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#I know trans women get harassed but that’s not the point
foldingfittedsheets · 1 month
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hey i get that you probably have your reasons for using 'afab' instead of 'woman' or something similar in your retail/sex shop/mattress store anecdote, but i wanted to point out people cannot tell assigned sex at birth by looking. many trans women also experience sexual harassment like what you describe even when people clock them. so im not sure 'afab' even covers what you were talking about fully.
I’m nonbinary but I appear female, and I’m only ever read as female. The point of using it there is just that what he saw was a tiny female even though that’s not what was there.
I’m not making a statement on how people read genders, but I’m not going to interrupt a funny story with a million disclaimers as to my intentions, I just trust that my readers are smart enough to know he was being sexist because of his interpretation of me.
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thedreadvampy · 1 year
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unwarranted Cis Opinion but I'm getting really uncomfortable w people responding to bathroom bills by posting pictures of trans men like DO YOU WANT THEM IN WOMEN'S BATHROOMS
bc like. no they're men. they should be in men's bathrooms unless that feels unsafe. but. it really feels like it's not helpful to lean into the idea that seeing someone presenting masc or being read as a man in a women's bathroom means You're In Danger.
like I know several butch women and NB ppl who are really scared around being on T or getting top surgery bc they're not men and they don't want to be in the men's bathroom, and in that circumstance stuff like growing facial hair or reading more androgynously can be really fucking scary when people are being primed by propaganda to be on edge and hyperreactive to anyone who doesn't look like their idea of a Cis Woman.
and I'm not laying that at the feet of the people saying "hey uhhhh trans men are men and don't belong in women's bathrooms" bc it is not their fault. it's the fault of a concerted effort to make it difficult and dangerous to be trans or substantively gender nonconforming in public.
but at the same time idk I guess it just worries me cause sometimes it feels like "you fools! you are worried about this group of trans people bc you think they're the Lurking Danger of Men In Bathrooms? WRONG! the Men Making You Feel Afraid In Bathrooms are actually THESE trans people!" when in fact neither of those groups using the fucking bathroom is a problem. just piss and mind your business. people need to go where they need to go.
anyway this country is a hot fucking trash fire that somehow accelerates its descent into open fascism more every day so it's all super good and normal. so don't take this too seriously tbh cause it's somewhere near #2535654476457899009765 on the list of priorities for Queer Discourse right now when the fucking human rights commission is actively rescinding protections from trans people. Please ignore my gibberish.
#red said#i get that the point is to follow their logic to its logical conclusion like SEE THE EFFECT IS THE OPPOSITE OF YOUR STATED INTENTIONS#but a) the lawmakers already know this tbf#and also b) ultimately you still do end up making a lot of tweets that look very very very like the original scaremongering abt trans ppl#and transphobes and ppl who are unfamiliar with trans stuff alike have repeatedly and consistently demonstrated either an unwillingness#or an inability. to understand the difference btw a trans man and a trans woman.#and meanwhile idk it does feel like most posts like this are tacitly reinforcing the idea that you SHOULD be scared of masc-presenting ppl#it's putting so much emphasis on clockability. and the truth is not everyone using the bathroom does or should have to pass perfectly.#if a trans woman who looks like one of these trans men needs to piss. a woman with stubble and short hair and muscly shoulders.#SHE HAS EVERY RIGHT TO PISS IN THE WOMEN'S BATHROOM. even if she doesn't look like a cis woman.#if a trans dude looks like a girl he still doesn't belong in the ladies unless he personally feels the need to go there for his safety#if someone is not actively bothering you harassing you or treating you with aggression it's not really any of your business is it#maybe that's a trans man. maybe that's a trans woman. maybe that's a woman or dyke on T. maybe that's a cis woman who just looks masculine.#who gives a shit? a key factor in ladies bathrooms is that they have fucking cubicles. unless someone is making it your business it's not.#and if they are then the problem isn't that they're the Wrong Sex/Gender it's that they're behaving badly/disrespectfully/threateningly#which is also a problem when cis women do it!!!!!
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br1ghtestlight · 25 days
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i do have more feminine clothes and sometimes i feel bad i dont wear them more (apart from them being summer clothes) but like..... when i go outside dressed more feminine people treat me worse?? and im in a more vunerable position for harassment etc and in general people are just assholes to me. doesnt happen when im dressed normally
maybe some of that is just the general attitude i give off and some of it is misogyny but either way idk why i would willingly subject myself to that. but i also feel BAD bcuz i have all these cute outfits i never get to wear!!!!! Have men considered being less shitty by any chance
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moesartblog · 30 days
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Ok tumblr I’m now begging
BEGGING
That you start treating these “ridiculous drama” scenarios that get boiled down to one sentence the same way you’ve helped people treat “frivolous” lawsuits against major corporations
Because it’s been several times now I’ve seen shit like “chili lady cancelled for sharing food?! The worlds gone mad!!” Without actually knowing the real conversation that was happening about that incident.
Same thing with the DoorDash shit recently
And let me tell you the vast majority of these situations involve disabled people sharing their thoughts and feelings on a topic, and so-called progressives going “you’re fucking re- I mean uh ridiculous! Who would think like this!? Entitled lazy fucks!”
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hellhoundlair · 6 months
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if i was hayden ethel cain i would sent anthrax to tumblr .com like the entire website
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gaogaigoatgrrl · 2 months
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i hope that in the wake of predstrogen/predesterone's back-to-back deletion we don't forget about the ongoing building wave of seemingly organic transmisogyny from the userbase leading up to it, some of which may or may not have been the result of terf psyops but all of which certainly wouldn't have been possible without the eager participation of a significant proportion of users, including but probably not limited to:
the entire concept of transandrophobia (if this offends you, think long and hard about why you want so badly for it to be real)
the ongoing backlash against the terms tme and tma (if they offend you, think long and hard about why they might have practical value to trans women and people with similar social positionality)
the ongoing trend of trans women's blogs getting flagged on the flimsiest of pretenses and generally receiving far more scrutiny for "adult content" than anyone else's
the seeming unironic revival of "baeddel" as a slur for outspoken trans women, on the basis of a long-dead clique that, ironically enough, self-applied the long-dead (and tbf, etymologically questionable) slur from the middle ages to reclaim it
the entire "trans women should be fucking trans men instead of complaining about transmisogyny" genre of post
the backlash when tgirls finally started calling out the aforementioned bullshit
the copypasted anons sent to several trans women (many of whom were lesbians) sexually harassing them and threatening corrective rape for calling out the aforementioned bullshit
the backlash when tgirls called the aforementioned bullshit sexual harassment
the expansion of flexible queer label use (which to be clear, i am generally all for) to include "afab trans women", muddying the waters and making transmisogyny harder to articulate
the backlash when tgirls started calling out the aforementioned bullshit
the aita incident in which a trans woman described a cis woman claiming to be a trans woman in a group chat and giving other trans women terrible medical advice based on no actual qualifications or experience, and got a huge backlash for warning them about the aforementioned bullshit despite the stakes of, you know, following terrible medical advice
everything from the sixth point onward happened within the past... week? two weeks? my sense of time is a bit fuzzy. who knows what the rest of this week has in store?
people on this website are so incredibly hostile to trans women even being able to name our own oppression, let alone resist it in any concrete way. and i know it's not just this website. don't you get tired of the crab bucket bullshit? holy fucking shit.
like, i've been lucky, i've overwhelmingly managed to dodge it (probably on account of frankly being a pretty boring and inconsistent poster). this time last year, i was actually bored that i didn't have anons in my inbox to argue with. but i've seen it happen to so many other women now, it's absurd. even if it never hits you personally, you can never shake the awareness that it's happening to so many of the cool girls on here, people you like and whose posts you laugh at and who you look up to. they just kinda seem to drop like flies over time. don't you get tired?
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sarasade · 5 months
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One of the most generally useful things to come out of Hbomberguy's plagiarism video and Todd in the Shadows' similar video on misinformation is how they bring transparency to the internet phenomenon of "I made up a guy to get mad at".
Seriously, I've seen people make up a lot of stupid shit on the internet over the years and it's often just a manipulative attempt to paint a group of marginalized people in a bad light.
That's the TL;DR version of this post. 
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ANYWAY here is the long version
Those videos are mostly about James Somerton's plagiarism of other queer people's work. However I'd like to talk about that 20-30% of Somerton's original writing- and oh boy. It's mostly about complaining about White Straight Women and misgendering well-known trans creators such as Rebecca Sugar and calling Becky Albertalli a straight woman while it's pretty common knowledge that she was forced to out herself as bi because she received so much harassment over "being a cishet woman who appropriates LGBT+ stories".
One thing that irks me especially is how in his Killing Stalking and Gay Shipping videos Somerton brings up how straight women/ teen girl shippers exploit gay men for their personal sexual fantasies. This gets brought up several times in his videos.
Being all up and arms about Somerton being a "White Cis Gay Who Hates Women and Queer People tm" is not that useful because the kind of rhetoric he's using is extremely common in fandom and LGBT+ spaces on Tumblr, TikTok and Twitter. We really don't need to bring Somerton's identity to this since he is in no way an unique example.
It's hypocritical to make this about an individual person when I've seen A TON of posts, tweets and videos where queer people talk about these Sinister Straight Women who are supposedly out there fetishizing and exploiting queer men. It's pretty clear to me that this is just an excuse to shit on women and queer people for having any sexual interests. At worst these comments are spreading misinformation about BL, a form of media that has been excessively studied by both Asian feminists and Asian queer women.
This all sounds really familiar and I think it's good that people are calling it out as what it is: misogyny and transphobia. I'd also point out the potentially racist motives behind being this hypervigilant about Asian media.
People can absolutely be misogynist regardless of gender or orientation. I really don't know why we need to create some kind of made up enemy to get mad at. I actually think it's almost sinister how "anti-fujoshi" people call Slash shippers and fujoshi misogynists or claim that they have internalised misogyny while being dismissive about women's interests and creative pursuits under Japanese obscenity laws, China's censorship, book bans in American schools and various other disadvances that are part of being a queer and/or female creator.
I think we shouldn't be naive about the bad faith actors who want to turn queer people against each other. For example Fujoshi.info mentions anti-gender (TERF, GC etc) movement using this kind of rhetoric as well.
Anyway if you want to read more:
- about the false info around BL fandom fujoshi.info
-There is the scholar Thomas Baudinette who studies gay media in Japan. Here is a podcast with him and the scholar Khursten Santos
-James Welker is a BL scholar as well. Here is a podcast interview about the new international BL article collection he edited.
-I've already talked about this Youtube channel by KrisPNatz and his great Killing Stalking video that actually engages with the themes of the manhwa
- There is also HR Coleman's thesis DO NOT FEED THE FETISHIZERS: BOYS LOVE FANS RESISTANCE AND CHALLENGE OF PERCEIVED REPUTATION where she interviews 36 BL fans and actually breaks down why fetishization has become such a huge talking point in the fandom discourse. Spoilers, it's mostly about young queer people and women being worried that they will get judged and pathologized for their interest in anything sexual.
-Great podcast about Danmei and censorship with Liang Ge
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txttletale · 6 months
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( i want to preface this by saying that im coming from a place of genuine confusion and wanting to learn, and if i say something rude please let me know/it is definitely not my intention ! ) i understand if you don't respond, but i'm kind of confused about the "being uncomfortable with incest/cnc/age-play (shortened to ICA for the purpose of this ask) kinks" is queerphobic post. in my own personal experience both online and offline, cishet couples where the woman calls her partner daddy are seen as cringey/uncomfortable. every person i've met who watches game of thrones has been made uncomfortable by the incest/doesn't support it. while i agree with the fact that kink is private business, i don't think the arguments provided are solid enough to say that being anti-ICA is exclusively queerphobic...? i feel like it more so has to do with structured discomfort. i do understand/agree that transfems are definitely under more scrutiny when it comes to kinks and fetishes, but i'm not sure if correlation equals causation here.
there is a huge jump between 'being uncomfortable' and the type of treatment that trans women online who are into Problematic Kinks™ get. nobody is asking you, personally, to be comfortable with everyone's kinks. my point is less that people are 'comforable' with the aformentioned mass-culture cishet expressions of these kinks, but that uncomfortable or not they do not respond to them with targeted mass sexual harassment, exile and ostracization from communities, and co-ordinated social murder campaigns. the cishet girl who calls her boyfriend daddy might be considered 'cringe' but she is not considered a dangerous predator who thousands of strangers need to be warned about and shown her private sexts so that everyone knows what a dangerous predator she is.
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butchmartyr · 2 months
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sometimes i get so frustrated about how many transmisogynistic users get reblogged despite their reliable-to-the-point-of-predictability episodes of vitriolic hostility against transfems or absolute lack of care in spreading hearsay about us that i think of making a big blocklist or callout, but its a foolish idea because callouts are only for making a spectacle and Other of someone in order to reinforce norms in the in group. transmisogyny callouts never spread to a large audience for this reason; as a rhetorical tool, they are not for enacting justice.
and even if they could, i stop myself, because they're a stupid way of trying to stop bigotry in the first place. we should be striving to be able to recognize bigoted rhetoric and challenge it ourselves, to stand with the marginalized in our communities, rather than making the victims have to point out The Bad Ones over and over since you can't see. and clearly, you can't see! because i cant hardly scroll this website and see an acquaintance reblog a post without recognizing op as either an open transmisogynistic themself, or a useful idiot for transmisogynists and spreading their callouts. (many of which included private pictures and nudes for "evidence" towards their evil kinks; to make this clear, revenge porn with a coat of progressive paint.)
but time and time again, nobody sees the problem when it happens to trans women. its all a pretense to voice preconceptions of disgust to trans women. they dont really believe that making shitty posts is equivalent to actual sexual abuse, just like they dont actually believe that wearing thigh highs is pedophile-coded, its all just excuses to hate trans women like they want to. for them, its just finding excuses to put in the keywords that turn peoples brains off and play into their bias. oh, sure, i cyberstalked literal years into her private nsfw blog to dig up that nude and match it with a selfie from her main and i put both in the callout im spreading around, but why would that be bad? dont you know she calls her girlfriend mommy in private sometimes? look, i did mental gymnastics to equate this consensual roleplay to real world harm, its totally pedo-incest coded! look, i said shes into raceplay apropos of nothing just to get people pissed at her, but you're not gonna check, right? why would spreading that and her nudes- sorry i mean evidence of her crimes to more strangers and exposing her to transphobes be bad? how can it be sexual harassment when the woman person really really deserves it i promise?
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ecoevoexo · 1 year
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honestly there's a lot to think abt here from legislation targeting trans women (public indecency, solicitation, prurient purposes) to expectations of sexual availability (everything from cis ppl not caring abt consent to GC genital checks) to pressures around presenting in a sexualized or desexualized way--i know a lot of trans women hav trouble navigating this one, bc one wants to feel good about oneself but the moment you dress in a vaguely revealing way its highly sexualized, leading to a whole counter aesthetic of baggy hoodies & flannels & loose pants (an overlap w traumatized cis lesbian aesthetics for sure, but also w sex workers getting off the clock & not wanting to be harassed on the bus ride home).
its hard to discuss this dynamic without erasing or minimizing the further oppression faced by trans women actually engaging in sex work, especially fssw, but it's been something broadly known by most trans women i've talked to about it that we are seen as an identity inherently linked to sex work. for many people the first exposure to trans women is either porn, seeing sex workers on the street, or "dead tranny h**ker" jokes in family guy or whatever. no normie cis person's idea of a trans woman is a virtuous mother, in terms of the madonna/whore complex of patriarchy we are firmly relegated to one side. rather the dynamic is sexual predator / sexual prey, with sexual prey being considered the more virtuous, but both being seen as open for killing.
and in many ways i think it would be fair to see sesta/fosta as the beginning of the legal reaction against trans people in the US. at this point one of the main tactics for controlling trans--and queer in general--content in online and other media is by appealing to its inherently sexual nature. likewise this is used as a justification for all sorts of right-wing amplification of violence, which is very telling given how many right-wing politicians & pundits seek out trans porn & sex workers. just as a man might say "a woman belongs in the kitchen", it's clear a lot of people think "a tranny belongs in the redlight district, and nowhere else!"
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thefemalejoker42069 · 8 months
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I used to think the “schools are transitioning kids” thing was just your average right-wing moral panic but recently a young girl in virginia was led to transition by her school without her parents knowing, was sexually harassed and threatened while using the boy’s facilities (per the schools suggestion even though they knew she was getting rape threats), ran away from home because of the bullying and harassment at school and then was sex trafficked.
at what point are the prominent activists of the trans movement going to just acknowledge that they’ve gone too far and they are hurting girls? will they ever? do they seriously not realize that this shit is causing an unbelievable amount of backlash against not just them, but gay and lesbian people as well who have nothing to do with this?
the only people calling it out are deranged right-wing media outlets because everyone else is terrified of being called a nazi and losing their job due to pressure from activists. we need more normal, level-headed people talking about this. no more endangering girls and women for the sake of a political agenda.
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AITA for banning transfem people off my website?
I (M40) banned a transfem (multiple, really, but this most recent one has turned into a real headache) from my social media blogging site. I informed her that her transition timeline pics were sexual content and then when people asked why she was banned I threatened to call the cops on her.
When I said that, she pointed it out on her alt blog, which I immediately destroyed like an angry god might smite its followers! Then I went to show everyone the horrible messages she sent after she'd been harassed for months without our moderation doing anything about it where she talked about hoping I die forever a painful death involving a car covered in hammers that explodes more than a few times and hammers go flying everywhere. This SHOULD have made people more sympathetic toward me, but now every single person on my website is calling me a transphobic rich techbro!
I can't be transphobic, because if I worked at a place that I thought was transphobic, I would simply not work at that place.
Hey, so, I know this is the topic of the day and we sometimes do posts about those, but this one isn't...fun. It's just depressing and exhausting that yet another internet space is confirmed to be actively hostile towards trans women (which like, not news, but more of it piling up just sucks)
However, I am going to post this (because this is the assholes blog) so y'all can discuss in the replies, try not to say anything that will get my blog nuked though
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catboybiologist · 4 months
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Be honest: do you think there are femboys who aren't just eggs?
Yes, and tbh I resent that their existence is questioned so much. And I know this is gonna be considered a Bad Take by many people I've fostered a community with, so uh. Yeah.
As a former femboy, and current dykey/tomboyish trans woman, gender nonconformity within your actual gender is an essential part of a trans or genderqueer identity. In a lot of ways, my transition goals are the inverse of being a femboy- I'm going from a feminine man to a masculine woman. And yet, the trans community doesn't question my feminimity as a masculine woman in the same places where many people would question the masculinity of a feminine man. And don't even get me started on where NB identities fit into all of this. This is largely coming from the same place where people are okay with women wearing pants, but men or AMABs in general wearing skirts is Bad (tm).
Like don't get me wrong. The caricature of the Bad Trans pushing all the femboys to become eggs is a wildly overexaggerated, and I've met many, many femboys online that used that caricature to excuse rampant transphobia. But. I hate that there's a but. But.... I literally experienced it myself many times during my femboy days, especially online. Here's a short list:
-Had a transmed bombard me with harassing messages and comments on reddit telling me that I was a "fencesitter" and I just needed to "fucking transition already and stop making trans people look bad"
-Had a trans woman I knew irl shove an estradiol pill in my face, and try to order me to take it, in front of a group of people I wasn't even fully comfortable presenting as a femboy to, until she was eventually asked by someone else to stop.
-Had several comments indicating that I should be force femmed in femboy subreddits
-Had many, many DMs trying to tell me I was a "failed man" that should just transition already
And to clarify- all of this is so, so mild compared to transphobia that myself and others face. But it is a very real thing that happens. To many femboys, I think this is the first time they've received any kind of queerphobia or questioning of their identity, so it feels far worse in their heads than it really actually is. And, to be fair, I think it mostly happens from the more gender binary minded cis community than it comes from trans people- but as I've said, I've had it coming from trans women both irl and online.
I've also tangentially noticed that it seems to be transmed adjacent. Not saying that this anon is, or others who try to encourage femboys to explore their gender, but there certainly is a correlation. If its difficult for you to acknowledge cis gender nonconformity, then its easy to see that extending to a lack of understanding of nonbinary people or others with different trans experiences.
Every time one of these things happened, it didn't put me any closer to transition. It made me feel unsafe. It made me feel on the spot, and scared, and almost outed.
I've said this before, and I'll say it again- if you want historical parallels to femboys, we have a perfect example in drag. Drag is performative, over the top femininity that has become its own artform, style, and means of expression in a way that is intrinsically tied to gender nonconformity. Being a femboy is also all of those things. And guess what? Many drag queens have used it as a way to explore their own gender and realize that they're trans. There are also many who are cis, and remain confident in that identity. Is the percentage of trans people among people who have done drag at some point higher than the general population? Of fucking course- its one of the few places where exploring gender is encouraged and celebrated. Of course trans people flock to that. And the exact same thing is true of femboys. Are a higher proportion of femboys trans or eggs than the general population. Of course. It's a great venue for trans people to explore their identities. But even more of them are
Am I saying you're a bad person if you encourage femboys and gender nonconforming people to consider the possibility that they're trans? Of fucking course not. It was the gentle, affirming pressure with respect and care for my comfort levels from several incredible trans women I know irl that eventually made me confident enough to start HRT. Their continually support is a key factor in my social transition plans for the future. I needed that pressure, and I think everyone, including people who aren't actively engaging in gender nonconformity, needs some push to question their gender and start unlocking cis+. But to be blunt, questioning whether cis femboys even exist is not gentle, comfortable, and affirming pushes.
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soup-mother · 29 days
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I'm incredibly lucky for all the girls i know now, unfortunately it was definitely a struggle to get to this point. like Tumblr was genuinely super isolating as a newly out trans girl, this was during the peak of "trans resources" being "here's how to bind" and literally nothing else, but wow that was a lonely time.
I'd say "I'm glad it's better now" but given how many people keep getting run off this site and all the backlash to transfeminism like it blatantly isn't, it's just a tiny bit different.
i love you trans women, i wish we could talk about that without it being derailed, i wish we could make the positivity and resources we needed when we were younger without getting harassed for it. i wish the small groups still clinging stubbornly to the rock weren't taken as proof of thriving overrepresented community.
i wish we weren't accused of "forgetting our history" for not wanting to watch or read transmisogynistic shit that everyone else just magically thinks is fine because they forget we exist.
i wish us being sexually harassed or threatened wasn't seen as "funny" by half the population of this fucking website and "discourse" by the other half.
i love u trans women. past a certain point everyone else can go fuck themselves 💕🏳️‍⚧️
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thottybrucewayne · 5 months
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Another James Somerton lie that's super egregious to me is his lying about Janelle Monáe having to come out of the closet when Pynk came out because "Everyone got confused and thought the song was a girl power anthem when it was really Janelle's coming out song." and making a big deal about erasure and what not but it's like A. None of that is true the second that music video came out everybody and they mama said, "Janelle Monáe gay?????????????????" That was the primary reading of the music video, and it's very well-documented B. It could be argued that the music is somewhat of a "girl power" anthem too and I doubt Janelle would have an issue with that interpretation given that Pynk has a very "owning your sexuality and taking up space" message. C. Funny that James Somerton would make such an impassioned defense of an artist being "forced" to come out because he literally lied on a bisexual writer who was forced to come out after people assumed that she was some gross straight woman obsessed with gay men. James, who supposedly did alllllllll this research, lumped that author in with the "Straight woman who writes gay men's stories." in his video and proceeded to get pissy with her when she left a pretty mild comment of "Hey, after a whole harassment campaign against me forcing me to come out of the closet it kinda sucks that people are still calling me straight." Then, after very gently being called out over him erasing her sexuality to fit his narrative, he proceeded to omit the title of that author's work in his later videos and make up a lie about her being mean to him on Twitter when his audience questioned him on it. LITERALLY TALKIN OUTTA BOTH SIDES OF HIS MOUTH
This whole situation reminds me of a TikTok creator who's been called out for stealing from Black women all the time and how every time it's brought up, it's met with silence. Once, He just straight-up read out a Black trans femme's tweets without properly crediting her or asking her for permission to use her work. Making the excuse of "Well, I screenshotted the tweets and put them on the screen so..." then his fans spent days bashing her for calling him out on using the work of other creators without asking and making fun of her for having a donation up which I don't think he ever addressed outside of the occasional stray comment.
This way of "building a progressive brand" through stealing the work of marginalized writers is actually common in left circles and academia and has been an issue, particularly for Black trans femme essayists, for a while. Black MaGes (people of marginalized genders) will come out and say, "Hey! This really popular essayist ripped me off word for word bar for bar" and get paid dust because their platform isn't large enough to speak out and because their platforms are smaller, people are less inclined to care when they get ripped off. Like, it's easy for us to point at James and say, "Omg? How could he get away with stealing this much for so long?" when the answer is simple, nobody cares what you have to say if you don't have a big platform, thus nobody cares if you get stolen from and unfortunately, we're all complicit. Look at how much this situation has blown up just because a super-popular guy brought it up. If Hbomb and Todd in the shadows didn't speak on this story and these small creators made a bigger stink about James biting their shit, yall would have ignored them at best or crucified them and accused them of trying to tear down the body of work of a gay man and probably throw in something about them secretly being a kiwi farms troll trying to sew discord in the community (I know how yall get down...) at worst. To address this issue more substantially, WE have to be better about learning slowly and taking time to pour over materials ourselves and not fall into the trap of letting whatever video essayist we like the best at the moment shape how we think and feel about whatever topic they're covering. Ismatu Gwendolyn and their threadings essays on substack have really helped me personally start removing myself from the "quick learner" rat race and the need to digest as much information as possible that video essays fulfill and reintroduced me to learning slowly and with intention and reading sources for myself first without depending on the thoughts and feelings of a creator I like and agree with to color my view of things. If we work towards getting used to treating video essayists like essayists and not our parasocial besties being our beginning and end to learning on a topic, we can A. Mitigate the amount of misinformation and plagiarized work circulating by being able to identify them easier and B. Improve our personal relationship to learning so we don't have to rely on some stranger with "bisexual lighting" to make us feel smart.
Edit: Please rb the typo-less version,,,,
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genderkoolaid · 8 months
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In the last two decades, there has been a growing body of literature on trans health in India. However, most research is limited to HIV/AIDS and primarily focuses on trans women. Studies on trans men or transmasculine identities and their healthcare needs and experiences in India have received little scholarly attention. Even globally, the literature on trans men’s health is relatively scant, with existing studies conducted mainly in Western countries. There exists a dearth of government data and statistics on trans men in India. The only attempt to enumerate the transgender population was made by the national census, which categorised them as ‘other.’ The census estimated 4,87,803 transgender people in India. However, several transgender activists have argued that this number is a considerable miscalculation and an inaccurate representation of the entire transgender community in India. Moreover, the lack of official data on trans men also risks under-allocating funds for much-needed welfare programmes. Moreover, trans men experience direct and indirect discrimination in healthcare settings. Such experiences include being asked invasive or inappropriate questions about their bodies, invalidating their gender identity via misgendering, deadnaming, and being denied healthcare or receiving low-quality care. Sometimes, it also includes physical mishandling and verbal harassment by the hospital staff and co-patients or not being allowed to enter certain hospital wards or spaces. [...] For many trans men, the family becomes the first space for mental and physical violence and outright rejection of their identity, with instances of forced heterosexual marriages or corrective rape. Vinay (name changed), a 30-year-old trans man from Punjab, says, “Family says ‘you’re ruining our reputation, get married, have one-two kids and then everything will be fine.’ They even use rape as a measure saying ‘you don’t know who you are, and when it happens, then you’ll know [your true sexual orientation].’”  Many have to deal with uninformed healthcare providers unwilling to treat them because of their gender identity. Lack of knowledge amongst medical professionals and poor social understanding of trans men means that trans men often have to self-advocate and explain their health-related issues and gender identity to medical practitioners who constantly challenge or dismiss their identity. This self-advocacy and mental effort to explain or justify one’s gender identity and expression often leads to emotional exhaustion. Soham (name changed), a 24-year- old trans man from New Delhi, recounts his experience of going to a hospital,  “The doctor came and shouted my dead name. There were a lot of people in the emergency room and I remember feeling numb for a second…He shouted, ‘Is this you? Yehi naam hai aapka?’ (‘Is this you? Is this your name?’)…Then he literally pointed at my chest and said your chest is so flat, do you have your periods? I was numb and I didn’t say anything. I didn’t get my medicine, I didn’t tell him my problem, I just went home and I locked myself in my room for a week.” 
— I Didn’t Get My Medicine, And I Locked Myself In My Room For A Week (Trans Men Are Invisible in India's Healthcare) by Arushi Raj and Fatima Juned
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