is 28°c/84°f too hot or too cold for you?
here's a hot take: the fact that whether trans men are as oppressed as trans women is even a talking point at all is a sign that something is Wrong.
people have argued for years that asexuals don't belong in the lgbt+ community because they're less oppressed, and push back against that idea is framed as aggression or outright homophobia.
people who other m-specs from the community or even are just openly bigoted towards them cite things like "passing privilege" to prove that they have it better, that they're lesser within the community
panphobes paint pan people as biphobes and biphobes paint bi people as transphobes while m-spec people are pitted against each other by people who hate them as a whole
transmeds and truscum argue that people who don't transition aren't Really trans, they create images of hypersexualized stereotypically feminine people and argue that all tucutes are read as (and really Are) cis women and don't have to face real discrimination because of it
and they all take notes from terfs who've perfected the art of painting marginalized groups as privileged invaders and aggressors
over and over and over again intracommunity violence is bred, spread, and justified with the insistence that the group being spoken of is actually privileged and therefore Deserves it. silencing, othering, exclusion, and sometimes outright violence and harassment are justified on the basis of those people being painted as privileged invaders who either don't belong at all or who exist as lessers who should sit down, shut up, and take what people give them.
and the fact that the insistence that trans men be treated as Equals within their Own Communities is presented as Violence on their part is as absurd as it always is frankly. the fact that trans men have to Openly Testify themselves as lesser in order to be taken in good faith At All is fucked up.
and it's two parts really. the first is that as a community we don't treat all members this way. if you believe that gay men are a valuable part of the community then you don't argue that they're lesser than lesbians because they don't face the same kind of misogyny. you accept them as Different but Valuable parts of the community. you listen to them when they talk about their experiences. you don't even Consider if they're lesser, it doesn't cross your mind. just like people who aren't aphobic don't wonder if aspec on the whole are less oppressed before they boost the voices of aro/aces.
the second is that for Years I've seen and been actively Pressed to "admit" that trans men Baseline face less violence than trans women, when statistically that just isn't true. trans men often aren't reported on to the same extent that trans women are because of a lack of visibility and misreporting as cis women, but when they are the statistics are Comparable. and it just makes me wonder Why.
why I see the same things coming from exclusionists in every stripe and yet again and again and again people fall for it and normalize it until we're forced to take half measures in denying our own oppression and lived experiences just to be heard at all.
strange-aeons
