(mainly) transmasc things ig

hey shoutout to butches who dont preform masculinity in the “ok and safe” range. shoutout to butches who are large and intimidating and hairy and loud and dont represent the weird watered down butchness that the media loves to showcase.

a specific form of antimasculism in which butchness is ok as long as its a safe form of masculinity that doesnt threaten anyones perception of gender presentation. people are fine with butches as long as its a skinny white lesbian with a pixie cut, but fat black butches get shoved under the bus and labeled “threatening”. as a butch trans man, who is perceived as a butch woman in feminist spaces, im allowed to present however i want as long as my masculinity is always in an androgynous, female-type masculinity. if i dont, then i am labeled the threat or the bad type of masculine and no longer get access to “safe spaces” for presenting butchness wrong. butchness is ok as long as the person presenting it isnt too strongly masculine, and even within gnc spaces masculinity is villainized if its not done in a queer, pseudo progressive way. neoliberal spaces hate stereotypes of butches so much they’ll attack anyone who fits into a stereotype.

Has to be said. Gotta add that not much seems to be said about transmasculinity within this paradigm.

oh yeah, trans men and mascs are often included in this. anyone who preforms masculinity wrong in progressive spaces, whether or not theyre an actual threat or are litterally just existing, ends up being vilified. theres plenty of posts about how this affects trans people though, not many about butches.

Pete Buttigieg is just a faggot.

It's very important to me that younger queers understand this: to the people who you're trying to be more respectable for when you say things like neopronouns set the trans movement back or you're why the cishets don't accept us or including [aces/bi people with the 'wrong kind' of partners/non-binary people/kinksters/non-passing trans ppl/furries/polyam people] just hurts us, can't you wait until we get all our rights before we talk about some of yours? -- to those people? Pete Buttigieg is just a fag.

On Sunday at Pride Northwest, some kids -- late teens, early 20s -- asked what our button I survived Reagan for this? meant. All of the queer adults at the tables making up our ad hoc counter looked at each other and sighed a little. Emet and another adult started to explain the way that the Reagan Administration handled -- or didn't handle -- the beginning of the AIDS crisis. How many people died. How much we were ignored. The Ashes Action. The Time Magazine article which explicitly blamed bisexual men for passing the pandemic to the cishet community, playing on all the worst stereotypical bullshit. The way that even when the CDC started paying attention, they were so focused on gay men that they ignored AIDS in the lesbian community, leading to the "women don't get AIDS, they just die from it" poster. And so on.

I finished counting out change and passed the last Bear Pride raised fist pin over to a bear a little older than me, then turned my head and interjected, "they didn't care until it started infecting more than just the fags." I turned my head back and handed him his change. He laughed bitterly and said, "remember when they called it 'gay cancer?'"

That what I need you to understand. The people for whom you are folding yourself into smaller and smaller boxes will never see you as anything but a freak. A queer. A dyke. A tranny. A fag.

Never.

These are people who will stand by and let you wither away and die alone, gasping for breath in a cinderblock room, and not even claim your ashes, and they will say you deserve it, because of your lifestyle. If they speak of you at all it will be by the wrong name, with the pictures you hate the most. They will curse at your lover, throw him out of the home you shared, and steal the gift you gave last Christmas to throw it in the trash just so he can't have it and they'll say Jesus loves you! while they do it. They'll feel good and righteous and blessed and holy and pure for doing it.

And for them, you spit in the eye of your sister. For them, you disavow your sibling. For their sake, you trim away bits of your heart and lace yourself up tight. Never too loud. Never too queer. Never inconvenient or embarrassing, never asking for too much.

Pete Buttigieg is what happens when your Boomer dad turns out gay. Middle America. Parents still married. Suburban-sprouted. Valedictorian. Harvard-educated. Rhodes Scholarship. Military service. More power to him: I hope he and Chasten are very happy together. Genuinely, I do.

You couldn't create a more respectable gay if you grew one in a lab run by concerned voter focus groups.

But Pete Buttigieg? Is just a fag.

That's the part you don't seem to get: when they abandoned us, they abandoned all of us. Rock Hudson was a beloved movie star and even personally friendly with that horrid pair of ambitious jackals. Nancy Reagan refused to help him get into the only place in the world that could treat him at the time, and he died.

It was 1985, 4 years after the CDC first released papers on what would eventually become known as HIV/AIDS and 7 years after the first known death from an infection from HIV-2. Reagan hadn't even said the word AIDS by the time Hudson died.

Pete Buttigieg is just a fag, and so am I. Unless I'm a dyke, which seems to depend on who's yelling what from which window and what day it is.

Yes, there will be people who genuinely love and accept you. Those people are worth all the frustration of the rest, thankfully, and they're the ones who love you in a pup mask or a leather harness and a neon jock like the ones sold by the men up the row from us last weekend. They're the ones who laugh out loud when you tell them you hid the word "dyke" in your company name, the ones who love you in all your messiness and uncertainty and the way you don't fit into neat boxes all scrubbed up and clean.

Most cishets, though... well, they don't actively mean you specifically any harm, at least not when they have to look at you. Not when you're right there in front of them. Maybe they'll be okay with you, personally, especially if you're the kind of gay who makes a good rhetorical device, and as long as you remain a good rhetorical device.

They need people to know that they don't have a problem with the gays, after all, and there you are, being all convenient. You make a nice token, and as long as you do, well. You're useful.

But they call you by your deadname when you're not around, and they put the wrong pronouns in your medical record even though they met you years after you came out, and they won't put themselves out to save you. Not one little bit.

I didn't want to be here again. The year I graduated from high school was the worst year of the AIDS crisis. The world into which I became an adult was a world in which an advisor and friend to Reagan, William F. Buckley, openly advocated for forcibly tattooing the HIV status of HIV+ gay men on their buttocks (and IV drug users on their forearms), and in which my father not only told me that when I was 14 or so, but when was told me that he'd advocated for that tattoo being "over their assholes."

(Buckley wrote that in '86, but he doubled down on it in 2005.

Fucker.)

But yeah. I didn't want to be here again. I wanted my daughter to inherit a better world. I wanted Obergefell and Lawrence v. Texas and Hope & Change to really mean something. I work for it, today and all days. I haven't given up.

I need you to know that, too. This isn't a white flag. I'm not surrendering. This isn't over. To misquote Henry Rollins, this is what Marsha and Sylvia and Stormé and Leslie and Brenda and Auntie Sugar trained us for. This is punk rock time.

But I need you to understand that if Pete Buttigieg is just a fag, if that human embodiment of a Wonder Bread, mayo and Oscar Meyer bologna sandwich is not respectable enough for them -- and he's not -- then the rest of us have absolutely no hope of measuring up. Not even if we trim away every colorful, beautiful piece of our community, not even if the Sisters Of Perpetual Indulgence vanish into the ether, not even if we sacrifice the five elements of vogue on the altar of white supremacist cishet middle-class conformity: we can't trim ourselves down to something they'll accept.

The only other option is radical acceptance of our queer selves. The only other option is solidarity. The only other option is for fats and femme queens and drags and kinksters and queers and zine writers and sex workers and furries and addicts and kids and the ones who can look us in the eye and see all of us to say we're here, we're queer, get used to it just the way we did 30 years ago. It's revolutionary, complete and total acceptance of our entire community, not just the ones the cishets can pretend to be comfortable with as long as we don't challenge them too much, or it's conceding the shoreline inch by inch to the rising waters of fascism until we've got nowhere left to stand and some of us start drowning.

That's it. Either it's all of us or it's none of us, because if we leave the answer up to the Reagans of the world and all the people who enabled him in the name of lower taxes and Democrats who wring their hands, weeping oh I don't agree with it but we'll lose the election if we fight it right now, the answer is none of us.

The brunch gays can come, too, I guess.

every time i see discourse about pedohysteria amidst a trans genocide i think about that news article from 2016 about the mexican immigrant who voted for trump because trump said he’d get rid of all the “bad hombres” from mexico, only to be deported himself because it turns out what trump was really saying was that he wanted to deport all mexicans, not just “the bad ones”

not just him, but there were many other examples too, like white conservatives who have mexican immigrant friends and family or people in the community important to them who were mexican immigrants, and they voted for trump because they thought trump was just getting rid of “criminals”, and then they regret it when their families and communities get torn apart by deportations of their spouses, their friends, their favourite restaurant owners, etc.

anyways, i hope young queers, trans people esp, understand that when conservatives talk about “pedophiles” and “groomers”, they’re not talking about actual child abusers, they’re talking about all queer people. they’re talking about all trans people. it’s why in florida, they’re categorizing “drag” as a child sex crime, and making sex crimes against children punishable by death. they’re trying to execute every single trans person, and that’s just the rhetoric they’re using

so stop buying into the pedohysteria. it’s easy to think “well, i’m not a pedophile, so i’ll be safe” when you don’t realize that in the eyes of conservatives, every single queer person is a pedophile and deserves death, and contributing to their rhetoric by trying to figure out which trans woman is a pedophile is just accelerating your own march to the gallows

When I was in school, the argument – and in fact the standard belief – was that no gay person, ever, could be a teacher, because all gay people were pedophiles and groomers. It was for the “safety of children.” Lesbians and gay men couldn’t be allowed in locker rooms with “normal” people because we would ogle and assault them. Every gay, every lesbian, every trans person, every bi person (pan didn’t really exist as a term then) had the assumption of being a sex offender just waiting for an opportunity.

Literally everything they say about trans people now, they said about gay people 30 years ago.

There are people right now in government trying to outlaw gay marriage again, saying that Pete Buttigieg – the human equivalent of a Wonder Bread pb&j sandwich, as wholesome in image as they come – shouldn’t be allowed to raise his children because he’s abusing his children by raising them. People on Twitter have started openly calling for rounding up and executing anyone who ever helped a minor access HRT - parents, doctors, nurses, the receptionist who checked us in for my daughter’s appointments - and while those are only random people online, that isn’t a thing you saw happening frequently just a couple of years ago. Louder voices have started calling for mentally ill people – starting with trans and gay people – to lose our rights to vote.

Do I think queer people are being rounded up right now? No. Do I see the rhetoric escalating? Yes. Is it aimed at all of us? Oh yes.

Groomer, pedo, degenerate, freak: they mean all of us. There are no exceptions. If you think there are, you’re fooling yourself.

Join, or Die.

i know what it's like to be surrounded by friends who keep hating on men around you. "can i even trust them?" "will they like me less when i transition?" "do them see me as less than their female friends?" "do they not care about my feelings?"

i cannot make you suddenly feel okay about this, though i wish for that myself. i wish i wouldn't have to stand up for myself and risk conflict. but we shouldn't feel okay about this. it's hard, but it's also one of the steps to equality for all genders.

Do we have any data on how being legally nonbinary affects people's lives/how they are treated? there's evidence that using they/them on a resume makes you get rejected more but I haven't found anything on gender markers. Im legally X (not entirely my decision) and it's something that stresses me out in certain situations since idk how people, especially in governmental/health situations, will react to me being nonbinary and thus blatantly trans

oh also not about legal gender but re: nb hiring theres also this:

anyways if anyone else is legally X and has experiences w discrimination to share please do so

amazing <3

you have to understand that there is an overlap between drag queens and trans women and between trans women and cis lesbians and between lesbians and drag kings and between drag kings and trans men and between trans men and cis gay men and between gay men and drag queens and between lesbians and bisexual women and between gay men and bisexual men and between lesbians and asexual women and between gay men and asexual men and between all sexualities and nonbinary people and between butches and transmascs and between binary trans people and genserqueer people.

basically what I'm saying is that we're all family. there aren't clear divides or walls that separate us. and that's the point. being easily separated into perfect neat little boxes is exactly what queerphobic people want. don't let your oppressers trick you into thinking your family is your enemy.

if you tried to map out our community, you wouldn't get a bunch of neat circles that don't touch or overlap or have any relationship with each other at all. you'd get this.

da queerness katamari

yes yes yes so agree!

and having things in common does not make them the same thing. it’s so important to see and embrace and value our similarities and what we have in common! solidarity is incredibly important! recognizing and valuing our similarities and shared experiences does not mean we have to think these things are the SAME things though. differences are also beautiful! our diversity is what makes us strong and powerful! we do not have to focus on what we have in common to love one other and be in community together, we can value each other FOR our differences, not in spite of them.

i think overly focusing on shared experiences makes us lose the skill of caring for others we do not and cannot relate to. i think we need to practice deeply valuing people we do not understand and have little in common with. i can love someone i don’t have much in common with just as much as those i have a lot of shared experiences with!

in conclusion, having something in common with another identity group doesn’t make the two groups ~essentially the same~ or without significant difference. and differences are not bad or harmful or something to be afraid of. in fact, differences should be seen as beautiful and valued.

loving being a trans man is harmless. loving being a man in general is harmless. loving yourself for being a man, and loving other men is harmless. identifying as a man is a good thing, the only time it becomes an issue is when it's forced on someone who does not want it- other than that, anyone is allowed to love being a man, because being a man is not inherently a toxic trait. being a man is good, actually- and despite it all, at the end of the day, no matter how others may make me feel, i still love being a trans man, and it's okay for you to love being one, too.

I respect a doctor who has likely had to answer a lot of stupid questions about transition surgery and has just reached the end of his rope.