Controversial opinion: Trans women are not "male women".

Hope this helps!

Turbo-nuclear take: "Trans woman" is not a different gender from "cis woman".

Take at which we can achieve nuclear fusion: "woman of color" is also not a different gender from "cis woman".

If women of color are so "masculinized", if we are so Indelibly Associated with Maleness, then why are we hypersexualized and treated as disposable sex objects by a white-hegemonic patriarchal culture? Does our fetishization as "highly submissive" register as particularly male to you? Does the proliferation of beauty industry trends fixated on commodifying our features and making them surgically available to white women seem like we are being distanced from womanhood?

If "trans women face so much pressure to change their bodies", why do clinics stonewall and refuse to prescribe us the treatment we desperately need, and why do doctors UNDER-PRESCRIBE HRT to us, or refuse to cover top surgery for trans women?

Think, Tumblr, think!

I will state, plainly, that this site is so transmisogynistic, even its acceptance of transfemininity is transmisogynistic.

Tumblr hates women. Hates women and womanhood. It views being a woman as boring, un-hip, conformist, regressive, and 'patriarchal' or 'male gaze'.

Every time I see a post that is transfem-positive, it is almost always couched in casting trans women as Male Women, as avatars of gender-ambiguity, as a "masculine womanhood".

Best of both worlds, eh?

You are The Misogyny Site, and even your supposed 'acceptance' of us is poisoned swill.

And you will never unpack or do anything about the rampant transmisogyny on this site for as long as you are dominated by a culture that insists on womanhood as something to abhor and distance yourself from at all costs.

Controversial opinion: Trans women are not "male women".

Hope this helps!

Turbo-nuclear take: "Trans woman" is not a different gender from "cis woman".

Take at which we can achieve nuclear fusion: "woman of color" is also not a different gender from "cis woman".

If women of color are so "masculinized", if we are so Indelibly Associated with Maleness, then why are we hypersexualized and treated as disposable sex objects by a white-hegemonic patriarchal culture? Does our fetishization as "highly submissive" register as particularly male to you? Does the proliferation of beauty industry trends fixated on commodifying our features and making them surgically available to white women seem like we are being distanced from womanhood?

If "trans women face so much pressure to change their bodies", why do clinics stonewall and refuse to prescribe us the treatment we desperately need, and why do doctors UNDER-PRESCRIBE HRT to us, or refuse to cover top surgery for trans women?

Think, Tumblr, think!

Controversial opinion: Trans women are not "male women".

Hope this helps!

Turbo-nuclear take: "Trans woman" is not a different gender from "cis woman".

Take at which we can achieve nuclear fusion: "woman of color" is also not a different gender from "cis woman".

society demands hyperfemininity from trans women, then if we do it wrong we're mocked and belittled and if we do it right we're "reinforcing gender stereotypes"

genuinely gobsmacked that a white guy called me “trans girly eva braun” because my puerto rican girlfriend politely asked him to stop spreading misinformation about who is getting deported & being intellectually dishonest about why. and he assumed that my fiancee was me because he saw her pinned post about my immigration fund. and now he’s posting vile transmisogynistic creeds about how nobody wants to donate to me because im ugly and just spend all my money on makeup and clothes. and now he’s calling me a sexual abuser because somebody said something to the level of “she’s not gonna fuck you bro” in his inbox and, of course, he is blaming it on me.

unless something’s changed since he started having his temper tantrum, he categorically wasn’t getting sent death threats and sexual harassment. what he called death threats (later eugenics, later nazism) is somebody sent him “fix your heart or die”. what he called sexual harassment is somebody sending him “she’s not gonna fuck you”

i think it goes without saying that if you’re publicly lying about a trans woman calling her a sexual predator etc. based on unrelated anons, you are in fact sexually harassing her not the other way around.

I see Tumblr has only become more normal about trans women since I last checked

Death Of The Woman

Originally posted on the Dolphin Diaries substack.

The following essay is not my usual fare. It’s my personal story as a detrans woman, and as such, it will lack in abstracted theory or argumentation. After this I will be publishing a special interview, and then I’ll return to my usual programming.

For now though, be advised this isn’t quite light reading material. There is some cursory description of sexual violence. If you do not feel like you can engage with that, skip from the paragraph beginning “At one point, …” to the next titled section.

This is a beautiful and moving piece from Emma, about the crossing and re-crossing of gendered boundaries under patriarchal regimes that seek to narrow the possibilities of what we can and should aspire to. Please give it a read.

a) Emma is a woman

b) As much as we are both radical lesbian feminists who vibe with Wittig, down to the ejection of lesbians from womanhood and the third-sexing inherent to the gender hierarchy, we are also cognizant of our womanization and legibility as women under patriarchy.

c) Patrick Califia is a trans man ... and neither of us is a huge fan of his writings, I must say.

This isn't exactly the first time someone with otherwise positive impressions of my writing has said something that implies that I'm either not a woman or it's unfortunate that I am one. Which is particularly strange in response to Death Of The Woman, where I document painstakingly navigating the desire to be a lesbian woman in a world that denies them and erases their struggle with placing themselves among women.

Like I don't think you all understand what a nonbinary woman is, frankly.

It's great if you don't want to be a woman at all or you like Patrick Califia's writing (the ones where he's not defending NAMBLA, anyway--that one's not okay to like) and you also relate to my writing, but you don't have to grieve for the hypothetical transmasculine-me that would've been so much better off than woman-me, thanks. Or misgender me, for that matter. My pronouns are the literal first thing in my bio, and if you don't care to check that, they're literally discussed in my essay--use your head, please.

Death Of The Woman

Originally posted on the Dolphin Diaries substack.

The following essay is not my usual fare. It’s my personal story as a detrans woman, and as such, it will lack in abstracted theory or argumentation. After this I will be publishing a special interview, and then I’ll return to my usual programming.

For now though, be advised this isn’t quite light reading material. There is some cursory description of sexual violence. If you do not feel like you can engage with that, skip from the paragraph beginning “At one point, …” to the next titled section.

This is a beautiful and moving piece from Emma, about the crossing and re-crossing of gendered boundaries under patriarchal regimes that seek to narrow the possibilities of what we can and should aspire to. Please give it a read.

a) Emma is a woman

b) As much as we are both radical lesbian feminists who vibe with Wittig, down to the ejection of lesbians from womanhood and the third-sexing inherent to the gender hierarchy, we are also cognizant of our womanization and legibility as women under patriarchy.

c) Patrick Califia is a trans man ... and neither of us is a huge fan of his writings, I must say.

Hey, everyone remember this nonsense dropped into the discourse years ago? So incredible that it’s ultimately being used against trans people now by the Alliance Defending Freedom and James Dobson-funded Women’s Liberation Front to claim trans people appropriated language and experiences from intersex people.

Maybe it’s cool if people don’t try to disrupt an entire community based on their own misunderstandings and assumptions, especially not in ways that exploit social justice language to a point that people will eagerly jump on and defend it because it sounds right even if it’s not factually correct.

What is factually correct here is:

So this discourse has hung around like a bad smell, picking up awareness among none other than terfs and their religious right allies, who have repeatedly ordered trans people to stop using AMAB and AFAB, to stop saying that sex is assigned at birth, and to claim that trans people are simply stealing from intersex people to validate their own experiences. That this discourse was itself adopted to deprive trans people of language to describe trans experiences.

And today, the Women’s Liberation Front released this statement, declaring “no confidence” for the leaders of the “LGB” movement.

Among other things, this statement reiterates the claims thatswhatkentsaid made in August 2011, and expands upon them based on the discourse thatswhatkentsaid inspired by taking shots at trans people for no other reason than not understanding the terminology in the first place and refusing to listen when trans people tried to explain.

This is who WoLF actually is. A far right evangelical front claiming to be “radical feminists” that have adopted terf arguments.

I’m not trying to reclaim anything here. The whole CAMAB/CAFAB thing is pretty much over and most people accept it for intersex people. But, really, please, discourse fucking responsibly and don’t use it to attack marginalized groups for shady reasons in the future, thank you very much.

Also, congratulations on getting your transphobic discourse ~appropriated~ by actual fascists. That’s really a great outcome, ain’t it?

Death Of The Woman

Originally posted on the Dolphin Diaries substack.

The following essay is not my usual fare. It’s my personal story as a detrans woman, and as such, it will lack in abstracted theory or argumentation. After this I will be publishing a special interview, and then I’ll return to my usual programming.

For now though, be advised this isn’t quite light reading material. There is some cursory description of sexual violence. If you do not feel like you can engage with that, skip from the paragraph beginning “At one point, …” to the next titled section.

This is a beautiful and moving piece from Emma, about the crossing and re-crossing of gendered boundaries under patriarchal regimes that seek to narrow the possibilities of what we can and should aspire to. Please give it a read.

Trans/Rad/Fem by Talia Bhatt

goodreads

Second-Wave feminism is, today, nearly synonymous with ‘transphobia’. Any mention of this era or the movement of ‘radical feminism’ conjures images of feminists allying with right-wingers and the authoritarian state, providing legal justification for outlawing gender-affirming care and spreading deeply evil caricatures of trans women to rationalize their exclusion as feminist subjects. In the ensuing struggle to reconcile trans rights with feminism, the specter of the trans-exclusionary radical feminist has often reared its head in opposition. One may be tempted to conclude that the Second Wave, as a whole, has done irreparable harm to feminist, queer and trans politics, and must be discarded entirely.

But is that truly the case?

Radical feminism also is responsible for repudiating bioessentialistic notions of gender with theories that place it as a firmly social phenomenon. It gave us the language to describe patriarchy as a regime of mandatory heterosexual existence and dared to dream of a post-gender existence long before anyone spoke the phrase “breaking the binary”. Modern transfeminism owes much to radical feminist theory, and despite all propaganda to the contrary, the two schools of thought may be far more allied than believed.

This series of essays aims to reconstruct and reintroduce the radical feminist framework that its misbegotten inheritors seem determined to forget and in doing so boldly makes the claim that transfeminism, far from being antagonistic to radical feminism, is in fact its direct descendant. It shows how a comprehensive social theory of transsexual oppression flows almost naturally from radical feminist precepts and dares to declare that a materialist, radical transfeminism is the way forward to seize the foundations of patriarchy at the root.

I do think the whole "look at what you made me do" tone that Tumblr TERFs take the second they've been slightly challenged is incredibly ironic, given that they present themselves as being opposed to abusers.

The central TERF derangement is a flat denial of the idea that they could ever have any experiences in common with trans woman, that trans women face "authentic misogyny", or that there are any situations at all where trans women could be subject to more violence than cis women.

It's very Raymondian, at its core: Cis womanhood is more Real than trans womanhood, and trans women's claims to commonalities with cis women is both 'delusional' and 'demeans' the 'value' of cis womanhood.

A sneering disavowal via spitting on the ground, "I'm nothing like you, and your suffering has nothing to do with mine. You suffering isn't even REAL. You chose it, I didn't."

And you know, sure. Enjoy your cope.

Degendering and Racialization

"racialized cis women face transmisogyny" has two glaring issues.

1. For women of color, *degendering* has always been a vector of dehumanization; the modern trans panic only gave new language to an extant phenomenon.

2. Crucially, it forgets about trans women of color.

Read my latest:

[“Though third-sexing and degendering are mechanisms that patriarchal reactionaries understand and deploy intuitively, their schema of sex as dichotomous only allows them to call their targets “men” when attempting to exclude someone from the category “woman”. (Even as misogynists fully understand the purpose of gender as a social disciplining tool, they must safeguard the fiction of ‘immutable’, ‘binary’ sex, leaving a not-woman or a failed-woman to be called a perverse, violent man.) As noted, this is not ‘masculinization’, the elevation to the social role of ‘man’, but rather dehumanization, bestialization, brutification—the construction of a target as a brutish, primitive, animalistic threat to ‘real women’ that can and indeed must be put down. While the patriarchy’s ‘protectionism’ over women-as-a-resource is largely a fiction—reproductive assets are claimed, jealously guarded, and exploited, not ‘protected’—the purpose of racialized degendering is to exclude women of color from even that flimsy heterosexual contract and leave them only fit for brutalization and/or violent consumption.”]

Indirectly transmisogyny-affected cis woman (she cares so much about her many friends who are trans women and the transmisogyny they all face is affecting her a lot)

this is half of my friend circle lel

Degendering and Racialization

"racialized cis women face transmisogyny" has two glaring issues.

1. For women of color, *degendering* has always been a vector of dehumanization; the modern trans panic only gave new language to an extant phenomenon.

2. Crucially, it forgets about trans women of color.

Read my latest:

Another Talia Bhatt banger, right here