The demand for transfeminized labor shows up in the way transfems are treated as having a responsibility to the rest of the trans community that not all trans people have.

Transmisogyny theory tends to be discussed in terms of how much it helps TME people.

This is one reason it’s misleading to use “transmisogyny” to mean “misogyny when trans people experience it,” because that doesn’t get at transfeminized labor, the role of caretaker and parent assigned to trans women and trans female-adjacent people.

“Misogyny” is broadly used in feminist discussion to mean patriarchal gender regulation when it has anything to do with the expectations of womanhood. It’s hard to find a kind of trans person who ISN’T affected by this.

Transmisogyny is a more complex system of gender regulation that imposes the norms of trans womanhood specifically. Different non-binary people are also subject to this, but it’s a very particular relation to gender norms.

And no, you can’t necessarily tell from sight or from a single post whether someone is TMA. It’s an intentionally somewhat vague boundary. This doesn’t mean the grouping doesn’t exist.

But while I wholeheartedly agree that, for instance, the relationship between trans male-spectrum people and misogyny greatly needs better explored and analyzed, it’s telling how often the subtext (or just text) is that it’s specifically transfems’ job to analyze this.

As others have noted, the reverse rarely seems to be true. Transmisogyny theory, as an account of the position TMA people have in gendered society, has always been the project of trans women and trans female-spectrum people. We haven’t, generally, asked anyone else to do it.

I realize these kinds of threads can seem very “discoursey,” but I’m not responding to a topic du jour, nor venting steam about other trans people.

I want to help make the pattern recognizable, of how duty, work, and blame are connected to trans womanhood.

This burden of duty and the attribution of threat—that trans women are dominant, controlling, rapacious—are causally related. This is why the transmisogyny distinction matters, and needs to matter to cis people. The assignation of duty leads to the image of frightening power.

Twitter is not the best place for this analysis or discussion but, you know, more in-depth writing that gets disseminated more fully is a taller ask atm. Twitter is good at making you reactive about what others are saying, but it’s also a decent place to explore thoughts.