn’t intend for these characters to be gay.” But Tolkien himself says that he doesn’t write Christian allegory, in fact he despises all allegory. What he does is write about the rich and varied human existence, and when he did so he drew on the experiences of the likely closeted gay and bisexual men he had met over his life! And he synthesized this as just a way people behave, not as ‘representation’ but reality. And we can recognize that while in the early twentieth century, the 15% of people that identify as bisexual in the current generation (gen Z) would likely have married people of the opposite gender, that doesn’t mean they didn’t have same-gender relationships that had romantic elements even if they were never consummated.

A second example; in Tamora Pierce’s the Song of the Lioness Quartet, Alanna, the main character, dresses as a boy and trains to be a knight. As she grows up, she has to re-learn to connect with her femininity in secret with the few people who know who she is (thus making her a paradoxically-apt role model for both trans men and trans women, depending on which parts of the narrative one projects oneself onto). But Alanna never feels truly comfortable as a woman, either, and constantly has to assert both her masculinity and femininity to different people once she becomes a knight and reveals the secret. Tamora Pierce has since stated that if Alanna were born in the modern day, she would likely identify as genderfluid. But these books were written in the 1980s, and while there were people in that time period who were exploring the language of nonbinary and genderfluid identities, it wasn’t really a widespread notion, and while I can’t be sure Tamora Pierce didn’t encounter that language I sort of doubt Alanna was intended from the beginning to fit that identity. Instead, Pierce wrote a character based on the people she knew in life, who perhaps uncomfortably chafed at their assigned gender, and wrote a character who really believably would be genderfluid today, despite (plausibly) not knowing what ‘genderfluid’ was!

And I think that’s beautiful. There’s not really a point to this but just to highlight a perspective in literary analysis that you can lose if you focus too much on the biographical details of the author.

[justchillandshipit]

I was going to post this last night, but I was tired. For Ramon to say, "The Diaz men," when referring to Chris and himself right after purposefully excluding Eddie from attending the match, makes me want to rage. The implication here is what? That somehow Eddie isn't a man. He couldn't go. (It was also clear they had not told Eddie about the chess tournament in the first place, even though he lives near them now. There is no way they should have even assumed that a parent would not want to see their own son in a tournament. There is no acceptable excuse for that. None. Also, when Eddie arrives at the tournament at Buck's encouragement, he learns that Ramon has been calling Chris his son.)

I know Minear has a habit of redeeming parents with no effort or change on the parents' part, but I don't feel like what happened last night should be the end of things with Eddie's parents. He claimed his rights as a Dad, but he desperately needs to claim his right to be treated with the respect of another human being, and yes, a man. It doesn't matter what his sexuality is. Eddie is still a man. I say this as a feminist. I hate the patriarchy, but I don't hate men, and Eddie deserves to have that respect. (That includes those who identify as trans.) People deserve the respect of their personhood.

There needs to be more confrontations. Period.

And yet another thing.

When you recall what Eddie said to Chris when he left about how he could always come home, whether it was 5 mins or 5 months etc., you really have to wonder what was being said in front of Chris. (as if he weren't capable of following a conversation.) We saw how Helena was. She wasn't outright confrontational. She was passive-aggressive and manipulative. I'd go so far as to say that she was gaslighting to get an outraged, angry reaction so she could play like she was the reasonable one or the victim. From there, she could accuse Eddie of behaving badly. And from Chris's behavior at the dinner table at Eddie's house. She has most definitely been doing the same to him. Even with the PS5, I think he gave the response that would avoid Helena being upset.

Seriously, what were they saying to Chris that he was thinking that Eddie wasn't his Dad anymore?

I swear, I really do adore and respect Tim Minear on many levels, but on this, I feel actively angry. Being a biological parent doesn't give you a free pass to do this. I'm not saying Tim should make all our firefighters hate their parents, but I think the parents should each have to put in the work with their actual children to repair the relationship. It shouldn't be Eddie's job to mend the fences he didn't break.

Eddie is a great parent. Chim, Hen, Maddie, and even Buck, if you want to include his co-parenting, are good parents. Bobby, obviously, is on the next level in parenting. They are not good parents because their parents taught them how to be good. They're good, first, because they are less selfish. Second, because they have been on the other side and know what they never want their kids to experience or feel. If any of these people do make mistakes, and they will because they're human, those mistakes don't come from the same place of selfishness. Eddie said it to Buck once, "I know you'll keep trying." That's what Eddie and the others do. They keep trying. Eddie's parents, Chim's parents, Buck's parents; I haven't seen them make the first attempt.

Lord, sorry guys. I didn't plan to rant. I just got angrier as I typed. Bless you if you stuck it out until the end.

I haven't read any post-episode interviews yet. I'll do that after this post, so some of this may be discussed elsewhere, but here you have my two cents on the matter.

[taliabhattwrites]

Saying that "Transmisogyny is Misandry" is an act of epistemic violence. Stop it.

The following is a section of my essay The Question Has An Answer, entitled "The Measure of a Misandrist"

This is, ultimately, where most critiques of radical feminism go wrong, even when supposedly made with trans women’s vilification in mind. It is a too-popular idea that radical feminism was too harsh, too critical and too antagonistic towards men. After all—goes the reasoning—is not the fixation on trans women, the denial of our womanhood, and the maligning of us as ontologically predatory a consequence of their gender-absolutism? Is not resorting to ‘misandry’ in response to society’s misogyny also wrong?

Such arguments fail to be compelling for two reasons, the first of which should be obvious: transmisogyny is not misandry. The transmisogynist does not treat trans women the way she treats men, even if she refers to a trans woman as a man in the process of degendering her. Even if a transmisogynist bears an authentic antipathy for men, there is a crucial difference in how she regards trans women: namely, as an acceptable target of misogynistic degradation. Trans women’s bodies are dissected and scrutinized, our behavior pathologized and sexualized, and our own testimony discarded as unreliable, insubstantial, and immaterial. We are dehumanized, third-sexed, and branded permissible targets for ritualistic, collective, and sexualized punishment. A fate that even queer men tend to be spared.

Secondly and perhaps more importantly: the ‘misandry’ of the average transmisogynistic feminist is greatly overstated.

Trivially, we can note how the modern Gender-Conservative movement is full of men and the women who gleefully encourage their violence against trans people, a modern incarnation that bears the most threadbare of claims to any feminist tradition. They are, more than anything, a project concerned with the obfuscation of the term ‘feminist’, so that staunchly patriarchal ideologues can claim the label simply for promulgating transmisogynistic rhetoric. The face of modern transphobia is a far-flung cry from the academic lesbian feminists of yore, and is these days definitively male. Men abound at transphobic rallies, threaten to follow trans women into bathrooms to beat them, and call for the abolition of transition care in publications the world over.

Is such an answer evasive, though? Surely conservative men’s transmisogyny is a mainstream discursive force now, but was not the second wave chock-full of misandrist lesbian feminists aiming their ire at trans women? Can we not draw a line from their extremism to modern antifeminist backlash?

To get to the heart of that matter, we have to recall a little history.

April, 1973. The West Coast Lesbian Conference was, at that point, the largest gathering of lesbian feminists to date. Beth Elliot, a trans lesbian folk singer and feminist activist had been on the organizing committee for the event and was also scheduled to perform on opening night. Her fellow LA organizers had, in fact, insisted upon it.

When she took the stage at 9 p.m., she was accosted by two women, one of whom snatched the mic away to scream that Beth was a “transsexual” and a “rapist”, and demanded that she be ejected. In the ensuing chaos, a few organizers took the initiative to hold a vote (or, two, by some accounts), allowing the assembled audience to decide on Beth’s inclusion. The vote passed��by a slim majority, in some accounts, or by an overwhelming two-thirds majority, in some others—and so a visibly shaken Beth Elliot, with the support of her sisters, gave a short performance before promptly leaving.

Robin Morgan, who was scheduled to give a keynote speech on the theme of ‘unity’ the following day, spent the night editing her address. Rather than speaking for forty-five minutes, Morgan spent twice that time on a meandering screed “attacking everything in sight”, per Pat Buchanan—the conference organizers, women who work with men, and of course, transsexuals, blaming the continuing ills of patriarchy on a lack of feminist consciousness. Her caustic rhetoric shifted the entire tone and mood of the conference, forefronting the issue of biodestined womanhood. The Black Women’s Caucus, who had prepared a position paper on Black feminist organizing and the relevance of race to their struggle, are often omitted entirely from accounts of the conference, in large part due to Morgan’s troonmadness sucking up all the oxygen.

While some of the facts surrounding this incident are disputed, we know that Morgan’s invective was circulated amongst lesbian feminists, drawing attention to the topic of transsexual inclusion. Her charges that Beth Elliot was an “infiltrator” and “rapist” accrued sufficient cachet to get Beth blacklisted from feminist publications and music scenes. Despite a measure of personal support, Beth withdrew from the public eye, and Morgan’s bilious language found itself echoed in 1979’s Transsexual Empire, this time levied at Sandy Stone.

In some sense, Robin Morgan, Sister Raymond, and their ilk set the discursive tone on translesbophobia. While 1960’s Psycho attests that the idea of the deceptive, cross-dressing predator already held some sway in the cultural psychosexual imaginary, Morgan and Raymond—clumsily and soporifically—elevated that hateful trope to the status of “feminist concern”. They provided a framework and legitimacy to complement the sexologists’ pathologization of the “homosexual transsexual”, transmuting the cultural idea of the tranny from a pitiable, somewhat tragic figure, to a rapacious and monstrous one. Although coercion through deceptive seduction had always been core to the mythology of transsexuality, Morgan and Raymond enabled eradicationist sentiment towards trans women as a whole to be imbued with a certain feminist authority, recasting it as almost righteous.

We were, in the truest sense of the term, constructed, remade as biotechnological horrors seeking to traverse, fresh and bloody, from the scalpel to the women’s bathroom.

Given the centrality of that hastily-rewritten keynote speech to modern transmisogynistic propaganda, Morgan’s awareness of its discursive relevance is fascinating to witness. As Finn Enke notes in Collective Memory and the Transfeminist 1970s, when Morgan published her own account in 1977, her comments from the 1973 speech condemning the organizers for “inviting” Beth Elliot are omitted entirely. Morgan deliberately edited the speech to extend her critique of transsexuals and Beth Elliot specifically, dubbing them “gatecrashers” who sought to undermine and destroy the feminist movement from within. She consciously chose to erase Beth’s involvement in organizing the event, in addition to eliding that the majority of second-wave lesbian feminists present chose to defend and protect her.

Perhaps the most telling omission in subsequent accounts of this speech is an interesting detail about Morgan herself. Once she was done berating “women who work with men”, Morgan launched an impassioned defense of her husband. Before she derided Beth Elliot as a “male gatecrasher” with no place in lesbian feminism, Morgan advocated for her male husband’s place in lesbian feminism, on the grounds that he was a “feminist”, a “feminine man”, and—I still cannot help but marvel at this term whenever I encounter it—an “effeminist faggot”.

Seriously.

It is impossible to overstate just how utterly pathetic this pantomime of radicalism is. Morgan sublimated her own sexual and gendered anxieties into unrestrained transmisogyny, as many people often do, seeking to secure her own place as a lesbian by defining her legitimacy against the seeming illegitimacy of an “outsider”. Her arguments for doing so hinged on staining transsexual womanhood with the original sin of reproducing manhood, even as she pleaded the case that her husband, through his proximity to the feminine, had successfully absolved his own! Morgan’s audacity and insecurity drips off the page, revealing her charade to be nothing more than a performative, incoherent, inconsistent, bigoted farce.

Additionally, this revelation demonstrates how even here, in the holy of holies, at the epicenter of lesbian-feminist transmisogyny, misandry could hardly be claimed as a motivation. Beth Elliot was condemned for her transsexuality. Her putative ‘manhood’ was invoked only to degender and dehumanize her, while the avowed transmisogynist slurring her asked for the inclusion of men in the same breath!

Nor should we discount those who stood by Beth Elliot and Sandy Stone, even if their efforts were ignored, silenced, and erased. Enke’s paper meditates on a photograph of Beth on stage, framed to depict her alone, isolated, besieged. The woman holding Beth’s hand is left just out of the picture.

Meanwhile, for all their condemnation of trans lesbians’ “male energy”, the transmisogynists who so revile trans women’s “manhood” had no compunctions when it came to allying with the “male institutions” that have surveilled us, vilified us, marginalized us, and tried to erase our very stories, our connections, our sisterhood from history. Even the scraps that remain cannot escape reframing, rewriting, revisionism that insists: you were always unwanted, and stood apart.

Except when we weren’t, and didn’t.

[justjensenanddean]

Soldier Boy's final interview (deepsgills)

They Don't Make Men Like That Anymore

REVISITING THE FINAL SOLDIER BOY INTERVIEW

By now, the stoic fellow on this month's cover needs no introduction but in case you've been away for the past 20 years, his name is Soldier Boy, and he's a movie star. In fact, he's the world's biggest movie star as well as Vought's biggest commodity. He stands about six feet tall, weighs around 175 and likes women. Boy, does he like women. His reputation as a hyperactive Lothario has been fueled by rumored romances with everyone from Rita

Hayworth and Jane Russell to such non-Hollywood types as jockey Aubrey Brabazon and country singer Tammy Wynette. But that's only rumors. The documented loves of his life have been somewhat few and far between. Who has time for a relationship when you're constantly having to save the world.

For most of this decade, Solder Boy has labored in low-level action films that critics have hated but moviegoers have loved. Now my entrenched as the screen's lending box-office attraction Soldier Boy reportedly gets C$4,000.00 a picture, and that's just when he hires out as an actor. Soldier Boy is also a director and has lately taken a fling of producing his own films. He also does his own stunts and has been known to dabble in stunt co-coordinating for his co-stars, he truly does it all.

Soldier Boy has vaulted to super stardom on the strength of his charm, strength, good looks and comedic skills, in most of his roles-he portrays a kind of macho brut who often doesn't take himself or even the film he's in very seriously. Thus in Hero Seeking Hero-the Gone Win the Wind of good-of-boy romantic comedy movies-the film's biggest laugh comes when Soldier Boy breaches cinema's third wall by winking at the audience. And it's an audience he has shrewdly built for himself through frequent appearances on late night TV talk fests. For a man intent on becoming a movie star and America's number one superhero, life has sure taken a couple of funny bounces. He has gone on to star in hundreds of Vought Studios movies such as in 10 Seconds to Doomsday. A Hero's Story, Brothers in Arms: Soldier Boy & Gunpowder, Escape from Teron, Freedom and Firepower, Ghosts of Hanol, Hero Seeking Hero, Loose Cannon, Love and Wox Mt. St. Doom, Normandy, Red Thunder, Super in Suburbia. The Capitol Conspiracy. The Soldier and the Shooter and The Soldier Boy Story.

To interview Hollywood's reigning male sex symbol, Vigor sent freelancer Leor Boshi to meet with Soldier Boy at his home in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles. Boshi reports: "When he's not on his ranch in Texas Soldier Boy lives in a handsome Spanish-style home that, thanks to California's Insone real-estate spiral, is now worth several million dollars. The two story house contains a number of expensive and exquisite Western Paintings recent enthusiasm of $8, and outside there's on C$114.600.00 tenn court and what appears to be an Olympic-size filled swimming pool.

"When I met him, Soldier Boy was wearing tapered white-satin swim trunks and black Nike running shoes. Rarely seen without his super attire. Without too much in the way of preliminaries. I followed him out of the house, down a steep fight of stone steps and around back to the pool, passing a garaged Rolls Royce and a Trans Am on the way. Soldier Boy is built like a tall middleweight boxer, well muscled and incredibly strong. “You can never be too rich or too strong.” He told me when we got to the pool. Soldier Boy, as it turns out, is a highly candid man who's a lot friendlier than he lets on at first. Especially to people bearing tape recorders. After a rather stiff first meeting. Soldier Boy and I ended up talking for more than 13 hours and the resulting interview will, I think, surprise a number of readers. Continued on the next page.

"I hate losing. The feeling of someone else getting the better of you… I never want to feel weak. I know I am the strongest, but sometimes, I struggle to feel my best."

[genderqueerdykes]

"i'm not transphobic it's just really easy to accidentally misgender transmasc people who dress fem." first of all, transmascs are allowed to dress however we please, it says nothing about our status as mascs, but second of all, why do you hate the concept of stealth trans men & mascs so much? you do realize that trans men and mascs have to fly stealth, too? for safety? because we can and will be targeted and harmed and denied access to resources and places like restrooms?

are you scared of men "infiltrating" your gender like a terf or some shit? i don't know how to tell you that not all trans men and mascs have the privilege in order to be socially out and/or medically transitioning. fuck off. men are men no matter what they wear, how they present, or what their body looks like. get out of here with this bullshit.

[plaidos]

I really like dropouts content overall, but there was a bit in a season of Dimension 20 (Starstruck) where an exploitative, deceptive man (Dan Scrap) dressed up as a woman (Danielle Scrap) to invade a space designed to exclude men in order to reap the benefits of that space. Like that's THE narrative transphobes use, and there Brennan doing it as a bit and the rest of the main cast laughing uproarsly about it. It made me feel nauseous. There definitely is a transmisogyny issue at dropout

this is the kind of stuff im talking about — i like Brennan, he’s funny, he’s a good comic, but a mistake like this isn’t just a “he said the wrong pronoun by accident” type thing — it betrays a foundational misunderstanding to what transphobia is and how/why it functions the way it does. now that makes sense, Brennan is a cis man without these experiences, he isn’t an activist or a sociologist, but you know maybe that is the perfect demonstration of how he isn’t the best pick for a “deconstructive pastiche of Harry Potter” tabletop campaign — maybe a real life trans woman would be a better pick? somebody who has actually had to contend with bigotry a day in their life, even, maybe!

given how often Dimension 20 players (including the MisMag party!!) make jokes about feminine men stuff like this seems really glaring to trans girls who would’ve been prospective fans. i don’t feel comfortable watching that shit! it feels like a bunch of TME people patting themselves on the back for being good allies without paying attention to how to correct the wrongs in question, like a totally superficial distinction.

i’ve heard that Dropout specifically apologised for this instance, but i really don’t think that fixes the problem. the fact that “a man calling himself a woman’s name and pretending he’s a woman to sneak into a women’s space” is a story that made it far enough into play that there was actual discourse over it is a big fucking deal, not just a small mistake, but the literal exact same type of transmisogyny that Dimension 20’s players are supposed to be deconstructing… so why do we have players who don’t even know how to not REINFORCE those biases? Surely a cis man who literally cannot functionally or materially identify transmisogyny should not be your top pick for a “harry potter without the bigotry” campaign?

it’s cool that other marginalised demographics are represented in MisMag (and Dimension 20 in general) but let’s be totally honest with ourselves: JK Rowling didn’t join the KKK, she isn’t rallying against abortion rights — she is pouring millions and millions of dollars into criminalising specifically transfeminine existence. it is unequivocally a bad look to seemingly intentionally exclude transfems from a commentary on her works, and an even worse & transmisogynistic move to double down on a second season without a transfeminine player, especially after the (totally unaddressed!) backlash from transfem fans the first time.

[uss-edsall]

Mark my words, at minimum there is going to be a four year gap in U.S. military scholarship on anything to do with any topic that isn't white men.

I am not allowed to say something that is "an immutable quality of soldiers". What this means is that I can't say if someone was of any race. So I can't say someone was black. I can't say someone was asian. I can't say if they're Japanese-American. I also can't say anything about gender. So I can't say if someone's a woman. I can't say if someone's trans. I can't talk about sexuality, so I can't say if someone's gay.

This goes further than being unable to say "she's a woman" or "he was black." It also addresses any topic including them.

I cannot say "the first woman pilot," so Lieutenant Sally D. Murphy's achievement no longer matters. I cannot say "the first African-American man to be awarded the Medal of Honor," so I can't explain the significance of Sergeant William Harvey Carney's award. I cannot reference when Don't Ask, Don't Tell was enacted, or repealed, because I can't talk about gay people. I can't mention the anti-miscegenation laws that prevented the men of the 1st Filipino Regiment from marrying white women, because I can't mention race. The only reason I can even say Filipino is because that was in the unit's name. I can't write about the racial conflicts during the Vietnam era, because again, I can't mention race.

I wanted to do an article on the U.S. Army's 'ethnic battalions' in World War II, which were five units built around men who were either descendants of immigrants, or foreign aliens who volunteered for the Army, of specific nations. Austrian, Greek, Norwegian, Japanese-American, and Filipino. First strike, it was flagged because of the word 'ethnic' in the name. Second strike, the Japanese and Filipino part. Strangely, nobody had any issue with the European nations. Third, someone With Power saw the name of it and went "get rid of that as quickly as possible we do NOT want a DOGE visit to the museum."

So. You can see where that's heading.