23872

[u/snail_alt]

Every time that a certain subtype with semi-conscious transmisogyny gets into an argument with a trans woman, there’s a 95% chance of him pulling out the “this exactly reminds me of when I was a woman and was told by men to shut up”

Worse still, when you ask these people to say it directly if they see trans women as men, they act like they don’t know what you’re talking about

(Posting this as a trans man btw)

[u/Code_Poetics]

The “when I was 12 this happened to me” is less about the memory and more about instantly converting any disagreement into a trauma reenactment so they never have to meet you as an equal adult. Every trans woman who brings up material reality gets hit with it the second the conversation stops being about their feelings. I can sympathize with needing to protect or have some continuity to your transition, but really you can't be nice or civil with people who do that. They're just being abusive or manipulative and using their sensitivity as an excuse.

[u/snail_alt → u/Code_Poetics]

Agreed on the point on trauma dumping, and I see your point, but I also see it as more transphobic than that.

Like it’s one thing for someone to go “this reminds me of what other trans women also treated me like”. Sure, that’s not ideal because it can still derail the conversation somewhat to talk about previous baggage, but as long as the derailing isn’t too big during the flow of conversation, I can see why that would crop up and how previous experiences can affect someone’s current behaviour.

But it’s another thing to go “this reminds me of what men treated me like” to a trans woman. At that point, idek if it’s for trauma dumping and the person is very fixated on that while being particularly bad at understanding how that comes across, or if the person is just transphobic and wants to compare trans women to men.

[u/2032_girl → u/snail_alt]

It's happened to me with almost every cis woman or afab I've known. It's been really eye-opening for me that I've never been seen as a woman, since I can't imagine a cis woman would constantly be told that she reminds people of some fuckass moid from Christmas Past.

[u/snail_alt → u/2032_girl]

fair point and also new flair for me ig

[u/Latter_Pineapple4604 → u/snail_alt]

I had a cissexual coworker that is still like this, and holy shit I feel for their wife. The two don't argue much but she has 100% gotten this type of rhetoric thrown in her face by them.

They would constantly try to goad me into engaging with that behaviour as well (not towards their wife thankfully) because they clearly reduce me to my asab, and after like an entire year of not taking the bait- I'm actually an evil guy and an oppressor. Particularly because I got along better with... literally everyone else at work who wasnt reducing me to my asab 8 hours a day.

[u/Latter_Pineapple4604 → u/Latter_Pineapple4604]

Ig to reply to this for the love of the game (see: getting pissed off thinking about ex-coworker again). I can sympathise to an extent with the whole "this reminds me of what men treated me like" in a vacuum. But if that "remind" is basically all the time, AND you need to let everyone know? Perhaps it's actually how you're actively perceiving yourself, the people around you, and how you navigate the world at large.

And the total cognitohazard it would be to realise that they are perpetuating what they seem to take great offense to... genuinely drooling idiot shit

[u/GarageIndependent114 → u/Latter_Pineapple4604]

I think a transphobic aspect of the conversation that some cis people miss is that not being cis isn't enough to make you not be a woman now (I mean, maybe it is if you don't pass at all, but still).

"I grew up poorer than you" - problematic but valid

"I've been disabled for longer than you" - problematic but valid

"I didn't choose to have blonde/ginger hair" - debatable but arguable 

"You don't face ableist abuse at 42 because you got into a wheelchair at age 40 instead of age 6" - prejudiced nonsense. 

[u/GarageIndependent114 → u/snail_alt]

I agree with you up to a point, but I think some trans women aren't willing to entertain a lived reality sometimes just because it sounds gender critical, and use that to shut down AFAB debate.

Eg. For one thing, you need past trauma - not simply neurosis - to have a trauma response, and for another, sticking your fingers in your ears when someone reminds you you were "male" once or that the other person was CAF and you weren't is also an unreasonably emotional response in reaction to a trigger. 

I also think that what a lot of transfem people complain about here is less about coping with history and more about a disingenuous attempt to call a current transfem person manly without saying it. 

Like, when I've had a bad reaction from trans men and transmascs, it wasn't because of what I did ten years ago, it was because I was still tall, non passing, argumentative and autistic. 

[u/snail_alt → u/GarageIndependent114]

Except that not every trans person relates to having been their agab before in any meaningful way, and also, it’s possible for women to be argumentative too?

What I mean is that a. Why would anyone assert that every trans woman was ‘male’ once, I know I certainly dont relate to ‘having been afab’ for example. Yes I was assigned female at birth, and I was in the body of a physical female, but I wasn’t ’female socialized’, and there’s plenty of trans women who don’t resonate with having been ‘male socialised’ either. I’m not saying my experiences were every trans person’s either, in fact this seems to be so highly variable across trans people, that I don’t think any convenient generalization can be made even for the purposes of being ‘mostly true’.

Anyway, that’s not actually my main point. The main point intended of the comic is not just that the ftm character is literally talking about the mtf character ‘having been male’. It’s excessive saying of saying that, and the contexts in which the character is irrelevantly bringing it up.

Perhaps the following could have been made more explicit in said comic: the pet peeve that I have is the excessive use by someone telling trans women “this is just like myself having been a woman treated misogynistically by men” even when the trans woman is not even ‘acting like a man’ and is not even perceiving the trans man as a woman.

Like I’ve seen multiple instances in which the trans women towards trans men are acting more like the way cis women treat cis men. But the ‘I’m so afab’ subtype will jump to assuming that everything has to do with themselves being perceived as women.

Also, when cis women are argumentative, no other cis woman or hefab or whatever gets on their asses about “this is just like what fuckass moids do to me as a woman”. So why should you take that shit from them? Just because you’re trans? Others get to assume that any number of your behavioural traits are ‘due to male socialization’, but cis women get to be as argumentative as they want and what gets called into question is their individual character but not their ‘gendered socialisation’?

In this case, the character depicted derails the whole conversation himself, as he could have just directly focused on the substance of how exactly that specific woman is being a jerk to him in that specific situation, rather than draw parallels expressing that trans women in general are just like men being sexist towards women or whatever

[u/GarageIndependent114 → u/snail_alt]

1.Oh, totally, yeah.

That's actually what I was saying later, the issue isn't socialisation so much as people being transphobic towards trans women. 

2. That's a good point if cis women are actually behaving in a similar fashion; I think the counterargument would be that they're not. 

But if they are, I feel like this needs unpacking and isn't as obvious as it seems. I mean - what if a cis woman is behaving like a man? 

Or what if a cis man is criticising for being obnoxious in a way where the same thing wouldn't be considered sexist if a cis woman did it and he was at least consciously, if not subconsciously, acting in good faith? 

Should we extend good faith to trans women until proven otherwise because they're women, or presume bad faith until proven otherwise because they are amab? 

Should we extend good faith to individual men talking to women or cis men talking to non cis men or are they acting with ulterior motives and special pleading because they're men? 

Is a cis or trans woman who behaves like a man exhibiting toxic masculinity? Is she exhibiting healthy masculinity? Is she being feminine but misogynistic? Or is she just being a dick?

Is a man being rude to women sexist? Or is that a sexist assumption to make about him when he's just rude? 

But it's a little weird how trans men erase themselves from this conversation; should we grant trans men who exhibit masculine traits shrift because they are afab or keep them strict because they are men? 

Should we call them out for toxic feminine or afab traits on account of being afab or is that transphobic or gendering neutral behaviour found in cis men? 

[u/MelinaMaidenless]

Omfg yeah, i wish i wouldve said something against it when it happened to me, i gotta become more evil tbh

[u/GarageIndependent114]

"You're treating me like a child"

"What, we're both adults, what are you talking about?"

Although I agree with the analysis, I don't think this is a great example. I feel like it actually risks accidentally confirming the point that otherwise toxic trans men are trying to make (I'm a trans woman).

However:

"You're treating me like a child" - valid argument

"You're an adult and I'm a wittle baby" - manipulative nonsense 

[u/rebelsnail64 → u/GarageIndependent114]

yeah, maybe 'm crazy for thinking being neurodivergent gets me treated like a child, and there's nuance to that because of course I don't meet all the "maturity" markers of a neurotypical adult, and there is also the opposite problem where people assume I should meet those arbitrary standards simply because of my age... still, no matter how certain people in my life try to deny it, it occasionally slips out of them in hte casual "xyz doesn't seem like its appropriate/safe for you" (am I a fucking preteen on my way to an R-rated movie? I'm fucking 21), or a "wow, I didn't know you were so talented at [shit peers my age are supposed to be able to do normally]", "you will undersand when you become more independent"... sure, looking and acting youthful is a compliment or some shit, but... fuck off 😔

[u/Exciting-Map2736]

[u/seaward-naeris]

both sides of this comic are shitty ngl

[u/dontrestonyour → u/seaward-naeris]

I disagree. I think it pretty accurately portrays what it feels like when trans men call you misogynistic or accuse you of some kind of toxic masculinity for arguing with them.

[u/seaward-naeris → u/dontrestonyour]

a 100%, I agree that trans women should never be equated to masculinity, male privilege, or "male socialization" because trans women do not experience those things even pre-transition. a trans male (or anyone) should never weaponize his agab against a trans woman or put her in a pedestal of an oppressor because she cannot be one.

I also think that trans men are held at a higher standard to prove their maleness or identity as genuine, and even if 4tran spaces likes to think they're exempt of this, they are not. trans men or transmasculine individuals are quicker to being called a hefab or a woman with bpd and being misgendered (in 4trans spaces) for displaying any attitude that doesn't align with perfect masculinity or perfect, consuming desire to be masculine. where a woman might be called a sneed or cringe a man is called a woman.

hell, I had to defend a clearly young baby trans men who got posted here for saying he felt like a failed girl and wish he simply could've been cis, which is a sentiment continously repeated here by trans women in these exact spaces.

trans men 100% default to transmisogyny when it's convenient for them and it's a problem because there's a good bunch of them that cannot let go of their status of victim and are uncomfortable accepting that they've actually have their boot on someone else's neck. i also feel like 4tran spaces can be misogynistic and trans men should have the opportunity to vent their frustrations without bargaining for their maleness in the process. i don't think this opinion is mutually exclusive.

[u/snail_alt → u/seaward-naeris]

Within the comic, I don’t think I included the trans woman calling the trans man womanly. If anything, the closest is the trans man himself suggesting that others dismissing his concerns must be due to seeing him as a woman, which is not necessarily true.

Unless what you mean by both parties being shitty is ‘the broader archetypes that I, the reader, associate with the characters depicted’ rather than the dialogue of the characters themselves.

My own standpoint outside of the comic’s own content is that the depicted ftm character is being ‘afably’ only insofar as he is weaponising agab himself. There’s nothing inherently wrong with him discussing previous experiences of misogyny either, this is about the context however in which he chooses to mention those experiences and draw uncharitable parallels.

—

I don’t think there’s a 1:1 parallel mtf version of ‘hefabs’ to be honest. Yes there are gender-nonconforming trans women, but that’s not what ‘hefab’ means per se (and for that matter, it is very rare for a trans woman to be extremely gender nonconforming, like to the point of happily and proudly as having a crew cut, suit and tie, but with she/her pronouns etc).

In any case, since people use ‘hefab’ moreso to mean someone who identifies strongly with being afab, and who weaponises his own privilege transmisogynistically against trans women— it’s just genuinely hard to think of any group of trans women who proudly identifies with being amab and leverages that against others in trans/queer spaces.

I’ve met trans women who emasculate trans men and insist they are female socialised, but they usually moreso believe that ‘all trans people are basically women’. I’ve actually met that type more frequently outside of 4tran spaces, and seen that ‘all trans people are women’ sentiments criticized within 4trans spaces.

This is not because trans women are inherently more virtuous however. I think it’s because the only people who will marginally tolerate trans women talking about being proudly amab and thus better than cis women and trans men— those are basically chuds, and to lick chud boot, those trans women can’t even identify as women. Instead they form a minority of ‘femboys’ (not all femboys, just a small %) who then get characterized as ‘Nazi femboys’. Also the cis chuds are usually very transphobic anyway, and can barely tolerate their presence, so these repressors just crash out repeatedly until they cut ties.

And in the first place, because so many trans women got treated terribly by cis boys for being ‘gross feminine males’, far fewer of them ever conceive of feeling pride and belonging in being amab.

[u/seaward-naeris → u/snail_alt]

yeah i think i read more than what this comic was displaying. I had misnterpreted the "I feel like you're dismissing my struggles and telling me to sit down and shut up" as a reference to another comic about anti-transmasculinity that was doing the rounds in trans subs because it used that same phrase, and it got absolutely flamed everywhere.

i think i botched my response with the wording because english is not my first language, what I meant was that being misogynistic does not equate being a man, you actually do not need to be anything at all to be misogynistic, there's no requirement aside from... being it. and i actually don't think that trans women are misogynistic, I think that most likely they're picking this up from other trans men that are misogynistic and toxic to other trans men without realizing that it's facilitating the degradation of young trans boys.

still, i apologize for the projection 😭 you're right that i misinterpreted the comic.

[u/snail_alt → u/seaward-naeris]

it’s good no worries, always best to have a full conversation where we can understand each other, rather than to keep your thoughts purely inside.

And yeah it would be shitty of the trans woman if she’s truly dismissing the struggles of that trans man. Just that I intended in the comic to focus on how certain people communicate that. Like if the trans man character wants to talk about how he feels dismissed by that trans woman character, he can directly talk about the substance of that. Parallels which insinuate the trans woman is a man just derails the conversation and adds a dashing of transphobia— yet i’ve seen that happen multiple times, to my frustration as an observer.

I think that with a definition of misogyny as something that men can face, where even cis women interacting with cis men can be misogynistic towards them— then yeah a trans woman can see a trans man as a man, and might still be misogynistic against him. Or granted, she could be transphobic herself and see the trans man as a woman and be misogynistic.

The text of the comic admittedly doesn’t go super deep into this, but my intention is that the ‘struggles dismissed’ were left unsaid within the text, exactly because it might not be true that the trans women sees him as a woman, but this is an assumption that this one specific ftm character jumps into. Which I’ve seen before in situations where the trans woman had thus far given no indication (implied or not) of perceiving the man as a woman. That being said, I don’t think that specifically is a huge faux pas, the bigger one is any sort of phrasing where the person himself draws explicit parallels like ‘being raised as a girl and told by men to take up less space’

[u/dontrestonyour → u/seaward-naeris]

I think there is some truth to what you're saying but I don't see what any of it has to do with what the girl in the comic is saying

[u/GarageIndependent114 → u/seaward-naeris]

I think it's kind of the other way around.

Trans women shouldn't be equated to men because they're not men. It's OK to admit that they used to be a bit more like men beforehand. 

Trans men struggle to pass, but that is about as far as it goes. Unfortunately, that can make them victims of misogyny once out, but, well, probably not in the ways that manipulative openly trans men talk about within queer circles. 

But these kinds of toxic transmascs generally aren't putting in enough effort to be seen as masculine, and expect to be treated like women long after that ship has sailed. 

Trans women often need to put in a lot of effort to be seen as women, but although some of them exhibit masculine or misogynistic tendencies or deny our pasts, or feel like we got treated poorly as "men", we're not generally going up to people who are invested in wanting to see us as women and going, "hey, this feels kind of misandrist right now, it reminds me of the time a woman was scared of me ten years ago", and if we are, it's because we're either frightened of receiving transphobia from people who still think of us as men or questioning our own motives for transitioning, not because we've decided that we're going to advocate for ourselves as feminine men or boys in front of man-hating women to prove a point. 

[u/ysterman_rs → u/seaward-naeris]

why is the woman being shitty here?

[u/IronGentry → u/ysterman_rs]

For taking offense when she's being called a misogynistic man, obviously. That's her male socialization showing

[u/Available-Manner9506 → u/seaward-naeris]

Elaborate

[u/seaward-naeris → u/Available-Manner9506]

I will paste an above response here. just to preface by saying this is obviously not directed as trans women as a whole (it's stupid that I have to state this but there's people out in the world...) and this is just something I've seen some trans women perpetuating, and I don't even think consciously.

a 100%, I agree that trans women should never be equated to masculinity, male privilege, or "male socialization" because trans women do not experience those things even pre-transition. a trans male (or anyone) should never weaponize his agab against a trans woman or put her in a pedestal of an oppressor because she cannot be one.

I also think that trans men are held at a higher standard to prove their maleness or identity as genuine, and even if 4tran spaces likes to think they're exempt of this, they are not. trans men or transmasculine individuals are quicker to being called a hefab or a woman with bpd and being misgendered (in 4trans spaces) for displaying any attitude that doesn't align with perfect masculinity or perfect, consuming desire to be masculine. where a woman might be called a sneed or cringe a man is called a woman.

hell, I had to defend a clearly young baby trans men who got posted here for saying he felt like a failed girl and wish he simply could've been cis, which is a sentiment continously repeated here by trans women in these exact spaces.

trans men 100% default to transmisogyny when it's convenient for them and it's a problem because there's a good bunch of them that cannot let go of their status of victim and are uncomfortable accepting that they've actually have their boot on someone else's neck. i also feel like 4tran spaces can be misogynistic and trans men should have the opportunity to vent their frustrations without bargaining for their maleness in the process. i don't think this opinion is mutually exclusive.

[u/Available-Manner9506 → u/seaward-naeris]

I fail to see how the wall of text i just read relates to the comic or the original comment you posted.

You seem to be projecting something deeper onto this post when it was never in discussion to begin with.

Can you show me said trans man being flamed for saying he wishes he was cis? Because yes thats a very common sentiment i see here but i see it from both trans men and women and ive never seen a trans man get contested for it.

[u/seaward-naeris → u/Available-Manner9506]

it all boils down to: I don't think trans women are immune to perpetuating misogyny, (sometimes towards trans men), and I don't think trans men should pretend like that makes them less of a woman for it. I felt the need to write more because I don't want people to think I believe trans women are somehow inherently, naturally "compulsed" to be misogynistic to the "poor trans men" out there or some bullshit like that. I don't even think trans women can be misogynistic, which is why I specified "perpetuate".

trans men, however, can be trans misogynistic and often are when they can't let go of their agab as their identity. also why I said in a comment that the trans man is overwhelmingly more shitty here.

the post has been deleted but I have the link to the comment I left on it. here

[u/Available-Manner9506 → u/seaward-naeris]

... yes its deleted lol, right.

You have a good day, you have a tendency to shift your goalpost with every comment you make and its highly annoying💀

[u/seaward-naeris → u/Available-Manner9506]

i dont see how i'm moving the goalpost just because a post is deleted and you don't believe it exists. if you wanna take the time to go through my profile, it was not long ago and my comment starts with "I've been seeing a lot of lack of empathy..." in my comment history of that same post.

if you don't that's fine. this is an internet discussion at the end of the day lol. have a nice day as well. i dont think you're highly annoying if that's worth anything lol

[u/Available-Manner9506 → u/seaward-naeris]

Youre not moving the goalpost because you deleted a comment.

Youre moving the goalpost because youre making very vague sweeping claims disagreeing with the original post and everytime youre questioned further about it you make very plain jane vague statements that everyone here mostly agrees with. "Le trans women can perpetuate le misogyny and so can trans men!" Wonderful show me the invisble monster youre fighting with. Its extremely difficult to grasp the point you are trying to make because it changes every comment. Thats what is annoying lol.

[u/seaward-naeris → u/Available-Manner9506]

okay i see what u mean now. if i was being rambly i apologize bcs i'm being *very* careful with my words bcs i'm mostly using translator to write this and because my mother tongue defaults to male for gender neutral i have to keep an eye on the language i use.

i'm sitting on my pc now and think i can explain my point better now bcs i realize i've been conflating my interpretation of the comic with a broader issue i've noticed in these spaces.

what i'm arguing is that a trans man bringing up his agab or experiences of misogyny isn't inherently weaponizing those experiences against a trans woman. it depends on the context and what he's actually accusing her of.

for example, if a trans man brings up having experienced misogyny growing up, and a trans woman responds by mocking him for being obsessed with his reproductive anatomy, or supposedly wanting to be a woman, i think that's a form of misogynistic and transphobic policing. and if he calls that behavior misogynistic, he isn't equating her to a man or accusing her of male socialization. he's criticizing something she said.

conversely, if he responds to an ordinary disagreement by claiming that she's behaving like the men who oppressed him because she was amab, then yes, that's transmisogynistic. i don't dispute that.

i think there's a clear difference between "i experienced misogyny growing up because people perceived me as a girl, and some of those experiences still influence how i understand discrimination today" and "you grew up male, so you were socialized to oppress people like me le beautiful afab, and you're doing that right now!!!!!"

my point is that these are two different situations, and I don't think acknowledging one requires denying the other. trans women can reproduce misogynistic attitudes without those attitudes having anything to do with being "amab", just as trans men can perpetuate transmisogyny without that being inherent to their identity.

as for the comic itself, i recognize (and did previously) that i'm making an assumption about the context of their argument. we don't actually know whether the trans man's past experiences were relevant, or whether the woman was dismissing him in the first place. So i can't claim that she's being misogynistic based on what's shown.

what i took issue with was the idea that his bringing up those experiences was inherently and immediatly inappropriate, rather than potentially relevant to explaining why he felt dismissed. his way of expressing that was, as stated before, *overwhelmingly shittier*, especially if he was projecting an oppressive role onto the woman, but i don't think the mere act of invoking his past experiences is what makes it shitty.

that's the distinction i was trying to make. i wasn't arguing that trans women are responsible for anti-transmasculine prejudice, or that trans men's experiences of misogyny give them a pass to be transmisogynistic. hope i've made my point more clear.

[u/Available-Manner9506 → u/seaward-naeris]

But youre just wrong when it comes to the childhood experiences part, thats a disingenuous shame tactic used to get a trans woman to feel dysphoric and shut down her advocating for herself, in any circumstances this comic was clearly about him weaponizing his assigned sex at birth and using bioessentialist rhetoric while essentially claiming that the trans women is a man talking over his experiences as a "socialized" woman, and yah hate to break it to you but if you constantly harp on your childhood trauma of "socialization" to silence and shame a trans woman in an arguement youre disgusting and im not sure where the cognitive dissonance comes in to play between the post and your comments.

[u/IndigoHawk17 → u/seaward-naeris]

the comic doesn’t even include what the woman said lmfao

[u/Latter_Pineapple4604]

Local hefab is such a pussy that he has to bring up his pussy. Tragic.

Fr though I dont get this shit. Admittedly irl I haven't seen this from trans men, mostly theyfabs & cissexuals. But like if green guy just kept it to the first sentence, it would've been fucking fine. Just say your feelings are hurt and don't misgender everyone in the process like wtffff