Idk But The Idea That Trans Men Commonly Enter Terf Spaces On Purpose & Then Get Detransed & Indoctrinated

You know, the argument that saying trans men don’t have male privilege is misgendering is actually really fucking annoying because privilege is not like. Anything intrinsic to who you are. You don’t have it by default as a result of your identity. It’s something you get as a result of the systems in power.

A deeply closeted trans man who has spent every waking moment living as a “cis woman” due to not socially transitioning due to being in an actively dangerous environment that won’t allow him to is still a man. If you argue that he has to have male privilege because he’s a man then you are not basing your theory on reality but on your own imagination. If you argue he isn’t actually a man because he doesn’t have male privilege then you just don’t see trans men as men.

If you equate manhood with access to male privilege then you just don’t see trans men as men. Or, best case scenario and it only applies if you’re a trans man, you’re turning to patriarchy as a source of gender validation when we should be dismantling the patriarchy. For your own sake, you absolutely need to have a concept of what your gender means to you and a source of validation for that gender that exists outside of patriarchy. If misogyny and by extension male privilege dissolves into nothingness tomorrow, what is it that makes you a man? You don’t need to answer that immediately, but you do need to at least think about it.

It took me forever to figure out how anyone could reasonably claim that trans men weren’t directly targeted by the EO about “protecting women and girls from gender ideology” until I thought about how that phrasing would be interpreted if you’re thinking of trans women and only trans women. Now I’m slightly less irritated with people saying only trans women are gonna get hit by the EOs and switching from “are you fucking for real right now, like are you just pretending this isn’t even here” to “hey I thought about how this would apply to trans women, can you do the same for trans men?”

If your focus is solely on trans women, “protecting women and girls from gender ideology” means not letting trans women into women’s bathrooms or locker rooms, which is enforced by forcibly detransitioning them legally and socially. The idea being to “protect” cis women from trans women existing near them.

If you focus on trans men tho, “protecting women and girls from gender ideology” means denying them any sort of medical transition and then forcibly detransitioning them legally and socially because the “women” you’re trying to “protect” are both the trans men themselves and the egg transmascs near them who might consider transitioning because they now see it as an option. (See: the common rhetoric of trans men perpetuating a “social contagion” and giving your “daughters” “ROGD.”). This is also why it mentions FGM; they’re not talking about actual female genital mutilation, they’re talking about transmasculine bottom surgery. Phalloplasty is like +$100k and no insurance covers it, so basically anyone who was saving up for it just got told to go fuck themselves.

Not to mention no matter what their ASAB was, nonbinary people are going to be hit but in a way that lumps them in with trans women and trans men based on ASAB. They are just as screwed as the rest of us.

I’m just saying, it would help so much if y’all would just read something and think about how it affects multiple different types of people.

An incredibly pernicious anti-transmasc argument that keeps making the rounds is that everything we do was plagiarized from trans women.

Coining a term to describe our unique and gendered experiences of oppression? We're just copying trans women.

Complain that we're often rejected from queer circles for our perceived violent maleness? We're just parroting what's happened to trans women.

Forcemasc fetish blogs? We're just copying One Specific Trans Woman-Run Blog that got popular.

These claims are annoying on their own, but together they paint a clear picture of what transandrophobes want you to believe: that trans men and transmascs are incapable of creating anything ourselves, or if we did, it would have nothing in common with what trans women and fems are doing. The function of these claims is to convince you that trans people of seemingly opposite identities are equally opposite in experiences, and any evidence to the contrary is actually cultural appropriation fueled by jealousy.

This is gender essentialism. It's fueled by the radical feminist belief that "woman" and "man" are not so much terms that get abused to justify people's oppression as they are positions in a class conflict, one where All Men seek and/or directly benefit from the oppression of All Women, and that indeed, manhood and womanhood themselves are defined by this relationship to one another. To be a man is to be an entitled parasite; to be a woman is to be an overworked victim.

That notion is racist and transphobic on the face of it, and that is equally obvious in these arguments about trans men - all of which are predicated on the idea that the average trans man is white, well-off, and able to go stealth whenever necessary, and therefore benefits from the maximum amount of male privilege a trans man can be afforded. Following from that logic, any trans man or that you encounter online can be reasonably assumed to share that experience, and any mention he might make of trans men who fail to meet those qualifications is nothing more than a rhetorical cudgel that we use to deny our own privilege.

I'm sure you can see the problem there.

It's not surprising that I typically see these claims made by white women, frequently about Black and Indigenous men. Speaking from the perspective of a white person, it can be very easy to fall into a trap of thinking that our specific experiences with oppression makes us general experts, and grow defensive when someone provides knowledge that shows we were wrong. It can like we're being victimized on the basis of the oppression we do have, and it can be incredibly hard to stop, listen, and admit that we fucked up. This is doubly difficult when the person criticizing us is a member of a demographic that seemingly contributes to the oppression we face.

But just because we think it's happening doesn't always make it so. Yes, there are times when people are acting in bad faith, or overlooking their own areas of ignorance - to err, as they say, is human. But often, we're the ones in the wrong, and need to recognize that fact before acting. So where do we draw the line?

The thing that I've always found crucial is to stop, breathe, and think. We have to honestly ask ourselves whether the other party is saying "your experiences are not real", or just "your understanding of these issues isn't as all-encompassing as you assumed". Simply asking yourself "am I really being harmed, or do I just feel like I'm being harmed?" can often save you from a massive foot-in-mouth situation.

It's necessary to remember that people whose identities are different from our own have their own experience and knowledge. Unless they are coming out and telling us what problems we do or don't have, we need to trust that they're coming from a place of good faith and genuine knowledge, and be willing to listen and change our minds if necessary.

We have to make ourselves comfortable with the fact that we are not always the most, or only, important voice in the room.

That's something that a lot of anti-transmasc women love to remind us, and I wouldn't say they're always wrong. Simply being a man can and often does incentivize people to engage in misogyny, to talk over women and disregard their experiences, when we find them uncomfortable or irrelevant. Again - everybody fucks up sometimes. But it crosses a line when you start demanding that courtesy from others while refusing to extend it back to them; when you treat any information they offer as automatically inferior or entirely invalid, based solely on their perceived relationship to privilege.

In fact, doing so is literally an ad hominem argument.

Aside from that, I must point out that these arguments are being employed specifically to silence trans men's and mascs' voices. This is not an honest misunderstanding; it's an act of profound self-centeredness at best and outright malice at worst. How do I know this? Well, stop me if you've ever heard one of these before:

"Women don't have real interests; they just like silly frivolous things. Men's hobbies are real and meaningful."

"Women are inherently wired to be emotional. Men are logical and level-headed. I'm not sexist, it's just science."

"If you hear a woman say anything smart, you can bet she learned it from a man."

These, too, are silencing tactics, historically (and currently!) used to devalue and silence the voices of women. In fact, they're things that I have personally heard and been affected by, as a trans man who has spent the vast majority of my life being seen and treated as a woman.

I didn't fall for it then, and I sure ain't falling for it now.

hate people wanting to shut down conversations about transandrophobia say that trans men and mascs "measurably" experience less violence than trans women and fems

one of the core aspects of transandrophobia is erasure. the rates of violence we face cannot be "measurably" different than anything, because the rates of violence we face are deliberately not measured and erased whenever posssible

RE: Binary Privilege, I really think youtuber VerilyBitchie said it best in her video on monosexism that privilege can be broken down into two parts; unjust enrichment and spared injustice. The example she uses is a bisexual man from a country where being queer is a crime being denied asylum because a judge does not view him as queer enough to actually be in danger(or even queer at all), while a gay man would be approved by that same judge because they think he's more at risk. The gay man is not being unjustly enriched, he needs asylum! But, he is being spared an injustice, namely his sexuality is seen as more real than the bi man's so he gets to escape while the bi man has to go back to his country and risk imprisonment and death. (This is also why I think it's important to keep in mind that being granted privilege does not necessarily mean a person is an oppressor or capable of leveraging their privilege to oppress. The gay man is not oppressing the bi man in this situation, he is just being given grace the bi man is not granted.)

So while I do think that binary trans people may be spared some injustices that nonbinary people have to deal with, I don't think any of that translates to like, unjust enrichment or the ability to oppress nonbinary people on a systemic level. And even then it does depend entirely on the situation and the people involved. I would be considered nonbinary by cishet people, but I use she/they pronouns, so I am spared the injustice someone who uses say, it/its or a neo-pronoun would face because mine are easier for cishet people to adjust to(even though a lot of cishet people default to her and ignore the fact that I'm trans, they are still using the correct pronouns). I am spared the injustice of having people treat me like a freak for my pronouns and default to the wrong ones because mine are seen as normal and easy to ignore, but I am not gaining any unjust enrichment, and certainly am not being granted the kind of privilege that would allow me to systemically oppress another nonbinary person.

I also think maybe it's important to keep in mind that someone can be bigoted without being an oppressor. Like I do not think that monosexual queer people are my systemic oppressors as a bisexual, BUT I can face bigotry and lateral aggression in the form of monosexism from biphobic monosexual queers. Like they can absolutely uphold my systemic oppression and weaponize parts of it against me, but they are NOT the ones who built or are driving the monosexism machine. That's cishet society. I think that's the what we see with like, transmedicalism and exorsexism from other trans people. They still aren't our oppressors, they aren't granted unjust enrichment or power, but they can still be exorsexist and transphobic and weaponize both against nonbinary people in horrifying ways, and they are also granted some slight privilege that we are not in the form of spared injustice.

I think conversations around privilege and oppression and bigotry are really complicated, and it's just important to keep in mind that having privilege you don't does not always mean someone is your oppressor, and also that someone can be bigoted and oppressive towards you without actually being your systemic oppressor class, you know? Or that's at least how I think about it, and it seems to help break down the conversation in a way that avoids too much finger pointing or semantic circular arguments over terminology that get us nowhere.

I like the scientific breakdown of "privilege," that's a very cool way of putting it.

in the wake of genderqueerdykes transmisognistic post shall you not use it as an excuse to be anti good faith identities, or spreading the “transandrophobia truther” theory. Just because someone is a shit person doesn’t mean you get to be horrible back. and if you try arguing with me on this fuck off because i will block u.

I can’t help but think detransitioning is a form of self-harm for some of these “detrans females” swept up in the TERF movement. Some of them were never transgender at all, just exploring their gender and finding they didn’t like it. But some are genuinely miserable identifying as women and are continuing to harm themselves by forcing themselves into being something they can never truly be. I’ve never been detrans or bought into that ideology but I have denied myself gender affirming care as a form of self-harm. As in, I am still a man but I don’t think I deserve to receive the help I need to affirm that.

evil sneaky lying men want access to your Women's Resources to steal them from Real Women. it's not perpetuating reactionary transmisogyny to say this because the men we're talking about are transgender men 👍 don't worry about it.

It doesn't mean anything btw if you say "terfs dni" but still say all of the same things they do. Just so you know.

men are so whiny and sensitive about this oh my god. do you not hear how misogynistic entitled and lesbophobic this is and also just what a huge loser you sound like. "lesbians hate us because we're MEN and not sexy butch lesbians" Well yeah.. obviously.. even cis men can usually put it together that lesbians probably love lesbians more than men, so why are you so confused? you expecting some sort of special pussy treatment? No one wishes you would become a butch lesbian, you are thinking quite highly of yourself though aren't you