Social justice abstractions tend to revolve around irreducible foundation concepts that are treated like objects instead of descriptions of complex events in the real world.

Misogyny isn’t a particle, do we understand? It’s the name for several different things

You get these arguments like “trans men deal with misogyny + transphobia so isn’t that transmisogyny?”

Okay but do trans men routinely get murdered and raped for having a dick

Or get put in men’s prisons while obv looking like a woman

Once you start naming the concrete things that transmisogyny is actually about, instead of stopping at abstractions like “confluence of misogyny and transphobia” without grounding in real events, it all starts to make sense

The point is observation/research/etc has led to the insight that there’s a specific pattern of oppression for groups of people who were “born as male, but are women/womanlike,” and we want ways to name that without crude concessions to cissexist mythology or complicated language

This observation doesn’t have to threaten or diminish any other group of people, but for some reason it’s been a controversy in trans circles ever since it was made fifteen years ago

A lot of people say the problem with the concept transmisandry is “misandry doesn’t exist” but the real problem is that this concept’s history is inseparable from a movement to “counter” the insight of transmisogyny analysis and tell trans women “no u”

There’s nothing at all inherently wrong with naming particular patterns that happen to trans men as a group!

But in practice that’s never been what “transmisandry” is. It’s always been primarily a way to say “oh you say I’m a transmisogynist? Well I say you’re a transmisandrist, check and mate.”

It’s not good faith analysis, it’s a device of arguing standpoint authority

The thing is transmisogyny analysis isn’t just about *particularity* but also about disproportionate oppression, such as trans women being especially likely to be oppressed as sex workers, hyperstigmatized, sterilized, fired, homeless, make less money, etc.

Of course trans men deal with misogyny in their daily lives and of course they have specific patterns of oppression they’re up against that deserve better analysis and ways of organizing to relieve or abolish. All true!

But the problem that crops up in online discourse circles is that instead of this organization or relief being the goal, it all goes into this absurd imaginary war of all other trans people vs. trans women, because cis society distracts trans ppl by scapegoating trans women

This is also why vital understanding of transmisogyny, not just as an abstract but a real thing in the world, in the prisons, in the streets, in our gut reactions, is important.

Destigmatizing trans women helps to fight cissexism more generally

This is also why arguing over who “truly experiences misogyny” is often pointless because by design the idea of misogyny encompasses multiple different process that don’t affect even all *women* equally

In feminist dialogue, “misogyny” is often used as a catch-all term for any form of gender regulatory violence, violence that functions to insulate the gender-sex system and protect its normative categories. E.g. you get a lot of feminisms arguing “homophobia IS misogyny”

We know e.g. cishet women aren’t oppressed by homophobia. But the idea is meant to be that misogyny is an umbrella term for gender-stabilizing patriarchal violence, and it alternate between that defintion and the more specific and classic “violence against women”

The conditions that give rise to the oppression of women are also the conditions from which arise the oppression of all trans people, but for trans people we call the emergence “transphobia”

That they run together, in style, origin, and effect, is an easy observation to make.

But this doesn’t by itself explain the particular position trans women—“monster women who cannot bear children”—have to endure in the male supremacist gender system

So we have spent years building analysis about that particular role and the oppression that is unique to it. It has gone well beyond Julia Serano, beyond individualist definitions, beyond liberal feminism

And something else that the years have shown is that collectively, trans communities are more comfortable scapegoating trans women + demanding labor from trans women than they are breaking down the systems of gender + the state that put us where they are