All of these guys tend to be younger, it seems to be a new trend cause we didn't have issues like this 10 years ago. They'll come in, talk only to other gay guys, and exclude women (incl trans women) from all conversations to the point it becomes very awkward. This has happened 3 times in the past 2 years or so. We had an event recently and we had a handful of trans people show up. I tried to talk to everyone to just say hi (I'm the organizer after all) and the guy just stared at me?? Then one of the sweetest trans ladies there talked to me about how she was trying to get contact details for people so we could, y'know, be a community, and the guy apparently told her that all of his chats and local groups for trans men were men only and that they had so many issues with trans women trying to make LGBT spaces all about them so they only let trans men in. She was just looking for people to hang out with! The lack of solidarity here was shocking to me.

Maybe it's some social media thing? Over compensation? Idfk. Shits getting weird.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 34 points 1 month ago

People always pretend that's a tumblr thing, but if it ever was it has long spread beyond that and it's now a community wide thing that i have seen play out irl more than once. And that shouldn't surprise anybody. When you teach men to act this way, some will always take the bait. It's how patriarchy sustains itself, by offering men safe options to hurt women. Most men only do this in subtle ways they may not even be aware of, but the number of those that are more brutal is always large enough to cause a problem and the number of those who flat-out refuse to hurt, exploit or sideline women is way too often too low.

So how do you deal with this without excluding nonproblematic trans men from your space? Obviously making it "non-men only" cannot be the solution. While it can make sense to have some events restricted to certain queer identities if you have the capacities, just so they have a safer space for themselves, we cannot organize community in a way that shows all cis gay and cis bi and trans men the door. These are still marginalized queer identities that have aligned class interests with us, and besides that nobody wants a door policy that determines if somebody is too masc to enter.

It's important to not make this about these men's gender identity, but about their behavior. Their behavior is openly (trans)misogynist, exclusionary and ultimately aimed to take your space over by bullying trans women out of it. People who behave in that way need to be barred from your space. It's an unfortunate reality of safer spaces under patriarchy that they need to blacklist some people, and these guys sound like prime candidates for that. You need to purge them.

  • source