> There are no fem queens anymore. The poor black and Latina sex workers taking estrogen think of themselves as transgender now. The rich, white, educated activists imposed their understanding of gender variance—developed substantially for political reasons—on everyone. I don’t mean to say this is a bad thing, or an oppressive thing...
I'll counterclaim, this is a bad thing. It might have been a necessary evil for the advancement of certain civil rights, and tactically advantageous. But it represents backwards steps in the ultimate kind of gender liberation that I value, which is a more expansive, complicated, and nuanced understanding of gender and "allowed gender identities", for everyone. It's good for everyone who desires it to get to take estrogen and develop boobs and feel good in their augmented bodies, without having to spiral about what it truly means about their fundamental intrinsic gender identity and sexuality. Losing this norm might very well be a worthwhile temporary sacrifice to make on the path to securing other things that are good for the community, but it is a sacrifice nonetheless.
I agree that it would be better if we had a world of more expansive, complicated, and nuanced gender identities, but I really don't think the ball scene had that. The ball scene definitely seemed to police its neogenders more than (say) Tumblr policed its neogenders. It's just that their genders were at a skew to the presently accepted ones.
As much as I care about having better gender categories (whatever they may be), I view the process of inclusive consensus building as more pertinent, but it might just be my people-pleasing side popping up. To be fair, I'm sure there are strong political incentives to be less inclusive to non-Whites (maybe it's worth the short-term win to protect more folks from getting murdered). If I'm in their position, I might make the same decision too.
(I'm commenting again because I keep thinking about this article, it's really good!)
I'm not so convinced that the categories of the transgender model have trampled other understandings - one way of looking at it is that now there's an outsider label to supplement the insider labels (where, yeah, the outsider label is often used inside too). Somebody who says "I'm transmasculine and non-binary" on a form or when educating a co-worker might say "I'm neutrois and basically a frost elf crossed with an untamed fox - it's like there's nothing there, but it's a really loud nothing" when talking about what their gender feels like with other trans people; someone who's a trans woman to outsiders might say "I'm a trans woman - specifically the kind that's a living weapon rebelling against her creator."* Some people in t4t relationships that are straight by the transgender model's labels will talk about their gay feelings, some trans men are sapphic, some transbians will sweetly whisper the f-slur to each other. Some people are transgender to outsiders but strongly prefer a term specific to their culture when inside. A bunch of people prefer transsexual to transgender when they're around people that Get It. I don't personally know anybody that uses fem queen but I can testify to the continued existence of butch queens (trans and cis) and butches and drag queens and TVs and fairies.
Definitely the meanings of those words have changed over time, and definitely the transgender model plays a key role in identity formation and experience for many people these days, but many many trans people don't actually believe gender identity is a tidy taxonomy independent of sexuality, even when they use that language in public.
* Two lightly anonymized & condensed real-life examples from conversations I've had in the last few months.
I love this stuff and deeply wish our current cultural discussion could bear any nuance or sense of history. Absent that nuance or history I've basically retreated to "gender is a largely incoherent concept outside of any specific context" which is fine for avoiding offending people in conversation but not very useful for outlining legal rights. In any case thank you for your continued efforts to get some of this stuff in a digestable format.
Legally my opinion is pretty simple - sex abolition in law. The law is no place to judge people based on what's in their pants. Sex wasn't always written on passports. The differently gendered criminal sentences for rape that still exists in most countries, for example, are just awful.
Bathrooms and changing rooms? Individual stalls. Domestic violence shelters for women only? As long as there are enough DV shelters for everyone, we can have one only for natural blondes for all I care. Sports? Sports organisations are not legal bodies.
The only thing I'm kind of iffy about is housing the incarcerated. But prison is really weird anyways. Why are violent people put together? Why is a male rapist locked inside with a bunch of men? In my country (Denmark), any prisoner can voluntarily isolate from everybody else and most child abusers do so to avoid getting beaten up. Maybe that's the most humane and practical thing to do for the vanishingly few prisoners who are trans.
I like the general thrust of your ideas but it's worth noting the degree to which it would be acceptable to either the activist left or activist right is far from clear.
Aside from recommending that trans people be tortured with solitary confinement (definitely not humane!!!), this is not far from a trans rights position*. Note that women's bathrooms are already individual stalls, that trans sports bans are aimed at overriding the existing policies of sports organisations, and enough DV shelters for everyone that needs them is a vision of fully automated luxury gay space communism very far from the current reality.
(The wrinkle you'll run into when thinking through the details is the same problem Eleanor Roosevelt & a bunch of women in labor organizing had with the Equal Rights Amendment in the US - if you remove de jure references to sex you may compromise protections against de facto sexism & transphobia.)
* I've replaced "activist left" with "trans rights" because I think "left" and "right" have devolved into uselessness by now - when not shipping people off to El Salvadoran death camps is considered a leftist position we're not talking about two coherent political theories anymore. Similarly "activist" stops being a useful term in a world where existing as trans and talking about it is considered activism.
Have you seen Scandinavian prisons? It's solitary confinement, sure, but with video games and books and music and good food and in many cases internet. You get your own little dorm room.
someone suggest to allow people to "voluntarily isolate", and you turned it to "trans people be tortured with solitary confinement". this is not truth-seeking or fair, way to describe that position.
I might have misunderstood the OP & I'm happy to be corrected, but "voluntary isolation" is commonly used in the prison system to refer (misleadingly) to solitary confinement of a prisoner who's the target of violence, as in the case OP described. The OP didn't make this totally clear, but my read is that the OP's suggestion is to house trans women in men's prisons, where they are subject to very high rates of sexual violence, and "solve the problem" of the violence they're experiencing through solitary confinement.
This is the status quo when women are housed in men's prisons, not a proposal for change, and it's a monstrous situation. Solitary confinement is considered torture by most human rights organizations and the UN, and the conditions remain torture if they are "chosen" because the alternative is another form of violence. If someone is given a choice between rape or torture, "allowing people to voluntary isolate" is IMO not a fair way to describe that situation., and the situation is not humane.
from my point of view, OP's view is not specified enough for me to understand what exactly they mean, and if i want to know, i should ask, as what was written correspond to wide variety of possible positions.
I find presenting the postion of not having sex-segregation as "male prison" as straightforwardly wrong. in male prison the people are males, in not sex segregated prison there are both makes and females. (this is example of not-truth-seeking) (it is possible to claim that with the current sex-ratios in violent crimes, everyone-prisons are practically male ones. but this is not what you claimed).
so, from my point of view you read claim that can have different interpretations, and not only jumped to the worst possible one, jump to one that factually contradict the claim.
from my point of view, your the-opposite-of-charitableness make you draw false conclusion, and then. instead of double check and notice your confusion, or ASK IF THIS IS WHAT THEY MEAN, jump to accusations, with emotional language, that in turn trigger people and make it harder for them to think clearly.
personally, i find the hypotheses "I think it fine to have rape in prisons" very low probability, and think that it fail sanity check, and that at the point this is your hypotheses you should be very suspicious of it, assume you almost certainly wrong, and also, ASK OP IF THIS IS WHAT THEY MEAN.
but also, can't you see the large differences between "it seems to me that you support situation when the choice is between solitary confinement, that considered torture by most human rights organizations and the UN, and between being raped? because this is how i interpret what you wrote, and it seem wrong" and "you recommending that trans people be tortured with solitary confinement"?
there is a large difference, even if you for some reason still give weirdly large probability to some of the more low-probability interpretations, in a way that from my side look like it resulted form politics mind killing effect (aka, if you read the same pattern of writing about different domain, you would have come to different conclusion).
> people who are attracted to members of the same gender are more likely to find it psychologically important to break gender norms in glaring, obvious ways that make sexist people mad at them
Is this purely selection bias?
It's been the case historically. If you're a huge fairy and you're into men, then you have a possible life path that you can't get if you're only one of those things.
But nowadays, the overwhelming majority of gay and bi men I know are typical men with no interest in effeminacy, and likewise for lesbians and bi women.
Among the feminine men and masculine women I know (not necessarily a typical bunch), there seems to be little to no "natural" correlation with orientation. Exclusively-straight people, and bi men who try to pursue women, get more pushback against it, so they tend to knock it off, though.
It's really, really fascinating to me how much trans people skewed male/MTF for so long. I don't believe the interwebs is seducing our precious daughters or anything, but it is... strange? How it has shifted.
In Iran, where GNC gay people are pressured to transition and being trans is seen as better than being gay, there are more FTM than MTF.
It's extremely challenging (both because the categories are subjective/contested and because there's no solid data collection) to tell if there actually was any skew historically, or which way it went, between transmasculine / transfeminine folks. I'm not sure we can say that it's shifted, or which way.
There are a couple factors in the 1990s / 2000s and into the early 2010s that skew what little data/evidence we have:
- A much more powerful force in creating the category of transgender than the rich white activists or any of the groups mentioned above was the NIH and the researchers they funded as part of trying to study / treat HIV. Researchers were trying harder to find transfeminine folks than transmasculine folks because the former were viewed as a vector for AIDS. The rise of the term transgender in research / policy / academia significantly predates GenderPAC - my read is that GenderPAC adopted this term primarily because they were trying to talk to Washington, not primarily because a big tent is more politically powerful (it often isn't if your tent has divergent goals & culture). Because of the initial policy goals of the term, its boundaries, and the forces encouraging its use, skew toward transfeminine people initially.
- A bunch of data sources are tied to medical data and don't capture anybody doing DIY medical transition (probably the majority of people on hormones pre-WPATH 2011). You'll much more likely show up in the medical system if you're rich and you're aiming for bottom surgery or you're poor and getting hormones from a clinic that is using them as a carrot to encourage HIV screening, both of which skew transfeminine.
- It takes more material resources for trans women to go stealth than trans men, and the employment discrimination / violence trans women face are greater, which means transfeminine folks were more likely to end up organizing for their survival in groups like the ball scene or STAR, which skews recent political history towards trans femmes. (Some kinds of political history, anyway - if you wrote a history of trans lawyers working on trans rights, it'd skew heavily trans masc for these same reasons.)
- Media coverage of the time skews transfeminine for a similar reason the historical record of the present time is going to capture a lot more reports of cis women being ejected from women's bathrooms than trans people ejected from any bathroom even though there are certainly more of the latter - it's a more salacious story.
Gender is so complicated that I'm not sure that asking about the rate of transness by AGAB is a well-formed question at all, but if it were there's a lot that skews our picture of it.
Yeah, if you look at the 2008 National Transgender Discrimination Survey, the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey, and the 2022 U.S. Transgender Survey (all the largest studies ever undertaken on trans people at the time*), it's really clear how what was once a very stark AMAB skew has gradually equalized, ending a trend that goes back long before we had the word "trans".
*Sources will qualify this with "... in the US", but I don't think there have actually been larger studies anywhere else.
And I agree this is probably more of a "we stopped beating left-handers" thing than anything. I think there has historically been some very significant hermeneutical injustice against transmasculine people that's still really hard to articulate and talk about. I can point to my own childhood and gesture in the direction of a lack of a sense of ownership over my own identity that would allow me to even question something like my gender (transmasculine people have also historically first expressed their identities later in life, a trend which I believe is also now equalizing), but it's hard to really get a good grasp of the issue because of the fact that it *is* hermeneutical injustice.
I sometimes feel the confines of living inside a framework that wasn't really actually made to describe people like me. I hope that one day trans people have enough of a respite from everything else that we can start to unpack that.
Statistics on trans people in Iran are likely either counting GRS or legal transitions. In Iran, to legally transition, one must first have GRS - for trans men this means a hysterectomy, and for trans women this means vaginoplasty. Hysterectomies in Iran are relatively safe and affordable; vaginoplasties in Iran are high-risk and quite expensive.
(A general principle at play here is that prior to forming theories about the sociological causes of a statistic about trans people, one should ask about what makes trans people show up in the statistics.)
"there are no fem queens anymore' - it felt a little jarring to read that, cos in my (recent, limited) experience in the ball scene, *within* the community we use "fem queen" all the time. You made the joke of having "butch queen up in drags" in bio - im in an insta groupchat called "FQs and jnr FQs of [my city]" (FQ being fem queen). And I've almost *never* heard the term "trans woman" used in intra-community conversation. Including just like casual conversation not specifically about balls. (Again with the caveat that im new to the community).
Talking to other people outside the ballroom community is a different story of course. Maybe it's more like a code-switching thing?
That being said, the first time "fem queen"was explained to me as a term it was as "a trans woman in ballroom". But then someone else started explaining to me how that doesn't really capture it.
The ballroom categories and terms have clearly for sure gotten far less cultural hegemony, and I think probably been morphed or diluted in some way by the influence of the transgender categories, but by my knowledge it's a bit far to say they're totally gone.
Love this post by the way, feels good for my brain to learn the history of the different categories it uses.
> There are no fem queens anymore. The poor black and Latina sex workers taking estrogen think of themselves as transgender now. The rich, white, educated activists imposed their understanding of gender variance—developed substantially for political reasons—on everyone. I don’t mean to say this is a bad thing, or an oppressive thing...
I'll counterclaim, this is a bad thing. It might have been a necessary evil for the advancement of certain civil rights, and tactically advantageous. But it represents backwards steps in the ultimate kind of gender liberation that I value, which is a more expansive, complicated, and nuanced understanding of gender and "allowed gender identities", for everyone. It's good for everyone who desires it to get to take estrogen and develop boobs and feel good in their augmented bodies, without having to spiral about what it truly means about their fundamental intrinsic gender identity and sexuality. Losing this norm might very well be a worthwhile temporary sacrifice to make on the path to securing other things that are good for the community, but it is a sacrifice nonetheless.
I agree that it would be better if we had a world of more expansive, complicated, and nuanced gender identities, but I really don't think the ball scene had that. The ball scene definitely seemed to police its neogenders more than (say) Tumblr policed its neogenders. It's just that their genders were at a skew to the presently accepted ones.
As much as I care about having better gender categories (whatever they may be), I view the process of inclusive consensus building as more pertinent, but it might just be my people-pleasing side popping up. To be fair, I'm sure there are strong political incentives to be less inclusive to non-Whites (maybe it's worth the short-term win to protect more folks from getting murdered). If I'm in their position, I might make the same decision too.
(I'm commenting again because I keep thinking about this article, it's really good!)
I'm not so convinced that the categories of the transgender model have trampled other understandings - one way of looking at it is that now there's an outsider label to supplement the insider labels (where, yeah, the outsider label is often used inside too). Somebody who says "I'm transmasculine and non-binary" on a form or when educating a co-worker might say "I'm neutrois and basically a frost elf crossed with an untamed fox - it's like there's nothing there, but it's a really loud nothing" when talking about what their gender feels like with other trans people; someone who's a trans woman to outsiders might say "I'm a trans woman - specifically the kind that's a living weapon rebelling against her creator."* Some people in t4t relationships that are straight by the transgender model's labels will talk about their gay feelings, some trans men are sapphic, some transbians will sweetly whisper the f-slur to each other. Some people are transgender to outsiders but strongly prefer a term specific to their culture when inside. A bunch of people prefer transsexual to transgender when they're around people that Get It. I don't personally know anybody that uses fem queen but I can testify to the continued existence of butch queens (trans and cis) and butches and drag queens and TVs and fairies.
Definitely the meanings of those words have changed over time, and definitely the transgender model plays a key role in identity formation and experience for many people these days, but many many trans people don't actually believe gender identity is a tidy taxonomy independent of sexuality, even when they use that language in public.
* Two lightly anonymized & condensed real-life examples from conversations I've had in the last few months.
I love this stuff and deeply wish our current cultural discussion could bear any nuance or sense of history. Absent that nuance or history I've basically retreated to "gender is a largely incoherent concept outside of any specific context" which is fine for avoiding offending people in conversation but not very useful for outlining legal rights. In any case thank you for your continued efforts to get some of this stuff in a digestable format.
Legally my opinion is pretty simple - sex abolition in law. The law is no place to judge people based on what's in their pants. Sex wasn't always written on passports. The differently gendered criminal sentences for rape that still exists in most countries, for example, are just awful.
Bathrooms and changing rooms? Individual stalls. Domestic violence shelters for women only? As long as there are enough DV shelters for everyone, we can have one only for natural blondes for all I care. Sports? Sports organisations are not legal bodies.
The only thing I'm kind of iffy about is housing the incarcerated. But prison is really weird anyways. Why are violent people put together? Why is a male rapist locked inside with a bunch of men? In my country (Denmark), any prisoner can voluntarily isolate from everybody else and most child abusers do so to avoid getting beaten up. Maybe that's the most humane and practical thing to do for the vanishingly few prisoners who are trans.
I like the general thrust of your ideas but it's worth noting the degree to which it would be acceptable to either the activist left or activist right is far from clear.
Aside from recommending that trans people be tortured with solitary confinement (definitely not humane!!!), this is not far from a trans rights position*. Note that women's bathrooms are already individual stalls, that trans sports bans are aimed at overriding the existing policies of sports organisations, and enough DV shelters for everyone that needs them is a vision of fully automated luxury gay space communism very far from the current reality.
(The wrinkle you'll run into when thinking through the details is the same problem Eleanor Roosevelt & a bunch of women in labor organizing had with the Equal Rights Amendment in the US - if you remove de jure references to sex you may compromise protections against de facto sexism & transphobia.)
* I've replaced "activist left" with "trans rights" because I think "left" and "right" have devolved into uselessness by now - when not shipping people off to El Salvadoran death camps is considered a leftist position we're not talking about two coherent political theories anymore. Similarly "activist" stops being a useful term in a world where existing as trans and talking about it is considered activism.
Have you seen Scandinavian prisons? It's solitary confinement, sure, but with video games and books and music and good food and in many cases internet. You get your own little dorm room.
someone suggest to allow people to "voluntarily isolate", and you turned it to "trans people be tortured with solitary confinement". this is not truth-seeking or fair, way to describe that position.
I might have misunderstood the OP & I'm happy to be corrected, but "voluntary isolation" is commonly used in the prison system to refer (misleadingly) to solitary confinement of a prisoner who's the target of violence, as in the case OP described. The OP didn't make this totally clear, but my read is that the OP's suggestion is to house trans women in men's prisons, where they are subject to very high rates of sexual violence, and "solve the problem" of the violence they're experiencing through solitary confinement.
This is the status quo when women are housed in men's prisons, not a proposal for change, and it's a monstrous situation. Solitary confinement is considered torture by most human rights organizations and the UN, and the conditions remain torture if they are "chosen" because the alternative is another form of violence. If someone is given a choice between rape or torture, "allowing people to voluntary isolate" is IMO not a fair way to describe that situation., and the situation is not humane.
What do you think I'm missing?
from my point of view, OP's view is not specified enough for me to understand what exactly they mean, and if i want to know, i should ask, as what was written correspond to wide variety of possible positions.
I find presenting the postion of not having sex-segregation as "male prison" as straightforwardly wrong. in male prison the people are males, in not sex segregated prison there are both makes and females. (this is example of not-truth-seeking) (it is possible to claim that with the current sex-ratios in violent crimes, everyone-prisons are practically male ones. but this is not what you claimed).
so, from my point of view you read claim that can have different interpretations, and not only jumped to the worst possible one, jump to one that factually contradict the claim.
from my point of view, your the-opposite-of-charitableness make you draw false conclusion, and then. instead of double check and notice your confusion, or ASK IF THIS IS WHAT THEY MEAN, jump to accusations, with emotional language, that in turn trigger people and make it harder for them to think clearly.
personally, i find the hypotheses "I think it fine to have rape in prisons" very low probability, and think that it fail sanity check, and that at the point this is your hypotheses you should be very suspicious of it, assume you almost certainly wrong, and also, ASK OP IF THIS IS WHAT THEY MEAN.
but also, can't you see the large differences between "it seems to me that you support situation when the choice is between solitary confinement, that considered torture by most human rights organizations and the UN, and between being raped? because this is how i interpret what you wrote, and it seem wrong" and "you recommending that trans people be tortured with solitary confinement"?
there is a large difference, even if you for some reason still give weirdly large probability to some of the more low-probability interpretations, in a way that from my side look like it resulted form politics mind killing effect (aka, if you read the same pattern of writing about different domain, you would have come to different conclusion).
> people who are attracted to members of the same gender are more likely to find it psychologically important to break gender norms in glaring, obvious ways that make sexist people mad at them
Is this purely selection bias?
It's been the case historically. If you're a huge fairy and you're into men, then you have a possible life path that you can't get if you're only one of those things.
But nowadays, the overwhelming majority of gay and bi men I know are typical men with no interest in effeminacy, and likewise for lesbians and bi women.
Among the feminine men and masculine women I know (not necessarily a typical bunch), there seems to be little to no "natural" correlation with orientation. Exclusively-straight people, and bi men who try to pursue women, get more pushback against it, so they tend to knock it off, though.
> A surprisingly common take in New York City because all of the anti-venereal-disease campaigns only mentioned sex with women.
In The Wisdom of Whores, Elizabeth Pisani says the exact same thing happened in Indonesia.
It's really, really fascinating to me how much trans people skewed male/MTF for so long. I don't believe the interwebs is seducing our precious daughters or anything, but it is... strange? How it has shifted.
In Iran, where GNC gay people are pressured to transition and being trans is seen as better than being gay, there are more FTM than MTF.
It's extremely challenging (both because the categories are subjective/contested and because there's no solid data collection) to tell if there actually was any skew historically, or which way it went, between transmasculine / transfeminine folks. I'm not sure we can say that it's shifted, or which way.
There are a couple factors in the 1990s / 2000s and into the early 2010s that skew what little data/evidence we have:
- A much more powerful force in creating the category of transgender than the rich white activists or any of the groups mentioned above was the NIH and the researchers they funded as part of trying to study / treat HIV. Researchers were trying harder to find transfeminine folks than transmasculine folks because the former were viewed as a vector for AIDS. The rise of the term transgender in research / policy / academia significantly predates GenderPAC - my read is that GenderPAC adopted this term primarily because they were trying to talk to Washington, not primarily because a big tent is more politically powerful (it often isn't if your tent has divergent goals & culture). Because of the initial policy goals of the term, its boundaries, and the forces encouraging its use, skew toward transfeminine people initially.
- A bunch of data sources are tied to medical data and don't capture anybody doing DIY medical transition (probably the majority of people on hormones pre-WPATH 2011). You'll much more likely show up in the medical system if you're rich and you're aiming for bottom surgery or you're poor and getting hormones from a clinic that is using them as a carrot to encourage HIV screening, both of which skew transfeminine.
- It takes more material resources for trans women to go stealth than trans men, and the employment discrimination / violence trans women face are greater, which means transfeminine folks were more likely to end up organizing for their survival in groups like the ball scene or STAR, which skews recent political history towards trans femmes. (Some kinds of political history, anyway - if you wrote a history of trans lawyers working on trans rights, it'd skew heavily trans masc for these same reasons.)
- Media coverage of the time skews transfeminine for a similar reason the historical record of the present time is going to capture a lot more reports of cis women being ejected from women's bathrooms than trans people ejected from any bathroom even though there are certainly more of the latter - it's a more salacious story.
Gender is so complicated that I'm not sure that asking about the rate of transness by AGAB is a well-formed question at all, but if it were there's a lot that skews our picture of it.
Yeah, if you look at the 2008 National Transgender Discrimination Survey, the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey, and the 2022 U.S. Transgender Survey (all the largest studies ever undertaken on trans people at the time*), it's really clear how what was once a very stark AMAB skew has gradually equalized, ending a trend that goes back long before we had the word "trans".
*Sources will qualify this with "... in the US", but I don't think there have actually been larger studies anywhere else.
And I agree this is probably more of a "we stopped beating left-handers" thing than anything. I think there has historically been some very significant hermeneutical injustice against transmasculine people that's still really hard to articulate and talk about. I can point to my own childhood and gesture in the direction of a lack of a sense of ownership over my own identity that would allow me to even question something like my gender (transmasculine people have also historically first expressed their identities later in life, a trend which I believe is also now equalizing), but it's hard to really get a good grasp of the issue because of the fact that it *is* hermeneutical injustice.
I sometimes feel the confines of living inside a framework that wasn't really actually made to describe people like me. I hope that one day trans people have enough of a respite from everything else that we can start to unpack that.
Interesting fact about Iran, especially since, as I understand it, male homosexuality is punished more harshly.
Do you think the fact that Iranian women face significant legal disabilities accounts for the FTM-favouring skew?
Statistics on trans people in Iran are likely either counting GRS or legal transitions. In Iran, to legally transition, one must first have GRS - for trans men this means a hysterectomy, and for trans women this means vaginoplasty. Hysterectomies in Iran are relatively safe and affordable; vaginoplasties in Iran are high-risk and quite expensive.
(A general principle at play here is that prior to forming theories about the sociological causes of a statistic about trans people, one should ask about what makes trans people show up in the statistics.)
"there are no fem queens anymore' - it felt a little jarring to read that, cos in my (recent, limited) experience in the ball scene, *within* the community we use "fem queen" all the time. You made the joke of having "butch queen up in drags" in bio - im in an insta groupchat called "FQs and jnr FQs of [my city]" (FQ being fem queen). And I've almost *never* heard the term "trans woman" used in intra-community conversation. Including just like casual conversation not specifically about balls. (Again with the caveat that im new to the community).
Talking to other people outside the ballroom community is a different story of course. Maybe it's more like a code-switching thing?
That being said, the first time "fem queen"was explained to me as a term it was as "a trans woman in ballroom". But then someone else started explaining to me how that doesn't really capture it.
The ballroom categories and terms have clearly for sure gotten far less cultural hegemony, and I think probably been morphed or diluted in some way by the influence of the transgender categories, but by my knowledge it's a bit far to say they're totally gone.
Love this post by the way, feels good for my brain to learn the history of the different categories it uses.
" I don’t mean to say this is a bad thing, or an oppressive thing"
why? it does look both bad and oppressive.