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Oh, they’re all wonderful, actually. I am gr8 friends with them all.

Vriska.

I know multiple trans girls with this name.

I am not singling out ‘transmasc comrades’, merely acknowledging that there are transmascs within the trans community who take advantage of their trans status and conditional male privilege to avoid suffering consequences for transmisogynistic behavior is not singling out anyone. I use TME to refer to cis people all the time, and so does everyone else who I have seen regularly use the term.

I think you and I have had extremely different experiences and I don’t think either of us is going to benefit from continuing this conversation. I apologize, I recognize this may come off as a bit cowardly, but I don’t think I’m realistically going to convince you of anything, nor do I think you are realistically going to convince me of anything.

It seems like your mind on this subject is pretty much already made up, as is mine.

It’s not in any way fundamentally different - that is why TME as a term includes not just trans men, but also cis men and cis women, that is part of the point of the term.

The only manner in which it is different is that transmisogynist (or just str8 up misogynist, although this seems somewhat less common in my experience) trans men are afforded something of a shield from criticism by way of their transness. They can assert that trans women and trans men are functionally the ‘same’, that they are equally victimized in all contexts, and use that to dismiss any accusations of transmisogyny they may face because of their behavior as ‘infighting’ - pointing to the shared enemy of the cisheteropatriarchy as a way of deflecting their own problems.

This is most effective when it comes to more subtle forms of transmisogyny that may be somewhat unconscious - tendencies to talk over trans women, a quickness to cancel and ostracize them, an expectation that trans women ought to not be too ‘forceful’, even perhaps the common retort to trans women’s complaints of intracommunity transmisogyny I have seen of ‘why are we infighting we should be kissing and making out instead’, shit like that.

I simply disagree on that matter, then. I find TMA/TME to be very useful terms, especially when one is talking about structural transmisogyny within the trans community itself. Indeed, I find that the TMA/TME terminology’s very existence has been helpful in causing a lot more discussion about intracommunity transmisogyny, which is an issue that in the past in my experience has not been discussed at all.

In this case, I used it pretty much because I find it more concise than what the post you are quoting suggests.

Oh, and I guess to answer your edit - I have no idea why Serano was so miffed about that. I am not her, and cannot say, although it is obvious that she has some degree of exorsexist brainworms regardless of what her experiences may or may not have been.

I would say that the reason I care is fairly simple? The existence of this current of thought and it’s advocacy by the individuals I mentioned did me significant psychological harm. It is only natural that I would care given that is the case.

And yes the similarity to TERF ideology is obvious, and I am aware that the Gender Accelerationist Manifesto does not advocate for this - I don’t think the people in question were wreckers however, they had quite open public histories of having been trans for years. And I am not trying to ‘single out’ TME people - I am genuinely just describing what I saw in my experience using the most precise terms available to me, given I characterize the current of thought we are discussing as being a manifestation of transmisogyny, I thought it would be relevant to mention in this instance, that is all.

I do agree that Serano’s work is generally mired in exorsexist assumptions, yes, but I don’t actually have that much of an issue with the passage you quote? While the phrase ‘binary phobia’ is obviously absurd, I have myself met people who genuinely believed that being non-binary was somehow superior to or more enlightened than having a binary gender. It might be less common now than it was when I first started transitioning about 8 years ago, but this is absolutely a current of thought that exists within the trans community, largely, in my experience, among TME non-binary people.

I myself used to hold this view, in fact! It was something that was directed at me a lot early in my transition, and I internalized the idea that ‘binary trans women’ (and it was always trans women, nobody ever directed this shit at trans men in my experience) were somehow ‘reinforcing the binary’ and were ultimately obstacles to the cause of ‘gender abolition’. Being a trans woman myself, internalizing this idea did me a lot of harm - it took me 7 years to actually start presenting femininely because of it, because I was so convinced that if I did so, I would be acting in an immoral manner by way of reinforcing the gender binary, and so I forced myself to present in a masculine or neutral manner even though I didn’t actually want that, and even though doing so actively mentally hurt me. Indeed, this sort of thought was likely a large contributor to the 2 years in which I de-transitioned.

The idea Serano describes here, even if her wording is awful, absolutely does exist in the trans community - I would classify it mostly as one of the forms of intracommunity transmisogyny as this sort of thought does seem to be largely directed at ‘binary trans women’ specifically. Obviously as a problem it is not at all comparable in scale to homophobia or transphobia, but it absolutely does exist - to characterize non-binary people as being privileged because of this current of thought is, however, ridiculous, yes. In actuality I would say that this stuff is just a manifestation of transmisogyny, a manifestation of the contextual privilege held by TME people within the trans community.