the truscum community has turned from having intellectual discussions to cringing about teenagers using bun pronouns and it doesn’t help our case and is honestly just annoying.
I would much rather talk about how the concept of pronouns like it/bun/gore are harmful than mocking some kid who wants attention. it’s also just rude, kids are cringe and were just putting them out here to publicly humiliate.
unless the kid is being absolutely horrible I think it’s just not right to do that. they probably have their own mental health issues and attention issues that they need to work on, a bunch of people making fun of them won’t help them or our cause. it will just make us look mean.
it is an insult to women all over the world and throughout history to suggest they are oppressed because of gender identity. no one rapes someone’s gender identity. they rape and oppress based on biological sex. to contest this is ludicrous.
I feel so sorry for all the young lesbians whose female partners are currently medically transitioning. They have to support their partners’ transitions unconditionally and unquestioningly lest they be called transphobic, they have to wonder whether they’ll still be attracted to their partners post-transition, they have to stop calling themselves lesbians lest they offend their partners. And if they break it off, will their friends call them transphobic? Will they be marked as terfs?
I can’t imagine being a teenager, falling in love with a girl, and then essentially being forced (I remember how deep the fear of being transphobic went) to call the girl I love they or he, watch her start testosterone or get surgery, and give up calling myself lesbian. It would be heartbreaking and confusing. I know this is happening—I can name several couples like this who show up on my Instagram feed these days. And it is heartbreaking. How many more young lesbians would there be if they didn’t give up the lesbian label to accommodate their attraction to trans identified females? How many more young lesbians would there be if they were encouraged to look up to and learn from older lesbians rather than dismiss them as terfs or … not queer enough?
(This is not meant to imply I don’t care about the hardships of the scores of “trans” teenage girls themselves. I absolutely do, having been one for several years.)
I’m gonna give you all another reminder that @/fandersunite on tumblr and Instagram is an ace and aro exclusionist. Thought it would be good to let you all know, now that pride month has rolled around and they’re already been hi jacking ace/aro positivity posts. Stay safe my lovelies.
a history of @/fandersunite being ace/aro-exclusionary (with bonus transphobia):
i know she is incredibly popular in the ts fandom but her comments are harmful. on tumblr, we are more active in lgbt+ issues, but on instagram, people are taking her comments as a representation of community as a whole.
she is severely misinformed on trans and ace issues, which is dangerous for her young audience. i hope she learns but til then i’ll be avoiding interacting with her.
this isnt my normal post type but im rlly fucking sick of the exclusion of nb people from trans spaces. i go thru a lot of the same struggles as binary trans people, and struggles that r unique to nb people yet i, and other enbies, r considered “not trans enough”. its hurtful to see other trans people, people who should understand ur struggle, exclude u from a place u belong in
[edit: not all nb people identify as trans and that is okay!! pls just include nb people who do identify as trans in ur trans spaces]
hey lmao i changed my name to gus/reno and also im a tucute and use neopronouns and i dont reeaally feel like using this account ever again but if you’re chill with me i run an active (we have like. 40 people) discourse server and im potentially looking for a new mod or two
uhh, hi! i made a discourse server! again! because i want to be active in this stuff without the toxicity of tumblr beyond me!
i’ll make an official post soon but it’s still in its baby stages so ;;;
everyone is welcome! we have multiple fun bots, discourse channels, channels to show your art or your pets or the like, etc. feel free to promo this to your friends! keep in mind that we do have measures in place to prevent raids.
In a year, their fucking waiting lists for the NHS Gender Identity Clinic have gone from 12 months to 24 months, due to “An increase of illegitimate cases”, referrals for people that are made to the Gender Identity Clinic, which go through the entire system, get an appointment and aren’t even actually trans. The clinic has to see these people anyway, at least once, which takes up valuable appointments for real trans people in desperate need.
This is the sort of shit I mean when I say that transtrenders are stealing resources. I don’t mean “oh boo hoo they’re taking our binders”, I mean you’re taking up our appointment spaces for no reason, denying people the healthcare they need all because you want to be a real trans boy uwu
am i the only one who thinks that the concept of “internalized bigotry” the way some of y’all throw it around is just…fancy gaslighting? like regardless of what the term originally meant (and i realize that it’s being misused), telling a trans person that they have “internalized transphobia” just because they’re transmed or telling a woman that she has “internalized misogyny” just because she doesn’t consider herself to be a feminist is…really fucked up.
like shockingly enough, minorities are not a hive mind. we don’t agree with each other on everything. someone holding a different opinion than you is not the same as racism, sexism, homophobia etc and to act like minorities are incapable of forming different opinions on their own without the influence of their oppressors is so fucking condescending.
unpopular opinion but we should make hrt and surgery easier to get, not harder. informed consent should be an option for all fully-informed adults and it really doesn’t matterthat a handful of trendy cis people might take advantage of that and transition when they don’t need to.
like sorry but i’ll prioritize giving trans people access to the healthcare they need over protecting stupid people from their own bad decisions any day. i can’t believe that’s even a question.
i can honestly say with absolute certainty that i’d be dead without informed consent and like seriously, i can’t fathom why so many of y’all wanna shoot yourselves in the foot in the name of “protecting” tucutes from getting dysphoria.
like some of you really care more about the tucutes you claim to dislike than you care about yourselves and your trans siblings and it really shows. it also sucks.
like if your bio has ‘truscum don’t interact’ in it but you go out of your way to interact with truscum first then like…i Really Don’t Know What to Tell You.
Trans medicalism is a pseudoscience based on TERF rethoric & outdated studies, it deserves to be met with the same amount of skepticism and dismissal as the anti vaxx & flat earth pseudosciences. Send tweet.
Honestly, anyone who uses they/them and also binary pronouns are probably just straight up trans/cis.
If you are fine with your AGAB pronouns as well as they/them, you’re probably just cis.
If you’re fine with the pronouns opposite of your AGAB as well as they/them, you’re probably just trans.
Being fine with they/them in general doesn’t mean you are nonbinary. It just makes you normal.
(This post does not include people who only use they/them pronouns)
You put it into words.
Also cis people who say they go by any pronouns. It’s not that you go by any pronouns, it’s that you don’t experience dysphoria in being misgendered the way trans people do. My friend is a cis man but he dresses pretty neutral and has incredibly long hair so he often gets called a lady and such. It doesn’t bother him the way it does our other guy friend, who’s trans. He’s similar, his hairs on the longer side (nowhere near the other one’s tho) and he can be kinda feminine but when he gets misgendered? It hurts. Because he’s not cis.
Trumeds: We’re just protecting the community and real trans people! We’re just trying to help!
Also trumeds: *mass report dysphoric trans artists and activists to have their blogs taken down and get them post blocked for either disagreeing with them, or for being GNC in the “wrong way” and loving their transness (which they’ll take as “proof” of them being “trenders”)*
I’m extremely anti trumed, just in case you didn’t know
Smash the patriarchy. Clothing, presentation, makeup… it’s all for anyone.
I have sensory issues that prevent me from binding more than occasionally. I would like to not have bulging chest tissue, but most days I suck it up and wear a supportive bra because I feel it less than my more flattening options. I can’t pass no matter how much I imitate typical American male fashion and culture. I like pastels and have a doll face. I’m no less valid than any of my binary trans friends. My experience is totally different, yes, but that does not make it invalid.
Uncommon genders and pronouns do not affect binary trans people.
If some rando states that they “don’t take trans people seriously” and/or they “only listen to ‘good’ trans people”, then they are transphobic
If a doctor refuses to provide you with treatment because of their doubts or disdain for trans people, they are transphobic. They probably don’t care for your “binary trans status”.
There are no excuses, as a binary trans person, to cast the blame on other forms of trans people because you didn’t get what you need.
Hahah guess I can just call people transphobic now because they have a perfectly valid concern about stupid people who are inserting themselves in my community
ur not special dawg. Your concerns are not valid either. How tf is a person with an uncommon gender and uncommon pronouns gonna undermine your trans status, let alone prevent you from getting hormones or whatever? Did these people tell your psychiatrist to not give you hormones specifically? Did people with uncommon genders/pronouns hold your providers at gunpoint so they refuse you treatment?
No, you are complaining about non issues. A psychiatirist refusing to give treatment to trans people because of their “fears/concerns” is on them. Stop tryna pin that on people simply trying to live their lives. Ya dang transphobe.
Stop simping for cis people/rest of society when a ton of them don’t respect you. You being a transmed will not make you “more respected” by cis people. There are cis people who don’t care for trans lives, or at least, see you as a token trans friend to “prove tucutes wrong”, and that is not okay.
Why do you care so much about cis approval? Why die for people that won’t ride for you? Why do you expect trans people to fit this “mold” so YOU can look “appropriate” to the eyes of cis people?
It brings you down, and it brings other trans people down. No trans person deserves to feel “abnormal” because of transmeds striving for cis approval AND bringing down trans people that oppose transmedicalism/TERF ideology/transphobia.
trons maels weare wombyn skin constum to try & b us cuz thay awant a prussiun point & the trancults ltells them tis ok cuz they have “”””””””””””””fmele broan””””””””””””””””””””” lyk thats not the mots seist malarky i have ever herd but u sll fsll 4 it bevzuse ytong id s uclt
i see a lot of trans men and female nonbinaries often say things like “i face misogyny because people still see me as a woman! i don’t deny that!” but male nonbinaries and trans women would rather be caught dead than accept that they have male privilege … why is that
^ Adding the above answer to my request for clarification on what “male privilege” for trans women means here, as it would be too cumbersome to respond via replies.
So the simple answer to this is we don’t experience male privilege because we’re not men. We may have physiological similarities to cis men, and we may be socialized (often against our will) in similar ways, but as trans women we experience all of these things through a transfeminine lens. Nearly every single aspect of what is thought of as being a boy/man is intrinsically inseparable from this lived experience, and most advantages in this regard come with associated costs that outweigh them on the whole.
Biological advantages like not having to worry about getting pregnant, come not only with dysphoria and its associated mental health issues, but are also used as a bludgeon by society to “prove” we’re not “real” women. We are inundated with messaging, both through personal attacks and through society at large, that the ability to produce eggs and carry children is an intrinsic feature of womanhood (which is a damaging narrative to all women, obviously, but is harmful to trans women in much the same way as it is to cis women who do not have the ability to get pregnant.) Trans girls forced to go through “male” puberty experience increasingly severe dysphoria, suicidal ideation, and find it ever more difficult to pass which furthers ostracism.
Social advantages for being raised as male are more ephemeral, and are better described as “passing privilege” than male privilege. We are treated as boys/men not because we *are* boys/men, but because we *pass* as boys/men, and that preferential treatment largely vanishes the moment we come out as trans women. In fact, out trans women by and large face gendered oppression in similar ways to cis women, with things like violent victimization, sexual abuse, poverty, employment discrimination, wage gaps, etc. experienced at rates commensurate to or in some cases even higher than cis women. Further, passing for cis men is deeply traumatizing for most trans women, and is often done to avoid abuse, ostracism from family, or worse.
In the same way that I’m sure you wouldn’t consider a cis girl who passes for a boy to have male privilege, or a gay person who passes as straight while closeted to have heterosexual privilege, closeted trans women do not have male privilege. Privilege granted at the point of a gun and at the cost of denying who we are is no privilege at all. While I do not deny that trans women have some advantages, with all factors considered it clearly does not meet the bar to qualify for privilege in human society any more than the advantages associated with being a woman equate to female privilege.
Lastly I’ll say to your original point, I don’t really see trans women not having male privilege and trans men suffering from being perceived as women as being in fundamental opposition, it’s all a function of cisnormative patriarchal forces that value manhood and devalue anyone perceived as not being a part of that. However, as I am not a trans man (similar with non-binary people) I can’t fully speak to their experience, so I will leave it there for others to weigh in.
what is a man? what is a woman?
i am aware that dysphoria is a real and debilitating condition, but why does incongruence between the mind and the body warrant the denial of social conditioning based on biology? trans women didn’t grow up being taught how to “become women” which is NOT something to envy. little girls are forced into femininity, face discrimination and bias in school (and, depending on geographical location, are denied the right to an education because of their sex), are face cat calling and street harassment from pre-puberty ages, etc. the descent from girlhood into womanhood is something that the vast, vast majority of trans women do not experience because of the ages of their transitions. childhood socialization is incredibly difficult to unlearn and becomes a core part of ourselves. while girls are going through this, boys (referring to male children including trans women) are taught to be strong and smart and powerful. they are masculinized, which gnc boys find undoubtedly uncomfortable, but it is true that they grow up learning that they are worth more than girls and they do not face systemic and interpersonal misogyny.
male privilege is an axis of oppression that exists outside of our minds. i am white, and i am also an immigrant. i face discrimination due to my immigrant status and i do not have the same internal thoughts and beliefs as a huge majority of white americans, but that does not erase my white privilege. when my whiteness grants me privilege i am uncomfortable because i know i am not the intended benefactor of this privilege—many of my family are refugees and we escaped our home country because of extreme poverty. this does not erase the privilege i have when people are unaware of my immigrant status. i am still white. trans women are still male.
trans girls are not forced to go through male puberty, they simply do—it is a sign that their bodies are working properly.
and honestly? masculine girls who can pass as men and gay people who can pass as straight do not have privilege in the same way that male humans have male privilege. a masculine woman (such as myself) has still undergone female socialization. everyone in our lives knows we are women. we are treated as such. i also choose to dress myself up and lie about being a lesbian when i’m around extended family members and in my work environment, because it’s easier. this does not change the fact that i grew up being told that i, as a woman, must like men. heteronormativity has been a part of my daily life since the moment i was born. male children aren’t taught that they can’t be women—they are taught that they are better than women. there is a difference.
i do think that trans women who pass as women face misogyny. i do think that violence against trans people is abhorrent and trans people have a right to safety. what i do not think is that feelings are more important than biological and social truths. i also do not think gender should be a part of our society; whoever seeks to uphold it is a misogynist.
A woman is a person of female gender, vice versa for a man. And respectfully, it’s clear that there is a fundamental ideological difference between us on how that is defined, so I’m not particularly interested in arguing the point.
I agree that the way cis girls are forced into womanhood is not something to envy. It is oppression, I never stated otherwise. Further, I agree that boys are taught to be strong and smart and powerful. That they are better. The difference here is, once again, that trans women are not boys. We were never boys. We were trans girls perceived as boys, who are taught that this idealized male version of ourselves is strong and powerful. But that person is not *us*. We are “lesser”, lesser in some cases even than cis women but most certainly lesser than cis men. We are an imposter. We speak the truth at our own peril, a peril which often includes abuse. Homelessness. Conversion therapy. Murder.
How does our internalized power, our inherent privilege, actually manifest in society? Not by preferential treatment in employment. Not by being favored for governmental positions. Not by an increased likelihood to avoid poverty, to avoid being sexually abused or fetishized or forced into the sex trade to survive. Not by better opportunities for education. Not by preferential treatment in the eyes of the law.
We only have access to those things if we stay in the closet. And being forced to deny who we are to get benefits does not equate to privilege any more than a cis lesbian “just marrying a man” to pass as straight equates to heterosexual privilege. We are not boys who just decide one day to become women, we are women, and our journey to recognizing this within ourselves is as unique and varied as a gay person’s journey to recognizing their sexuality. Neither is diminished by not understanding ourselves until a later age, especially when the ways society, family and peers seek to deny our identities are completely outside of our control.
You claim that denying this is adhering to biological and social reality, but to do so you have to completely ignore our social reality and lived experiences, otherwise it falls flat. I’m not saying these things to minimize the oppression of cis women, but to show that we are both being oppressed along the same axis but in different ways. Our oppressors are the same, and always have been.
I don’t expect you to agree, again because of the fundamental ideological differences between us. My goal was to explain why trans women do not feel that we experience male privilege with good faith arguments, which I hope you can agree that I have done.
Some followup points since this is winding long:
* Cis girls being raised and socialized as boys, with their true identities kept secret from friends and close family absolutely is something that happens! It doesn’t mean they have male privilege, any more than trans women do.
* Likewise, trans girls *are* sometimes forced to go through male puberty, as gender affirming care is restricted in many areas of the world. Several states in the US are taking great efforts to do so by passing laws to forcibly detransition all trans kids in their jurisdiction. Our bodies are doing what our hormones tell them to do, but it doesn’t mean those things are right in all cases, and it is standard medical practice to make adjustments were necessary.
* Biological reality is far more complex than we once thought, as decades of medical research into gender affirming care has shown. There is a reason why every major international medical organization endorses gender affirming care for trans people: because it works the vast majority of the time.
i am interested in arguing that point though—what is the female gender? why do you think gender should exist?
how can trans women not go through male socialization if so many of them don’t come out for years, often decades? socialization is how we are treated by society, not how we feel about the way we are treated by society
bio women are also at an increased risk for homelessness and murder—in fact, one thing that led me to gender abolition was how many trans women are being prostituted/trafficked. i know that gender identity does play a role in how society treats people and i don’t think anyone should have to be a victim of violence or trafficking for any reason—the concept of gender/gender roles is the oldest and most deeply ingrained system of violence that exists in the world. why anyone would want to contribute to it is beyond me
you still say that trans women are women without giving me a concrete definition for what a woman is. someone of the female gender makes no sense because female is a biological category, not a gender. would trans women still be women in a hypothetical alternate universe where gender and gender roles do not exist?
i do agree that that trans women may feel that they don’t have male privilege—that is exactly why i made the original post. of course life is hard for you—i never said it isn’t. but the way we perceive things is not usually the way things really are. trans women who do not pass or who are in the closet are treated better by society and that is a fact. when i choose to pass as straight i am treated better but it would be illogical to say that i have privilege because i am still denied the rights to life in multiple countries, would be shunned by some family members, only recently got the right to vote, etc. these are concrete, material reality. gender as something separate from sex is a fickle and fluid thing that no one can ever give a good definition for and everyone “experiences differently.” we can talk about rates of violence and abuse towards trans women while acknowledging that they also live in a society that values males
and every major medical organization endorses transitioning because it is a huge source of money. trust scientists but also have critical thinking skills about the economic state of the world
It’s not a matter of whether I think gender should exist. It’s that the cultural notion that sex and gender identity are both a.) binary and b.) easily divisible into entirely biological and entirely social does not match our current understanding of human development. This is reflected not only by studies of very young trans children whose behaviors are almost entirely indistinct from their cisgender counterparts, but also by the dissonance experienced by both transgender people AND cisgender people who had their sex non-consensually reassigned in infancy, which in both cases can express itself both as positive knowledge or through discomfort (of varying degrees) with one’s apparent sex. The purely ideological belief that there is no innate sense of gender rooted in biology means that this is a topic that, in my experience, we would typically go round and round with no hope of reaching an agreement… which is why I said that I’m not interested in rehashing that experience.
Note that this is different from gender roles and gender-based discrimination, both of which we all agree should be abolished! But trans women are not gender roles, there are many butch trans women, androgynous trans women, etc. Many do follow cultural feminine norms, but this is because we exist in society and are subject to the same pressures as everyone else (along with additional pressure to “pass” to avoid transphobic harassment.) In a future world where gender roles no longer exist, trans women would still be women, and would ideally have easier access to more advanced treatments that will resolve the mind/body incongruence in a way that makes their outward sex indistinguishable from both their sense of self and cisgender members of said sex. But their social lives and their roles in society would be whatever they wanted them to be, just the same as cis women.
Your replies thus far have constantly skirted around the points that the purported privilege received while closeted is functionally indistinguishable from the way straight privilege is temporarily “granted” to closeted gay people (after all, are gay kids not socialized as straight, taught that being straight was superior, morally righteous and the de facto norm?), and that this purported “male” privilege does not offer a meaningful systemic advantage to trans women in modern societies in which trans people are consistently amongst the most marginalized minorities, with no institutional power to speak of. Without that, how can you make the claim that we experience gender-based privilege, much less male privilege?
I readily acknowledge that society favors males. What society does not do, however, is favor out trans women, or treat them as males in a way that can meaningfully be described as privilege outside of certain edge cases. Because, again, trans women also experience the concrete, material realities of being shunned, being killed, and of having rights restricted in many areas of the world. Hell, in the US many trans women alsodidn’t have the right to vote until half a century *after* white women!
Lastly to address your final paragraph:
“and every major medical organization endorses transitioning because it is a huge source of money. trust scientists but also have critical thinking skills about the economic state of the world”
This is a thought-terminating cliche, because it doesn’t meaningfully address the argument that gender affirming care is the only treatment that actually works for trans people. All it does is give you ideological cover to ignore scientific consensus and the efficacy of these treatments, in much the same way as anti-vaccine or climate science denial does.
i see a lot of trans men and female nonbinaries often say things like “i face misogyny because people still see me as a woman! i don’t deny that!” but male nonbinaries and trans women would rather be caught dead than accept that they have male privilege … why is that
^ Adding the above answer to my request for clarification on what “male privilege” for trans women means here, as it would be too cumbersome to respond via replies.
So the simple answer to this is we don’t experience male privilege because we’re not men. We may have physiological similarities to cis men, and we may be socialized (often against our will) in similar ways, but as trans women we experience all of these things through a transfeminine lens. Nearly every single aspect of what is thought of as being a boy/man is intrinsically inseparable from this lived experience, and most advantages in this regard come with associated costs that outweigh them on the whole.
Biological advantages like not having to worry about getting pregnant, come not only with dysphoria and its associated mental health issues, but are also used as a bludgeon by society to “prove” we’re not “real” women. We are inundated with messaging, both through personal attacks and through society at large, that the ability to produce eggs and carry children is an intrinsic feature of womanhood (which is a damaging narrative to all women, obviously, but is harmful to trans women in much the same way as it is to cis women who do not have the ability to get pregnant.) Trans girls forced to go through “male” puberty experience increasingly severe dysphoria, suicidal ideation, and find it ever more difficult to pass which furthers ostracism.
Social advantages for being raised as male are more ephemeral, and are better described as “passing privilege” than male privilege. We are treated as boys/men not because we *are* boys/men, but because we *pass* as boys/men, and that preferential treatment largely vanishes the moment we come out as trans women. In fact, out trans women by and large face gendered oppression in similar ways to cis women, with things like violent victimization, sexual abuse, poverty, employment discrimination, wage gaps, etc. experienced at rates commensurate to or in some cases even higher than cis women. Further, passing for cis men is deeply traumatizing for most trans women, and is often done to avoid abuse, ostracism from family, or worse.
In the same way that I’m sure you wouldn’t consider a cis girl who passes for a boy to have male privilege, or a gay person who passes as straight while closeted to have heterosexual privilege, closeted trans women do not have male privilege. Privilege granted at the point of a gun and at the cost of denying who we are is no privilege at all. While I do not deny that trans women have some advantages, with all factors considered it clearly does not meet the bar to qualify for privilege in human society any more than the advantages associated with being a woman equate to female privilege.
Lastly I’ll say to your original point, I don’t really see trans women not having male privilege and trans men suffering from being perceived as women as being in fundamental opposition, it’s all a function of cisnormative patriarchal forces that value manhood and devalue anyone perceived as not being a part of that. However, as I am not a trans man (similar with non-binary people) I can’t fully speak to their experience, so I will leave it there for others to weigh in.
