As A Trans Man And As A Ukrainian Jew, I Cannot Stress How Important It Is For Us To Know Our History.

My transmasc experience was being fine being seen as a girl but growing up and hating the idea of being seen as a woman. “Young woman” was too much for me even before I knew I was trans. Womanhood seemed to come with so many more expectations for gender conformity than girlhood. As many other trans men and mascs have shared, about when I hit puberty was when I started being gifted makeup and spa kits that I was so uninterested in and never used, instead of toys and books and art supplies like before. I understand what people mean when they say “child” is treated like a separate gender.

quite literally the only day you can rb this the last one was 2005

got a major pest problem this year actually

I believe it was the work of legal scholar Florence Ashley where I first encountered this term (it might have also been Serano), but I’m becoming more and more committed to saying “degender” as opposed to “misgender.” like I think the term ‘misgender’ fails to properly identify the mechanism behind the process it describes: misgendering is not an act of attributing the wrong gender characteristics to a trans person, it is an act of dehumanisation. I think the term ‘misgender’ especially gives people much easier rhetorical cover to argue that trans women are hurt by misandry by being ‘mislabeled as men,’ or that they are in fact ‘actually men’ and benefit from male privilege, because the (incorrect) assumption underlying this is that when trans women are ‘misgendered’ they are being treated like men - to follow this line of thinking to its natural conclusion, this denies the existence of transmisogyny altogether, because any ‘misgendering’ of trans women is done only with the intent, conscious or otherwise, to inscribe the social position (and the privileges this position affords) of men onto them, as opposed to stripping them of their womanhood (and thus, their humanity).

The term degendering, however, I think more accurately describes this dehumanising process. Pulling from the work of both Judith Butler and Maria Lugones, gender mediates access to personhood - Lugones says in the Coloniality of Gender that in the colonial imaginary, animals have no gender, they only have (a) sex, and so who gets ‘sexed’ and who gets ‘gendered’ is a matter of who counts as human. She describes this gendering process as fundamentally colonial and emerging as a colonial technology of power - who is gendered is who gets to be considered human, and so the construction of binary sex is a way of ‘speciating’ or rendering non-human the Indigenous and African people of colonized America, justifying and systematising the brutal use of their land and/or their labour until their death by equating them to animals. Sylvia Wynter likewise describes in 1492: A New World View that a popular term used by Spanish colonizers to describe the indigenous people was “heads of Indian men and women,” as in heads of cattle. By the same token, white men are granted the high status of human, worthy of governance, wealth, and knowledge production, and white women are afforded the subordinate though still very high responsibility of reproducing these men by raising and educating children. Appeals to a person’s sex as something more real, more obvious, or ‘poorly concealed’ by their gender is to deny them their gender outright, and therefore is a mechanism to render them non-human. Likewise, for Butler, gender produces the human subject - to be outside gender is to be considered “unthinkable” as a human being, a being in “unliveable” space.

Therefore the process of trans women going from women -> “male” is not “being gendered as a man,” it is being positioned as non-human. when people deny the gender of trans women, most especially trans women of colour, they invariably do this through reference to their genitals, to their ‘sex,’ as something inescapable, incapable of being concealed - again, this is not a process of rendering them as men, it is the exact opposite: it is a process of rendering them as non-human. there is not a misidentification process happening, they are not being “misgendered as men,” there is a de-identification of them as human beings. Hence, they are not misgendered, they are degendered, stripped of gender, stripped of their humanity

“nobody is making you do this” i am driven by unnatural forces you will never even begin to comprehend

no, spotify, i don't want to use ai to "turn my ideas into playlists". i already fucking do that with my brain and hands and i do it for fun. what, should i get ai to pet my cat for me? to play my silly games for me? to spend time with my beautiful wife for me? how about i rend you asunder

me trying to convince myself that the whole spectrum of human emotions is a good and necessary thing to feel even if its not comfortable while im actively experiencing emotions that make me feel like my bones are being dissolved in acid

the phrase ‘this is my first time being alive’ has done wonders for me recently. Yeah, I don’t know how to navigate this situation! It’s brand new to me and I’m learning on the fly, aren’t humans such wonderfully adaptive creatures?

big fan of being cared about

i’m not sure why economic sanctions are considered the peaceful alternative to war they literally make poverty and daily life in countries they’re implemented against worse which…leads to conflict and suffering