Read, reblog, and resonate!
I gotta outline the problems I have with terminally online people being so damn adamant about putting terms like “TME” or “transmisogyny exempt” in their bios, because as much as I just wanna yell “fuck off with that shit” at the people who insist on making this a thing, I haven’t really found a post wrapping up all the problems with this in an easy to understand way. And that’s a problem of its own, because people are so fucking afraid and otherwise discouraged from questioning any new “progressive” online discourse stance that gains traction and risk getting ostracized from the communities they’ve come to depend on.
For those people, have some food for thought.
Firstly, aside from like some people of color denoting that they’re white-passing (which is an entirely different bag of worms), the vast majority of abouts, bios, what have yous that denote your identity Do Not contain a disclaimer list of your privileges. Saying shit like “transmasc, TME” is about as “redundant” (I’ll get to that) as saying “able-bodied, able-minded, ableism exempt” and therefore unnecessary. Except it’s not just unnecessary - and this is likely why some people so deep into discourse culture insist on using it - it serves to downplay your experiences as a trans person and feeds directly into oppression olympics politics.
If your marginalized identity has to constantly be paired with “I don’t actually have it as bad as these other marginalized people though”, you’re creating an unconscious divider between yourself and people who are actually in a decently similar boat that you are, as well as creating a reminder of “I don’t actually have it that bad” which very quickly evolves into “my experiences as a marginalized individual aren’t valid enough” and that can lead to “so it’s okay if I start getting excluded from communities I thought I was supposed to belong in”. It’s a divisionist, exclusionist method of thinking and serves to weaken our community, whether the people participating in this practice aim to do so or not.
And even if all that wasn’t an issue, the practice shouldn’t even have legs to stand on because no the fuck you’re not exempt from transmisogyny because that’s not how bigotry actually works. Bigotry, in real life, does not attack based on how you identify, for the most part, it attacks based on how you are perceived. Believe it or not, cishet and straight trans people are not exempt from being affected by homophobia. Cishet and cis gay people are not exempt from being affected by transphobia. There are many more examples I could give but I’d start derailing. Point is, marginalized people, ESPECIALLY queer people, have SO many overlapping experiences based on how they’re perceived by their oppressors - and it’s why dividing up the community so staunchly is a bad thing.
If you’re transmasc and visibly aren’t performing your gender properly (which HEAVILY varies from bigot to bigot so don’t even bring passing privilege into this) and are attacked for it, you don’t actually know if it was transmisandry or transmisogyny at play just because YOU know how YOU identify. And your online discourse buddies don’t know, either, no matter what they try to tell you. That’s just the reality of how marginalization works.
Please, just stop drinking this koolaid. For the sake of yourself and others. For the sake of being real about how the world works. Just label yourself as transmasc and literally anyone who is capable of critical thought can then go “hm, it’s probable that they don’t have the exact 1:1 life experiences a trans woman does” if that thought’s even applicable. I’m begging yalls to give this one some more thought before digging your heels in.