The Transmanosphere is grooming your boyfriend

A response to Steph Snow on transmisogyny, grievance, and the queer institutions that keep producing both

This one’s free, like everything here. Paid subscriptions are the reason I get to write instead of trying to cite theory for meals.

Support me directly here:

https://ko-fi.com/bundleofstyyx

Follow my socials

Bluesky: bundleofstyx.org / Twitter: @bundleofstyx_ / Tumblr: bundle of stx / Instagram: Bundleof.styx

Before you read this, read Steph’s Transmanosphere: The Trans Masculine Radicalization Pipeline. I’m responding directly to the phenomenon she identifies and the history she lays out, and I’m not going to spend thousands of words reproducing her argument when she already made it herself.

I agree with a substantial portion of it. My disagreement is about where we locate the cause. There’s a point where her analysis stops several feet before the bottom of the building.

Steph Is Describing Something Real

Spend enough time in queer spaces as a transsexual woman and eventually you run into a particular kind of transmasculine politics organized around resentment toward trans women. Sometimes it’s dressed in the language of invisibility, which is its own kind of joke, since I have never in my life felt invisible. Sometimes it’s about resources: who gets the grant, who gets the reading slot. Sometimes it becomes an elaborate theory in which transfeminism is secretly the instrument through which trans women dominate everyone else. I’ve seen versions of this so many times that I could reproduce the entire discourse from memory while being hit over the head with a frying pan.

Trans women are hypervisible and therefore privileged, hypersexualized and therefore privileged, disproportionately discussed and therefore privileged, disproportionately murdered and somehow still privileged because people discuss the murders. It’s an extraordinary political technology because it never loses an argument. Feed it evidence of transmisogyny and it comes back out the other side as evidence that trans women receive too much attention. There is no input the machine cannot use.

Steph and many others have called the ecosystem producing some of this the transmanosphere. The comparison to the manosphere is useful, and I think it undersells the problem.

The manosphere did more than teach men to hate women. It gave them an explanatory system that converted personal frustration into political grievance. Romantic rejection became feminism. Loneliness became gynocentrism. Sexual insecurity became female privilege. A miserable afternoon became evidence that civilization had been captured by women. The genius of reactionary politics has always been its ability to take a real feeling and hand it the worst available explanation.

Trans men do experience alienation. They experience medical neglect, sexual violence, reproductive violence, and transphobia. They get infantilized and isolated. They get treated by nominally progressive people as confused women who wandered tragically away from womanhood, which carries its own humiliation. The injuries are real. The political question is what explanation gets attached to them, and increasingly one available explanation is trans women did this to you.

Grievance Needs an Analysis

One of the failures of contemporary queer politics is the assumption that marginalized people will naturally understand one another. Apparently oppression was supposed to function as an undergraduate seminar in comparative political theory. It doesn’t. Suffering teaches you that you suffered. Everything after that requires analysis.

A person can experience misogyny without developing feminist politics. A trans person can experience transphobia while remaining perfectly capable of reproducing transmisogyny. Identity gives us a location in social relations. It does not come with an explanation attached. You learn the explanation the way you learn anything else, by reading and getting corrected, usually more than once.

Her article is useful here because she recognizes that trans men can build political cultures around grievance the same way cis men do. I’d go further. Queer culture has spent years making that development easy. We built political environments where identity counts as epistemic authority, discomfort counts as evidence of injury, interpersonal conflict gets translated into structural oppression, and people are encouraged to understand themselves through finer and finer taxonomies of marginalization. Then everybody acted surprised when people learned to construct oppression narratives about one another. We built a courtroom, and the anonymous ask box was where the trials happened: unattributable, impossible to face. Then we handed everyone a law degree from Tumblr University. Somebody was eventually going to start filing.

The Oppression Calculator Was Always Going to Break

A great deal of queer discourse runs on an implicit ranking system. Who is visible? Who is represented? Who receives resources? Who gets talked about? Who is allowed to speak? Who is centered? Those questions can be useful. They become disastrous the moment they come loose from material analysis.

Consider the claim that trans women are “overrepresented.” Compared to whom, where, and under what conditions? Pornography is visibility. A murder statistic is visibility. National legislation naming her is visibility. Being the symbolic explanation for the collapse of Western civilization is visibility. Visibility describes attention. Power describes relationships. A woman can be the single most discussed category of person in a country’s politics and still not be safe walking into a public restroom.

Collapse those categories and the grievance politics writes itself. Trans women receive enormous amounts of cultural attention. Trans men often experience erasure. The mistake happens when the second gets explained through the first. Suddenly the trans woman is the beneficiary of her own hypervisibility. Her fetishization gets counted as representation, her political persecution as cultural centrality, her position as the favorite object of reactionary obsession as proof that society cares about her more. That’s how a material relationship turns into a competition over attention, and attention is a currency that can be measured and screenshotted in a way that power, mostly, cannot.

Attention is the currency of the internet. Steph is right to spend so much time on platforms. They changed what political conflict feels like. The timeline hands everyone a scoreboard: likes, followers, reblogs, views, comments, mentions. One person gets twenty thousand likes for a post about transmisogyny and another gets forty-seven for a post about transmasculine healthcare, and an entire theory of social power gets built out of analytics. Capitalism has finally achieved the dream of turning oppression into influencer metrics.

Trans Men Are Men. Now What?

Steph writes what will probably become the most contested sentence in her article: “Trans men are men. As men, they hold male privilege.”

I understand what she’s doing. Queer spaces have been reluctant to analyze trans men as men whenever doing so would mean admitting that transition can change someone’s relationship to patriarchal power. A trans man can be read as male and pick up the social authority that comes with it. He can participate in misogyny and transmisogyny. He can abuse women. None of this should be controversial unless our theory of gender mysteriously stops working the second it produces an uncomfortable conclusion.

My disagreement with the sentence was never about whether the privilege is real. It’s about whether one label can do the work an entire relationship needs. A trans man can hold real power in one room and be genuinely unsafe in the next, and admitting the second doesn’t require taking back the first. Invariance means asking how power operates across changing social contexts instead of handing every person a fixed inventory, and that only works if you’re willing to hold both facts about him at once.

A passing trans man talking to a woman at work is in one social relation. The same man in a gynecologist’s waiting room is in another. So is the closeted trans boy living with violently transphobic parents. So is the white trans man talking over a Black trans woman. The categories stay meaningful. Their political expression changes depending on who is standing across from you.

A trans man raising his voice in a staff meeting gets read through the same script that reads any man raising his voice: forceful, maybe an asshole, but rarely unstable. The same man raising his voice in an emergency room, giving a doctor his actual medical history, can get read as a woman who needs to calm down before anyone will treat him. It’s the same man and the same volume, and two different institutions arrive at two completely different verdicts. A privilege chart cannot hold both of those rooms at once. Only an account of the specific institution can.

This is why reducing everything to AGAB fails. Flipping the analysis after transition and calling the problem solved fails the same way, just with the arrow pointing in a different direction. We need to analyze relationships instead. Who has institutional credibility? Who is presumed dangerous? Whose anger reads as a threat? Whose sexuality is treated as predation? Whose body is publicly debatable? Who can mobilize the institution against whom? Those questions tell us more than a little RPG character sheet where everyone gets +3 privilege for one identity and -2 oppression for another. Human society unfortunately has more complicated game mechanics.

The Queer Community Has Its Own Gender System

Here’s where I split from the framework around the transmanosphere. The problem can’t be understood by importing the gender hierarchy of heterosexual society into queer spaces and calling it done. Queer communities build their own local hierarchies: reputations, sexual economies, friendship networks, aesthetic expectations, moral vocabularies, informal discipline. Inside those, transmisogyny can operate through people with wildly different relationships to gender outside them. A cis lesbian can participate in it. So can a nonbinary person. So can a trans man. A trans woman can reproduce ideas that end up hurting other trans women.

So it can’t be reduced to the identity of whoever happens to be carrying it. What reproduces it is a queer culture that has never dealt with the fact that it produces gendered power internally, and that culture runs through very ordinary channels: who vouches for whom before a date and who gets warned about in the group chat. None of that requires a villain in a MAGA hat. It just requires people repeating what they already believe to people who already agree with them.

We prefer stories where oppression arrives from outside: the Republican politician, the pastor, the TERF, the fascist, the man yelling from the pickup truck. Those villains are convenient because recognizing them costs us nothing. The hard question starts when everybody in the room has pronouns in their bio. What happens when the person spreading transmisogyny is trans? What happens when the person protecting an abuser is a lesbian? What happens when the institution abandoning a trans woman has a Progress Pride flag hanging over the front desk? What happens when everyone involved can correctly explain intersectionality?

Then we have to admit that having progressive language doesn’t stop people from reproducing domination. Sometimes it makes them much better at justifying it.

The Radicalization Pipeline Begins With Something True

Reactionary movements find pain and give it an enemy.

Young men are lonely. True. Dating has gotten strange and commodified. True. Economic life is precarious and people feel disposable. True. Then Andrew Tate walks into the room and explains that women did it. The lie attaches itself to something recognizable.

Transmasculine grievance politics can work the same way. Trans men are sometimes ignored in queer discourse. Transmasculine healthcare gets insufficient attention. Trans men experience sexual violence that is routinely misunderstood. Some queer spaces infantilize trans men. Some transfeminists are assholes. I have investigated this allegation extensively and regret to inform everyone that trans women are capable of being annoying.

Then comes the conversion. Why are trans men invisible? Because trans women demand all the attention. Why are transmasculine problems neglected? Because transfeminism captured queer politics. Real injury goes in one end. A political enemy comes out the other.

Trans women make an easier target than cis patriarchy for a simple reason: you can find us. Cis patriarchy does not have a Discord server. It does not post. A trans man frustrated with his healthcare cannot block his endocrinologist’s entire professional field, but he can block a trans woman and get forty replies agreeing that she was the problem all along. The target has to be close enough to reach, and that is most of what decides who gets picked.

And This Is Why “Listen to Marginalized People” Was Never Enough

There’s an uncomfortable lesson in this for progressive politics. We spent years teaching people that lived experience carries political authority without teaching them how experience becomes analysis. Someone can describe accurately everything that happened to them and still be wrong about why it happened.

Grievance politics survives by collapsing that distinction. “I feel ignored” becomes “you have privilege over me.” “I experienced violence” becomes “your demographic did it.” “I am uncomfortable around this group” becomes “this group is dangerous.” “My needs are neglected” becomes “resources are being stolen from me.” Each substitution swaps a feeling for a causal claim and skips the part where you show your work. Once subjective experience becomes self-interpreting, almost nothing is left that can correct a reactionary conclusion.

Queer spaces are especially vulnerable because our moral language puts enormous weight on validating people’s experiences. Sometimes validation is humane. Sometimes a person’s interpretation of what happened to them is simply wrong. A functional political culture has to be able to say so.

Tumblr Did Not Invent This

Steph spends real time tracing Tumblr’s role, and she’s right that Tumblr matters. I have my own history with that website, which I’ll describe academically as Jesus fucking Christ.

But Tumblr can’t carry the whole explanation. The same politics shows up on TikTok, on Twitter, in Discord servers, on Instagram, and offline. Different platforms change its vocabulary and intensity, but what travels with it does not change: the same friend-of-a-friend network deciding who is credible, the same conviction that private information becomes public property the moment somebody is angry enough. The shape survives the migration.

Algorithms reward grievance because grievance produces engagement. They find contradictions that already exist and learn to monetize them. Trans women and trans men occupy different positions in gendered society. They experience different violence and have competing institutional needs. They misunderstand each other, and sometimes they do each other real damage. A healthy political movement would build something capable of negotiating that. An unhealthy political culture turns it into content. Guess which one Silicon Valley prefers.

Where I Agree With Steph

There is a transmasculine political tendency organized partly around resentment toward trans women. It should be studied. Trans men participating in transmisogyny shouldn’t be shielded by appeals to their transness. Feminists should stop treating trans men as honorary women whenever recognizing them as men becomes politically inconvenient. Trans women shouldn’t be expected to eat misogyny because the person serving it also experiences transphobia. Solidarity becomes meaningless the moment it requires pretending the contradictions disappeared.

But I don’t want the response to the transmanosphere to turn into another identity war. Do that and the transmanosphere wins. If trans women answer by building an inverse politics where trans men are a coherent enemy class, we’ve built the same machine with the signs reversed. Every injury becomes evidence. Every anecdote becomes sociology. Every abusive trans man represents trans men, every abusive trans woman represents trans women, and everyone retreats into demographic fortresses to spend the rest of their lives compiling screenshots about the neighboring kingdom. We already tried politics by callout dossier. It sucked.

We Need Feminism Again

The answer is feminism. I mean it in the old-fashioned sense, the embarrassing one, where we try to develop a theory that explains gendered social relations across differences. A Feminism built and grounded in invariance.

Transfeminism should be able to explain the lives of trans women and our relationships with cis women, trans men, nonbinary people, and men in general. It should explain institutions, sexuality, family, violence, and why people who sincerely believe themselves progressive keep reproducing the hierarchies they condemn. The aspiration of trans feminism should be to change feminism itself. Eventually, a feminism incapable of understanding transsexual life should become intellectually impossible. Without a Feminism grounded in a invariant ideology an analysis of everyday life it is useless.

That’s more demanding than deciding which category of queer person is currently the villain. It means analyzing relationships even when everyone involved is marginalized and admitting that oppressed people can hold power over other oppressed people. Solidarity gets built through political practice. The comforting fantasy that queer community exists outside the social relations governing everybody else has to go.

There’s no force field around the gay bar and no exemption for knowing what intersectionality means. We bring the world inside with us: its racism, its misogyny, its transmisogyny, its class hierarchy, its sexual violence, its obsession with beauty, its talent for turning frightened people on each other. What we build once we’re in there is the part that’s still open.

Steph is right that something dangerous develops when transmasculine grievance organizes itself around hostility toward trans women, and calling it the transmanosphere gives us a name for one expression of it. The transmanosphere is also a symptom. We taught everybody how to identify their wounds. We were much less successful at teaching them how to work out who inflicted them. Wherever that distinction stays unresolved, somebody is always waiting to supply an answer. Usually the worst one available.

Works cited

Transmanosphere: The Trans Masculine Radicalization Pipeline. The article this piece responds to throughout. the Tumblr history discussed in the Tumblr section, and the quoted line on trans men and male privilege.