Calling on all of us — myself included — to do better.
Two notes: First, I am writing these reflections as a non-binary person who was assigned female at birth — i.e., “AFAB.” Thus, I am writing from the perspective of someone who’s witnessed transmisogyny (and undoubtedly perpetuated it) while also being exempt from experiencing it. Second, please note that this piece gives brief examples of transmisogyny I’ve witnessed in queer leftist spaces.
I’ve been out-ish as a non-binary person for about 5 years, and I’ve been a part of queer leftist spaces for several years longer. Over these years, I’ve learned a lot about the way gender functions in these spaces — the way it can both unite a space and implode it, sometimes at the same time. One of the things that has struck me the most is that people such as myself — queer/trans leftists who were assigned female at birth — need to grapple with transmisogyny on a much deeper level than we have been. To chalk up transmisogyny as something located within The Right misses the ocean of transmisogyny that exists inside us, too.
When I’ve brought up transmisogyny in conversation with other AFAB folks in queer leftist spaces (such as abolitionist groups), I have often been met with a blank stare. Had I not been politically radicalized specifically by transfeminine folks, I probably wouldn’t have noticed the transmisogyny rife in these spaces, myself.* But it’s there, and it’s heavy, and those of us who don’t experience transmisogyny have a responsibility to reckon with it accordingly.
In my experience, transmisogyny in queer left spaces often operates along two lines: as a form of interpersonal bonding amongst people who are assigned female at birth (AFAB), and as an unspoken underpinning to our gender politics. For clarity’s sake, I’m going to give a few examples of each. Please note that the following examples are specific to my own experience and are through the lens of my identity. It’s also worth noting that these examples could be easily expanded into essays of their own — my goal here was to err on the side of brevity.
First, by “interpersonal bonding,” I particularly mean the pervasive joking comments made by many AFAB queers about AMAB (assigned male at birth) bodies. It is very common, for instance, to hear queer AFAB leftists make derogatory remarks about trans women’s penises — or to riff on how AMAB bodies are less aesthetically pleasing than AFAB bodies. A year or two ago, I had a conversation with an artist friend about transmisogyny in queer spaces, only for her to turn around a few minutes later and crack a joke about how she felt “male genitals” were too ugly to make art about. The assumption that AMAB bodies inherently = gross/laughable/etc. and AFAB bodies = desirable/feminist/etc. is ubiquitous in these spaces.
Second, by transmisogyny “underpinning our gender politics,” I mean that AFAB folks in queer leftist spaces often proclaim gender to be a social construct while simultaneously reconstructing it in a way that is transmisogynistic. For instance, we’ll proclaim “TRANS WOMEN ARE WOMEN” on social media — then turn around and say that anyone with a penis is inherently predatory. I’ve heard people argue that all AMAB people are socialized male and therefore naturally take up too much leftist organizing space. I’ve also known many AFAB folks (and been one of them myself!) who say that all AFAB people share a monolithic experience of gender oppression that “other people” simply don’t get.
It’s ironic that queer AFAB organizers who are so eager to reject gender norms actually re-invest in them in ways that harm transfem people. All our subversive actions against the gender binary don’t mean anything if we still implicitly hold the idea that anyone who is AMAB is innately oppressive. Even if you’d never say something like “trans women are secretly just men,” that is quite literally what you’re articulating when you say things like “everyone assigned male at birth is socialized into violence.” (As a simplistic rule of thumb, maybe anytime we start chalking inherent characteristics up to genitals we should get really concerned.)
The stakes of all of this are high. Many of us already recognize that transfem people are hyper-marginalized on every front: housing, labor status, intimate violence, and more. What we often fail to reckon with is that although our queer leftist spaces are (probably) less likely to contribute directly to those forms of violence, our spaces are just as likely to misgender and emotionally abuse transfem folks. It’s no wonder that so many trans women speak poignantly of social ostracism as a matter of life and death; as Kai Cheng Thom points out, “social death is real death for trans women.”
On a final note, I legitimately don’t understand why AFAB queer leftists refuse to wrestle with this part of ourselves. Obviously it’s the transmisogyny — but what I’m saying is, I don’t understand our investment in transmisogyny and the underpinnings of that investment. What are we getting, politically and personally and politically/personally, out of this reductive view of gender? Maybe it’s solipsism: when we believe that our bodies are the only oppressed bodies, it absolves us of the need to recognize how oppression operates elsewhere and how we are implicated. So let’s unpack that shit — and let’s do so as a matter of political necessity.
We owe it to all of us to create a gender politics that can articulate how cisgender and transgender women’s experiences meaningfully overlap around a shared experience of womanhood. We owe it to all of us to divest from gender norms and implicit assumptions around assigned sex and socialization; to create queer left spaces that discursively and materially support transfem folks at every turn. We owe it to all of us because it’s ethically right, because it’s what we do if we want to organize with love, and because we, as people combating gender oppression, need all of us. Let’s build a politics that recognizes it is more powerful to come together in a shared understanding of gender oppression than to nitpick the ways in which our personal experiences do (or do not) diverge.
*And I’m sure I still miss a lot of it! Also, if you want to read up on some of the transfem people who’ve radicalized me, I recommend writings by Kai Cheng Thom, Sandy Stone, Emi Koyama, Susan Stryker, and Alyson Escalante. I’ve also been really g-ddamn lucky to know and love IRL transfem folks who are patient and persistent with me as I construct my view of the world.
