A Thorn With No Name
An essay about transphobia, societal structure and compounding axes of oppression.
I spend a lot of time on the internet as a mostly passive observer. The older I get, the more able I feel to form coherent opinions on things and share them with others. In this essay, I am going to be sharing my opinions on transphobia, transmisogyny, transphobia specifically experienced by transmasculine individuals, and the difficulty that comes when trying to name axes and experiences of oppression when they don’t compound the same way that some do with each other.
I often do not consider my intersecting identities of existing, both online and offline. This is because I’m often trying to forget about them and live as a single human being, as if that is possible. However, when it comes to lenses of analyses in the context of this essay, these identifiers lend weight to the observations I will go on to describe. I am affected by anti-Blackness, general misogyny, misogynoir, transphobia and ableism. I am not the target of transmisogynistic hatred.
It is paramount that oppressed peoples take a moment in their analysis of the world at large and the people who are around them to stick their head out from their lived experiences of oppression that they and their community have in order to listen and learn about the experiences and oppression faced by those in communities they don’t belong to. I think that a good intersectional approach to being a human being stems from empathetic curiosity and a desire to learn how to recognize, as well as support, the struggles of others. This is how I approach learning about the struggles and lived experiences of transfeminine people. Because this is not something that directly happens to me, I will not be able to intrinsically understand and thus must listen to the stories told by others in forming my praxis of support and general conductance.
My source material for learning about the issues faced by trans women ranges from Tumblr blogs dedicated to talking about transfeminism by people like Mousey (@mousidy) and Lilith (@seraphina-aureline), tumblr text posts at large about being transfeminine, posts here on Medium penned by transgender women like Andrea King, Amber Poe, and Julia Serano, and communication with the trans women in my day-to-day life.
From these materials, lovingly, powerfully and vulnerably shared by these women, I’ve come to learn much about the transfeminine experience and how it contrasts with the transmasculine one. The simplest analogy for comparison of the ways transphobia affects these two groups of trans people differently is the idea of hypervisibility versus invisibility, neither of them being good.
Transgender women become the face of trans-ness leading to scapegoating, are loudly discussed always at all times, are excluded loudly from women’s-only spaces because of how they are painted as “predators” while it is very much not safe for them to be in male spaces because of they are often victims of abuse at the hands of men for the crime of being women. For their safety, it is “easiest” to go back into the closet, if possible, or never come out at all, leading to them dying a suffocating death while smothering themselves.
In contrast, transmasculine people in the general public are often ignored, ridiculed as women who don’t know better and have fallen victim to “brain-washing”. They are excluded from men’s spaces for the crime of “being women” but also not allowed into women’s spaces unless they force themselves back into the closet, if even possible. It would be “easiest” to go back into the closet to avoid being third-sexed and cast out or to never come out at all.
In both cases, it is “safest” to be silent and out of the way, not to speak up, not to transition, not to take up space as a trans person. From these descriptions, it is abundantly clear, even to those without eagle eyes, that both groups experience their own flavour of transphobia based on how society thinks they’ve transgressed from the status quo and where they’ve transgressed from. And if you give it another look, you will see how these two groups are both affected by misogyny albeit differently.
In the case of trans women, it becomes clear that some of the backlash that they face is related to their “abandonment” of masculinity in favour of something that society at large considers to be inferior to masculinity and so they must be mentally ill, sexually deviant or both. This in part stems from a hatred of women and femininity as a concept. In the case of trans men, it also clear that the infantilisation and dismissal that trans men face from the certain spheres of opinion saying how they are misguided (a la TERF rhetoric that all trans men are brainwashed lesbians who have been misled to think that transition is the answer, women with “penis envy”, butch flight etc) stems from misogyny’s infantilisation of women at large as people who don’t know what they want, cannot know what they are, and who cannot be controlled with the stewardship of their own bodies.
Ideally, there would be a word that explains both of these relationships with trans-ness and misogyny. One could argue that that term is transphobia as it summarily describes these things already, although not framed in terms of misogyny’s effect on transphobia. In some ways, I’d be inclined to agree with that assessment. Others could argue that the term used to describe the relationship between trans-ness and misogyny should be the portmanteau of the two words, “transmisogyny”. But the term transmisogyny has already been coined to refer to a specific phenomenon.
The term transmisogyny was coined by one of the previously mentioned essayists, Julia Serano, in 2007 to describe a phenomenon in which the axis of transphobia compounds with the axis of oppression faced by all women, misogyny, to create a form of oppression that targets transfeminine people specifically. I find it to be a useful term in describing the oppression that is aimed directly at transfeminine people as opposed to the trans community at large. I appreciate it in the same way I appreciate the term “misogynoir”.
Misogynoir is a term used to describe the intersection of misogyny and anti-Blackness that specifically affects Black women. It was coined by a Black feminist named Mora Bailey in 2008. Some examples of misogynoir that I have experienced personally are sexual objectification while told that I am entirely outside of a white-centric definition of mainstream beauty and thus will never be beautiful, being fetishized for being “exotic” by white partners; people being surprised when I am eloquent, multilingual and highly educated both because I am Black and am perceived as a woman, hardly ever seeing Black women in positions of power, and my pain being considered less important than that of my white femme counterparts. The term succinctly discusses how, as someone who is both Black and is perceived as a woman, I experience a form of misogyny that is distinctly different than that experienced by white femmes because of my race. Because I and others like me experience this different thing, it was given a name reminiscent of the two things that interact to create it, misogyny, and our racialized colour, “noir” meaning “black”.
Serano in the 2021 essay “What is Transmisogyny” describes the fact that the intersection between transness that affects people who are not transfeminine and misogyny as not “adequately articulated” by the term transmisogyny and thus deserves its own separate name to properly describe it. I agree with her. I also agree that, in how transmisogyny also sums up the way in which transphobia specifically affects trans women rather than everyone, transmasculine people should have a term that can explain their specific experience of transphobia. However, online, this has led to a little bit of a problem, most of which I believe is language-based semantics at best and I dread to think what it is at its worst.
A few of the proposed names for this specific form of bigotry aimed at trans men are “transmisandry” and “transandrophobia”. On upon first, fletting glance, the term “transmisandry” isn’t a big deal and explains itself as “a hatred of transmasculinity”. But when you put it in the context of words like transmisogyny and misogynoir, words that add modifiers to the existing structural issue of misogyny, it seems to imply that misandry/hatred of men are also similar societal problems which I do not believe is true. This makes me hesitate to use the term and want to find a new one. At the same time though, I sometimes hear arguments to the contrary. A friend of mine compared the word’s etymology to that of anti-Semitism as a hatred of Jewish people and how people like to discredit the term of anti-Semitism with the argument of there not being a “Semite” group in the first place. There is always space to argue whether or not the etymology of a word needs to be perfect in order to properly convey what it is intending to title or summarise. I am of the belief that where possible, it is necessary to pick a word that makes sense and holds up at least under some scrutiny. Even the term “anti-Semitism” was first used to create a “scientific sounding name” for the term “Jew Hatred” or “Judenhass”. I like to think that this is the same problem that people looking to describe this sort of bigotry experienced by transmasculine people have ended up with a similar “pitfall” of etymology in trying to come up with a theory name for an existing problem. It matters what you call something but the fact that something has an imperfect name does not mean it does not describe a real phenomenon.
I want to draw a related parallel. Previously, I’ve spoken about the unique intersection between anti-Black racism and misogyny that Black women face. Now I would like to hold space for the anti-Blackness specifically experienced by Black men. This form of oppression is not an intersection between one form of oppression and another the way misogynoir is, but is a niche of one axis of oppression. Black men are also hypersexualized in a way similar to Black women, often being reduced to a fetish while being not considered “actual men” by the larger white hegemony. They are also considered to be loud, under-educated and are underappreciated for their societal contributions. As well as this, they are often considered physically superior to non-Black men, leading to them not being seen as worthy of protection and as a threat, illustrated by the skew of violence towards Black men by law enforcement.
In broad strokes, a lot of these are similar to the expression of anti-Black bigotry that also is experienced by Black women. However, these experiences are not the same. There are gendered differences. And yet, there is no widely-agreed upon term in the public sphere to specifically discuss the experience of anti-Blackness experienced by Black men. Based on the same idea that underpins the idea of naming bigotry specifically experienced by transmasculine people, one would, misguidedly, suggest that the term should be Black misandry, “misandrnoir” if you would. Upon a quick internet search, I have found a paper that I’m sure would be interesting titled “Black Misandry and the Killing of Black Boys and Men” by Derrick R Brooms and Jelisa S Clark. The term gets to the point it aims at succinctly, but “Black misandry” or “anti-Black misandry” doesn’t seem to be a widely used or accepted term, for a reason similar to the criticism I draw to the name “transmisandry”. In a sphere where the names used to describe the intersection of misogyny with other things by using identity terms like race and trans-ness, it seems as though terms like “Black Misandry” and “anti-Black misandry” attempt to suggest that misandry is its own axis of oppression. Black men are hated for being Black, not because they are men.
I think that the attempt to succinctly describe the kind of bigotry experienced by masculine members of marginalized groups falls to victim to the same thing — ie the fact that the proponents of it attempt to draw parallels to the specific axes of bigotry faced by women which are compounded by identifiers like trans-ness and race and, in that process, accidentally suggest that misandry is a structural issue. It is a complicated space to find oneself in because you are aware of what it is you’re trying to describe as a real thing but also knowing well the pitfalls that come from trying to name this thing. I hold space for people who do not recognise the mistake that is aligning themselves with people they do not agree with (using the term misandry trying to describe a hatred that a specific subset of men experience that is not as a result of the fact that they are men accidentally aligning marginalized men with “men’s rights activists”). Without lateral thought in this way, it is an easy mistake to make. Once this mistake is drawn attention to, I think people who are well-intentioned should and would pivot, as I am currently doing and as the community at large seems to be doing, to coin a new term that describes the phenomenon that drives the search for a name without making harmful parallels. This is the argument made by some proponents of the term “transandrophobia.”
As put by the essayist Kira Leigh here on Medium, the term works better than its counterpart of “transmisandry” because the term “androphobia” is not used by the wider sphere of “men’s rights activists” as a way of weaponising one’s masculinity simply as a way to cudgel feminism. Other proponents of the term transandrophobia suggest that the term is broken down etymologically as “transandro-phobia” as in “fear of transmasculine people” similar to the construction of the words transphobia and homophobia, rather than “fear of masculine people who happen to be trans”, “trans-androphobia”. This would, ideally, combat the idea that trans men, in talking about their issues, are suggesting that there is a societal axis in which men are oppressed simply for being men.
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Although it is not as “snappy” as the term “transandrophobia”, I think the term “anti-transmasculinity” also works well as a way to convey bigotry specifically towards transmasculine people. Even the Wikipedia page for discrimination against transgender men lists “anti-transmasculinity” first as one of the ways to describe it. Similarly, I propose “anti Black masculinity” for Black men. I see the potential use cases and understanding for the use of the term “transandrophobia” as a unique term that summarily describes what we as transmasculine people face, but “androphobia” is an existing word that does mean “fear of men” . When the comparative words being used add modifiers to existing terms that describe existing phenomena, one can easily make the term weaponisable by people who do know of this one proposed etymological dissection that is not widely understood or agreed upon to suggest that in talking about their issues, transmasculine people are intending to suggest that a societal androphobia is a real thing. Herein lies the issues that come from trying to name things that haven’t previously been named in the framework of this society we are trying to make space for ourselves in. I struggle through these linguistic semantics with the aim of trying to reach a term that I think doesn’t leave transmascs open to accusation of being “just like men’s rights activists” without silencing conversations about the issues we specifically face as an intersection of our trans-ness, transphobia and misogyny.
Both trans men and Black men are oppressed groups that have their own issues. But they don’t have their own name for what they’re going through. Without being able to name your experiences, our experiences, it becomes increasingly easy for people to imagine that these issues do not exist, especially in the context of a patriarchal society that tells us that only women have emotions and men should suck it up and bear any pain they face. This goes doubly so for marginalized men. A thorn with no name is still a thorn. It makes sense to want to give a name to your pain. And I am one of those people experiencing a pain that I want to give name to, as a transmasculine person, in some ways as a Black man, and in other ways as a trans Black man. Unlike transmisogynoir, there is no term that specifically gives me the language to express the compounding issues I have for being Black, transgender and transmasculine. Issues like being excluded from transmasculine spaces because I’m Black, being unrepresented in transmasc passing advice where it says things like I should cut my hair to become masculine and the threats to my reproductive healthcare being compounded by the fact that I am Black, transgender and in possession of a womb. This lack of terminology is a crying shame that I want to work to resolve. The fight to try and name these issues faced by groups of marginalized men is a struggle but one worth having. But there are some, in both directions, who argue that the naming of our issues isn’t important.
There are proponents who outright suggest that both Black and transgender men don’t have their own unique experiences of oppression. This is categorically false. There are proponents that suggest that marginalized groups of men should just use the broader terms of their axes of oppression in attempting to discuss the issues that they face. I find this reductive. You do not describe all colours that have hues of red as red. You use terms like crimson, burgundy and garnet to describe the nuances of the different hues found within “the same colour”. The same goes for attempting to describe different niches of oppression experienced by different groups. There are also proponents that suggest that the idea of transgender men having issues that reflect misogyny somehow “prove” that transgender men are not men but are actually just women. That’s at best narrow-minded and at worst, transphobia aimed directly at transgender men, what I am calling “anti-transmasculinity”. We as transgender men, especially those of us who are feminine, who do not present as men and who do not pass, do not suddenly become welcome into the male hegemony of our patriarchal society. Transgender men, both out and in the closest, still need to access reproductive care that aligns with the organs we have like pap smears and birth control. We are still targets of things like date rape and sexual assault, specifically things like corrective rape and fetishisation for having vaginas even if we don’t like to use them. We are not impervious to so-called “women’s issues” simply because we announce ourselves as transmasculine or begin our transition. People who think otherwise should review why they think that we are suddenly exempt from these things the second we come out, if we ever do.
I understand why some people get defensive of the names for these experiences that are currently in circulation. Trans men are made invisible and in ways so are Black men. So when a name arises that seems like it fits, it makes sense for people to defend it. I defend what the terms, as outlined in this essay, seeks to describe — a desire to name what we are going to in their neck of the woods in terms of their oppression. But I don’t defend the terms themselves. I would like to say that I cannot find fault in the term “transandrophobia” but I can. An argument can be made that I’m being semantic and that linguistics will forever be malleable, that trying to seek to pacify other people who are upset at the term is pandering. But it’s important to listen to each other and understand the frameworks that we seek to expand. For me, a larger problem comes from doubling down when confronted with ideas for discussion about potential issues with the language determined upon.
In addition to the nuanced thought I’ve referenced here, in part informed by my own experience and in part informed by some proponents of the term as a way to describe their lived experience of oppression, I’ve seen some people on tumblr rabidly defend the idea of using the term “transandrophobia” when opened up to conversation, and say that they’re doing so in response to the uses of the term “transmisogyny exempt (TME) / affected (TMA)” being used as an identifier for them by some transfeminine people that forces them into a binary that they do not want to be in. These mentions will have to serve as “strawmen” in my argument because I don’t want to enshrine these people in screenshots in this essay.
I am personally of the belief that the terms TME and TMA are useful in terms of distinction between someone who is specifically affected by a specific axis of oppression (transmisogyny) and who isn’t when discussing transfeminism. At the same time though, I think they are best used as lens for analysis rather than identifiers. When used as an identifier rather than adjective in addition to, or even in place of, the terms “trans woman” and “transfeminine”, I find that people frame their general thinking in terms of an in-group versus an out-group. I don’t think that is productive as a way to conduct one’s self outside of bouts of introspection or a setting in which you are breaking down the world around you into theory. I feel the same way about the way people use the terms AFAB and AMAB a lot more than I think they should. These are not identifying terms; they are adjectives that are designed to have specific and narrow uses. Consider: I do not describe myself as “misogynoir-affected” as an identity. That does not change the fact that I am personally affected by misogynoir. I do not consider myself as “ableism affected” nor do I use that as an identity label. I say that I am Black. I say that I am disabled. If I were to be talking about the fact that I am affected by misogynoir or ableism in the terms of my life experience or how my life differs to people who are not affected by these things, those terms would be adequate adjectives.
Let it be clear that I am not saying that the terms TMA and TME should not be used at all, only that they are best used in the contexts where it makes analytical sense, not as an identity label. I think people who argue that the terms do not have any uses at all are at best misguided and at worst, trying to stop transfeminine people from being able to articulate that there is an axis of oppression that happens specifically to them in the compounding intersection of trans-ness and womanhood. It is important to have terms to describe different things. But it is equally important to know how to use these terms where they are supposed to be used.
Online but specifically on tumblr, there is a lot of intracommunal hatred between transgender people, branching in a lot of ways but summarily about intracommunity transmisogyny, the use of the term “transandrophobia”, instances of transmasculine erasure in terms of discussion of anti-transmaculine issues and the ideas that one group of trans people experiences more oppression than another. Both transmasculine and transfeminine people lodge this accusation at each other. There are talks about talking over each other (which does happen) but I think this is partially because of the nature of the internet. Tumblr is a blogging platform whose ecosystem often comes from adding on thoughts to other people’s thoughts and ideas. It quite literally by definition fosters crosstalk. Still, this sort of intracommunity hatred leads to splintering of in-groups and out-groups. And largely I find this issue leaning heavily on the idea of whiteness and how it affects these people’s ideas and ability to be able to discuss intersecting axes of oppression with nuance.
Like I said in my opening, I think it’s important to recognize how you are different from others in terms of experience and oppression because some groups around you overlap with people who can cause you harm. This is an inevitable part of being in a society. An attempt to govern your interactions with others on a in-group/out-group basis will not hold. The definition of “in-group” will forever become narrower until there is no one but you left inside it. Isolation is the only thing that will await you. Let me describe it this way: if I were to separate myself, on a day-to-day basis, from the people in my community that are not affected by the same axis of oppression as me — in this example, Blackness — I would not be able to interact with any white queers even though they are in community with me. I would not be able to live in the majority white country where I reside. I would have to move back to my nation that is majority Black. But I know very well that when I get there, my axis of oppression in terms of in-group/out-group changes. I then become a Queer instead of a Black person. The in-group narrows. People affected by anti-transmasculinity only. It narrows again. Nonbinary trans men only. Narrows. Again and again until it’s just me. This is not how community is built, creating in and out groups. But having language to describe your differences to other people is important. When you know what occasions necessitate the use of these words.
This sort of separatism into in- and out-groups, intentionally or not, is where a lot of white queers in general fall short in their analyses of intersectionality and building community across axes of experience. For some, transness and or misogyny is their first foray into analyzing the oppression in the world they live in. Because of this, they often seek to amplify the oppression that happens them as the loudest, most important or — in the worst case — only one that exists or matters because that is true in their perspective. I think this stems from a strange sort of internalized white supremacy and a sort of self-centeredness that I find endemic to spaces of white people who are otherwise marginalized from the larger white hegemony. This sort of self-centeredness and self-pedestalling fundamentally fails to recognize that there will always be another group that is experiencing oppression in your community, even in your periphery, for entirely different reasons that you should make space to listen to and communicate with, especially people who experience compounding axes of oppression like being transgender and being Black or otherwise racialized in a hostile world. I don’t often see people talk about transmisogynoir online. I don’t often see people talking about the intersection between racialization and trans-ness, how it changes the experience distinctly. A lot of online rhetoric is white centric. And that, I’d like to think, is because of narrowmindedness and not bigotry. I hope it is at least. Because in that case, it can be remedied by drawing awareness to it.
I write this essay to say that all of us trans people experience transphobia, non-gendered nonbinary people included. All of us experience unique intersections of transphobia with misogyny and other classes of oppression based on our other identity adjectives (race, class, location of birth). Trans feminine people have a term for what they experience that is generally accepted. That term is transmisogyny. This is not because trans women are the only group oppressed among trans people. It is because someone has coined a term that smoothly, in my opinion, builds upon the existing framework of misogyny and highlights a niche in which one axis of oppression multiplies another. Non-gender-leaning nonbinary people and intersex people have the term exorsexism. But like other masculine oppressed groups, transmasculine people do not have a widely-agreed upon unique term that expresses the niche of oppression that we face including the ways we experience misogyny as transmasculine people or the way transphobia is acted against us specificially without brushing against ideas that suggest that there is a structural hatred of men in society. The lack of a term agreed upon by the queer community at large should not be taken to mean that these issues don’t exist. And I hope there comes a time in the near future in which we as masculine portions of oppressed groups successfully develop the language we need to describe our experiences that do not feed into harmful ideas as a by-product.
My whole essay in some ways is summed up nicely by this post.
Sources linked to in this post:
- https://www.tumblr.com/mousidy
- https://www.tumblr.com/seraphina-aureline
- Andrea King
- Amber Poe
- Julia Serano
- “Introduction: What is Misogynoir?” by Mora Bailey
- “Black Misandry and the Killing of Black Boys and Men” by Derrick R Brooms and Jelisa S Clark
- Kira Leigh
- Wikipedia page for discrimination against transgender men
