Due to recent concerns regarding this post by @[email protected], I felt compelled to issue a statement to this community.
There were a few people who responded to this post by acknowledging some degree of validity to Serano’s pretty damn explicitly enbyphobic analysis. I just want to start and say that I don’t entirely assume bad faith here, as some people often get sucked into holding bad beliefs in good faith with no malicious intent. However, let me just make something totally clear here: Serano’s ideas presented in this passage, especially if uncritically given a thumbs up, are very harmful.
As a person who has been harmed very harshly by enbyphobia in the trans community, I see through bullshit. I’ve seen disingenuous efforts at masking enbyphobic statements as “I’m just concerned about the oppression of binary trans people!” before. These kinds of takes are often thrown around myopically by people who think that there is, within the trans community, some degree of disproportionate hate against binary trans people compared to how enbies are viewed when, in actuality, it’s the inverse.
Truscummy rhetoric and non-binary erasure have damaged more enbies than any of this so-called “binary-phobia” has damaged binary trans people. This notion of “binary-phobia” being rife in the community is laughable, as this position is such a niche that you seldom hear about it seriously being exercised and you’d especially never see whole online forums dedicated to it. You, however, cannot say the same thing about transmedicalism. Transmedicalism has pushed many false narratives about non-binary people that aim to be prescriptivist and thereby wholly inaccurate in describing the non-binary experience.
To give a common example, truscum often believe that enbies are inherently non-dysphoric and never undergo any form of medical transition. This is demonstrably false, and the enbies who are dysphoric and/or undergo medical transition are not just some tiny, obscure percentage of the non-binary community. These enbies are far more common than one would think if they go beyond watching bigoted cringe compilations and actually take some time to interact with non-binary people.
However, with that being said, even if a trans person is non-dysphoric, that doesn’t make them not a valid trans person, and just to make my point totally clear here: not all non-dysphoric trans people are non-binary, and not all non-binary people are non-dysphoric. Either way, both groups, non-dysphoric trans people and non-binary trans people, whether someone is one, the other, or both, are not invalid in their gender identity. Gender identity is a deeply personal thing, and every single person who is not cis inherently subverts the system that keeps cisheternormative and patriarchal oppression in place. It is about as valid for a binary trans person to be enbyphobic as it is for a cis person to hate trans people in general, but in this case, it is far more hypocritical.
To go back to Serano’s concerns, I’m not saying that I’ve never seen non-binary people give bad takes on binary trans people and gender transition altogether. I have, but these are rare cases that don’t make this notion of a major problem with “binary-phobia” any more legitimate of a concern than something as silly as “anti-white racism.” I sensed that a lot of users were trying to sniff out good faith in what Serano is saying, but it is nowhere to be found, so you can stop looking. If there were, at the very least, some fair understanding for the current day, she would’ve done a fair revision of this horrid passage, but she has not.
The bottom line is that gender identity is incredibly personal, and as leftists who absolutely do not want to validate systems of oppression, anyone who is gatekeeping certain kinds of trans people or being bigoted in some other way towards them is going against some of the core, fundamental principles of leftism by validating reactionary, oppressive structures. Whether someone is medically transitioning or not, dysphoric or non-dysphoric, binary or non-binary, gender-conforming or gender-nonconforming, or existing in any way that a trans person can exist whatsoever, and there are a lot of those, they are welcome here, and this is a judgement-free zone for all transgender, non-binary, and genderqueer comrades.
If you have yet to do so, please read The Gender Accelerationist Manifesto by Eme Flores and Vikky Storm, and I have an old effortpost comment that takes down transmedicalism and actually references this work in the process right here.
You are all valid in your gender identities and experiences as trans, non-binary, and genderqueer people, so do NOT fucking tell anyone else here that they aren’t, even if you’re doing it with the mask on.
Also if any more anti-transmed comrades would like to join the mod team please reply here and we can induct you into the cabal
i might be up for it. i have mod experience on other platforms.
Added, lmk your matrix id for the group chat
I would be willing to join
added
also check your matrix
Is this the based department? Thank you for your service o7
It’s very sad, so sad, that we even need to say this at all.
Thanks for making this post, I was dismayed at the reaction, frankly. I had expected to make my big, bold shitpost and have people go ‘haha yeah, what a silly passage to put in this otherwise cool text’, not… that.
I only ever read selected passages from Serano’s work- I can see why the people in my life would have skipped those parts, really disappointing to only be finding out about it now.
“Selected passages” is probably the right way to do it sadly
i… genuinely remember cringing at the passage when i read it the very first time. i think i just internalized/reinterpreted/hallucinated different concepts in it afterwards while it was bouncing around in my head. idk why i defended it so much
Hate to see it, but that’s another reason why it’s so troublesome to pass the book around without qualifier. Also not looking forward to reading more and watching it get worse!!
Its always frustrating to deal with enbyphobia. Cissies will they me if I tell them I’m nonbinary and put me in the designated trinary box instead of understanding what nonbinary is (and will continue to be bad when I call them out,) and binary trans people will say I’m fake for not using they/them while being nonbinary, again somehow not understanding what being nonbinary is.
Cissies will they me if I tell them I’m nonbinary and put me in the designated trinary box instead of understanding what nonbinary is (and will continue to be bad when I call them out,) and binary trans people will say I’m fake for not using they/them while being nonbinary
Getting tactically they/themed (dripping with disdain) just because you’re pissing someone off while visibly trans is obnoxious, especially when they try to be like ‘it’s just the English language, can you believe this guy’
especially when they try to be like ‘it’s just the English language, can you believe this guy’
Malicious pedantry is still being a proper dickhead and idk how cis crackers mentally resolve that kind of bullshit in their heads. Like, fuck am I gonna want to talk to you if you give the vibe that you are maliciously ignoring pronouns? It’d be different if it was me; I prefer they/them-- but your pronouns are right there, in easy sight. There’s no excuse for it that point.
Malicious pedantry
You better be careful of insulting lemmy users by accusing them of pedantry or you might get your post removed for a civility violation
Like I give the first fuck lmao. Pleas for “civility” are the last stand of both the spineless misleader and the white moderate.
it’s always a one way civility too
Civility is the privilege of people who can calmly discuss the pros and cons of the atrocities being done in their name to other people, while they comfortably sip on their drink of choice and fart in their armchair.
Really great and necessary post thanks for sharing. I’d never read Serano before but just from that excerpt it surprised me it wasn’t immediately obvious to more people what they were trying to do with those last sentences, and the exclusionary sentiment is something I’ve encountered constantly in even the densest of queer spaces
Thanks for linking that post. It gave me a lot of food for thought. I just recently read Whipping Girl and have to admit that I read the parts being criticized by @[email protected] more or less uncritically.
I don’t spend much time in queer spaces irl (always felt too gay for the straights and and too straight for the gays rip), I don’t have a reality check to compare Serano’s take to. Anyway I appreciate the critique.
See this is what I was worried about, wonder how many people have read that and then just carried it with them. Not a fan! And so I had to post.
One of my mothers is a super chuddy conservative truscum POS who is also MtF.
I’m as confused as you probably are about it. It seems to me like she should explode in a puff of contradiction.
Ever met a trans lesbian ex cop? 🙂↕️ ahh new york city
Are you calling this community no better than my reactionary mother?
No god no
I mean to say I don’t understand her at all let me edit that
Thanks for clarifying <3
what if we had transmedicalism but it’s a femmed version of medic from tf2
Put the socks on, Fritz.
A player, learning of this: I AM FULLY CHARMED
i honestly did not know or internalize what julia serano said as enbyphobic at first, I think because despite being non-binary myself my exposure to genuine enbyphobia has been very scarce and limited mostly to generic TERFs and spineless chuds, both people who have very obvious and surface level arguments. i know it is not a justification for my behavior but i apologize for my extreme lack of genuine analysis
i kind of wish she never said it (… well i mean it outed her as enbyphobic which is good), because i think pointing out the “can’t win” position pretty much affecting all marginalized people on this planet is something she almost went into but she just veered into random concerns about “binaryphobia” instead. I wish she generalized the “too subversive” (be socially punished) vs “not subversive enough” (be socially punished) dichotomy that exists and i think i kind of translated it into that in my head, because it was what made sense to me (again not an excuse I know). but it’s obvious in retrospect that it makes no sense to single out a random marginalized group as propagating it edit: a group that is one of the most affected by it too! such as weird expectations about non-binary people always being androgynous
i found a really good tumblr blog about what trans men go through and significant flaws in serano’s theory etc and her strong degrees of transandrophobia and i can post some highlights if people want (the hyper based stuff i’ve found them say)
I was sitting with my better half last night and saying “C’mon, there’s no way Serano is an out-and-out transandrophobe! That shit in Nevada is just Binnie being funny and making her character annoying!”
Show it
Posting without username, for purpose of privacy. It’s borderline theory though
Seeing her Trans-Misogyny Primer again, I’ve been having to come to terms with just how heavily Julia Serano’s original framework of transmisogyny relies on misrepresenting transmasc experiences to make it seem as though we have things near universally better. It’s not malicious, and I’ve seen transmasc theorists misrepresent transfem experiences as well, it’s an easy mistake to make. But the idea that transmascs just experience Regular Transphobia while trans women and fems have an Extra layer on top of that for being fem instead of masc really is core to her original theory, and she makes that point in a lot of disappointing ways, including by using our invisibility and erasure as evidence we don’t suffer as much. I understand why so many people think transmascs don’t have any unique experiences or gendered elements to our oppression if her work is all they’ve read on the subject. And I get why they see us sharing our actual experiences as a threat to transmisogyny theory if they believe it cannot stand on its own without downplaying what we go through. But I’ve read other works on transmisogyny and I guarantee there are ways to discuss the unique victimization of trans women and transfems while leaving us out of it. I just want to see people acknowledge that different kinds of trans folks deal with transphobia and sexism in different ways, is that really so much to ask? Seeing all this has made me deeply committed to never publishing any writing about trans oppression without the input of trans people with different genders, races, and experiences from me.
Personally I’m beginning to think a mixture of transphobia and misogyny directed at them is a phenomenon that all trans people experience, but the configuration of it varies wildly, based on their gender and AGAB forced on them. So transandrophoboa and transmisogyny are terms for different forms of oppression based off the same Lego bricks. Which also makes sense when you think of how basically everyone who uses trans misogynistic arguments ends up either consciously or unconsciously supporting transandrophobic ones as well even if they claim not to, and vice versa
Transandrophobia absolutely shows in different ways than transmisogyny, and how that plays out in practice is extremely visible in how various parts of the community are misrepresented in transphobic propaganda. We are all familiar with how trans women are demonized as invaders of women-only spaces, it is this fearmongering that is used to fight against self ID laws and for bathroom bills - which, ofc, affects trans people of all genders, it’s not as if any transphobe supports self ID for trans men, and the death of Nex Benedict shows how dangerous bathroom bills are for transmasc people.
And when we look at the propaganda against gender affirming care, the campaigning is specifically centered on AFAB transition regret and “irreversible damage” done to the reproductive organs - there’s a reason the vile screed of that name shows a little girl with a hole above her abdomen on the cover. The fight for gender affirming care is one for bodily autonomy, and if you have a uterus, that autonomy is always contested whether you’re cis or not, and transandrophobia is a front where this becomes starkly visible. A transmasculine person undergoing medical transition rebels against the public ownership of their uterus, a trans man takes away the very ability of straight men to sexualize and objectify his body, and the dictatorship of the cis fights tooth and nail against these radical claims to autonomy with the double insult of being misogynist and violating gender recognition with that very misogyny. Trans men are constantly belittled as confused and incapable of making their own decisions, and frequently have to fight harder to have their wish to transition taken seriously. Most of the transmasc people i know have a substantially longer way between their coming out and when they start receiving care, and the pressure to not alter a body that has been claimed as not exclusively their own weighs in heavily on this. ofc once this discourse is part of the legislative process, we once more see laws that destroy or gatekeep access to gender affirming care for trans people of all genders.
Transandrophobia doesn’t end once a transmasculine person has made his or their body unclaimable by the patriarchy, tho. I’ve experienced male privilege for most of my life and i can safely say that it’s deeply fucked. This isn’t like white supremacy where you get freebies for looking a certain way. Male privilege means that men get broken to be turned into agents of violence, and if you refuse to be broken, if you do not want to violate others, the patriarchy punishes you for that. I do not mean to downplay the harm men do or paint them as “the real victims”, i hear about friends of mine getting assaulted by men every week and i gotta be honest here, it’s hard not to turn into a radfem weirdo because of it. But i’ve seen firsthand that men aren’t essentially like this, they get molded that way, and that happens through constant, intrusive male role policing by the most disgusting men in your day-to-day life. Which people in male gender roles get hit the hardest by that? It’s simple, it’s the queer ones. Everybody who has been a transfem egg knows that personally, knows the constant hazing, and gay and bisexual cis men experience different, but highly similar things to that, and this hits even harder in the case of trans men and transmasculine nonbinary people who pass well enough as men to at least get the f slur yelled at them.
In our lived experiences, all trans people get the unique perspective of traversing boundaries between gender roles and gender performances that remain forever unknown to cis people. Trans women get to experience the abrupt fall from male privilege, while trans men get thrown headfirst into the demands of toxic masculinity, and both of these yield insights that are a direct threat to maintaining patriarchy. And once nonbinary people enter the fray, the very foundation of patriarchy, the core assumption of exorsexism and oppositional sexism, begins to crumble. Our fights are often waged on different parts of the front, but they are always connected both in their revolutionary potential for gender accelerationsim and in the reactionary backlash we have to weather.
I hope it was clear that I am agreeing with everything here! I guess my descriptor of it as different incarnations of misogyny would be inaccurate, but like you said, I view it that way because the patriarchal violence done to men is specifically done to turn them into doers of violence. Patriarchy by itself is like a whole system bent towards subjugating the lower reproductive-labor class and it doesn’t care about hurting or subjugating anyone, even people not part of that class, if it has to to do its main goals. And when you add capitalism on top of it…
It is like, I wanted to give Serano the benefit of the doubt, surely this concept does not have transandrophobia and shit built in! Alas, the least charitable read of her work is basically accurate.
original framework of transmisogyny relies on misrepresenting transmasc experiences to make it seem as though we have things near universally better. It’s not malicious,
“Transmascs have it soooo easy!” AM I ON 4CHAN RIGHT NOW???
using our invisibility and erasure as evidence we don’t suffer as much.
FUCK
I actually saw some terf shit recently that makes me question the whole “trans men’s expressions of mssculinity are not targeted, trans women’s expressions of femininity are” shit. The terfs are expanding.
I’m beginning to think a mixture of transphobia and misogyny directed at them is a phenomenon that all trans people experience, but the configuration of it varies wildly, based on their gender and AGAB forced on them. So transandrophoboa and transmisogyny are terms for different forms of oppression based off the same Lego bricks.
Fr, someone should write Theory about this…
Clarification: neither I nor the writer of the post believes that transmasc people (are treated better/don’t experience as much transphobia/whatever weird take), the OP was just pointing those out as flawed beliefs. I would at least hope they don’t subscribe to them, given they seem to be transmasc themselves
i would be interested if you feel like posting it!
thank u!
Well said
thanks for taking the time to make this post. glad to see this is gonna be (hopefully) taken seriously going forward as it is a really damaging form of intra community prejudice especially, as many of us were trying to explain on the serano post…
How was this shit not already banned?
Though the sidebar doesn’t say it, it’s kind of always been an “unwritten” rule that’s just never been properly addressed, y’know?
This was actually my very first post here, so it’s quite funny that you mention it.
The rules need hammered out something fierce then. While I’m not a part of the community, bullshit such as you mentioned should’ve been crushed a long time ago.
We’ve removed for it before but tbh yeah good point, added a new rule to make it more clear
As an enby, thank you for this. I feel seen. 🫶