"who benefits from the imbalance and who suffers most? and what if one of the reasons things haven't resolved, despite all the effort that you've put into it, is because the person you're with knows they benefit from you being in an imbalanced relationship"

take this in, digest it.....

now apply this to anti-transmasc discourse

and tbh trans discourse overall

But if someone is an abusive person, they're not looking for repair.

They're looking for control.

Source: the.god.led on tiktok

if your abusive behavior makes you feel like immediately lashing out at the person putting the mirror in front of you, consider that maybe you're the bad one in this situation. :)

trans men and mascs, I understand that you have been accustomed to breadcrumbs for so long that they look like a fine lobster dinner, but please stop glazing every person who says the bare minimum supportive or nice thing about trans mascs.

ik we almost never get the bare minimum to begin with, so somebody actually acknowledging our problems feels like woah I'm in love with you. and victim blaming is horrendous, I am NOT making this post in order to shame anyone who has idealized a person who gave them the bare minimum. I hate it when I see that shit too. it's a very normal response when you're used to being either abused or neglected or forgotten, to suddenly feel like the bare minimum is huuuuge.

you're not bad for that. you shouldn't feel ashamed that you reacted that way. that's not your fault. anyone who tries to blame you for further abuse you experience when you were just trying to get your basic social needs met, when you literally just wanted someone to fucking support and care about you for once, is a piece of shit who needs to be sacrificially tossed into the volcano. okay? okay.

my point is: you still need to stop it. you deserve way more than the bare minimum. you need to develop some self esteem that you deserve more than the bare minimum. you can stop telling yourself that that's all you deserve. you can stop accepting the bare minimum just because you think that's the most you'll ever get. you shouldn't have to diminish yourself in order to be cared about. that's not love. that's not care. that's at best neglect and at worse coercive control and abuse.

edit: also fuck any of the people who give this same message but instead try to treat you like a hapless little child who can't use their brain or think for themselves. the way people will condescend to transmasc abuse victims is horrendous and there are ways of addressing it without being a POS. you don't have to accept that treatment, either. you are allowed to have agency in this discussion just as much as anyone else, and anyone who tries to treat you like a child and place themselves as the adult teaching you some sort of lesson, can go into the volcano as well.

slaves who cannot accept that they exist in the same world as transsexuals and that they aren't allowed to harm transsexuals get chained up and stored in the basement until it is time for them to be used. if they really really cannot accept that they aren't allowed to continue terfing, they will be lobotomized and blinded to protect them from having to see transsexuals.

@spambotarchive caught me another one

not to sound like I'm full of myself myself, but a bunch of people online have convinced themselves (via watching a lot of video essays and pseudointellectual psychobabble) that they are, quite frankly, a lot better at deciphering context, critical thinking, etc. than they actually are.

it's the same phenomenon as what's happening with LLMs, where people become convinced that their skills are better than they actually are, but if you took it all away... you'd find out that they're actually significantly worse than somebody who didn't use them at all.

and it shows when you put these people into scenarios where there are no videos or content for them to watch; when they've gotta form their own opinion based on their own brain. the results are horrendous.

once you go juuuuust outside of something that has premade talking points for them to regurgitate, they can't think on their own very well. because that's all they're doing. it's like when you study for an exam and don't ever quiz yourself, you just keep looking over your notes. so you get overly confident that you know your shit. but then you're only just jogging your memory as the answer is put in front of you, and you can't actually produce it on your own. a bunch of people are looking over how to solve a math problem, becoming convinced that they could do it on their own because they see the steps written out, and then when you put the exam in front of them... they don't actually know it.

but the kicker is that these same people? think they're not like that. but think everyone else is. they can recognize other peoples' incompetence, but not their own. they can talk about illiteracy and degrading critical thinking skills, but not see that they are also lacking in those areas. and they stubbornly don't believe the people who are actually competent.

anyways I'm watching a tiktok lesbian PhD arguing in her videos about that one podcast, and it's soooooo fucking emblematic of this. she's an actual academic. she knows her shit. this queer collective podcast, though, think they are far more well read and far more competent than they actually are. they are pseudointellectuals. meanwhile the lesbian is the actual intellectual. and the difference is fucking night and day. and it is still so so so so so so emblematic of queer discourse overall, except it's mostly pseudointellectuals posturing towards other pseudointellectuals trying to prove they're real intellectuals, all because they watched some video essays online.

read whipping girl by serano and female masculinity by halberstam back to back if you want the same whiplash (ha) in book form. makes it pretty clear that serano has absolutely 0 relevant academic background nor even the literary chops to warrant being as exalted as she is.

reading her old blog is a fantastic lesson in "oh she's an asshole who looks down on trans men as widdle babies who can't think for themselves". it's incredibly parental and condescending.

Reminded that “socialization” theory, or whichever name you want to call it by, is the way the modern feminist movement managed to argue (for the first time in human history) that the oppression of women was not rooted in nature but in nurture in a misogynisitic culture.

Like I cannot stress enough how being asked to drop the idea that being assigned and raised female socializes you in a certain way is not just to ask people to close an eye and say a small white lie in order to spare people’s feelings, it is to drop a bomb that has the power to undo all of feminism on a molecular level.

From the comments: “the resistance towards socialization as a theory is so bizarre to me because saying you don't believe it's real is basically admitting to being a bioessentialist. It's literally the ONE thing that is NOT bioessentialism! Plus it's frustrating to read so many posts positing their main argument as: ‘Socialization doesn't exist, because instead of being rewarded for fitting the gender roles expected of me specifically because of my body, I was PUNISHED for NOT fitting them!’ Like, being punished for NOT following a rule is a pretty solid way of admitting the rule exists. Because. Not following the rule incurs social punishment...”

theres definitely an idea in the trans community that trans men are uniquely privileged in both their ability to access transition and to pass as cis men with "less" treatments (hormones, surgery, voice training, ect) than trans women, and thats not true. in fact a lot of trans men end up never transitioning for one reason or another. id like to take a moment to acknowledge and remember all the trans men who never transitioned due to transphobia, transandrophobia, misogyny, financial underprivilege, or otherwise never having or seeing it as an option in the first place. including my biological mother apparently

preface: I'm not saying this all to compare struggles but to show that the assertion that our transition is "less" is just untrue.

- breast growth is a natural consequence of estrogen therapy. when trans women get top surgery at all, it is usually augmentation, which is generally minimally invasive and produces minimal scarring due to small incision size, depending on the procedure the patient chooses.

- in contrast, most trans men are not good candidates for minimal-scarring top surgery techniques and the most common procedure (double incision) involves two 6"+ incisions which usually require drains afterwards, and grafts or more complex incisions if the patient wants to keep their nipples.

- neovaginaplasty is generally a one- or two-stage operation which does not necessarily require flaps/grafts (for penile inversion, though other methods can be more complex).

- phalloplasty almost always requires at least two and possibly 3 or more staged operations, meaning the timeline can be a year or longer from the first procedure to the finished result to allow for healing between stages, and RFF (most common donor graft site) requires physical therapy to regain circulatory and motor function in the arm the graft came from. complications can involve loss of motor function or sensation of the hand.

- orchiectomy is an outpatient office procedure that only requires local anaesthetic and has a low rate of complications.

- hysterectomy is a major surgery requiring general anaesthesia or spinal nerve block and can result in complications such as significant blood loss, damage to nerves controlling urinary function, bowel perforation, etc.

- freezing sperm for future use is fairly straightforward, painless, and does not involve exogenous hormones if the patient has not already undergone HRT for an extended period. this can then be used to artificially inseminate a partner or surrogate at a later date, a process with a high success rate and low risk.

- freezing eggs for future use involves the administration of large doses of FSH and LH which in turn causes estrogens to spike in the patient, which may cause mood changes, cramps, and dysphoria. then a needle is inserted via the vaginal wall to harvest the eggs. lastly, actually reproducing using those frozen eggs requires IVF, which is considerably more expensive and complex than artificial insemination.

again, there are plenty of things about trans women's transition healthcare that are harder, and I'm not going to pretend it's as simple as one or the other group having an objectively worse time, but it's really easy to cherry pick if your agenda is to play oppression olympics.

the fact that trans men/mascs who have won women's chess titles are stripped of them and banned from the women's division upon transitioning is a great example of what we mean when we say society needs to stop punishing us for coming out

the fact that FIDE has a women's division is specifically due to historical misogyny in chess as a cultural phenomenon. people assigned/presumed female are far less likely to be encouraged to pursue chess, and those presumed-female chess players face stereotype threat and exclusion from social networks that directly impair the ability to learn and develop a support system. so a women's division was created as a kind of level playing field for all of those folks to compete in without the pressure of having to be measured against cis men (i.e. the historically dominant class)

but not trans men, fuck them, be a real man or get out, I guess

most grandmaster-level players have been playing since they were like, 5-8 years old, to be clear. like it is the type of game where you seem to need early exposure to spur brain development in the areas of the visual cortex responsible for picking up patterns on the board. the difference in treatment based on birth assignment is extremely relevant to a young player's potential to reach a high level and win titles.

something I've thought about regularly, being in STEM nowadays, is just how disadvantaged I am compared to my peers who were raised as boys. their parents put them in all sorts of STEM related clubs and activities. they did science fair projects. they were given STEM education as normal hobby things to do, and were encouraged to do so. for those of the younger age brackets, their social media feeds had educational content about science thrown onto them as something they'd be more likely to be interested in. a lot of them had already learned basically all of the basic physics and math and science concepts before even getting to college, because they spent a childhood getting familiarized with them and primed to understand them via normalized hobbies that encouraged the development of those specific knowledge areas. they had a head start.

meanwhile, I learned home ec and sewing and art and music and other hobbies that weren't really related to STEM, except maybe just computer literacy in general as a necessity. so when I got to college, I had to learn a bunch of stuff that I hadn't been super well introduced to before. obviously, I had high school classes. but it's still different.

Antifeminism online: a necessary history

This may end up being one of my longer posts, and possibly the most important post I'll ever make. If you're reading this, I beg you to save it so you can find it whenever you have time to take out of your day and read it in its entirety.

Since it was mentioned in a post I saw yesterday, I'd like to leave a couple of videos from The Alt-Right Playbook series by Innuendo Studios. This video below is the one that was explicitly referenced in the post. It's less than 5 minutes long.

This next one is one that very well illustrates a specific bad faith rhetorical strategy that originated in very right-leaning online spaces in the early to mid 2010s (mainly 4chan and Reddit) and was then disseminated to other social media with more politically diverse userbases when the channers and redditors started using it (among others discussed in the series) to obfuscate, silence, or "takedown" arguments by progressives. I'm highlighting this particular one because I think it is very commonly used now on Tumblr among users calling themselves "transfeminist" in a way that destabilizes and obfuscates actual feminist analysis. (I don't think everyone who does it is equally aware of what they're doing - this is a strategy that does not require a complete awareness of its results on the part of the user. However, many people who use it do very well know what they are doing and feign ignorance, as the strategy is one that has plausible deniability built into it. The video goes into this.) The video is 18 minutes long.

I would sincerely recommend anyone who considers themselves a progressive and who frequently comes across bad faith arguments made by people who try to smuggle in regressive ideas in the form of quippy statemens, "owns", gaslighting, goalpost-shifting, etc. to watch the entire series. It has many parts but most of the videos are pretty short and the whole thing is really digestible and simply phrased.

More specifically to the topic of this blog, the recent trans community """infighting""" is one where a contingent of 4chan and old-school Reddit expatriates have been pushing increasingly antifeminist beliefs into the previously relatively progressive and feminist demographic of queer and trans Tumblr users, moving the overton window slowly but surely to the right on issues like rape culture, domestic abuse, reproductive oppression, and the way gendered socialization produces unequal consciousness and thus unequal material results, while gradually discouraging direct engagement with the history of feminist political action and feminist theory and literature.

Now, I guarantee you that I have been online for longer than at least 80% of the people reading this. This is both because I am old (#MillennialCringe) and because I, like many nerdy girls and "girls" of the 00s, was a very early adopter (never let them tell you that the internet was solely or mostly male until X recent date. It's a sexist lie.) So as someone who has been online for a very long time and has been immersed in online political discussion for almost as long, let me tell you, the Internet's historical memory is extremely short.

The reason people who unironically believe in things like AFAB privilege, that "people with a vagina can get justice for rape if their rapist is AMAB" (quite literally the opposite of how rape has worked for the entirety of human history, BTW!), that cis men are closer to being "TMA" than anyone AFAB or even cis men are TMA (where to be "TMA" is to universally suffer the most severe gendered victimization and violence, since "literally everybody AFAB has privilege over ["TMA" peope]"), that "there is a type of power that AFAB people hold that cis men don't" due to "having access to cis womanhood", who proclaim their "little fondness for cis women as a class" while having "no quarrel with the cisgender men", who argue in favor of introducing "nuance" to the condemnation of a rapist as an offender and wonder whether it is even possible to know if or when rape has occurred, who perpetrate the classic MRA talking point of "false rape accusationss", can insist that they are the indefatigable feminist activists being harassed and persecuted, while the people who point out the physical, psychological, medical, legal, economic, reproductive, occupational, and sexual damage that being classed as female has come with for the majority of human history* are maligned as "MRAs", or "gamergaters" with so little pushback from anyone, is that the true nature and history of those fascist, racist, and antifeminist movements has been memoryholed, even as little as <15 years after they happened. At the same time, its agents have demonstrably succeeded in normalizing their language and beliefs throughout the entire Internet, to the point that the average Twitter or Tiktok feed of 2026 looks not unlike the front page of /pol/ in 2014.

I believe it has at this point become fundamental for anyone who considers themselves a progressive to actually educate themselves on the history, tactics, demographic makeup, language, and aesthetics of those movements. This is especially true for anyone who considers themselves a feminist and who wants to spread feminist beliefs, participate in feminist analysis and work to end sexist oppression. Sexism has always been one of the chief values used to attract people, mainly white cis men who felt disenfranchised from masculinity, to these environments and radicalize them. (The other big one of course being racism.) Here is a video in the Alt-Right Playbook series on how such radicalization worked in detail, it's longer than the others but very important, please, please watch it.

It's especially important to note that I don't believe it to be a coincidence that these movements gained traction not thanks to platforming or support from "classic" conservative hubs but thanks to the radicalization and infiltration of nerdy online spaces with a predominant white male presence. It is equally not coincidental, in my opinion, that to the sexist, racist men in these communities, Tumblr was seen as the stronghold of the annoying, whiny, self-victimizing feminists. This was due to the fact that Tumblr (and some other often female-created and female-moderated fannish spaces, like FF.net, LiveJournal, and later Ao3) was where all the nerdy girls and women ended up gathering, in order to be able to discuss nerdy interests somewhere where they wouldn't be subject to misogynistic harassment. All of this takes on even more significance when you remember that Gamergate, and the broader culture of anti-feminist movements it both was an early part of and further sparked, started specifically as a reaction to feminist journalist critiquing sexist ideology and content in video games, and more broadly to the growing voice of women in the culture of nerd hobbies.

One last thing I want to note is that many of the antifeminist talking points and stereotypes - and their related imagery - that were created at the time by these communities seem to have been recycled into talking points and imagery that is now used against transmasculine people and NB people AFAB (though they do of course still get used against women.) There is a clear and straightforward lineage that can be traced from the "hysterical feminazi" to the "whiny bitchboy transandrocunt", from the "crazy bitch who wants to cuck videogames" to compensate for her inferiority to the "power-tripping TME using AFAB privilege to censor TMA expression", from the "cringe fat SJW screeching about being lithosexual" to the "ugly theyfab with giant tits who thinks pronouns make them oppressed" or "delusional dyed-hair pooner with zippertits and fandom brain." The place where this lineage can be seen most evidently is in the wojak-style cartoons produced in these sort of spaces, where the aesthetic similarity and the correspondence of the language use highlight the fact that there is a direct continuity between the antifeminist 4/8channers and Redditors of then and the antifeminist, anti-transmasculine, exorsexist posters of now. The latter's ideologies still often start off on Chan boards, and eventually spread to Reddit and Twitter and Instagram and Bluesky, with the difference that they now use Tumblr as an inbetween step to proliferate and solidify their ideas, having at least partially supplanted the native userbase of Tumblr ("woke snowflake SJW" types) but having retained the website's function as a petri dish for percolating ideas about LGBT/queer identity and feminism before they get "trickled down" to the rest of the LGBT/feminist internet. At the bottom of this post I will leave some images as examples. (TW for virulent misogyny, transphobia and racism, and for self harm scars)

let's play a game

oh yeah I forgot to update this, but this person was, in fact, a proforcedbirth/"pro""life" trump supporter

and when i went to grab screenshots just now, apparently they're on a bit of a COVID denial kick lol

"Go outside" not in the sense of "be in nature to reset your brain a bit" but in the sense of "go and look at how the world actually operates when you aren't in a bubble of people with your shared thoughts and beliefs every so often to remind yourself of how privilege actually operates in the real world."

"Trans men aren't victims of real transphobic violence, they're just seen as mentally ill girls (and therefore safe)" is a belief that only exists if you have never seen how women with schizophrenia are treated. Look at how conservatives SNEER the words "mentally ill" when talking about LGBT people they want to murder. Them calling you "mentally ill" is not a sign they want to protect you and help you "recover" like you think it is due to spending time on sites that are generally more positive to mentally ill people. When conservatives call someone mentally ill, they want that person locked up and forcibly medicated for the rest of their natural lives at best, and killed at worst. Go outside. Watch.

this is one of the reasons why I keep saying that everybody needs to read up and learn about fundies and christofascist belief systems. listen to stories from people who escaped those communities, especially the women and queer folk. the modern dominant culture is based on these people's belief systems. you cannot effectively understand transphobia until you understand how christian fundamentalists think and act and feel. because they're who makes the system and sets the culture, very deliberately so.

rhetorical games are their favorite! they have built entire ecosystems on gaslighting people into a lot of things. and it's so difficult to explain to anyone who hasn't experienced that firsthand, because these people act kinda like the cheshire cat. they speak in metaphors that look like normal words. they are the experts of dogwhistles. when they express what looks like pity to an outsider, it's not pity. it is a deep contempt and hatred, more often than not. it is a desire to do violence upon that person, more often than not. it's confusing because it's supposed to be. they have to bend themselves into knots in order to justify things in their heads. "love the sinner, hate the sin" is a great example. and unfortunately it is sometimes very effective brainwashing and people researching it fall victim, too. so like. take care of yourself. but listen to people who have gotten out of these cults and offshoots and the horror stories from people.

Telling a group of people who are historically harmed by misogyny that they

IS NOT FEMINISM!!!

You are repeating misogynistic rhetoric, and are a piece of shit.

You cannot be a feminist while using "bitch", "cunt", "whiny", and "hysterical", as insults.

And specifically targeting a marginalized group with hateful speech makes you a fucking bigot.