gemini://inconsistentuniverse.space/essays/centeringsurvivors.gmi

> This an archived version of gemini://inconsistentuniverse.space/essays/centeringsurvivors.gmi captured on 2022-01-08. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

This is going to be an odd post in that it's half essay, half polemic, and a response to very particular things that have been happening in online trans activism as opposed to, well, what I think are the more careful and less time-dependent observations I generally make here.

So within the past week a porn star and (admitted) serial rapist Lily Cade, a cis lesbian who has been given a platform by anti-trans organizations, went on to post a series of manifestos on her blog this past week (The week of November 1st 2021).

In it, she called trans women all rapists, pedophiles, and monsters. She described us as men who have given into our shadow who must deconvert or be publicly executed as an example to others. This was the language of genocide. She invoked the Great Replacement theory, a favorite of neo-nazi groups, to explain the very existence of transness. She named particular trans women she thought should be executed.

It was, in short, horrifying. It's absolutely the kind of screed that someone might reference for why they committed a mass shooting.

But then something terrible happened between us, something I still don't know how to process. You see, she didn't just say horrific things about trans women. She also said that she thought trans men should, as punishment for betraying their nature as women, be raped and forcibly impregnated in order to remind them of who they are. Dear reader I cannot impress upon you enough that that description right there is still massively euphemized because Lily Cade made this point in some of the most demeaning terms I've ever seen. She gleefully, grotesquely, invoked the spector of corrective rape and the same way she called on (cis) men to murder my kind she very clearly called for (cis) men to rape trans men as an act of liberation for women as a whole. She calls on imagery of animal husbandry and breeding programs to describe this.

[A side note, dear reader, is that I should probably actually create something more permanent to link back to these threads since I don't trust twitter culture to leave it standing for long]

But assuming you were able to read those threads and links you should see the pattern of what's happening: cafab trans people discussed their own feelings around the threats of corrective rape and the response from some trans women has been "but that's not that bad!"

As a (many times over) survivor of sexual violence myself, I am absolutely horrified by this response. Not only does it make me feel sick to see people literally trying to place violence like rape on a scale to determine what's bad enough to be worth discussing, but we're seeing what should be a moment of solidarity, a moment of shared horror at the hatred we're receiving, and turning it into a contest for who has it worse.

one of the main points I was making is that anti-trans cis women look at trans women as the "that which is not me" in a way that reflects back into negative self-definition. I argued that the denial of our experiences in common leads to such strange things as cis women claiming that they can Always Tell who's trans, leading to hilarious and sad results as they paranoidly accuse random cis women with firm chins of being Secret Men.

Even more than that, though, the dark side of it is an absolute destruction of feminism from within by denying the shared experience of misogyny. One of the examples of this is, horrifyingly enough, connected to sexual violence: the claim that people like me can't be traumatized by rape in the same way someone assigned female at birth can. Writers like Naomi Wolf went as far as to claim that there is a spiritual component that seats the vagina itself as the place of trauma and that without a vagina rape may or may not have an emotional impact, she couldn't say.

I bring up such grotesque opinions because they tie back around into what I want to say: I think some trans women treat trans men as monsters in the same way that cis women treat us as monsters, by which I mean again the "that which is not me".

You can see the threads of this in the twitter conversations I linked above: cafab trans people discussing their own fear is being treated as an act of aggression, a denial that trans women are being threatened.

This is actually a trend I've been slowly noticing for years. I remember the time a trans man I know described his experiences in his youth as "a girlhood" online and got mobbed by other trans women declaring that he was misgendering himself *in order to call us men*. You see, the implication was that if he had a girlhood then our experiences are, by definition, a boyhood.

Which is absurd. It requires a theory of transness that boils down to "men are from mars, women are from venus: trans edition". As a feminist, I know that I'm living in a culture where specifically cis men are treated as the default perspective, the objective moral measure, the natural order. Part of Simone de Beauvoir's point in The Second Sex was that *women* are sexed, marked, and that men are not. What I think modern trans feminism can contribute to this understanding is that all bodies that aren't cis men are marked: cis women, trans men, trans women, &c. are all fundamentally other in a patriarchal culture.

If we accept that premise, then you can't draw these mirror opposites in trans women and trans men's experiences. CAFAB and CAMAB trans people are not *opposites* of each other but both experience having marked bodies. The oppression we experience on the basis of our selves and bodies is also different from each other yet not disjoint.

So to say that cafab trans people face the threat of forced pregnancy is not to rub in our faces that we can't become pregnant. It's not taking anything away from us nor is it saying that rape is not a horror to our bodies. To say that the threat of corrective rape is being used against cafab trans people is not to deny that it happens to camab trans people, indeed corrective rape is used against The Other broadly: this is a horror we have in common not a prize to be claimed by a single side.

Understanding the methods of oppression used against specific classes of bodies by patriarchy is not going to undermine anyone's liberation but give us better tools to fight together.

So many of my fellow trans women have become so committed to treating trans men/cafab trans people broadly as Other that they've started to espouse the ridiculous idea that if trans men don't unconditionally experience male privilege at all times, regardless of whether the world even sees them as men, then that implies that trans women aren't real women.

This need for trans men to be other posits trans men as our oppressors but I say to you: how? Was it trans men who've called me faggot my whole life? Were the men who sexually assaulted me in grad school secretly trans? Has the harassment I've been through, the gatekeeping I had to put up with to get meds, the bigotry I've faced just for existing been put in place by trans men?

If you want to argue about whether trans men can enact lateral violence against trans women, of course they can. Trans women do it to each other all the time. What the hell do you think Blair White's entire raison d'etre is? All of us who face patriarchal oppression are capable of hurting each other with the loaded guns set out on the table.

So speaking of lateral violence between oppressed groups, now we need to talk about the horror of playing games about how bad rape is.

First, a piece of context for why I'm as angry as I am: half of trans people are survivors of sexual violence. Half. Regardless of birth assignment. It's half of us consistently across categorizations.

So to dismiss threats of corrective rape, something I in fact have been through, as insults or not being as bad as other forms of violence horrifies me because the people doing this dismissal are telling a full half of their trans sisters that what they went through isn't that bad because it didn't kill them.

Yes, death is finality but are we really going to argue this point? Are we going to pretend there is a binary categorization of things that kill you and things that are trivial? Again, the initial catalyst for all of this internal strife that's happening within trans communities is because trans men said they were *also* horrified, not that trans women were wrong to be horrified.

The twisting and churning that involves turning this into a competition, frankly, disgusts me. It actively disgusts me to see people getting angry at people horrified by rape threats.

If this were any other feminist context, like cis lesbians being threatened with corrective rape, people would know better than to try and bring up the times gay men have been murdered to tell them to shut up.

The reason why it seems to be acceptable in this case is because, unfortunately, I think there are trans women who have decided to make trans men the enemy: they're easy mode man, man-light, the man you can fight and win. You attack trans men you get to feel like you're fighting patriarchy without actually doing a damn thing to stop it. Again, it reminds me of the ways that gender crits attack us: they've given up on fighting patriarchy but convinced themselves harassing trans women is almost the same thing.

Half of us are survivors. Again, half. Yes, murder is horrifying but to act like the far more common experience---by orders of magnitude---is not an even more actionable and immediate threat is grotesque and betrays not just solidarity with other trans people but also all the other trans women who are survivors.

Fighting back against sexual and reproductive violence has been, and should continue to be, central to anything calling itself feminism.

What I've been seeing in the past week reminds me of the ways that cis male survivors are also treated by some women: their experiences dismissed, treated as a joke, treated as not that bad. And given how many of us trans women experienced this kind of dismissal of our own experiences as survivors before we were out as trans, I find the lack of empathy and understanding of the dynamics involved actively horrifying.

I'm going to use a phrase that I don't see as often as I used to when I first started getting involved in feminist spaces in my early 20s: rape culture.

If we don't take rape culture seriously, we can't have feminist liberation. For any of us. Sexual violence isn't merely a part of patriarchal enforcement it is central to it. If we're not going to take sexual violence seriously *no matter who* it's directed at, then we can't call ourselves feminists. If you don't take threats of forced pregnancy seriously even though you can't become pregnant yourself, you're not actually a feminist.

I have, for some time, felt like there are a cadre of other trans women whose feminism starts and ends with "I want to be a woman but I don't want to be treated badly". It's been too many years of seeing other people say that reproductive rights and access to abortion aren't feminist issues because we can't become pregnant, it's been too many years of acting like solidarity with trans men and cis women is "siding with the oppressors", too many years of dismissing the ways misogyny is used *against all of us*.

Trans men are men but they aren't *cis* men. Patriarchy is made by and for cis men and cishet men at that. If you can't understand even this simplest of complexities and learn to work together, then your feminism---to paraphrase Flavia Dzodan---is bullshit.

Trans-feminism, solidarity, and centering survivors

Content Note: sexual violence, transphobia, forced pregnancy

Feminism, monstrosity, and marked bodies

Centering survivors