Author: peasantchick
hi there! what’s problematic about the phrase “women and femmes”? a lot of queer-identified folks i know use it a lot when referring to patriachial oppression, and at first it made sense to me but now i’m not so sure it does. thanks!!
femme is a specific identity that arose in a particular context within working-class communities in the 1930s & 40s centered around dating & having sex with other women & it’s silly to use it as a catch-all term for “feminine” (although I recognise that saying this is fighting a losing battle, lmao).
using “femme” to vaguely mean “feminine / feminine-presenting people” is 1. to misappropriate that terminology and 2. (and more importantly at this point imho) to imply that femininity or feminine presentation are hallmarks of “real” women, as positioned against gender nonconforming & butch women (who are decried for being “masculine” and therefore basically men). holding up “femininity” as a prerequisite for womanhood is, besides being flat-out misogynistic, always going to exclude and demonise lesbians (because even femmes aren’t acceptably feminine & are gender nonconforming in many aspects of their behaviour), & especially butches.
i’m almost certain this is a corruption of “women and trans femmes” or “trans women and femmes” where someone skipped over any mention of transness and it caught on because like. the original term is to include nonbinary trans people who aren’t women but are impacted by transmisogyny. and the term that’s caught on doesn’t really contain a group that has stuff in common
Trans continue to do the absolute most! Biological women are expected to cape for you but where are y’all on cis women’s issues? Y’all so fucking annoying.
Excuse me? I don’t know what planet you live on but it’s been my experience that trans women are overwhelmingly supportive of abortion rights. Maybe the reason why you don’t see droves of trans women at your pro-choice rallies is because we’re a tiny, marginalized minority among women so maybe there just aren’t a lot of trans women to turn out in the first place.
Oh yeah… and the fact that for the last several decades people like you have been doing your damnedest to make mainstream feminist spaces–like your aforementioned pro-choice rallies–as hostile as possible towards trans women.
Talk about a goddamn catch-22, eh?
Oh yeah… and while I’m at it I should point out that aside from lack of abortion access–turns out we cant conceive boy howdy what a privilege!–every single feminist issue I can possibly think of from rape to domestic violence to sex trafficking hits trans women hard.
Wonder why trans women aren’t front-and-center at your local women’s shelter? Maybe it’s because we’re too busy scrambling to put together resources of our own that you would have taken for granted sixty years ago because someone went and decided to make the resources you seem to be asking us to help you run inaccessible to us when we need them.
Anyway, get fucked.
I was gonna be all “you can put words in any order you want” but i can’t even argue with this
was thinking about this also: don’t hide your child’s disability from the child themself, or pretend it doesn’t exist
one of my best friends went to an autistic school for 7 years, but no one ever actually explained to him what autism actually was! parents never talked about it! so he thought that when he went to high school he’d ‘grown out of it,’ whatever it was.
we kept running into situations where, for example, we’re sitting together and someone asks me why I’m flapping and I say “I’m stimming, I’m autistic,” or this friend hears me explain accommodation stuff to a new teacher. and he kept responding with surprise: “that’s an autism thing? is autism the reason we do that?” “yeah!” “oh wow, I thought I was just weird!”
so i’ve been trying to convince my friend for most of this year now that all this ‘unusual’ stuff that we do and difficulties we have are just our natural way of being, because of our neurotype and disability… and the reaction has consistently been relief. like “oh, that’s why I’m like this! it’s not the wrong way, it’s just the autistic way!”
if you act like your child’s disability doesn’t exist, it won’t actually stop existing. they will still be a disabled child, only now they will have no understanding of what that means. they’re going to feel confused and out-of-place at best; have their needs ignored and most probably going to push themselves to able-bodied neurotypical standards of functioning when they just cannot handle that, which is extremely unhealthy!
disability is not a bad word! it is not shameful! you gain nothing from pretending a disabled person in your life is not disabled at all.
I’m still learning about what things I do are because I’m autistic. I was never told I was autistic, and always believed I was just weird, and to be ashamed for me being this way…
When I was younger and more abled, I was so fucking on board with the fantasy genre’s subversion of traditional femininity. We weren’t just fainting maidens locked up in towers; we could do anything men could do, be as strong or as physical or as violent. I got into western martial arts and learned to fight with a rapier, fell in love with the longsword.
But since I’ve gotten too disabled to fight anymore, I… find myself coming back to that maiden in a tower. It’s that funny thing, where subverting femininity is powerful for the people who have always been forced into it… but for the people who have always been excluded, the powerful thing can be embracing it.
As I’m disabled, as I say to groups of friends, “I can’t walk that far,” as I’m in too much pain to keep partying, I find myself worrying: I’m boring, too quiet, too stationary, irrelevant. The message sent to the disabled is: You’re out of the narrative, you’re secondary, you’re a burden.
The remarkable thing about the maiden in her tower is not her immobility; it’s common for disabled people to be abandoned, set adrift, waiting at bus stops or watching out the windows, forgotten in institutions or stranded in our houses. The remarkable thing is that she’s like a beacon, turning her tower into a lighthouse; people want to come to her, she’s important, she inspires through her appearance and words and craftwork. In medieval romances she gives gifts, write letters, sends messengers, and summons lovers; she plays chess, commissions ballads, composes music, commands knights. She is her household’s moral centre in a castle under siege. She is a castle unto herself, and the integrity of her body matters.
That can be so revolutionary to those of us stuck in our towers who fall prey to thinking: Nobody would want to visit; nobody would want to listen; nobody would want to stay.
I’m a bit pissed right now so I’m just going to leave this here.
If you’re really pro-choice, and say you support a woman’s right to choose, you better fucking support a trans woman’s right to have hrt and get srs if she so desires.
(I know I’m going to get hate for this.)
nah
a man wanting to a get boob implants for cosmetic reasons and to fulfill his autogynephilic kink is in no way in the same level or comparable to a traumatized rape victim wanting to get rid of the pregnancy that resulted from the sexual abuse she experienced, pro-choice activism is in no way related and should never go hand-in-hand with transgenderism rhetoric
0/10 this is a terrible post and you should feel ashamed
You do know that *I* am not allowed to have hormones, as a post-menopausal cis woman with a family history of breast cancer? You do know the majority of post-menopausal women who now request hormones do not get them, due to fear of liability and lawsuits, etc?
The official number of post-menopausal women (in the USA) on hormones is 1 in 5, and that is why. Even if we sign papers agreeing to the liability and taking responsibility… well, they don’t offer us any. The door is closed; they are simply not going there and possibly getting sued for malpractice.
Therefore, pay attention, you are actually getting treated far better than we are. The medical establishment assumes you are intelligent enough to choose what you want and grown up enough take responsibility, but fully 80% post-menopausal women are not given these choices.
I support the rights of 1 out of 5 trans women getting hormones, the same as for post-menopausal cis women. Exactly the same. If any woman in your family has had breast cancer, instant disqualification. Tough shit.
Now, that’s equality. As it is, trans women are of course treated FAR BETTER than cis women and after their initial diagnosis, have oceans of hormones at their disposal (at megadoses I have been told would be harmful for cis women) regardless of their family histories. So cut the bullshit, please.
1 in 5 is the number for us, so that should be the number for you… agreed?
If not, why do you think you deserve to be treated better than cis women?
hm don’t u think it’s just a bit, unnatural? doesn’t it make a mokery of the women who can produce their own estrogen? doesn’t taking these manufactured chemicals and pumping them into your body make you simply a product of the modern medical industry? isn’t artificial female hormones just a defiance of natural order? aren’t hormones just optional and cosmetic and unnecessary? just saying, i thought terfs were against all this hormone stuff. but im learning more everyday!
but in all seriousness. estrogen treatment at an old age comes with significant risk to trans & cis women. trans women who medically transition over 40 are very often denied hormones if there is any history of heart disease or blood clotting disorders in the family, although antiandrogens are a different matter because they have no risk and in fact reduce the risk of many cancers. and all trans women are on progressively lower dosages as we age because estrogen treatment is a cancer risk in all women, and medical guidelines state that over around 40, estrogen supplements should be kept as little as possible. often trans women have to halt hormones completely around the age breast cancer becomes a risk factor if there’s a family history. the ‘megadoses’ you’re talking about would be dangerous only to women who are already producing estrogen, as normal estrogen levels don’t to be doubled. in fact they’re only ‘megadoses’ compared to the microdoses found in contraceptives, because they have completely different functions. if a trans woman is taking more estrogen than is in the normal range of cis women for their age, that’s generally self-medication and is harmful if left unchecked. and at every age depending on the dosage we need bloodtests every 3 to 6 months to check our liver, kidneys and to check for clots.
and the whole ‘trans women have it better’ shit that you’re pushing ignores that trans women outside the US (Nowhere else has a planned parenthood) need to go to specialists for these drugs, which have a minimum year long waiting lists, often 2 years or more, just to get into preliminary psychological testing. they often require over 10 very expensive sessions of very intrusive evaluation. the country of New Zealand had one such specialist who recently retired, and now the entire damn country is unequipped to handle trans women. this isn’t like us just being able to go to the gynecologist.
it’s really not that hard to google what attaining hormone treatment is like for trans women there’s just no need to be this wrong next time
🍓🧀 (archive) 