jennie 👻 wife @jennie@deadinsi.de

it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to relate all these different factors under one heading, but it does seem to be historical fact.

"that sounds like a bad time," you say.

"it was," Jimmy-Sue agrees. "your rights were curtailed based on which gender you were, whether you were the 'right' one, whether you loved the right genders for your gender."

your sociology classes kick in. "so gender was some kind of partnering clade thing? like, exogamy systems?"

"kind of? gender organized a lot of stuff. there was a popular dogma among the White Supremacist Empire cultures that everyone belonged to one of only two genders, based on the assumed correspondence of hundreds of biological and social factors like chromosomal arrangement, body shape and composition, hormone levels, pitch and style of speech, clothing style, body posture and mannerisms..."

"I guess those body things do interact, but... why did they try to boil that mess down to two?"

Jimmy-Sue shrugs. "racism?"

that explains it.

what I mean by "gender abolition": it is the People's Year of 203. your name is Xalandra. you used to use a different name that nobody calls you. you use xe/xer pronouns. you're taking a low dose of exogenous testosterone after getting an orchiectomy, all of which was free and promptly available under informed consent. you prefer to wear leather harnesses and miniskirts over big boots, and you braid your beard. your 'type' in lovers is tall with big hips, lots of body hair, body mods, and makeup.

you have a friend, Jimmy-Sue, who is "genderfluid," a word that they explain rose in prominence in "gender nonbinary" spaces around the turn of the 21st Century of the Old Regimes. They're really into history and are part of a subculture of lifestyle historical re-enactment hobbyists. Jimmy-Sue knows more about "gender" than you do— they tell yoy prior to the People's Era, access to things like clothes, cosmetics, exogenous hormones, name changes and certain body mods were gated on 'gender'.

also sry "feminity" isn't actually what i mean here. more like "your rejection of being masculinized". i kno being or desiring to be feminine is not a universal experience for trans people who do not want to be masculinized this is a binary thought pattern i am working on breaking out of lol

we all (including cis women) are taught sexism, and we all (again including cis women) have oppurtunities to participate in it for our own selfish reasons. it is a Communal, Societal obligation to reject that. your feminity is something beautiful and powerful,Not something you should be pressured into performing to be "less toxic"

i guess my one final thing that i do want to be a little bit cautious about wording bc it's not My Personal Experience; i do think this mindset is Super Harmful to amab trans people also. it is similar to the concept of the like "original sin" lmao whereby you are toxic simply by virtue of being madculinized. your assigned gender is not an evil, harmful part of you u must outgrow, just like my actual gender (male) isn't an evil harmful part of me i must combat

to men but that's a sep. issue that i think is actually understood pretty well). the Final really harmful thing i think this all does, is, by associating feminism with feminine experiences, it makes being a feminist a "female" thing WHICH WE HAVE LITERALLY BEEN TRYING TO FUCKING DECONSTRUCT FOR FUCKING DECADES LMAO like. it's another one of those things where, in a roundabout way (and sure 4 dif reasons) uve ended up just saying what the patriarchy says

it is uhh, Fairly Often pointed put that trans men can be sexist [big 🤔 on this one lol] but not as frequently noted that cis women and other trans people can also be sexist. there is of course a slight difference; men (including trans and gay men) can benefit from the patriarchy, while feminized people are Always harmed by it (though there's another point here about how some cis and binary women can recieve benefits from it while it is also harmful in ways (cont)

it implies that feminism is not something everyone can and Must *choose* to learn about, but is instead something you inherently learn by being feminized. this is really bad because, like the idea that you can't be ableist if you are disabled, it erases the fact that we All have internalized sexism, *and* that people who are Not cis men can and do participate in upholding the patriarchy

i'm personally grossed out by this because it gets dangerously close to a huge problem in the queer community; valuing trans men for the ways we are involuntarily feminized. but aside from that it touches on a major part of why i think this viewpoint is So Fucking Toxic: it implies that feminism is something inherent to people who are Not Men, and/or are feminized by society

a lot of people have, entirely correctly, pointed out how this mindset harms trans men i do think that may unintentionally stop some people who've fallen into this mindset from realizing they need to analyze it. that's because a large percentage of them excuse trans men from this, because trans men are also feminized/experience misogyny

masculinity is not parallel to whiteness in that rejecting it is a necessary part of becoming radicalized

if it's your personal reason for being trans that's absolutely fine but moralizing the concept of being trans in general is bad actually. i think

the way some of you talk about being trans implies that the only way to reject what you consider to be the inherent toxicity of masculinity is by being trans and i think that's highkey fucked up