[IMAGE DESCRIPTION] drowning kid + skeleton Meme
In the top panel a mother and her kids are together in a swimming pool. The mother with text "egg_irl" is holding up her daughter with the text "transfems" over her. Meanwhile her son is drowning while she doesn't notice him with the text "transmascs" over him.
In the bottom Panel a skeleton is chained to a chair at the bottom of the ocean with the text "NonBinary/Genderqueer", "Genderfluid", and "Agender" over it. Each label is colored in the colors of their own Flags respectively.
[END OF IMAGE DESCRIPTION]
context:
Back on the original egg_irl subreddit it was common for there to be a disproportionate amount of transfem memes versus the others and a lot of them forgot to flair as [CW: Assumes Viewer is Transfem] when needed and also a few were a bit targeting towards transmascs and masculine enbies i.e.
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"get rid of your toxic, masculine mannerisms"
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"transmascs have cute feminine faces"
Why is that?
I'm not sure exactly why it is to be honest. I've heard a few theories on why though.
Disclaimer: these are theories I have heard from people in the community, they are not my own.
One theory I've heard from people is that because Reddit is supposedly meant more for men than it is for women a larger majority of trans people there will be transfem. It seems like a plausible reason for why there are so many transfem posts but it does little to explain the hostile treatment of transmasc and enbies on its own.
Another theory I've heard is that there's just more transfem people than transmasc and nonbinary. This one doesn't seem likely because there isn't much evidence to back it up besides the abundance of transfem posts in the community and also people claiming it's better (that's very subjective by the way, transmascs would say the same thing about being a man). On top of being unsubstantiated it also reeks of terf rhetoric since I've heard similar reasoning from them i.e. trying to say men will go extinct because they'll all become women 🙄. I've also seen quite a few polls with numbers significantly higher in transmasc and nonbinary numbers so that kind of dismantles this one then and there.
This theory basically says that it's not that there are more or less of any group but rather that transfems are louder in order to combat the immense amount of more direct and/or violent transphobia that they are targeted with. I heard this one in a trans community in a discussion about violence towards trans women. In some ways it makes sense since often trans women are more often seen as predators and attacked for it though it doesn't mean they experience more transphobia than anyone else. Transmascs still experience quite a lot of it but it's more subtle and typically less violent (except in cases where they're mistaken for trans women which sadly isn't uncommon). This one also reeks of terf rhetoric to me since I've heard lots of them say that transfems are loud and proud so I can't say for certain how accurate it actually is.
These are just a few theories I've heard people talk about when it comes to this phenomenon, there are also a few others but I'm not going to bring them up because they're either straight up completely bigoted arguments or they don't make any coherent sense whatsoever (sometimes both). Also it's important to take theories like this with a grain of salt, they may have elements that are true to them but they also have issues with them as well which could lead you astray. I don't think this isn't an issue it definitely is and I know a lot of transmascs and nonbinaries who have experienced invalidation in some way related to this or have been told that we matter less. I'm not really sure how we could solve this problem though.
I think we can pretty safely say it's not number 2. From what I found here transfem individuals slightly out number transmasc individuals and both out number 'gender nonconforming' individuals.
So more transfem individuals but not in the amount to explain the observed proportions in egg_irl.
Yeah I'm not super surprised, I figured their numbers were either equal or at least close to it. Even though there are slightly more trans women than trans men, it does make me wonder though why the sub was so overrun with them and why they try to be exclusionary to trans men (i.e. saying that being masculine is evil).
Also as a Side note, why is Gender Non-Conforming listed as trans there? Seems a bit weird since a Man assigned male at birth identifying as their assigned gender but choosing to dress as feminine doesn't really seem to fit the trans label, not saying people can't identify as trans if they choose to, it just seems a little strange in this case.
I'm wondering if it's supposed to be non-binary and whoever did the stats didn't know the difference. I'm non-binary and the number of people who assume that GNC, non-binary and androgynous all mean the same thing is ridiculously high. I've seen surveys that have gender options of "male, female, gender non-conforming".
Yeah I'm starting to feel like it was probably supposed to be NonBinary, though it's also weird to label GNC as it's own gender when it usually isn't, GNC is just when people don't conform to gender stereotypes, the person may be Cis, trans, isogender, GNC just means not following or having connection to the gender stereotypes.
Yep, exactly. But some people refuse to learn the difference. Especially given the number of people who justify misgendering me by saying "It's kinda hard to not see you as a woman when you're dressed like one" when 100% of what I'm wearing is from the men's department.