Theme
2:04pm June 16, 2014

madeofpatterns:

“Don’t call people men when they’re not men” should really not be controversial.

Yes exactly!

It amazes me how fast “DFAB is not the same as saying trans men” turned into an argument about transmisogyny, when transmisogyny was never mentioned in the original post, because it was not part of the topic of the original post.

It’s this simple:

Going around tumblr, I see a lot of conversations (mostly not about transmisogyny, but sometimes about it) in which people say “DFAB trans people” when they actually mean “trans men”.  Many times, they back this up with very explicit references to trans men that make it very clear that this is exactly what they mean. 

Then they make generalizations about “DFAB trans people”.  One of the big ones is “You have male privilege.”  That statement can only be made about “DFAB trans people” if “DFAB trans people” is being used to mean trans men and transmasculine people.

I am DFAB and genderless.

I do not have male privilege.

I do not appreciate hearing that I have male privilege.

I do not appreciate conversations that assume I have male privilege.

I do not appreciate entire communities building ideologies around the idea that all DFAB trans people have male privilege because we’re all basically trans men or something close enough to trans men that we have male privilege.

So I say something about it.

And all hell breaks loose.

I really, seriously wish that it were possible for everyone to sit down and have a conversation about these things, without introducing really inflammatory comments.  And especially without putting really horrible words in my mouth and expecting me to answer for things I never said.  But really… just would be nice if we could all explore what kind of privilege we do have, what we don’t, how our oppression works, how all these things compare to each other, without half the people involved being on some kind of ideological hair-trigger, where the first statement “out of line” gets taken as meaning fifty things that were never said.