transchopshop

[transchopshop]

"Men are always celebrated" is a take SO removed from reality, and the people making that claim never even have consistent logic about it. How can men, in your mind, be simultaneously arbiters of toxic standards imposed on themselves and also be immune to those same standards?? In the same breath you can say "any problem men face is their own fault" and also "men face no problems."

The moment you start looking deeper into the societal experiences of marginalized men you have to confront that the position of men in society is equally complex as anything else. To refuse to unpack that is a failure to do even the most basic aspect of social justice.

[transchopshop]

i really don't understand the difficulty cis people have with understanding the word "transgender" as an adjective and connecting that to whether someone is a man or a woman (at the most basic level of understanding trans people, at least). like, most of the time i get it from people who mean well and are trying to understand, but like???

i have so many people message me like "okay so you're a trans man, and that means...you were born a man?" and i'm sure a lot of trans women get the same treatment vice versa

like, okay, Kyle, i'm happy that you're at least TRYING to understand, but if i was assigned male at birth and identified as a woman, why would i refer to myself as a man, i.e. the gender i DON'T want to be seen as?

it's literally 1,000 times less complicated than y'all cis people are making it. "trans" is an adjective for the noun, man/woman. if i say am a trans man, you should refer to me as a man. that's it. stop thinking about what's in my pants and think about what i am telling you — that's how you respect me.

[transchopshop]

Hey there, everyone.

I've been trying so goddamn long to not do this, but I need help, and I don't know where else to turn.

I'm known as Zhanael online, and I'm a disabled, ace lesbian living alone with my cat on the Front Range of Colorado, which ain't a cheap place to live. I moved up here to help take care of my mother before she passed, and attempted to work for a while afterwards, until my disabilities (both physical and psychological) got the best of me. I'm already on SNAP and Medicaid, but I'm still waiting on my (first-time) SSDI app that was submitted a few months ago. I have unemployment, but only about $114/wk after taxes.

I'm STILL $200 short of Dec. rent and I have a $600 credit card payment that needs to be paid ASAP, as I'm currently overdrawn due to interest. I've had to put EVERYTHING on that credit card since I last worked 13 months ago, so I've hit the limit, despite my best efforts. I've used up my 401k already, my friends have mostly done what they can, and my dad is on SSDI already, so his help is heavily limited.

Please help me, Tumblr. I only have PayPal and Zelle, so if you're willing to help out, the email is this URL at Gmail.

Or you can toss me your email and I'll send a money request through Payps. Whichever you feel is safer. DMs are open if you want more info.

Even if you can't help, have a great rest of 2022 and stay safe.

And as a bonus, here's my lovely girl, Blake:

[transchopshop]

hm going from “you’re not allowed to be angry bc you’re a girl” to “you’re not allowed to be angry because you’re a man and it might scare people” is not a W

[transchopshop]

Hey, just say your tags about TME/TMA language being problematic. Genuine question: what is the issue with them? Is it that transmisogyny can be directed at people who aren't considered "TMA"?

I've talked about it here and there, but maybe this will be the time my thoughts are organized.

Up front, let me note there could be more elements involved the TME/TMA than I'm familiar with. I also feel it could be a useful tool in the right circumstances (for example, if you pursued research specifically focused on transmisogyny). My subjective experience is that TME/TMA are not used in this way, and the functional use of them isn't beneficial in general to trans people.

For those unfamiliar, TME means "transmisogyny exempt" and TMA means "transmisogyny affected." Now, as a thing that happens, these make sense. However, as commonly used, TME/TMA describes innate traits, which is where they stop being useful for me.

To start at the broadest scale, TME/A is often used reductively, with the principle that general bigotry against trans folx is in effect all derived from transmisogyny. I'm simplifying a little bit, but if we cut through some of the theory mechanics, we end up left with a broad generalization of transmisogyny as the primary and defining feature of the effort for trans rights, transphobia, and such. And, not to undermine the substantial effect transmisogyny has on the whole community, but this is not completely different from treating misogyny in general as the defining characteristic of all inequality. Misogyny is a significant form of inequality, but reducing all inequality to misogyny is kinda radical feminist territory. What with radfems generally wanting to wipe trans people off the map, I'm not comfortable standing on an ideological platform that close to theirs.

Related to this, there's no terms like "Transandrophobia Exempt," nothing at all addressing what kind of exemption / effect would apply to anyone off the gender binary - if it's going to be used to examine different kinds of bias against different kinds of trans people, or if it's meant to represent a state of being for trans people, there should be versions of it which apply to other people affected by bigotry who aren't trans femme. I suppose it can be argued that it's only to define one category of people (TMA) versus any other people (TME), which is true but again defines away the experiences of a large number of different trans people, or necessitates other trans people's experiences being defined through transmisogyny. To me that's not useful, because it excludes a significant amount of the complexity of the trans experience for the sake of only understanding a narrow band of it.

This leads into some further difficulties with the term. As a group, trans people have a great deal of insight to share with one another about our positive and negative experiences. The great variety and range of experiences in our community is fantastic, because I can find the experience of people who are trans men, agender, genderqueer, nonbinary, or anything else very relatable. I don't need to limit my understanding of gender via my specific experience as a trans woman either to share in how other trans folx view gender, nor to share my experience with the trans community at large.

We're getting deep down into it now, but related to the above and your note, I see TMA/E used as interchangeable with AFAB/AMAB, while being affected by transmisogyny isn't particularly limited to your assigned gender at birth. Bigotry expressed against trans people is not complex - it's a matter of a person or person who thinks any expression of gender they perceive as out of sync with what they assume is an intuitive understanding of innate gender characteristic should be must be resisted in the strongest possible way.

Or, more succinctly, transphobes do not care your agab, where you fall under the trans umbrella, or if you're trans at all. If a transphobe sees a cis woman and thinks she looks like a trans woman, they'll be transmisogynistic. If they see a trans woman and thinks she looks like a trans man, it's transandrophobia for them. They don't believe they ever have or ever will encounter anyone intersex, because they're really bad a statistics (fun fact, a small percentage is still a huge amount in any kind of city or town population). Bigots do not slow down to decide what kind of specific form of hate they're expressing, because the only thing important to them is that they're seeing someone who deviates from their internal belief system, and that person must be penalized for deviation.

We can certainly dissect how bigotry affects us all after the fact, the particular and (importantly) varying social lenses people are experiencing when they direct prejudice based on gender. I think that's a very complex and interesting question but it can't be examined via transmisogyny alone, because it's not limited to trans feminine people. Gender is one component of the many facets of how society can exert controls over disenfranchised groups, and it's tied into race, income, religion, nationality, and so forth. It's not impossible to examine one facet, it's just important to recognize that one facet is neither universal nor exclusive.

So far, the issue I have with TMA/E is that in a broad sense it seems to be used in an exclusionary way, as well as used in a way that re-creates a gender binary, and limits understanding bias towards trans people clearly. But all of this overlooks one very important issue.

We don't define who we are by how we are hated. I don't want to define myself as TMA. I'm a trans woman, I'm awesome. My gender isn't defined by someone who hates me for my genitals, my gender is defined by how much I love who I am, how much better my life is for being a trans woman. I do not find it useful to define myself by whether some specific kind of hatefulness is directed at me. To me, that's the component of TMA/E I cannot find a way around.

I am a depressed lady with massive anxiety, sometimes to the point I can't function, okay? I don't want to designate myself by another reason to be unhappy. So I don't find it useful, I kinda get why it's used, because it feels like a more inclusive way to talk about being trans and being expected to conform to an idea of femininity but not doing so. I do not think it succeeds in that capacity, and my overall experience with the term is that it does not usefully serve the trans community. My personal feeling is that it makes me uncomfortable. Despite being TMA by technicality, I haven't experienced much in the way of transmisogyny, and I would rather use a positive term to describe who I am.

(i haven't checked this for typos or spelling or inconsistencies)

[transchopshop]

"It Will Never Be a Lamb Again" is a piece about queerness, growing up, and conformity.

As I've gotten older, I've felt the expectation that I remain pure and recognizable, that anything new or different about me at this point must be something corrupt, something bad that doesn't belong. But growth and change cannot be separated, and who I am cannot be cut up into what's acceptable and what isn't.

[transchopshop]

do any other transmasc nonbinary folks deal with a sort of just-passed-the-mark dysphoria, in that after being on testosterone for a while, you long for the early years on T where you were a kind of genderfuckery that couldn't necessarily be determined by others?

don't get me wrong, having a beard makes me feel euphoric most days. it feels like me. but sometimes i miss the days when i had just a little bit of scruff on my face and people stuttered and hesitated when calling me an honorific because they weren't sure. and some days i miss even being clocked as a "~female~" butch with scruff because it felt like the right balance for me at the time.

now i'm just automatically assumed to be a cis male. and i'm almost wishing i'd stuck to a lower dose of T, but i also wonder if this is specifically my brain going "you were more attractive when you were percieved as a "~female~" queer therefore you're ugly now" or whatever lmao

[transchopshop]

twitter's clamped onto baeddel discourse and a LOOOOTTA mutuals of mine have revealed themselves to be self-hating transmascs willing to supplicate themselves at the feet of trans women who don't consider them to even be trans so like. i'm about to delete all my social media and just walk into the ocean

[transchopshop]

it’s genuinely so bonkers to me that people actually like are completely unaware of how queer masculinity looks for men, tho. like the discourse amounts to “a guy isn’t gay unless i think he looks a bit fruity” meanwhile the guy you want to call a metaphor for heteronormative masculinity is wearing skintight leather pants

[transchopshop]

trans men who are uncomfortable being called pretty or "girl" in a casual way or any sort of feminine term aren't "toxically masculine" or "fragile" they are trans men who have been traumatized by forced femininity. and if you mock them and/or continue to misgender them you are a huge asshole. also you should consider this before you start calling all men "princess"

[transchopshop]

The way that some of y'all talk about queer people that you think are weirder than you is fucking disgusting honestly

[transchopshop]

i guarantee you i wasn't being infantilized when another nonbinary person told me to just accept that i "look like a pedophile" just because my hairline's receding and i'm fat

"Trans men are always infantilized!"

Have you met a gay/Black/disabled/literally any trans man before or...

[transchopshop]

who are you people

[transchopshop]

[transchopshop]

[transchopshop]

Trans women will never be free until people stop having strong emotions about penises. Like we, as a society, have got to stop caring about dicks! Dicks have to stop symbolizing maleness, obviously, but they also have to stop symbolizing power, dominance, sexual agency and aggression, violence, and even sex itself. Like trans women can’t be free if the very conceptual presence of a penis represents an intrusion(!) of unwanted(!) sexuality(!) in public life. Like that’s why trans women are abhorrent to both male chauvinists and radical feminists, because both groups have extremely strong feelings about what a penis *represents*, and find the conceptual and actual presence of a woman with a penis to be simultaneously vile and nonsensical because they’ve loaded so much symbolic baggage onto both women and penises.

Anyway dicks are totally neutral body parts and seeing a dick, or a bulge in a swimsuit, or simply knowing that there’s a dick somewhere in the same bathroom as you isn’t harmful or violent

[transchopshop]

Some gay men have pussies and it’s very harmful/hurtful when a large majority of cis gay men talk about being gay “because vaginas are disgusting.”

Cant really speak for everyone but it annoys me and im sure it’s very similar for no op trans lesbians who constantly have hear about cis lesbians being “dick repulsed” so maybe just shut up and keep it to yourself perhaps!! just a thought!!

Begging cis people to use their one collective braincell and use more inclusive language for a community that has carried LGBTQ on their back for years (trans women of color specifically).

That being said, genital preference is unavoidable for a lot of people, especially for people who have trauma! What we don’t need to do is correlate your sexuality to your genital preference (ie, “i’m a lesbian because dick is gross” “i’m gay because vaginas are gross”). This is not only harmful for trans individuals, but it reduces sexuality simply to anatomy (which is not the point).