Due to recent concerns regarding this post by @[email protected], I felt compelled to issue a statement to this community.
There were a few people who responded to this post by acknowledging some degree of validity to Serano’s pretty damn explicitly enbyphobic analysis. I just want to start and say that I don’t entirely assume bad faith here, as some people often get sucked into holding bad beliefs in good faith with no malicious intent. However, let me just make something totally clear here: Serano’s ideas presented in this passage, especially if uncritically given a thumbs up, are very harmful.
As a person who has been harmed very harshly by enbyphobia in the trans community, I see through bullshit. I’ve seen disingenuous efforts at masking enbyphobic statements as “I’m just concerned about the oppression of binary trans people!” before. These kinds of takes are often thrown around myopically by people who think that there is, within the trans community, some degree of disproportionate hate against binary trans people compared to how enbies are viewed when, in actuality, it’s the inverse.
Truscummy rhetoric and non-binary erasure have damaged more enbies than any of this so-called “binary-phobia” has damaged binary trans people. This notion of “binary-phobia” being rife in the community is laughable, as this position is such a niche that you seldom hear about it seriously being exercised and you’d especially never see whole online forums dedicated to it. You, however, cannot say the same thing about transmedicalism. Transmedicalism has pushed many false narratives about non-binary people that aim to be prescriptivist and thereby wholly inaccurate in describing the non-binary experience.
To give a common example, truscum often believe that enbies are inherently non-dysphoric and never undergo any form of medical transition. This is demonstrably false, and the enbies who are dysphoric and/or undergo medical transition are not just some tiny, obscure percentage of the non-binary community. These enbies are far more common than one would think if they go beyond watching bigoted cringe compilations and actually take some time to interact with non-binary people.
However, with that being said, even if a trans person is non-dysphoric, that doesn’t make them not a valid trans person, and just to make my point totally clear here: not all non-dysphoric trans people are non-binary, and not all non-binary people are non-dysphoric. Either way, both groups, non-dysphoric trans people and non-binary trans people, whether someone is one, the other, or both, are not invalid in their gender identity. Gender identity is a deeply personal thing, and every single person who is not cis inherently subverts the system that keeps cisheternormative and patriarchal oppression in place. It is about as valid for a binary trans person to be enbyphobic as it is for a cis person to hate trans people in general, but in this case, it is far more hypocritical.
To go back to Serano’s concerns, I’m not saying that I’ve never seen non-binary people give bad takes on binary trans people and gender transition altogether. I have, but these are rare cases that don’t make this notion of a major problem with “binary-phobia” any more legitimate of a concern than something as silly as “anti-white racism.” I sensed that a lot of users were trying to sniff out good faith in what Serano is saying, but it is nowhere to be found, so you can stop looking. If there were, at the very least, some fair understanding for the current day, she would’ve done a fair revision of this horrid passage, but she has not.
The bottom line is that gender identity is incredibly personal, and as leftists who absolutely do not want to validate systems of oppression, anyone who is gatekeeping certain kinds of trans people or being bigoted in some other way towards them is going against some of the core, fundamental principles of leftism by validating reactionary, oppressive structures. Whether someone is medically transitioning or not, dysphoric or non-dysphoric, binary or non-binary, gender-conforming or gender-nonconforming, or existing in any way that a trans person can exist whatsoever, and there are a lot of those, they are welcome here, and this is a judgement-free zone for all transgender, non-binary, and genderqueer comrades.
If you have yet to do so, please read The Gender Accelerationist Manifesto by Eme Flores and Vikky Storm, and I have an old effortpost comment that takes down transmedicalism and actually references this work in the process right here.
You are all valid in your gender identities and experiences as trans, non-binary, and genderqueer people, so do NOT fucking tell anyone else here that they aren’t, even if you’re doing it with the mask on.
Transandrophobia absolutely shows in different ways than transmisogyny, and how that plays out in practice is extremely visible in how various parts of the community are misrepresented in transphobic propaganda. We are all familiar with how trans women are demonized as invaders of women-only spaces, it is this fearmongering that is used to fight against self ID laws and for bathroom bills - which, ofc, affects trans people of all genders, it’s not as if any transphobe supports self ID for trans men, and the death of Nex Benedict shows how dangerous bathroom bills are for transmasc people.
And when we look at the propaganda against gender affirming care, the campaigning is specifically centered on AFAB transition regret and “irreversible damage” done to the reproductive organs - there’s a reason the vile screed of that name shows a little girl with a hole above her abdomen on the cover. The fight for gender affirming care is one for bodily autonomy, and if you have a uterus, that autonomy is always contested whether you’re cis or not, and transandrophobia is a front where this becomes starkly visible. A transmasculine person undergoing medical transition rebels against the public ownership of their uterus, a trans man takes away the very ability of straight men to sexualize and objectify his body, and the dictatorship of the cis fights tooth and nail against these radical claims to autonomy with the double insult of being misogynist and violating gender recognition with that very misogyny. Trans men are constantly belittled as confused and incapable of making their own decisions, and frequently have to fight harder to have their wish to transition taken seriously. Most of the transmasc people i know have a substantially longer way between their coming out and when they start receiving care, and the pressure to not alter a body that has been claimed as not exclusively their own weighs in heavily on this. ofc once this discourse is part of the legislative process, we once more see laws that destroy or gatekeep access to gender affirming care for trans people of all genders.
Transandrophobia doesn’t end once a transmasculine person has made his or their body unclaimable by the patriarchy, tho. I’ve experienced male privilege for most of my life and i can safely say that it’s deeply fucked. This isn’t like white supremacy where you get freebies for looking a certain way. Male privilege means that men get broken to be turned into agents of violence, and if you refuse to be broken, if you do not want to violate others, the patriarchy punishes you for that. I do not mean to downplay the harm men do or paint them as “the real victims”, i hear about friends of mine getting assaulted by men every week and i gotta be honest here, it’s hard not to turn into a radfem weirdo because of it. But i’ve seen firsthand that men aren’t essentially like this, they get molded that way, and that happens through constant, intrusive male role policing by the most disgusting men in your day-to-day life. Which people in male gender roles get hit the hardest by that? It’s simple, it’s the queer ones. Everybody who has been a transfem egg knows that personally, knows the constant hazing, and gay and bisexual cis men experience different, but highly similar things to that, and this hits even harder in the case of trans men and transmasculine nonbinary people who pass well enough as men to at least get the f slur yelled at them.
In our lived experiences, all trans people get the unique perspective of traversing boundaries between gender roles and gender performances that remain forever unknown to cis people. Trans women get to experience the abrupt fall from male privilege, while trans men get thrown headfirst into the demands of toxic masculinity, and both of these yield insights that are a direct threat to maintaining patriarchy. And once nonbinary people enter the fray, the very foundation of patriarchy, the core assumption of exorsexism and oppositional sexism, begins to crumble. Our fights are often waged on different parts of the front, but they are always connected both in their revolutionary potential for gender accelerationsim and in the reactionary backlash we have to weather.
I hope it was clear that I am agreeing with everything here! I guess my descriptor of it as different incarnations of misogyny would be inaccurate, but like you said, I view it that way because the patriarchal violence done to men is specifically done to turn them into doers of violence. Patriarchy by itself is like a whole system bent towards subjugating the lower reproductive-labor class and it doesn’t care about hurting or subjugating anyone, even people not part of that class, if it has to to do its main goals. And when you add capitalism on top of it…
Yeah, how men suffer under patriarchy is … well, patriarchy. Like you said, it’s the overarching system here (i also find it useless to view transphobia, homophobia, biphobia and other forms of queer-specific discrimination as seperate phenomena, they are highly specific but they always intersect with patriarchy, there is no queer liberation without feminism, just assimilationism and inherently co-opted respectability politics). I find it fitting to use that as the overarching term, and misogyny when it is aimed directly at women, and transmisogyny when it is aimed specifically at trans women and creates an intersection between misogyny and transphobia - when i’m passing and stealth and subjected to misogyny, it’s just misogyny, when somebody knows or assumes i’m trans it’s transmisogyny. And when trans men are questioned in their validity or gatekept because patriarchy wants to control their uterus, that’s transandrophobia, i find that more fitting than “misdirected misogyny” because that unintentionally sounds as if there is a correct direction for misogyny, which doesn’t exist.
That’s just terminology, tho. I didn’t intend to call anything out about your post, just elaborate on the subject.