Many people want to claim oppressed and thus in-group status re: transmisogyny (“no one is exempt” etc) without OPPOSING transmisogyny, revealing the superficially semantic nature of this argument for what it is

The argument is simply this: “Look, we ALL suffer from transmisogyny, and so we should stop treating transmisogyny like it’s a distinction that matters!”

This is a straightforwardly anti-transfem theory and there’s no way it could be anything else.

This arises from the pattern in social justice milieu of standpoint epistemological authority, by which one claims authority on the subject of an oppression by merit of being someone who experiences that oppression

“Transmisogyny” as a concept has undergone much growth and proliferation in the past ten years. Cited correctly as originating with Julia Serano, it’s evolved through the work of numerous transfeminist bloggers, writers, etc.

Claim in-group status as oppressed by transmisogyny, usually through universalizing the concept as much as possible, is really just a claim to have as much authority to “speak on it” as any trans woman or trans female-adjacent person.

The thing that claimed authority is used to do is then say that we should stop viewing transmisogyny as entailing a power dynamic (because after all, we ~all experience it~)

The hypothesis that transmisogyny is a nigh universal experience isn’t something that arises out of necessity and that people are trying to argue for its own merits, in good faith. Rather this claim is a means to an end: the dissolution of transfem authority to self-advocate

It looks on the surface like a theory that the explanation of transmisogyny is so powerful that we should apply it to everything.

In practice, it’s an attempt to prevent and destroy any explanation there could be of trans female oppression, so that we can’t recognize it

The definition for “transmisogyny” supplied is one synonymizing it with anti-androgyny in the broadest sense. Gay men are met with anti-effeminate bigotry and queer cis women with the anti-sapphic and anti-viragist; these are then called forms of transmisogyny

“But even cis men experience transmisogyny! Look! Men are made fun of for being feminine!”

A tricky metaphysic is at work here. This is comparable to saying all women ~experience~ lesbophobia because lesbophobia includes misogyny and all women experience misogyny.

But in fact, not all rectangles are squares just because all squares are rectangles, and every point in every circle in a Venn diagram is not identical to the point where all the circles overlap

By trying to define transmisogyny as loosely being another name for any combination of gender regulation that any queer person might face, we take the dynamic of queer communities exploiting-then-ostracizing trans women and tucking it under the rug.

What we are ultimately getting at with the idea of transmisogyny is the the common tie between people in the TMA spectrum is being harshly targeted with nearly every different form of gender regulation at once, in synthesis with each other, creating a unique ecosystem

It’s not just the anti-woman or anti-feminine or anti-trans in combination, but the anti-effeminate (not the same as above), anti-androgynous, and negatively masculinized. It also has to do with the kinds of bodies transmisogynist culture parses transfems as having

Transmisogyny is a synthetic pattern. It’s both a cluster of multiple forms of gender regulatory violence occurring in tandem, and an emergent system of its own that isn’t reducible to its parts and that has qualities that none of the parts have.

You need both sides of this definition to get it. We need to understand it as simultaneously one complex thing and many simpler things running together.

So no, not every trans person or butch woman or drag queen or femme man is oppressed by transmisogyny. They are oppressed by an aspect of gender regulation that is also an ingredient in the complex gender regulation system transfems deal with. That distinction is huge.

Again, the attempt to universalize transmisogyny and the attempt to erase it are one and the same.

Other rhetorical examples:

- “not everything is about trans women” dovetailed with “transmisogyny is universal”
- “you can’t tell me I don’t experience TM (appeal to authority by experience)” combined with undermining the experiential authority of transfems