u/dilapidatedmushrooms

I can't believe I seriously used to be like that. I literally just had no problems no job or anything so I just pretended to have new problems by having people call me "he/they" and cutting my hair short. As if anyone would ever take anyone presenting like a "soft boi" seriously as anything other than a woman. I even whined about it making me "oppressed" as if presenting like that actually gave me any serious problems. I'm sooooo much better now, I realized that there's no "female personality", "female hobbies", "female way of thinking", that masculinity and femininity aren't inner essences. I "felt like a person" instead of "feeling like a girl" because girls are people. I can't believe that people are seriously just being "transmasc" and not realizing how much of a woman it makes them. AFABs say "I'm transmasc" or "I'm nonbinary" in such a weird pious tone, it's so cringe and feminine. I'm ironically more masculine than them by just being okay with being a woman and not being so bothered by it "marking" me that I move away from it. Like, the most actually "masculine" or "nonbinary" thing a woman can do is watch football alone in peace without making it anyone else's business, lol. Being a woman with very little gender is less gender-y than being trans or nonbinary.

It's really frustrating to see cis "allies" reduce anti-transmasculinity down to us "just being seen as confused girls", not being seen as "threats" because we're "biological women", us being men being universally accepted by otherwise transmisogynistic bigots because "being a man is more understandable", or just not regarded at all (because they can't sus out when they're implicitly referring to us or deliberately erasing us) just because the most press anti-transmasculinists get is with the whole "confused girls" thing and it's generally less ubiquitous. A lot of the time, the "allies" do it to highlight the severity of the press that trans women get, and while I do agree that trans women get more and more vicious press and the comparative severity needs highlighting, I wish they wouldn't do it a way which is not only untrue, but ultimately downplays bigotry we face entirely out of the speaker's own ignorance.

Bigotry isn't just open vitriol. The reality is that they do see us as threats, they just don't want to make it look as if they see us as threats because of bioessentialism. Like, with the sports thing. Giving prominent, positive press to trans male atheletes who chose to join women's teams as "trans inclusion" not only pits us against trans women all the more and diminishes the extent to which they're discriminated against for wanting to join women's teams, and not only erases the context of them being allowed on these teams only if they don't medically transition which I would not call actual "trans inclusion" let alone specific to trans men by any measure, but it paints us as "less trans" than we otherwise are and our identities as not worth taking seriously! It's the same reason you see more FtMtF detrans grifters in the media! It's the same reason leftist political movements are often boiled down in the press as privileged suburbanite kids who just want to feel special. Or, if I have to compare it to lesbophobia, why there's so many examples in fiction of lesbians "turning" for the right man. It's a form of dehumanization. Taking the press we get entirely at face value means not looking into why they're using this framing, means being less privy to the ways they do "talk about trans men" (which aren't just "confused girl" this far on), let alone all the other stuff, and being liable to "talk" that way yourself. At the very least, it misses a piece of the puzzle of the extent of the panic around trans people altogether.

And do they seriously think that "being seen as a confused girl" is at all straightforwardly out of benevolence or respect? Or like, the only problem here is us being called "girls" rather than "boys" or something? If they can understand that gay conversion therapists use a tactic of "love the sinner hate the sin" solely to get better public standing and appeal to so-called "family values"/appeal to potential converts, it's quite frustrating that "allies" can't do the same here, let alone diminish it to a "just", as if it's some sort of "lesser" bigotry that you can just shrug away. I wish there was at the very least a way to get people to understand that they should probably read past the headlines when it feels like they're inclined to roll their eyes at us from the get-go or see us as nothing more than hypothetical bathroom meat shields. (That's not to say that they read past the headlines any more when it comes to trans women, the average person doesn't at all, which is the whole problem I guess.) When it comes to trans men, it's even more frustrating when a bunch of trans men use their frustration with this to be toxically masculine and/or it's prime bait for TERF cultists for targeted indoctrination, since they can easily say that the problem is our "being female" and moreover pin all the blame on trans women.

Ughh my "transmasc" phase was SOOOOO cringe.

Trans women get free laser?? This is unnecessary!

"Notice how no one talks about trans men!"

True way to identify transmasc vs. transfem subtext for a male character