Political Transbianism

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I’d like to be so bold as to suggest that we have a problem. Trans-females are obviously having a moment in political discourse, and their characterization has shifted in emphasis over the years: from stealthy homosexuals trying to deceive heterosexual men, to perverse straight men masquerading as lesbians to infiltrate women's private spaces. Both of these notions have existed for a while. As Julia Serano notes in her seminal manifesto Whipping Girl, these stereotypes in fact mutually construct each other, and were also reified in Blanchard’s transsexualism typography as the heterosexual transsexual versus the autogynephile. However, the latter has become a convenient angle for fascists, whose self-avowed motive is often to protect women from various masses of predators in the forms of black men, Muslims, and (in this case) trans women.1 Each case yields baseless accusations and demands proactive retribution.

But what happens when the benefit of the doubt serves as a cover for actual impropriety? Online trans-female networks—especially and in particular of those attracted to women—have a cultural awareness of society’s predisposition to view trans lesbians as predators, and so caution for caution when a trans woman is accused of grooming or sexual assault, especially from an individual said to be exempt from transmisogyny,2 and doubly so if the one accused is said to be affected by transmisogynoir.3 It is notable that those terms originate from feminist theory to explain the precarious position of trans and/or black women as victims of disenfranchisement and social violence (i.e.: deaths treated as collateral from the structural dynamics of patriarchy, racism, and capitalism), but they are deployed here to rationalize an apparent predisposition of trans lesbians to be accused of impropriety.

What the fuck is up with that?

The Coconut Tree

There was a scandal inside a scandal the other day, when one group of online white trans women published an exposé against an online brown trans woman. Self-avowed theorist of transfeminism Tara Knight claimed to have received a cease-and-desist letter from the FBI telling her to stop posting radical gender theory, following statements from the Trump regime that they would investigate trans people as potential “nihilistic violent extremists”. “Officially confirmed by the federal government being a bad bih is revolutionary asf”, she posted on Instagram to lampoon her alleged encounter. Then the self-avowed journalists at The Needle, investigating her claim that she and others had received letters, asked her to provide evidence to verify that what she said happened happened. Knight provided the following image as evidence:

That looks less like a real photo of a fake document than an AI-generated photo of a fake document. It looks about as real as those AI-generated peepee monsters I made before AI became a 'thing'. Knight seemingly saw the writing on the wall and tried to get ahead of the upcoming exposé by writing a reflection on journalism as the pursuit of stories over truth (she seems to like getting ahead of things by decrying whatever the thing is):

Journalism does not run on truth. It runs on stories. Stories need tension, protagonists, antagonists, arcs, and payoff. Stories need something to sell. Once you understand that, the rest of the behavior stops looking confusing and starts looking inevitable. A journalist from The Needle implying I fabricated an FBI document (federal crime btw) is not an anomaly [!]. It is a reflex. It is what happens when reality refuses to arrange itself into a neat narrative and the writer still needs a hook.

Tara Knight, “Journalists Aren’t Your Friends”

And in the comments:

The accusation was I “ai generated” the letter. (Blurred it using image editing software) Why would I commit a felony in the stupidest way possible.

Girl, it’s not blurred. It’s straight-up hallucinated! So is this Andrea Dworkin quote which links to ChatGPT. Anyway, The Needle published an exposé explaining from toe to tip why it’s full of shit, and after 1–2 days of discourse, Tara Knight posted on her Instagram story (and later on her main feed) that there was no letter from the FBI, asking her followers to stop defending her on that count. The real issue in her view was Jane Migliara Brigham, self-avowed “transsexual nationalist” and co-author of the exposé, accusing Knight of being high on an interview with a certain Sophie From Mars (put a pin in it)—and more generally in accusing a trans woman of color not only of grifting her audience but of committing a felony by falsifying a federal letter. Knight was careful not to elaborate too much about the nature of what exactly she did in her later statement: “there was no letter from the fbi […] I’ll do better in the future and be more careful with how or what I put out there I apologize!” Clown show’s over.

Falling Out

But that's not all. Sophie From Mars, the BreadTuber? The article from The Needle explained in passing how she “was credibly accused of rape by five people who knew her” (these being, in fact, other trans women), for which she had confessed and apologized on Twitter/X before eventually deleting her post. Knight’s interview with Sophie was about how trans women are excluded from queer spaces, and Knight considered Sophie a key case in the unfair ostracization of trans women. Don’t confuse Sophie with Sophia, with whom Knight and Talia Bhatt and others orchestrated a campaign against a trans-masculine person for referring to their own sexual assault as having “experienced sexually objectified womanhood”,4 nicknaming them as “the Rapetical”. Chloe Corrupt, a trans ex-performer of CNC pornography who was accused by other performers of sexual assault (and referred to her lawyers as having "gangbanged" her accusers' wallets), also came out of the woodworks in support of Knight. Tara Knight, for her part, has written (perhaps generated) at length about the danger of whisper networks as a favorite strategy of the FBI to wreck organizations, and as a social pattern to which trans women are (apparently) especially vulnerable. Isn’t this a little weird? Why is there so much litigation about sexual assault accusations against trans women being driven by trans women credibly accused of sexual assault?

I feel like a bit of an outsider to this circus. I might be a trans woman with a female partner, but growing up I found community and friendship with other women (all cis-sex). Only during the COVID-19 pandemic did I make an effort to find what trans women were doing in online spaces, specifically trans lesbians because I had cis lesbian friends and a cis lesbian partner so I figured “Gay is great!” without thinking about it. Trans lesbians congregate in two kinds of online networks. The first are predominantly male spaces which (nevertheless) do not ask members to perform masculinity, and thus have a safe vibe for trans women who grew up with guy friends and find comfort in what they consider culturally familiar: this isn’t about “sex assigned at birth” or sexual orientation per se (as Blanchard would have it), but rather about whom one considers their social milieu. The second are what I would call “intimate networks” where trans lesbians excluded from typical dating pools (whether actually or in their minds) can get their freak on; I sometimes joke that mass-scale polyamory actuates some Nash equilibrium type shit by maximizing the amount of sex that otherwise sexless people can’t secure for themselves, but I’m been assured they are (in fact!) very desirable, which is why they have so much sex. Let’s take their word for it.

I had inadvertently entered that first network in pursuit of sorority, and what you might find is that the two often overlap. Someone who had invited me to some Discord server to further inundate myself in the hobby initiated “girl talk” in direct messages which soon progressed into hitting on me, sharing sexual fantasies (including a sex dream about me and my partner whom she identified with a random trans woman on the server, despite my partner being a cis woman), asking to start a joint GoFundMe, and also suggesting that I move from to Canada with her. I had not, and probably never will, publicly accuse this person of doing those things because being in that community made me all too aware of the apparent preponderance of trans women being accused of impropriety, and I didn’t want to contribute to a hostile culture which I was assured had it out for me too. Besides, I told myself, it’s just a bit of culture shock, right? Tara Knight describes how sex functions as a social currency for trans women, especially in T4T spaces (the virtue of which the person often extolled to me, even after she eventually remembered my partner was cis-female):

The girls who want to fuck her are warm. Responsive. Curious. Patient. They listen. They reassure her. They make her feel wanted in a way she hasn’t before.

Sex becomes the fastest way to feel included.

No one tells Emme she has to fuck to belong. That’s not how this works. What she notices instead is that sex smooths everything out. Conversations flow easier. Awkwardness disappears. Tension dissolves. She’s invited back. She’s checked on.

When she’s sexually available, things feel calm.

Knight describes how this mode of sex functions as insurance within a T4T community to prevent conflict and promote togetherness (albeit in a toxic, if unintended, way). "This is not manipulation, Knight says. “This is structure.” She avoids moralizing the dynamic on those grounds which on one hand I can’t fault her for because it’s not the fault of individuals or of sex itself, and she does describe the negative effects of that dynamic when the relationship falls apart outside of sex, but she emphasizes the dynamic as being “between trans women who care about each other” as if, even if it were not good, it cannot be helped. She concludes that one does not have to give up sex, including seemingly sex of this nature, but merely that one should see it as it is and not “let [their] body bankroll belonging without your awareness.” It’s nuanced, but the nuance is predicated on the participants being equal victims of the dynamic, in which blame on either individual seems like an unfair transgression of the social contract. This is how Chloe Corrupt seems to frame her own allegations.

I think there’s something wrong in the water. I’m trying not to be like, “Y’all bitches need Pauline sexual ethics,” but the dynamic Knight describes is not neutral or natural. Though she frames the relationship as being between two trans women, presumably equal, what she leaves unstated is that one person in the relationship is sexually abusing the other by invoking unfair socio-cultural expectations around sex. If the one who feels mistreated leaves the relationship, they also forfeit what security (material, emotional, etc.) they had by it; if they tell others about the mistreatment, they are breaking the social contract as well as exposing a personal conflict ripe for weaponization by hostile outsiders. The only way to win as an individual is to play the game and win some social currency for yourself—or at least, that’s the perspective of the one who chooses to play.

Conclusion

I am bitter and resentful: that I was treated a certain way, that I was exposed to bullshit pseudo-feminist rationalizations, that I was told (and am constantly told) that speaking on these issues plays into unfair stereotypes. There is a culture of sexual impropriety among trans lesbians in their networks, and the best faith view I have is that every person who perpetuates it is just playing a game at which they once found themselves losing, rather than there being a truly concerted effort to indulge in selfishness and silence its victims. The solution then isn’t to hunker down on the culture, but refuse to play the game and let those who found themselves in it speak honestly about it. I don’t have to worry myself anymore, being happily mono-amorous and now knowledgeable about this bullshit, but it frustrates me seeing feminist language being deployed to redeem rape culture as woke.

  1. If fascism can be defined as the aestheticization of politics, as per Walter Benjamin, one might characterize fascist sexual paranoia as cuckold pornification. ↩︎

  2. A term coined by Serano in her aforementioned book, referring to the particular position of trans-females at the social intersection of transphobia and misogyny, though Serano (as far as I remember) is not particularly concerned with accusations of sexual impropriety. ↩︎

  3. Misogynoir is a term coined by Moya Bailey referring to the particular position of black women between anti-black racism and misogyny. Transmisogynoir, in turn, is a portmanteau of Serano and Bailey’s portmanteaus to refer to the ever more specific position of black trans women (especially in being triply predisposed to poverty, and thus sex work, and thus violence resulting from those conditions). ↩︎

  4. I felt like a certain consensus had been reached that even though passing trans men may benefit from patriarchy (etc.), society’s orientation towards trans men as such is to (rhetorically and/or materially) castrate and thus refeminize them. Isn’t it a little inconsistent to target someone on the basis of stating that? It's not "smol bean" rhetoric. It's the same big tent (albeit woman-centered) feminism for which Talia Bhatt has advocated in other contexts. Or we are selectively feminizing or masculinizing trans men (as which the individual in question does not even self-identify!) based on whichever is more rhetorically convenient? ↩︎

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