The Sublime Object of Transmisogyny
does transmisogyny exist?
About a year ago the tumblerverse went absolutely ablaze and became rabidly obsessed with the term transmisogyny, after a trans poster had been kicked off of the site for advocating the death of the Tumblr CEO in a convoluted car bomb situation that tangentially involves hammers. Dont ask.
Naturally this was taken as an attack against the whole movement.
Quickly I was overcome with posts from the pro trans followers who I had gathered during my transition. One was long form. It went on about the various hardships of being a trans woman, of feeling like the odd one out in groups of women, or feeling othered, being disrespected by her father who now had less respect for her or would talk over her, being creeped on by men who would never let you meet thier parents. Theres a strange experience living in this limbo where you feel like you are experienceing misogyny or some kind of negativity whos target lies in your femininity, but you nevertheless arent wecome into femininity. Youll never actually be “one of the girls” and you can tell theyre just humoring you for PC points or to look hotter with you standing next to them. No guy will ever take you home to meet his parents, yada yada. I didnt know what to do with that feeling at that time or how I should analyze it and move foreward. The sentiment of the post got at a gnawing feeling I had in my bones that was saying “is this really doing anything?”.
So what is transmisogyny though? I think transmisogyny just describes the normal quotidian experience of being a feminine male. Your femininity is stigmatized and pathologized, youre told you are a woman or you act like one, but you know youll never be one. You are isolated on both sides of the so called gender binary. This creates a feeling of alienation that then primes you to identify as gender dysphoric and travel down an increasingly dionesian path that stops paying dividends almost as soon as it starts. The beauty of the ideology is that the myriad ways transitioning makes your life worse can all be explained away using fun terms like “transphobia” and “transmisogyny”. And this gets done in more and more convoluted ways the further down the rabit hole you go. lets take a look at this one:
Here is where the insanity of modern gender discourse gets cooked down into its raw essense. Transmisogyny is when “transphobes” treat you like a guy because you act like a guy…and are male… what this poster dosnt understand is that “trans people” and “trans allies” dont really treat eachother like they are valid ever, and there is a cloaked essentialism within thier behavior. Actually this post is a good example:
so youre telling me that trans women, who, due to the cult like nature of thier communities, are almost perpetually surrounded by allies… have trouble being actually treated like a woman, and are forced to continue acting out the male social script? This is something Ive noticed in about a milion ways as ive opened my eyes and stopped seeing reality through ridiculous mind frames like transphobia. When you appear male people treat you like a male, shocker. and when youre wearing a dress they treat you like a male in a dress. Another epifany that comes as a surprise to no one.
There is a strong desire to live in denial of the fact that this lifestyle does nothing for you, and the fact that the whole root of your dysphoria has always been this role structure… there is a community of “trans people” and “allies” who dont actually change how they act and thus contintue to perpetuate dysphoria which we are told has social roots, not biological ones…until they hit us with the butlerian bait and switch… further this dysphoria is only “aleviated” but never cured and gets sublimated into other pathologies like “dysmorphia” etc. I promise im trying to stay focussed.
look, it just stopped making sense to me. The scales fell off, its just crumbled by degrees. Gender is a social construct but its completely taboo to even beleive that socialization shapes our behavior, a socialization that is based on biological sex. “Gender is a social construct” but youre not allowed to ask how the structure of our society effects the developement of gender dysphoria and gendered alienations.
I think something is deeply wrong with gender, clearly. Men and women hate eachother, and if you pay any attention you realize men hate most other men, and women hate most other women. But this movement dosnt do anything to construct new and better gender roles that can help build community between men and women, that can approach the diverse virtues men and women can both posess and create an atmosphere of encouragement at following those virtues? In most of liberalism there isnt really a search for the good life… what things makes someones life good? the liberal mindset is that people should do “whatever makes them happy” as long as it “"dosnt affect you”. Naturally this ignores the fact that people are constantly doing things based on whim that inevitably dont make them happy and are often self destructive. Transition is only one of many of those things. I think its important that a just society develope discourse about what values it ought to have in service of creating hapiness for its members. The trans community and liberal community at large hate this attitude with a passion. Thier dionisian desire for freedom, even as it foments thier disolution, drives them with an unstopable fire…and any question that the things they do might not be in thier best interest is met with a disgustingly condescending scorn.
So you can be masc and be a girl and be male, you can be off hormones and be male and be a girl. If youve looked at this community for 5 minutes then you understand the obvious excesses. Thier desire is to deconstruct gender and put nothing in its place. They dont have an ideology that guides thier life, they are only driven by the desire to destroy the preasent order. Thats why theyre all anarcho communists (do they even read kropotkin? i doubt it).
And naturally when you deconstruct something and put nothing in its place, often an order rises up that is structured just like the one which was torn down, except its even worse typically.
Ok some other exampples as an apertif
so apperently transmisogyny is when people treat you like a guy because youre male and you get to have a breakdown because they dont care about your emotional terrorism over online discourse of someone who made a video game…they could put the pyramids to shame if they put this energy elsewhere. And of course, thinking makeup makes you pretty is transmisogynistic. Well, perhapse there is a chance for them to make up with the radfems after all…
look I cant say I have a fully developed Gender Virtue Ethic, I just wanted to put pen to paper on this stuff. Maybe one day itll make sense to me and ill have all the answers.