Punching up

Oh yes?

Let’s look up Morgan Page cotton ceiling then.

Let’s read My Trans Youth Group Experience with Morgan Page.

Morgan Page was the creator of the Planned Parenthood Toronto workshop “Overcoming the Cotton Ceiling: Breaking Down Sexual Barriers for Queer Trans Women” in 2012. And although I had never heard about this until after leaving the trans community, years later, those of us in Morgan’s youth group definitely identified as members of our chosen sex class, which is the cornerstone of the Cotton Ceiling movement: that sex-based attraction can be reclassified as gender-based attraction.

The only context in which lesbians were ever discussed was in regards to “trans lesbians”. Most of the MTFs & male NBs there would lecture the few FTMs and female NBs about our “masculine/male privilege,” explaining to us that they experienced “transmisogyny” and therefore we needed to know when to be quiet and listen. These beliefs and attitudes were essential in the aforementioned relationships between FTMs and older MTFs in the group. I remember one time I was discussing how I didn’t pass somewhere and was treated like a woman and called “dyke”, but they insisted it was just transphobia, and that I could no longer experience misogyny now that I identified as male. The idea that I might be a lesbian or that I might have experienced lesbophobia never came up. Isn’t this the perfect group mindset to facilitate abuse? Is this really the right dynamic for teens trying to discuss their trans issues, family, school, and mental health problems?

Yes and yes, and it’s also the core reversal that is so infuriating about the whole thing – the insistence that men who call themselves women are the most marginalized and persecuted of all, while women are the sneering dominant aristocrats who kick the poor cowering trans women up and down the stairs. This is not correct. Men are bigger and stronger than women and women cannot be the dominant sex.

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