Earlier today, a post caught the attention of the xnfm girlies. Yet another installment in the "xnfm hates trans men" saga. The girls, with nothing better to do, have united to call its poster, kitten, a retard. The following is a criticism of all sides.
Privilege and oppression are spooks. Trans men and trans women are spooks. And for that matter, so are transmisnadry and transmisogyny. In particular, I resent the use of any of these concepts in a bid to appear moral. Are trans men privileged over trans women? Literally who fucking cares? You're not going to win sympathy from me because you're oppressed, or lose it because you have privilege. There are no tribes here, and no one has ever won a war by being the most morally justified party. If you think you are in the right because the other side is being "transmisogynist," then you are no more serious than the woke moralists you argue against.
There is no conflict between "trans men" and "trans women." These are not coherent groups of people. That said, Kitten did get at something though when they said "fuck you and you are not part of my community." Clearly, we are not. Xnfm girlies like to chock this arrangement up to exclusionary bigotry, and while that is present, it is unhelpfully moralistic and narrow-minded. The real problem, on both sides, is a failure to properly identify what exactly that community is.
For us to be excluded is to imply that the default state is one where all "queer" people are in communion. This is the tacit commitment of most in the so-called queer community, but it is ahistoric and clearly untrue. Respectable gays have long been in tension with the actually sexually radical, and by claiming to represent "queer people" in general, they can dismiss whatever we are as some degenerate splinter cell ("Terminally-Online Delusional Transfems™"). It seems as absurd to me to ask to be included in a queer affinity space as it would for a Chinese person to ask to be included in a Japanese affinity space. We may share some surface level traits, and we may even experience similar social hardships, but we are not by that token one united group. Kitten just said the quiet part out loud it. Not many queers are willing to so openly stand up for their ideology, and i think that's admirable, genuinely.
So what are we? Some time ago, I made a reactionary comment about the presence of a transmasc on xf, for which I was promptly chastised. This left me confused (because I was retarded), and forced me to confront a reality I wasn't happy with at the time. That despite its branding as "an instance for girlfailure girlthings," xnfm is not a transfem space. We are not transfem (dot) me, we're xenofem (dot) me. Ours is not a politics of transgenderism, it's a politics of alienation. The overwhelming composition of our ranks is trans women simply because we are more alienated.
Of course, trans men, or indeed anyone of any group, may also be subject to alienation. In our milieu it is common to assign this alienation to the feminine. Most plainly, this conflation is evident in the term "xenofeminist." This leads to somewhat counterintuitive conclusions, such as that trans men are feminized by their alienation (ie transness). While the corollary is true, that trans men are masculinized insofar as they are not alienated (and vice versa), it is in placing the feminine at the opposite of the masculine (tacitly accepting the gender binary) that the tension arises.
Our conflict is not between disenfranchised women and enfranchised men. It is between the disenfranchised in general and the people and systems who facilitate our alienation. In particular, libidinally disenfranchised people against patriarchy; the castrated, both literally and metaphorically. Trans men, rape victims, black people, disabled people, etc. all share in their alienation with trans women. We are all castrated, and xnfm is a place for all of us, insofar as we can organize and theorize along the lines of our alienation. That said, trans men are rarely willing to do this, which is the real source of this conflict.
Trans men are willing to appeal to respectability for a variety reasons, be it for moralistic masturbation, going along with the crowd, monetary incentives, etc. The reason this is percieved as a transmasc issue is that trans women do not have access to the same avenues to respectability as trans men. Pickmes have to be people who already have some social respectability, and increasingly trans women are not that. Well-meaning folks who are ignorant of this see our radicalism as reactionary because they think they are part of the in-group, and they are defensive of our threat to their status quo.
Be mindful though, these are not wayward souls who need to be educated about their alienation. As you have seen many times, education does not work. However saintly a person may be, if they ally with patriarchy, they are our political enemy. The answer to pickmes is not to link them a study on why they're wrong, or in general to debate, it's to ignore them or ridicule them (props to cyndr, and everyone who chose to ignore this nonsense).
And the corollary to that: however wicked a person may be (indeed even if they are a cis man), if they fight patriarchy, they are our ally. Remember you're at war. Do not be picky about your comrades, nor conservative in your threat assessment. We do not win by being correct. We do not fight because we are on the side of the good. We are here because we are the wrong, the evil, and the crazy; and when we win, we'll win with power. My solidarity will be with my terminally online delusional transfem sisters over anyone, any day of the year. So fuck you, kitten. You're not part of my community either.