fuchsia noir @ThatWallflower@queer.party

@interneteh lactose for the intolerant

you should have milkshake ducked

Like i've had quite a few conversations with cis people i barely know who have told me about how they overcame their "body dysphoria" and my head starts tilting each time.

I'm convinced a huge swathe of misunderstanding is going on when cis people talk about trans people having "body dysphoria" and im pretty sure they're confusing it with body dysmorphia.

me:

steam: an item on your steam wishlist is on sale

hello sonic do you like me do you like ｍ ｙ ｂ ｏ ｎ ｅ ｓ

that is, techno-Orientalism.

Orientalism has always Othered 'the East' temporally, in addition to spatially, culturally, racially, etc.; techno-Orientalism is unusual in that it places 'the East' in the alienated future, rather than the 'backwards' past.

(Here, to further press my point on the parallelisms between Orientalism and transmisogyny, I might note that trans people are always understood as "invented yesterday," or we are buried in the past as 'obsolete'

unease with biomedical authority over sex & with 'plastic surgery' is crystalized into reactionary positions that are Orientalist, transmisogynistic, or both in focus, and hysteria over 'replacement' of Natural, Fully-Human Women à la Stepford Wives also has forms that focus on either of those reactionary streams in particular.

But I think the modern image of the fembot stems more heavily from Western reactions to the rise of the technology industries of East Asia;

and the chasers will attribute it (also shittily) to trans women's 'poor self-esteem'.

Cis, white feminist commentaries on Asian and trans women visit the same theme (understanding us as un-/pre-feminist women, to be pitied or condemned, 'rescued' or eradicated), and extend it in the modern era by technologizing our bodies: we are both understood through the objectifying image of the 'fembot'.

There are converging lines of inheritance here; a sometimes-feminist...

Just as sexualized understandings of Black men as inherently predatory inform transmisogynistic rhetoric on similar themes, there's a mirroring to be seen between misogynistic, Orientalist fetishization of (inclusively) East Asian women and transmisogynistic fetishization of trans women.

Both groups of women are commonly fetishized as 'docile' or 'obedient,' as well as hyperfeminized; the Asian fetishists usually have some shitty cultural explanation for the belief,

with his increasing depiction as beardless, young, and androgynous; it shows up in the intersexed (and castrated!) goddess Agdistis, associated with the Anatolian culture of the Phrygians.

& this continues as 'the East' spreads and changes throughout history, so that modern anti-Asian racism features the assertion that East Asians are sexually undifferentiated, and mocks/fetishizes/sensationalizes the transfeminine gender categories of societies like Thailand.

is 'soft,' 'weak,' 'unmanly,' and that the people that live in [wherever the ongoing tradition of Orientalism labels 'the East'] are pathologically undifferentiated in sex.

So in the early texts we have the Scythians described this way, with the general ambiguity of sex associated with their third-gender caste, the 'enarees'; it shows up in Dionysus's cult being associated with symbols of the East/Anatolia, and additionally 'effeminate' Anatolian garments in concert

The early Orientalist polemics fixate luridly on the shame supposedly conferred on the Eastern Roman Empire by the presence of powerful eunuchs. (Which is hypocritical, because powerful eunuchs are sort of a constant of the Roman empire on 'both sides' of the East/West split, and maybe of premodern empires broadly? Eunuchs were granted access to power on the basis of our inability to found troublesome dynastic lineages.) And these polemics suggest also that the East

This is a weird one; I'd get flagged for original research if I talked about this on Wikipedia, because if this has been covered in existing literature it's hidden behind paywalls and search-term jargon that I'm unfamiliar with:

transmisogyny and Orientalism go WAY back. like, literally all the way back. the earliest, Roman texts that found the genre of rhetoric and worldview that we call Orientalism have ALWAYS used transmisogyny to construct 'the Orient.'

hair on the limbs and trunk is a shared stigma, a way in which our struggle is linked to women of color's regardless of trans status.

The systems, ideologies, images of the body we struggle against have a shared genealogy in the effort to define womanhood to exclude all of us, at the exact same time that our whiteness empowers us over our sisters of color in the struggle.

experienced by Black women.

There is a whole genre of racist misogyny which centers around facial and body hair— a trait which is both raced and gendered in the white supremacist imaginary— and fixates on Middle Eastern/North African (MENA) , South Asian, and Latina women as targets for mockery and performative disgust; white trans women would do well to recognize that the stigmatization of our eyebrows (and brow bones), hair on the neck or around the mouth, and...

I've focused a lot on anti-Blackness here, for two reasons: one, anti-Blackness is a big fucking deal, pivotal to white supremacy broadly. Two, as I said at the beginning of this thread, I owe a specific debt to Black women for the solidarity work they do and have done on my behalf.

But this is not to exclude the racialized gender experiences of non-Black women of color from analysis, and racialized misogyny which features heavily-embodied misgendering is not only