A great deal of popular social justice theory online is committed to obfuscating both the history and mechanics of transmisogyny as a form of oppression, and it’s pretty clear a major function of this is to maintain dominance over transfems as a source of labor. Transfems lean heavily toward doing spiritual work, care work, advocacy and activism work, or creative/artistic work, all of which involve some kind of audience or service and often needing to be approved of by a community that could just as easily expel us.

I feel really frustrated when people try to attack my philosophy in ways that show they aren’t even familiar with it and haven’t done due diligence to understand what it is. A simple example is when I gather it’s being said “May Peterson insists anti-transmasculinity doesn’t exist”

When I talked about “anti-transmasculine transphobia” and defined features of it long before I saw almost anyone else doing so

It’s true that some negative perceptions of manhood and masculinity do reflect and flow into the same conditions that produce transmisogyny, it’s just that “misandry” is a very poor philosophical method of explaining that. 🧵 Mainly because it isn’t a method. “Misandry” is an atheoretical, commonsense piece of vernacular that has no clear, consistent philosophical meaning.

This tweet is not biphobic. A number of people are being very unkind to Ash about this and putting words in their mouth, and that’s the same behavior we’re talking about needing to stop against transfems, especially transfems of color.

Ash is making a very good point.

https://twitter.com/bloomfilters/status/1666520122289168388

It’s the same phenomenon I was talking about here:

https://twitter.com/maidensblade/status/1665085024322875392?s=20

It seems like transfems naming transmisogyny gets framed a lot as “transfems vs transmascs” whereas blaming transfems for being divisive or calling us bullies does not get framed that way The “vs” seems pretty important that way, because it suggests that at most it’s a lateral conflict.

“Transfems are bullying other trans people” on the other hand suggests that we’re somehow punching down

I can point out a great reason that intra-community transmisogyny needs to be resisted:

If it goes unchecked long enough, it tends to mature into full-blown fascism. *gestures at the entire TERF movement, at the alt-right, at queer conservatives*

I think it’s really important to stop trying to locate the source of transmisogyny as within feminism, or to define transmisogyny in the way it shows up among transphobic feminists. Yes there is a feminist expression of transmisogyny, but it’s far from being the primary one, the most harmful one, or the original one.

Looking at the trend of queer people selecting for "AFAB only" housing, I think a reason trans guys respond by saying that can hurt trans men too—barely mentioning it's explicitly targeting transfems—is because for years that's how everyone has learned to talk about transmisogyny I say A reason. Yes, unconscious transmisogynistic bias is part of this, but part of my point is that this transmisogynistic bias is something social justice actively teaches people, on purpose, because that's the general form activism-speak takes when something targets transfems

This thing where people argue that pro-transfem feminism and anti-transfem feminism are equally TERFy is such great evidence that the term TERF has lost all specific meaning in popular discourse. The fact that one of trans peoples' go-to ways of attacking trans women is to call us TERFs is exactly the dynamic my earlier thread was talking about. The way to justify marginalization of transfems is to frame us as the oppressor in whatever anti-oppression framework you use.

There are several different anti-oppression traditions that tend to focus each on a different key oppressor, and one of the features of transmisogyny is that TME people in those different traditions will tend to express transmisogyny by likening transfems to the key oppressor.

https://twitter.com/maidensblade/status/1665808621047775235

Likening us to men is the modus operandi of FEMINISTS who are transmisogynistic, because feminism focuses on men as the oppressor, and people have learned to start spotting this one.

That doesn't mean manhood is the only attribution of threat trans women endure.

One of the most insidious impacts of the TERF movement is the illusion a lot of people now believe that hatred of trans women, and oppression of trans women by other oppressed people, is unique to feminism or unique to highly privileged women.

https://twitter.com/maidensblade/status/1665802137110970374

There is certainly misogyny involved in this but understand it's primarily misogyny against trans women that allows for this illusion, because of the distinctions of TERFs is how loud and explicit they've been in their expressions of transmisogyny.

I don't wanna keep spending so much energy talking about transmisogyny theory, but I do think one of the most important things we all need to understand about it is that there *isn't presently a movement for trans women that has an influence anywhere.* There is a larger trans movement to fight transphobia, grown out of the original queer movement, but understand that this movement most people are familiar with doesn't really have a transmisogyny analysis or prioritize protecting transfems from intra-community oppression.

Y’all for the past 5 days I have been obsessed with the Rapunzel’s Tangled Adventure soundtrack and I have zero regrets concerning this Like I'm sorry but look at this??? This unexpectedly gay energy????

I think about this every time I see a case of trans women being targeted with some ghastly violence or discrimination that involves a trope that implicates another group, and the trope is treated as worse than the violence

https://twitter.com/maidensblade/status/1493622979728752642

A really common one is stuff like “trans women are bad because they’re male-bodied” with the reply being “wow, so you’re saying trans men aren’t male-bodied and thus not men? And that marginalized cis men must be bad? This is so harmful to marginalized people!”

I see this as the common thread between the futa discourse and other similar topics:

There's a pattern of queer people adopting cultural and aesthetic markers of trans women without adopting solidarity with trans women.
🧵 Trans womanhood has a strong existence in the imagination of cis heterosexual society, and this has been true for generations. I remember encountering this as a young child and later realizing that we were all being trained to recognize and hate/fear the kind of person that I am.

Been thinking lots lately about the kinship between transfems and butches I mean like

1. They’re both awesome

I feel like, very slowly, I am finally learning to protect myself and see myself as someone worthy of protection, and that shift in attitude feels so big it’s like even my everyday sensory experience of myself is becoming different I was looking back earlier after talking about trauma in therapy, and reflecting on how pretty much as soon as I was old enough to talk, I started experience violence from both other kids and from adults, violence I had no way of stopping

My bear god is so cute and precious. He is absolutely incapable of going out for an errand without bringing me home a snack or some kinds. On any given week he could go to work, go get car repairs done, do grocery shopping, etc, and always bring me home cookies, bagels, muffins, chicken strips, a variety of other things, and pretty much never needing to be asked.

This! One of the big problems, much as Ash is saying here, is that treating these identities as fundamentally different and unintelligible to each other also conceals their shared struggle and suffering, as well as the responsibility of the rest of the world in that suffering.

https://twitter.com/bloomfilters/status/1663664563072401410

A great deal of political discussion of trans women and other transmisogyny-affected cultural identities is a search for who is really to blame for our oppression, and the favored answer is usually not "all of us," but a more abstract or theoretical agent.

Person: "don't say these historical figures are trans women, that's assuming Western trans ideology is universal"

Same Person: "male-bodied crossdressers" The implicit value here is that cisness is non-ideological, culturally neutral, and natural, but that transness is the device of a particular modern movement with an agenda.

I loved The Little Mermaid so much as a young kid that I dreamed about it for months. If Ariel had been trans it would have meant more to me than I could say.

The idea of a young Black girl who likes mermaids getting to have her Ariel be Black is incredible. Seeing other white people be hostile to this strikes a tender place in me that still feels those childhood feelings, an almost infant self that sees this hostility as immense, senseless cruelty against little girls who have no power to hurt them .