Exactly. If it wasn’t hitched up to assigned sex I would have no problem with it.

And thanks for this post Cedar.

Transmasculine *and* transfeminine have always pissed me off because they feel like a judgement on my gender expression (and my butch-but-not-a-woman idenitity).

And because I id with the term transmasculinity but its been made *very* fucking clear to me that I’m not welcome within it.

Also when I think of transmasculine community I think of guys wearing shirts that say “Trust me I’m trans” and I wanna fucking puke. Or I think of trans guys having a skeezy male conversation about femmes and asking the opinion of my genderfluid id’d ftm-spectrum friend who likes *masculine* people and ignoring me.

and yes to everything you just said.

“Transmasculine refers to any person who was assigned female at birth but feels this is an incomplete or incorrect description of their gender.”

…”and they have some leanings toward the masculinity areas of the gender galaxy,” but in some ways I do like how inclusive their definition is. Regardless, I tend to use it to mean those of us butches, bois, trans guys, faggy femmes, and all sorts of other genderqueers.”

See what I mean? Also, “female bodied” is a total weasel term–it communicated FAAB to folks who want to eject transwomen [sic] from and/or include transmen [sic] in women’s space, and to folks who would be so ejected, but gives the speaker plausible deniability to mean that trans female spectrum folks are included if we’ve taken hormones and/or define our bodies as such–despite the fact that the wording has the effect of ejecting us (and they either know that, or are culpable for their ignorance).

#2)and, well, yeah.

And well, this is probably off topic, but I am a bit puzzled as how in some LGBTQI environments you still are always defined according to your “dose” of masculinity and feminity, like “ah, combat boots, that’s masculine, but you have a skirt and that’s feminine, here’s a category for you”… can’t I just be myself and wear what I want to without having to ponder if this or that is supposedly “masculine” or “feminine” ?

I think the question is, what alliances are being drawn, and why–who is being left out of those alliances? What potential alliances are being erased and precluded? What dialogue isn’t happening because these alliances are constructed in (unnecessary) opposition to other alliances, where social spaces almost uniformly run within these lines and thus prevent crossover and accountability.

Yeah, those are really important questions, which do need to be asked. I’m pretty sure that a lot of the people using the “transmasculine” label — like Sinclair, for one, I think — don’t in any way want to stop dialogue or erase alliances, though that is, apparently, a consequence of their actions.

What I’m saying, I guess, is that the only people I’ve heard use it are, to the best of my (limited) knowledge (as a cissexual person), sincere in their desire to be real allies to trans women (and other trans people). I might be badly misjudging here, though I really hope I’m not.

None of that has any bearing, though, on the fact that those questions are important ones that must be asked. I’m very much hoping that they will be asked — that people will ask them of themselves.

I feel like we’re pretty much in agreement, tho. I should write a post about __-only space as resources, not as who-is-really-___, not as well-___-is-a-distinct-group.

I think we’re pretty much in agreement, too. And I would love to read that post.

Also see Trans Men and Ciscentric Male Privilege

I’ve heard that trans men aren’t so organized there from one other person, and though it’s hard for me to really believe (like, is that true in large cities, too, or just the suburbs? ‘Coz Chicago totally has this trans middle aged white suburban women / young white trans men in trendy neighborhoods in the city / trans young women of color wherever they can afford to live or do sex work thing going on.) I’ll suspend judgement about the UK.

One of the important things to note is that while non-inclusive but not-formally-exclusive space *sucks*, it’s a different kettle of fish, and in the states, groups that have a majority trans women are almost always trying to recruit trans men, and trans male groups are almost always formally exclusive. And since the former are largely suburban, middle aged, radical/feminist trans women really don’t have anywhere to go, period. There’s I think two trans groups in Chicago that I’m allowed to go to (out of like 10), one of which is inaccessible via transportation and not my thing and the other I’ve never been able to check out because of schedule, but I’m kinda skeptical. Some of these groups I could go to as a SOFFA, but 1)that’s really ungendering for me, and 2)Al/lison isn’t a kind of FAAB trans person who’s welcome in those spaces, so I don’t really feel like that works for me either.

I do think it’s pretty important for trans men to admit their male privilege/privilege over trans women. I think the fact that trans guys write shit like ‘Hitting trans males is not the solution’ in response to a really mild call out is an example of privilege; as is the claim that sociologists ignored trans men until the 2000’s being “oppression”–does he have any clue *why* those sociologists were studying trans women, or what they were saying? That, like, historically Bailey isn’t that bad? …it takes a lot of privilege to be that clueless. (plus there’s the whole 98% trans female spectrum, 70% POC violence against trans folks deal. (source: an essay in Trans/Forming Femininisms: Transfeminist Voices Speak Out, otherwise a pretty problematic book…)

Also the fact that trans guys will argue they don’t have male privilege because things don’t get better when they transition–when if they didn’t have male privilege, they’d get *drastically* worse…

The language used in Female to Femme also seems to exclude trans women by taking the terminology (transition, “female to femme”) used by trans people and casting it in contrast to trans people.