This is why I have a problem with the imagination that TERFs are the ultra-transphobes or that fewer TERFs = less transmisogyny.

I grew up in a profoundly, violently, pervasively transmisogynistic place and culture and there wasn’t a radfem in sight https://twitter.com/Chican3ry/status/1323689803779629057

For context, when I was a young kid I was taught that I would go to hell if I ever grew my hair out or pierced my ears. It wasn’t just a supernatural threat—the implication was I would be exiled from my family forever

This was explicitly about my being a girl many times. I *asserted* being a girl multiple times before kindergarten and the message was my family couldn’t love me as a girl and that if I wanted love I should be (pretend to be) a boy as hard as I could

For some reason many people online think when I say things like I’m saying above, that it’s somehow defending TERFs. It’s not but I want it understood that nearly every emotional message TERFs try to send is one cis Christians sent first.

Including that trans girls are rapist-monsters! This came up in therapy because I had a fundamental lack of trust in my ability to be a safe person.

CW transmisogynist slur

My teen years alone included messages, both in emotionally charged subtext and in overt teachings:

-boys (“male-bodied”) will molest children
-cross-dressing indicates sexual evil
-one of the worst things you can be is a “shemale”

Some of the first places I saw talk people like me were in local discussions of immorality, effeminacy as “one of the greatest sins,” and Christian magazine articles talking about sex-working “cross-dressing boys” who needed to be saved from their sin

“Cross-dressing boys” seems to be the biggest go-to because TERFs use it too, transmisogynist gays use it, etc. Boys, not men. Even when gendered male we’re understood as less than/subordinate to men.

Cw anti-effeminacy

I mean the all-cis adults that made up my teachers, church leaders, etc, also taught less overtly gendered but still on-point lessons like: me being repeatedly targeted with violence was my fault because I was a faggy sissy crybaby. The just order of things

Cis and TME feminists who try to tell me that I don’t know what it’s like to grow up fearing men or to be subject to “female socialization” (training to accept violation + sexualization) have absolute no idea what my formative environment was like.

If anything it was plainly better to be a cis girl or woman in this environment, by miles, because not only did many cis women have positions of power in it, cis girls made up a large number of the more successful kids who targeted me. Less than 50% but not by a lot tbh

I think some people get the idea that TERFs represent a danger of extreme feminism, that transmisogyny arises from man-hating, when in reality cis women in the most anti-feminist environments you can think of believe the same things but much worse.

Transmisogyny doesn’t come from man-hating, it comes from male supremacy.

But another elephant in this room is that while radfems are led largely by women, environments in which cis men are overtly supreme have a this entire new level of transmisogyny to them. The men are always way, way worse.

Something all the “male socialization” stuff doesn’t illuminate is how profoundly cis men and boys, as a group, acclimate to becoming instinctual trans girl-spotters. They scan for signs of effeminacy. They are highly attuned to the non-verbal language of masculinity.

IME groups of boys use masculinity signaling to create a des facto hierarchy organically, emerging with each group, and they’re skilled at sussing out who should go at the bottom of the hierarchy. And they ritually humiliate, brutalize, and sexualize those people.

They do this from their own learned personal preference but also to enhance their own position in the hierarchy, to protect themselves from likewise being purged from the shelter of group masculinity.

One you realize that normative manhood functions by procedurally finding the “boys” that don’t belong in it and “purifying” us out—that normative manhood is treated like a resource to be competed for, intentionally insulated—a whole lot of gender dynamic make way more sense.

Of course cis boys and men and cis people overall know you’re a trans girl before you come out. They’re trained to know, to smell it on you.

It’s just this knowledge occurs on the instinct level and not the cerebral level.

The paradigm is that they FEEL you being an effeminate, an un-boy, they feel that you go at the bottom, that you should be purified. But in their heads they also think that of course you’ll never be a real girl and biology will always make you male. There’s no contradiction here

“You’re treated as what you’re perceived as,” used to say you can’t be met with oppression until you wear a dress or something, assumes a lot of false things. One of those things is that people don’t spot signs of unmanhood any quieter than makeup + a name change.

In fact part of survival as a boy is becoming adept at picking up the finest signals of effeminacy so you can both suppress them in yourself and so you can read the room, know who goes below you, know who’s functionally a girl. It gets worked into your limbic system.

But the myth also assumes that we only perceive things in a mental way, with beliefs and ideologies, when arguably the bulk of our day-to-day awareness of the world is intuitive, felt in the body and not fully processed by the intellect

Men have to be able to intuit the existence of trans girls + other effeminates because that’s a fundamental ingredient to maleness as a social process, to the rules of manhood.

There’s a constant effort to push you out of the grouping of manhood and to isolate you from the grouping of womanhood. In essence an emergent gender is constructed in and around you: something like under-girl, effeminate girl, not-boy-thus-half-girl.

Direct experience of this is why I don’t believe there is or ever has been a gender binary in function, even in the awareness of cis people, even though they profess a gender binary *ideologically.* They need non-dual gender categories for the male-female dualism to function!

Transmisogyny and anti-effeminacy are essential and fundamental aspects of the male supremacist system, fulfilling many important roles: cementing the boundaries of manhood is one of them. To have a social category of manhood you need effeminacy + trans womanhood as a contrast.