Transfeminism is not a meta-narrative, it is an analytic technology meant to provide a materialist analysis to a specific intersection: transmisogynized people. It is not the job of transfeminism or transfeminists to account for the experiences of TME people; there are other models for that.

It is not fair to ask us to explain your experiences for you: use feminism correctly (meaning actually understand how intersectionality works, so not transandrophobia) to do your own knowledge production, and listen to ours.

The greater vehicle kind of feminism associated with bell hooks is also an analytic technology designed to fit a specific purpose: to defend the place of feminisms in society and show how the abolition of patriarchy is widely beneficial. It does not mean that feminism should center people who benefit from and thus uphold patriarchy. Feminism as a political project can benefit everyone, but it is not meant to help uplift everyone's knowledge production equally. Men already have dominant knowledge production.

Once again we have men barging into women's theoretical traditions and going "why aren't you making this about meeeeeee". Transfeminism is not about you. Men are prioritized, favored and rewarded, and among trans people this means trans men. Thus, acknowledging, being generally aware of and taking seriously trans men's experiences and problems is what we've been doing; it is the background radiation of trans issues in a way that trans women's issues are not.

This is literally a non-issue: a problem trans discourse doesn't have and one that transfeminism is not designed to solve anyways. Also read the Combahee River Collective Statement.

"Do your own work but not the work you've already done because I don't like it because despite claiming to be a communist who claims to value materialist analysis I get uncomfortable when people analyze their own material reality when it challenges my simplistic, cis binary-centric understanding of the gender binary and oppression."

Did I get that right?

It was Audre Lorde who said "For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change."

In the discussion on trans oppression and liberation, the master's tools are the insistence that trans people slot neatly into cis-based gender dynamics. Insisting that TRANSGENDER men, just by virtue of existing as men, benefit from and uphold patriarchy is you trying to temporarily beat the master at his [ or in this case "her", since we're talking about building off a foundationally cis woman built framework of oppression ] own game.

It absolutely benefits you as a trans woman to use oppositional sexism to insist that your oppression is parallel to that of cis women and that subsequently trans men's positions in society must parallel cis men's. It gives you the spot at the feminist table that you do deserve to have..... in an underhanded way that throws other trans people under the bus and bars us from conversations on gendered oppression despite the fact that ALL transphobia experienced by ALL trans people boils down to being gender identity based oppression.

Is the feminist movement NOT founded on gender identity based liberation at its core? Is that, at the very least, not ALLIED with the rest of the trans community in a meaningful way where both might mutually benefit from a deeper understanding and analysis of gender that does include talking about masculinity and manhood and the social construction of gender as a whole?

It's not about centering men, you sound like the truscum and transmeds that used to fearmonger about how acknowledging nonbinary people will be the death of binary trans liberation in the 2010's.

It's about bare minimum just acknowledging that manhood is an important construct in the conversation on gender liberation and that marginalized manhood is an important vehicle for discussing and dismantling gendered systems of oppression too. It's about imagining gendered oppression more complexly than woman hurt/man harm. It's about finally fucking throwing the master's tools out the gd window. And that's NOT what has been done. At all.

Talking about the gendered oppression of trans men IN ADDITION TO - not above, not before, not centred, but just alongside all other trans experiences is vital to our broader understandings of gendered oppression within transfeminist and broader feminist discussions precisely because it throws a wrench in cis-centered understandings of gendered oppression.

If you can't see that you're dogshit at material analysis.

You're telling us to "do the work" and then get pissed off when we don't do it the way you want us to but you don't want to do the work yourself but we're still always doing it wrong no matter what, so what the fuck should we all do then? What's your solution?

Honestly I'm a little obsessed with this.

"Make your own theory, don't expect us to do it for you"

"Okay, we made our own theory and we call it transandropho-"

"NO, you have to do it the way I tell you"

Like. If that doesn't sum up the revolving door that is the main problem I don't know what does. It's always "make your own post" and "make your own theory" until we do and it gains traction and then it becomes "shut up about this because you didn't do it the way I wanted you to" and "this is inherently lesser importance than anything I go through so why waste time talking about your problems when you should be talking about mine".

Like I get "listen to trans women" and "trust us to make theory that will support you" and I say yes, the trans woman who taught me transgender political theory grouped it all under transmisogyny because every transgender person experiences an intersection of transphobia and misogyny regardless of their actual gender and I don't disagree with her so that's my understanding, and then it becomes "you're stealing our theory and words to talk about yourself, you rely too much on women to help you, go make your own" so then I do make my own posts going back to black feminism and black transfeminism that specifically mentions us and then I get "this theory makes you functionally identical to MRAs and other politically violent men" and "by centering [trans] men you are antifeminist and actively hate women and especially trans women" and "follow our lead and listen to us and talk about our problems and stop focusing so much on yourself" and in the mean time the theory is "trans men get raped and kill themselves a lot, let's examine why this happens and see if we can prevent these tragedies".

It just goes round and round and round in circles.

going to post here some of the article i've been working on regarding the whole "trans men dominate gender studies" narrative, showing some very key symptoms that this is a false narrative with no substantial evidence supporting it.

trans men are not the dominant narrative within feminism nor society at large. pericis men are. the "dominant narrative" within trans spaces has been, for decades, centered around trans women (both due to hypervisibility and other societal factors; this isn't to degrade the very real suffering that trans women face, but to point out that transmasc erasure literally cannot co-exist with what the commenter is proposing here as those two ideas are, for the most part, logically mutually exclusive).

trans men & transmascs do not occupy the same oppressive dynamic that pericis men do. the only reason people spread that false narrative is because they are looking at pericis woman feminism & assuming the dynamics work the same with trans people, when it is abundantly apparent that they don't. if "trans men" were labeled something else, then the argument would fall apart. the argument probably wouldn't be made in the first place. it is literally a semantics-based bullshit argument fabricated from the fact that the word "men" exists in that label, despite there being a silent (pericis) in front of "men" throughout pericis women's feminist literature. the reason trans people were excluded from that literature is because they literally weren't even considered. it was out of sight out of mind.

(also, tbh, i'm pretty sure that commenter is confused about what "materialism" actually means, bc there are several things in that post that point to that being the case)

here is a bibliometric analysis of trans people in academic literature:

and here are the individual node maps for trans men and trans women:

(note: I binned/recoded various terms into each category for simplification reasons. while i'm aware that "transmasculine" and "trans men" have nuanced differences, for this purpose, I recoded mentions of "transmasculine" or "transmasculinity" etc. into the catch-all category of "trans men" (ditto for transfemininity and trans women), since there are plenty of researchers who will use those words interchangeably and I didn't want to have my results biased by missing terms that were still technically included, just in a slightly off-mark way. I had words like "transwomen" (no space) recoded into "trans women" as well. I also went in and added labels that weren't in the original screenshots because VOSviewer is a meanie and excludes some if you're not zoomed in enough)

furthermore, here are the network maps of the journals for all of the above articles:

trans men:

trans women:

after looking at these, I decided to specifically look at the incidence of these in feminist literature and articles in the field of gender studies (since there were a lot of HIV research articles and health-science articles that aren't answering the question "do trans men dominate gender studies", since it's stuff like "does HRT increase the risk of stroke", which is an important question for sure, but not what I wanted to look at)

after going one-by-one and seeing which journals are gender studies journals vs not (and removing any of those that were not either gender studies journals or gender studies articles (I kept things like dissertations from WGS PhDs, since that is still solidly "gender studies" imho)), the results were:

"but what if it's because TERFs are just talking about trans women a lot" one of the largest contributors was Transgender Studies Quarterly, of which this pattern of roughly 2x the amount of articles written about trans women persisted. while I would need to investigate every single author and every single article to definitively answer this (which I do plan to do, but who knows if I'll actually get around to that tbh), the fact that it repeats even in journals known for publishing feminist lit specifically written by trans people, points to this not being the case. also just anecdotally, I had to go through the titles of the articles while selecting things in VOSviewer & I only saw a small handful that appeared to be TERFy. the vast vast vast majority of articles were trans-supportive and trans-affirming, and many of the authors I saw listed were names I recognized as being trans women in the field or directly citing from names like Susan Stryker and Julia Serano.

so what do these results say?

1. there were 1.85 times as many articles written mentioning trans women compared to articles written mentioning trans men
2. of those articles, the ones written mentioning trans women received 1.59x as many citations in total. standardizing this via average number of citations per article, even when you account for the larger number of articles, articles written mentioning trans women still received more citations per article
3. links & length strength are based on citations + authorship/co-authorship, which just kinda reiterates #2
4. articles written about/mentioning trans women were, on average, about 6 months more recent, with the average publication year being around 2019

overall, this points to trans women being both written about more often, with higher quantities of articles, as well as those articles being more influential within the field of gender studies (likely meaning the articles are higher quality and have more eyes on them, as they have more citations per article & higher link strength).