thambos:

skankassqueer: WHOA LOOK OUT PEOPLE WE GOT THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS GOING ON HERE so the feelings of trans men who don’t want to be around other men are more important than the feelings of women who don’t want to be around men?

birth assignment is a form of cultural cissexist abuse. by celebrating that abuse you are perpetuating it and perpetuating cis supremacy and actively making life harder for every other trans person

there’s a difference between being proud of being trans (which I am) and being proud of a particular aspect of cissexism.

you’re such a transmisogynist douchebag. what you’re really proud of isn’t the fact that you were wrongly accused of being a woman at birth. you’re proud of the fact that you have the privilege of not facing transmisogyny and you’re proud that you can use your CAFAB card to get free access to the queer community and women’s spaces. you are the pinnacle of trans male entitlement and an enormously patriarchal douche bag. I honestly don’t understand these kinds of arguments.

Wow, the four numbered points below are perfect examples of four of the main arguments used to defend FAAB as an identity. I’ll try to explain just why each is trans-misogynist and how they supports cis supremacy.

1. Why can’t there be women-identifed spaces AND woman-and/or-FAAB spaces (someone help me phrase this, I mean no-cis-men, yes everyone else). Existing separately, so that there are safe spaces away from men (trans and cis) AND away from just cis men. OR, hey, let’s look at the problem of crisis centers not really having ways to address same/similar-sex violence? A women-identified space still might not be safe to someone who was abused by another woman.

First off, this completely erases the existence of nonbinary people who were coercively assigned male at birth. There are serious problems with “women and trans” spaces policing the genders of women and nonbinary people who were coercively assigned male gender at birth that are rooted in trans-misogyny. This has to do with the fact that women’s spaces don’t add “trans” to include women and nonbinary people who were CAMAB. For one thing, trans women should have already have been included as women. All “women-and/or-FAAB” does is make it more obvious that trans women and nonbinary people who were CAMAB weren’t meant to be included.

The problem with crisis centers is not going to be fixed by making sure males who were CAFAB have special access to women’s spaces and services. Rather than attacking the integrity of women’s spaces, how about asking why their aren’t these sorts of services available to people who don’t identify as men, whether they were CAFAB or CAMAB.

Because, guess what, trans people shouldn’t have to hide our genders in order to receive vital services. Trans men and nonbinary people who were CAFAB shouldn’t have to undergo the violation of having their gender dismissed and being forced to deny themselves in order to receive services. This is an example of hwo trans-misogyny reinforces cis supremacy against all trans people.

The fact is, FAAB/FAB is quickly replacing WBW as the identity of choice for attacking the womanhood of trans women and excluding them from women’s spaces and services.

Also, I can’t ignore that fact that FAAB is constantly tagged onto things like survivor spaces and play parties as a way of treating trans women, including trans women survivors, as a threat to cis women. Trans women experience disproportionately high rates of sexual assualt when compared to cis women, as well as men and nonbinary people who were CAFAB. Yet FAAB is used over and over again to treat trans women as perpetrators, when in reality they are much more likely to be survivors. Not to mention how FAAB safe spaces treats all people who were CAFAB as if they are incapable of committing sexual assault or triggering survivors, which is completely false.

It’s a massive mistake to use the systemic and institutionalized coercive assigning of gender at birth as the basis of defining spaces and services for survivors.

2. Arguments like this are born out of the idea that we are only our identities, but many people don’t experience their gender as a role, but rather as a body, and to deny them the ability to identify in that way is damaging and harmful to them.

Bodies? Oh, I know what this is about: PENIS, PENIS, PENIS, PENIS, PENIS, PENIS, PENIS, PENIS, PENIS, PENIS, PENIS, PENIS. Which adds another layer onto the FAAB survivor spaces as code for “penis-free” spaces. This is what FAAB is being used as code for. You know what’s really harmful? Reducing a group of people to a single body part and then using that to deny their gender identity and life experience.

If trans men want to be proud of their vaginae, that’s great! Conflating FAAB with pride in one’s body is messed up. The State doesn’t assign gender at birth as a way of affirming our bodies, but as a means of restricting and controlling them. Especially in a society where coercive assignment of a gender at birth still means coercive surgical intervention for many. Assuming FAAB implies a certain body type is itself messed up.

3. I don’t understand being proud of being trans but not being proud of another oppressed class. FAAB folks are oppressed. Until recently when someone might be born into a family who accepts them and allows them to transition before being socialized as a girl, being FAAB meant being socialized as a girl and then having to transition out of that. And even now, you have to be born into certain circumstances to be allowed to transition and thus not conditioned in the way the girls and women are. So to be FAAB is to still be on the receiving end of a good deal of misogyny, and anyone who can actively fight against that has a right to be proud of being resistant to the oppression they face.

The old socialization argument, really? Denying that trans women have girlhoods or that they have to deal with internalized female socialization is trans-misogyny. Not all trans people who were CAFAB would agree that they had the same experience. Plus, it’s just messed up in general to assume that everyone shares a universal socialization based on an assigned gender at birth.



If you want to be proud of your childhood and how you were raised, more power to you. But that is not the same thing as being proud of being FAAB — that is, proud the State and medical professionals are forcing institutionalized gender onto people from the moment of birth on.

4. This is completely oxymoronic. How can someone who is proud of being FAAB not be proud of being FAAB? Why does that automatically translate into being “proud” of not facing transmisogyny (I can’t even type this out correctly it makes so little sense)? Yes, to be FAAB and transitioning means that you are privileged instead of oppressed in the realm of transmisogyny. But to be unashamed of being FAAB and unashamed of breaking the prescribed roles is just not as related as you’re making it sound.

Pride in FAAB exists, but lets just admit that it’s pride in cis supremacy and trans-misogyny. Every single example of FAAB as an identity above is based on and perpetuates trans-misogyny and cis supremacy.

TL;DR summary of above points: