Misogynoir - Blog Posts

a tale as old as time atp...

Going to the Black Fictional Woman's tag, and

seeing ships that don't include her

Post that doesn't have anything to do with her

posts that villainizes her but babies the, also grown and capable man

Seeing all her positive traits get attributed to a man

Essay on how the make love interest never really cared for her and was just using her to hide his feelings for another male that they ship him with.

The anti-blackness that easily slips through

I'm talking about Allura & Mel, but I've been in fandom long enough to basically be taking about damn near every black woman in a show...

Starting to think it's just straight up incorrect analysis to view terfs as even viewing trans women as men, and that they hate trans women for their masculinity (and by extention being characterized by hatred for men and masculinity). Instead, i think you have to view their comments on trans women and their bodies as intentionally and forcefully masculinizing a woman, excluding her from womanhood for not fitting into white women's beauty and body standards. Many people have noted that this is similair to how black women are historically and today masculinized in society, and indeed terfs commonly attack women of color for similair things. If it is about hating men it's noticable that they don't talk about men the same way, "men" are only ever a threat if she's a woman. Any other man is allowed to be an ally to the terf movement if he's "protecting women" (by excluding certain types of woman). It's misogyny, it's transmisogyny, everything about this structurally replicates the ways women are mistreated by society generally, and excluded from femininity, just lazerfocused on targeting trans women.

'We need more darkskin black girl mcs who have strong platonic relathionships with the male protagonist instead of romances and their own likable fleshed out personalities and don't get defanged!!!'You guys couldn't even handle Hazel Levesque

“The most disrespected person in America is the Black Woman. The most unprotected person in America is the Black Woman. The most neglected person in America is the Black Woman.”

-Malcolm X (1962)

(Originally made on insta by @michaelabalogun)

[Multiple people have pointed out that the Sojourner Truth speech isn’t accurate. Interesting none of you bother recommending other resources to spread awareness of what it’s like to be a Black Woman while you are pulling attention away from the main point–Black Women need to be recognized. If you have such a problem with how accurate the speech is, just know I looked into it and apparently she approved the second version which also expresses how she’s feeling. Let’s move on or pm me and I can list some alternatives if it’s weighing on your mind.]

I hate the "both sides are bad" narrative about jayviks vs Mel stans people use because only one side has written multiple fanfiction of a black woman being experimented on by their favorite white gay man. The way this isn't the first time jayviks put Mel in their fics just to write weird ass scenes like this

Holy hell people reblog this

Something white women overlook is just how much more often black women are sexually harassed than us. It didn't occur to me until an underclassman in high school asked me to walk her home because a man working construction on the street outside the school always harassed her whenever he saw her. I walked with her for maybe 10 minutes and GROWN ASS MEN yelled at her once a block! She was 14-15 to my 18, yet she got harassed more in one day than I do in a month. It really opened my eyes to how young black girls in particular are incredibly vulnerable in ways white girls usually aren't, because people see them as easier targets. And they are! A lot of people don't stand up for black girls the way they do white girls, even though black men and women were consistently the ones who looked out for me when I got sexually harassed as a child. The school administration did fuck all to help her or to get that creepy construction worker to stop until I got my dad to call in and yell at them about it. This poor girl would cry at the end of class because she was scared to walk home, in front of our teacher, but they did jack shit to keep her safe.

hey guys, I could use your help with something! Sue is a Black disabled mother, migrant, and PhD student at Newcastle University who urgently needs solidarity. Newcastle University is reporting her to the Home Office in retaliation for her complaint about her abusive supervisor, in full awareness of her Stage 5 kidney disease. this is a life-and-death situation.

here's how you can help:

retweet Unis Resist Border Control's tweet about Sue's abusive situation at the University of Newcastle

sign the open letter to Newcastle University by 22 May

pass a motion with your UCU branch (template here)

donate to help Sue find a kidney donor, apply to Leave to Remain, pay solicitor fees, and cover living costs

Sue's story from the #WeAreAllSue toolkit:

In 2022, Sue Agazie, high-achieving in her field, was promised financial support for her tuition fees through scholarships and paid opportunities and enrolled into the PhD programme at Newcastle University Business School with this understanding. When Sue arrived in the UK in 2023, however, she learned that all of this financial promise was a lie; the scholarships that she had been promised never materialised. Instead, she has gone into horrific debt and is having trouble surviving.

For almost a year, Sue sought financial support for herself and her family, including grants and opportunities that would burnish the reputation of her supervisor and university as a whole. However, in that year, her supervisor not only prevented her from applying to scholarships and paid opportunities, but further controlled her research and day-to-day quality of life, with a high-level of surveillance, inappropriate supervisory practices, and escalating harassment of both her and her family.

These practices include this supervisor repeatedly preventing Sue from taking part in important professional development activities, such as research presentations, within the Business School. He also isolated her from her senior colleagues, forbidding her from attending particular activities they were facilitating, or spreading malicious rumours about them. Further, the primary supervisor repeatedly ignored Sue's pleas for support on funding applications and other opportunities that would alleviate the precarious financial situation into which she had been placed, telling her to “stop sending me links to scholarships”.

This behaviour would culminate in the primary supervisor verbally abusing Sue a number of times, and maligning Sue’s husband, alleging that he has been too lazy to financially support her. These inappropriate supervisory practices belie Newcastle University’s commitment to gender equality under the Athena SWAN Charter, for which it holds a Silver award, and for which the Business School holds a Bronze award.

An environment of terror and retaliation

This environment of surveillance, harassment, and terror has grossly impacted the health of Sue as well as that of her spouse and children. In particular, her kidney condition escalated to stage 5 kidney disease, a severe and terminal illness that causes disablement and time-sensitive, highly-delicate medical needs, during this ordeal. The National Kidney Foundation in the United States indicates that “stress and uncontrolled reactions to stress” can “lead to kidney damage.” These compounding issues have also understandably affected Sue's studies, although she has bravely persisted in her research, meeting important deadlines.

Sue raised these issues using relevant avenues of informal complaint, including her supervisory teams and student support services; there are multiple complaints that have been raised in this department. However, she did not receive sufficient support. Further, her severe health issues were not treated with the urgency and importance that they deserved. In October and November 2023, Sue's supervisor accused her of allegedly plagiarising his work in what Sue sees as a malicious act of retaliation and victimisation over her informal complaint, and an attempt to sabotage her reputation not just at Newcastle University, but to prestigious global networks. Following all of this mistreatment, Sue filed a formal complaint against her supervisor in February 2024.

Newcastle University is closing ranks

The university came back to Sue on 5 March 2024 with its response, alleging that she had fabricated the complaint against her supervisor in retaliation for his accusations of research misconduct against her, painting this vulnerable, disabled African student as a malicious liar. The supervisor even denies the relevance of her terminal illness and implicates her young child's behaviour in his response, while maintaining that her terminal illness "has nothing to do with her studies or work pressure here". Sue maintains: “During the time that I was supervised by the primary PhD supervisor, he neither kept in regular communication about my disability nor did he signpost me to relevant services within and outside of Newcastle University that could help me. It is dangerous for the primary supervisor to maintain that my disability would not have affected my studies. His comments show a gross level of disability discrimination that does not befit the reputation that Newcastle University seeks to cultivate as an inclusive place.”

Now, the university is claiming that Sue is not "engaging" sufficiently with the programme, and is threatening to report her to the Home Office, despite a written promise in January 2024 that her status would be unaffected due to the ongoing complaint process, and full knowledge of her terminal stage 5 kidney failure. Adding more insult to injury, Newcastle University Accommodation Service has been hounding Sue for rent arrears, even though they know she is critically ill and in a complaint with the university, surviving with the support of Food & Solidarity. Sue has pleaded with the university’s Accommodation Service for a rent freeze, indicating her urgent health complications and her complaint underway with the university. In all correspondences, the Accommodation Service has ignored Sue’s pleas for clemency. There is real fear that the Accommodation Service will evict Sue, her husband and their child. This will, no doubt, cause real precarity to Sue’s already fragile health condition.

We are appalled that the Newcastle University Business School is utilising obvious misogynoirist tropes to close ranks around a disabled Black migrant student who has been treated horribly, and weaponising her precarious migrant status against her as she attempts to seek justice. We are also aware that Sue is not the only student in this situation and that there have been other complaints in this department. It is a stark illustration of the pernicious institutional racism at Russell Group universities that a disabled Black migrant woman with caring responsibilities has been treated this way not only by a supervisor, but by the institution, as well as the abject way these universities instrumentalise migrant students from the Global South as sources of income that they can afterwards dispose of.

Sue maintains that this ordeal has not diminished her resolve to complete her PhD studies at Newcastle University Business School. She says, “I want to finish my PhD research. But for that to happen, Newcastle University must provide the necessary support for a disabled student in a non-abusive environment. I hope that the university listens to me and we can come to a resolution on this matter soon.”

Her name was Samiya and she was brutally stabbed in the neck and chest before she was taken to a New York hospital with her sister Sanyia (who had been stabbed in the arm), where she did not survive her injuries from her neck and chest. These sisters were just at a store, and this predator FOLLOWED them after he was rejected and attacked them. He waited for them -and he's still not caught. This is just absolutely horrifying.

Misogyny fuels violence against women -and this very clear epidemic is killing young girls and women.

I cannot imagine the degree of entitlement you think you have to anyone's time and bodies- that anyone could hold that much disdain for rejection, and is okay with exerting power, control, and violence upon another person because YOUR ego is bruised. Fuck toxic masculinity and dismantle the patriarchy until it burns to the ground because I'm so sick of seeing this.

I wish all the best to the family and loved ones of Samiya. This young teenager should still be here. And I hope the man who did this gets apprehended and faces endless misery and misfortune in his lifetime.

"We cannot live without our lives" || Combahee River Collective members march in a memorial to 11 women of color murdered in the Boston area (1979). Photograph by Tia Cross via Verso

this is a really good video, it discussed the topic of the often brushed over misogynoir, never forget black woman in your feminism

Black Femicide and intimate partner violence

“I remember an incident from my own childhood, when a very close friend of mine and I, we were walking down the street. We were discussing whether God existed. And she said he did not. And I said he did. But then she said she had proof. She said, ‘I had been praying for two years for blue eyes, and he never gave me any.’ So, I just remember turning around and looking at her. She was very, very Black. And she was very, very, very, very beautiful. How painful. Can you imagine that kind of pain? About that, about color? So, I wanted to say you know, this kind of racism hurts. This is not lynchings, and murders, and drownings. This is interior pain. So deep. For an 11 year-old girl to believe that if she only had some characteristic of the white world, she would be okay. [Black girls] surrendered completely to the master narrative. I mean the whole notion of what is ugliness, what is worthlessness. She got it from her family, she got it from school, she got it from the movies — she got it everywhere; it’s white male life. The master narrative is whatever ideological script that is being imposed by the people in authority on everybody else. The master fiction, history, it has a certain point of view. So, when these little girls see that the most prized gift that they can get at Christmastime is this little white doll, that’s the master narrative speaking: “This is beautiful. This is lovely, and you’re not it.”

Toni Morrison on what inspired her to write her first novel, The Bluest Eye.

I’m begging Black girls and especially younger Black girls to please stop going on the Internet and complaining about being the least attractive/feminine/desirable and how guys don’t want you and how much you hate being a Black girl and wish you were another race(usually white/East Asian is what I see) so that you could be seen as beautiful/get the guy you want/not hate yourself every time you look into a mirror. Please. Stop doing that shit. I understand the soul-crushing way that Black girls are treated in society, and how insistent the world and people in general are in stripping us of our femininity and beauty and trying to gaslight us into believing that we’re ugly, and because of that it is so so easy to fall prey to the “we’re the ugliest of women and no one will ever love us” mentality. But when you make posts like these, talking down on yourself for being Black and expressing envy towards non-Black women, you are not only shitting on every Black woman out there who looks like you, you’re also giving non-Black girls an ego boost and letting them believe that they really are more attractive and valuable than us and that we’re “the ugly ones” because Black girls themselves are saying it and self-deprecating themselves.

I’m begging you to please stop going on these intensely anti-Black and misogynistic hate sites dedicated to hating on/tearing down women and venting about how being a Black girl is such a curse and a terrible burden and how you’ll never be as beautiful as a white/Asian woman because you have dark skin and coily hair. All you’re doing is putting yourself in harm’s way and validating the way people already think about us while shitting on your fellow Black sisters by painting us all with the “undesirable/ugly” brush. I understand that the rest of the world constantly tells us that we’re ugly/unlovable and less womanly than the rest of the groups. I understand feeling anger, confusion, and frustration at how were treated by people who are supposed to care about us and protect us. I understand feeding into it. But please don’t. Especially not on sites that prey on women’s insecurities and are filled to the brim with people who hate Black women with a seething passion. They’re only going to tell you that you’re right, not comfort you and make you feel better, you can’t rely on these sites for validation. Please talk to your friends and family or a therapist if you feel insecure about your race, and either follow Black female content creators who uplift Black women/girls or get off of social media for the betterment of your own mental health. Please. I’m begging you. 🙏🏿

We need to start telling Black girls that they’re beautiful again I’m so fucking serious. Enough of the “average Black girl” bullshit and pretending to be positive while tearing yourselves(and other Black women) down. No, you are not average just because you don’t wear makeup or wigs or extensions and aren’t slim thick and don’t look like an IG baddie(no shade to IG baddies ofc, you do you!). The whole “well ya see saying all women are beautiful is misogynistic because it places beauty as our primary value as women” shit doesn’t apply to Black women and never has. Black women live in a society that insists on telling us that we’re not beautiful any time we try to be confident about ourselves and how we(naturally) look. So let’s not give them the satisfaction. All Black girls are beautiful. Lightskin, brownskin, darkskin, short, tall, skinny, fat, muscular, cis, trans, girly, tomboyish, short-haired and long-haired, no matter what you look like, if you are a Black girl, then you are beautiful by default! Period! 💅🏿

white queers are always so damned certain that "true" queerness is for them & them alone. expressions of queerness from Black people (most notably, Black women & those percieved as women) that don't center whiteness & aren't tailored for white audiences are always, always pegged as being unbelievable. all this plus a heaping dose of thay classic "all bi women are dirty attention seeking liars" brand of biphobia. fuck off man

[Image description: tumblr post tags from @mettaworldpiece reading: #misogynoir #transmisogynoir #passing #antiblackness #ppl who say things like this do not consider antiblackness #ALL black ppl are degendered and hypergendered at the same time that is how Black men can be fetishized for their sexual organs but still #be denied manhood and called boys #for Black women womanhood is held as conditional #as in it is placed on them whether they identify w it or not can be stripped away w no consideration for the person affected #even the concept of passing comes from 'white-passing' or from raciallized Black ppl who could move thru white society w/o feeling #the violent conditions of antiblackness #for me there isnt a person who doesnt know im trans as soon as I open my mouth #that does not mean I move with safety when not speaking tho as misogynoir conditions people to take their toll of every Black woman #they come into contact w #for example the suburban constructions who got mad when I walked past their catcalls did not know I was trans #but that didnt stop them from acting like they were going to swerve and run me over when I tried to walk past to work /End image description.]

u look like a giant buff woman idk what u mean "dont pass" lol.

So I wanted to respond to this one, not to evaluate my features as “passing/not passing” but to talk a bit on racialization and transness as a larger Black trans woman. I am going to be speaking on the experience of cis women in addition to trans women.

Yes, I’m 6’2” and 260lbs. There are plenty of cis women my height/weight or larger/taller! It is not inherently a trait of solely trans women to be large. But this also means that I don’t always pass, because a lot of cis women who look like me don’t pass all the time either no matter what they do.

In this outfit running errands, I got hit on a bunch, gendered appropriately a bunch, and honestly felt the most femme I have in a while. Meanwhile, I still had a man start screaming at me on a metro train because he could see up my dress while I was sitting and “I DONT WANT TO SEE THIS MAN’S UNDERWEAR!”

Often, assumption of masculinity for largeness, for height, is something that gets inflicted on tall cis women as well, moreso if they’re an athlete or otherwise buff or “unfeminine”. Many end up with a complex about it that affects their comfort presenting anything less than high femme even as cis women by adulthood, because it’s implied they have to “make up” for their height/frame by being more feminine.

So despite this not being something limited solely to trans women, it does get significantly amplified on trans women when we have other features or traits that may affect it, such as voice, visible stubble, etc.

On top of that, Black women are often racialized as “more masculine” bc of systemic societal antiblackness. While it can happen to anyone that visibly reads as a Black woman, it gets notably worse the darker your skin is and the larger you are. I’m very lightskinned, so while I still experience it, it’s also not nearly as bad as it would be for someone much darker than me with my build.

So for larger Black trans women, we get a double whammy of “passing” tribulations, as we get the misogynistic assumption of “the larger you are, the more masculine you are” and the misogynoiric assumption that as a Black woman, we are inherently more masculine.

Both of these factors are completely out of our control as larger Black trans women. They aren’t something that can be changed by anything we do to try and “pass” because they are baseline societal bigotries currently - fuck, Megan Thee Stallion is quite literally one of the most beautiful cis women on earth while also being larger and she’s still CONSTANTLY accused of being a man/masculine online even in some of her most “feminine” presentations.

So when I say that I “often don’t pass” I’m not commenting on my features, what I think “outs me as AMAB”, etc. im commenting on the baseline societal transmisogynoir that states that someone who looks like me, transfemme or not, often does not pass.

Many people will still gender me appropriately from the jump, hit on me, catcall me, otherwise treat me like a woman - but just as often I will be categorically excluded from even possibly passing for people who have engraved these social bigotries to heart, and recognizing that doesn’t affect whether I’m “valid”, whether I’m attractive (bc I’m a fucking Goddess and stunning), etc. but affects my SAFETY and the likely of experiencing transmisogynistic or transmisogynoiristic harm or violence.

Passing is not about whether you are attractive or not, it’s about safety.

On the subject of black people and reproductive health (and if you’re black and capable of having children/have a cycle you have some of THE worse reproductive issues, i’m so sorry), I think about the time that white trans masc joined in on ridiculing reproductive health and restrictions in Texas, that affect primarily black and brown people, including black trans people. So to see some of them joining in on in on this conversation of a black trans employee being fired, when they were aye okay with wishing Texas blew up and had the audacity to be upset when people were centering black and brown people in reproductive justice, is infuriating. This is what I mean when i say some of this is so clearly performative. 

Like I am actually very tired of white and non-black trans people using us as cannon fodder as well as our experiences, but turning around and being anti-black two seconds later. 

I guess reproductive health and pregnancy for trans folks only matter when it’s white and non-black trans people? Or police violence only matters when it’s non-black trans people. 

I’ve been thinking about what julie plec did to Kat Graham and the treatment of the character Bonnie Bennet over the last few days and years later it still makes me sick. I was writing about it a few days ago for reasons and seeing her speak on Kat today enraged me.

Via deadline

The racism, misogynoir and antisemitism she was subjected to on that show is unbelievable.

“She has always been very gracious”

“She’s very kind as she kindly passes”

“and put the less good parts behind her”

The statement is a joke the “less good parts”she’s referring to are violent racism, antisemitism and discrimination. To anyone who didn’t know better this simply reads as a nice and polite statement. Here she’s admitting to repeatedly contacting Kat to reprise a role that was traumatising and rejoin a toxic work environment after Kat had repeatedly declined. Reducing her mistreatment to “less good parts” and praising how graciously she’s declined going back for further harm is vile.