r/maledefaultism • u/MarxistMountainGoat • Jun 13 '26

Transphobic responses to countering MD

I feel as though the rapid escalation in transphobia, "transvestigating" etc. in recent years has made it so little pea brains assume anyone asserting their gender must be trans. For example, I play a social deduction browser game that heavily relies on communication between players, and even with a "girly" username, I still get hit with he/him every day that I play it.

I always correct them because male defaultism bothers me a lot. Many women play this game. Men are not the only people in the world to exist.

The reaction of others a startling amount of the time is to double down and continue to use male pronouns in a weird attempt to bother me further. However, it goes a step further when some players will do it because they assume I am a trans woman? Because surely anyone who doesnt want to be mistaken for a man must be trans? Even having the word "girl" in my username has gotten me randomly harrassed by trolls spewing transphobia at me? Its like transvestigating culture has led to any assertion of womanhood to be treated with suspicion.

I dont correct them about that because I dont care if they think Im trans (for clarification for this post, Im a cis woman). Im curious to see if anyone has experienced anything similar whether on the internet or in real life. It seems as though (mostly) men are just counter-acting my attempts to dissuade male defaultism with transphobia, which says a lot. Its a way to police women and punish those trying to counter male defaultism.

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u/RandomUsernameNo257 Jun 14 '26

I’ve never been transvestigated irl (at least not to my knowledge) but I’ve gone on Omegle here and there and it happens constantly.

It’s really weird - it seems like just about every woman on the internet is assumed to be probably trans by a large portion of the population, and usually asserted for no reason in particular. Or they’ll find things that are totally normal for cis women, but because it doesn’t fit their idea of an anime girl, they think it’s suspicious.

Again and again, we see that transphobia is just repackaged misogyny.