Class Hatred in the Trans Community
Class Hatred in the Trans Community
As the crisis of capitalism escalates ever further, things get worse: the quality of manufacturing and services, imperialist war and genocide, the price of food, the surveillance state, our behaviour towards one another. An idealist might say that it is foolish, perhaps even offensive, to compare these things – but a materialist sees all of these things as connected. Everything is getting worse; it is because of the exploitation of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie, and it is getting very difficult for the average person to ignore that.
I’ve been consciously trans for around 13 years, and during that time I have seen an evolution in the way trans people talk to one another. The trans community, online and offline, has undoubtedly changed – the words we use, the places we go (cyber or real), the meaning of ‘trans’. These past couple years, I have noticed two things. First, I have noticed an explosion in a kind of language people call ‘/tttt/ slang’, alongside certain narratives and worldviews that are packaged with that language. Second, I have noticed a (often quite vitriolic) pushback against that language, those narratives, and those worldviews.
In days of yore, the trans community separated itself between those who were ‘truly trans’ and those who are not – this period lasted decades. The 2020s have rapidly brought us to a point where there are two new broad sub-groups within the trans community, and they have absolutely nothing to do with the ‘validity’ of a person’s transness.
What is ‘/tttt/ slang’?
‘/tttt/’ refers to 4chan’s /lgbt/ board. The letters ‘lgb’ are colloquially replaced with ‘ttt’ because the bulk of the board’s user base is made up of trans people (mostly trans women, originally). /tttt/ slang, then, refers to the various words invented and propagated by this community – a community which has long been synonymous with evil, in no small part because of the website it is home to.
Moral qualms aside, the linguistic landscape of /lgbt/ offers a lexicon of interesting words: hon, passoid, youngshit, and boymoder1, just to name a few. These words are also linguistically productive – they can be combined, often on the fly, to create new words with related meanings: passhon, manmoder, midshit, sneedhon2.
There is, and has been, grave pushback against the usage of this terminology. If you ask someone why they dislike /tttt/ slang, you usually get the same responses:
The usage of /tttt/ slang breeds self-hatred.
The usage of /tttt/ slang is misogynistic.
Better words exist.
The etymology of /tttt/ slang is immoral.
There are problems with all of these responses. (1) is idealistically fallacious; calling oneself a ‘hon’ is an observation of real deprivation – deprivation of a body that feels whole, and of appropriate medical care to address that issue. Any self-hatred present in such a trans woman is a result of that deprivation, not of the words she uses to name her situation. Replacing the phrase ‘I’m a hon’ with ‘I am a trans woman who does not pass’ is neither concise nor able to alter those criminally unfair circumstances. Words describe reality; they do not alter it.
(2) is similarly fallacious; it is not misogyny to observe that a particular trans woman passes because she possesses sexually dimorphic traits that are institutionally kept out of the reach of other trans women. The misogyny lies instead in how the deprived woman has been treated – both in the deprivation itself and in the way she is treated by society for her resulting appearance.
(3) Is simply false. /tttt/ slang is descriptive in a very precise way that no other form of queer slang has ever been before. As an example, the words youngshit, midshit and lateshit are used in reference to the level of pubertal development a trans person was at when they began hormone replacement therapy. There is no concise substitution for these words, which is significant for a community that largely inhabits social media platforms with character limits. What laypeople don’t seem to understand is that words are tools; people invent them because they are useful. Words are also subject to natural selection; if a word isn’t useful, it will fall into disuse. Youngshit, midshit, lateshit – these words concisely, precisely name very different trans experiences; different experiences of bodily change, of relationships, and of available resources. Without these words, trans people would have to talk about these experiences with extremely long noun phrases such as ‘trans woman who started taking HRT in the middle of puberty, after the fusing of most or all of her growth plates’, which is not only too long, but also not nuanced enough to encapsulate the meaning of midshit. If better words exist, where are they?
Finally, (4) is difficult to make sense of because many of the words we use every day have etymologies which are problematic. Slop, and its compound derivatives such as friendslop, re-entered the online lexicon via the neo-nazi slang goyslop. The phrase ‘long time no see’ entered the lexicon around the early 20th Century, likely as an imitation of non-native English speakers. Hysterical and hysteria come from the Greek word for the uterus. Going back even further, the word ‘bad’ came from an Anglo-Saxon slur for what we now understand to be LGBTI people. What makes these racist and misogynistic words okay?
To the uninitiated, this might all be quite a lot. To the initiated, this might all be quite boring, even offensive. I promise that these explanations and rhetorical questions are in service of a grander thesis. In further service of that thesis, I would now like you to imagine (if you can) the stereotype of a trans woman who uses /lgbt/. In recent times, the word used by outsiders to describe such a woman has been ‘Klansfem’ – a portmanteau of ‘transfem’ and ‘(Ku Klux) Klan’.
Here are the qualities you were probably imagining: ugly, bigoted, unhygienic, not in education or training, suffering from invisible disabilities, and perhaps possessing unusual sexual proclivities such as incest kink or paedophilia (or both). Remove the transness from this imagined person, and the true character of the stereotype is laid bare: it is a lumpenproletarian stereotype, an underclass stereotype. These qualities are often ascribed to the non-working poor more generally: the chav, the yokel, the refugee, the thug, or the white trash.
To be clear, there is a reason why the stereotype of a /tttt/ trans woman exists. Stereotypes come about from uninformed external observation. What does an external observer see when they look at /lgbt/? They see people who, for some reason, congregate on a corner of the internet that is constantly brigaded by racists. They see people who do not have jobs, who do not take care of themselves, who are often neurodivergent or mentally ill, and sometimes even physically disabled.
/tttt/ slang, then, has a class character. The pushback against it is more about trying to create a ‘clean’ trans community, free from the harsh realities that the majority of us face every day. When we observe the class position of the loudest voices amongst that pushback, the pieces in the puzzle begin to fall in place.
Winners and Losers
During the 2020s, the language and ethos of /tttt/ has undoubtedly breached containment and spread into the wider trans community. While in the previous decade, it was unthinkable for a trans woman to say a word like ‘passoid’ in realspace, it has now become more strange for any trans person at all to be wholly unaware of /tttt/ slang.
What is the ethos, or worldview, of /tttt/? To put it simply, the /tttt/ worldview is that, among trans people, there are winners and there are losers. Moreover, winning and losing is not a binary state. There are degrees of winning and losing – hence words like youngshit, midshit, and oldshit, and the various derivatives of ‘hon’, like shoulderhon, heighthon, framehon, poorhon3.
Disliking all the compound jargon is one thing, but you cannot deny that the /tttt/ ethos is not only reasonable, but unambiguously true (though people will try to deny it). There are two things that a dysphoric trans woman wants above all: to live as a woman, and to be rid of her dysphoria (or, at least, the worst extremes of her dysphoria). The absolute ‘win’ condition is to have both of these things; but, only a minority of trans women get to have both. A plurality have one, or the other, or some small combination of the two. A significant number of trans women have neither. These are different degrees of ‘winning’, and those who win the most will have better access to social capital, relationship opportunities, job and income opportunities – class signifiers.
The 2020s has seen an explosion in antagonism between trans winners and trans losers, especially online. This is not merely transphobia between trans persons. It is class hatred. In capitalist society, wage labour is the most moral thing of all4. Dysphoric trans women who do not pass, and consequently have trouble finding or coping with a job, are therefore morally bankrupt individuals – this is the subconscious process underlying the antagonism between trans winners and trans losers. Consciously, that antagonism manifests thusly: trans winners resent trans losers because they are lazy, they smell bad, they lack skill, they have the wrong mindset, and they are probably bigoted, to boot – the exact same reasons why, among the general population, the propertied and highly-paid resent the unemployed.5, 6
Despite all the bickering and dogpiling, the trans winner’s subconscious does not hate trans losers for being ‘bad people’. Rather, the trans winner’s hatred of the trans loser stems from a general societal hatred of the lumpenproletariat, of which most trans losers are a part. Trans losers are hated because trans losers do not produce sufficient value for capitalism. Oftentimes, in fact, trans losers are a net drain on the ‘system’; we cost more than we produce. This is why the system, under its ordinary functioning, leaves trans losers to suffer and die. But in times of poor systemic functioning – in times of mounting economic crisis and apocalyptic wars – what happens to the useless eaters? If the losers were all killed by a state euthanasia programme, would the winners even notice?
The resentment from the other side of the wall now ought to make much more sense. The winners often say to the losers, ‘You’re just jealous.’ Yes, we are jealous! We are jealous in the same way we are jealous of property owners, labour aristocrats, and moneyed artisans – which trans winners often all are. It is not a terribly astute observation. Poverty is miserable; it is terrible for your health, and it makes it impossible to do the things you want to do. Being a trans loser compounds with poverty; it is very hard to succeed in a job interview when you don’t pass, and it is very hard to achieve a degree when the state of your body makes you want to die every day – doubly so if you have no hope of your body ever changing because you live in a country that does not provide medical care for trans people. Being a trans loser is also often a result of poverty itself, because medical care costs money. It is miserable going online and witnessing other trans women living in bodies that I can only dream of existing in – and it is even worse if I encounter them in person; the last time it happened, I spent three days seriously considering suicide.
Trans victoryhood is inexplicably tied up with class, no matter how you shake it. The /tttt/ ethos is nascent class consciousness, manifesting in an underclass demographic that quickly sprang into existence7 at the eve of a violent economic storm. The popularisation of this ethos is not coincidental; it is class conflict, increasingly laid out to bare as the crisis deepens. The capitalist crisis and its conditions are logarithmic; this is why the trans community changed so rapidly after decades of being very stagnant.
I have been on HRT for almost a decade, and yet I experience daily passive suicidal ideation over the state of my body. I did not get lucky with my genetics, not by a long shot. I cannot look in the mirror, I couldn’t make it through university, I have never had a job before, and I often can’t leave my bed due to the dysphoria I feel from physically occupying space in a body that isn’t mine. It would take numerous surgical procedures to wrangle this vessel into something close to what I can call ‘my body’, and there is no conceivable way that I will ever afford any of these procedures, precisely because of the conditions brought about by the body I need to fix. Am I the next incarnation of Adolf Hitler because of this? Am I a ‘Klansfem’? Am I a racist, a misogynist, or perhaps a racial misogynist? Or am I just a person who has been forced into an impossible situation, a kind and thoughtful person with a rich internal life, a person who dreams of a world that operates on love, a person who has nevertheless been locked out from ever experiencing an ounce of happiness, embodiment, or self-actualisation?
The truth is, it is far easier to imagine that people like me exist in circumstances entirely of our own making. It is comforting to think that the things you have are entirely down to ‘hard work’ (whatever that means), rather than a myriad of random factors outwith anyone’s control. But there is a reason why it is called the ‘just world fallacy’ – it is not an accurate conception of reality. It is a mind-blowingly cruel, uncharitable, simplistic way of viewing society.
I understand that this piece is unlikely to change the minds of trans winners (assuming any winners ever read this). My hope instead is that the less fortunate (and our allies) will read this and understand that class solidarity almost always comes before any other kind of solidarity. The passoids are not coming to save us, because most of them hate us. So long as surgery and hormones are sold as commodities, there will always be trans losers – there will always be hons. The flourishing of each and every trans person can only be guaranteed by a world where the things people want and need are provided without question, without a fee. The world must be dragged, kicking and screaming, into the next stage of civilisation. I don’t know when that’ll be possible, but I know it’ll happen eventually. Let’s stick together until then. Keep tabs on your oomfs. Get in touch with them on different platforms. Meet them in person, if you can. The state wants to kill us with suicide and war and euthanasia. I don’t want it to win. I love you.
Footnotes
1. Definitions – hon: ‘a trans woman who does not pass as cis’, passoid: ‘a trans woman who passes as cis (often with connotations of beauty therein)’, youngshit: ‘a trans person who begun taking HRT early enough to affect skeletal changes consistent with their gender identity’, boymoder: ‘a trans woman who makes no attempt to present as a woman because she is not confident she will pass (she may do so for reasons of safety, comfort, or both), often with the hope of one day living as a woman in the future’.
2. Definitions – passhon: ‘a trans woman who is often interpreted by strangers as an unusually masculine cis woman’, manmoder: ‘a trans woman who makes no attempt to present as a woman; unlike a boymoder, she does not have any hope of ever living as a woman, and considers HRT to essentially be a form of palliative medicine’, midshit: ‘a trans person who began HRT while still a minor, but after their growth plates fused, preventing them from achieving a body that fully aligns with their gender identity’, sneedhon: ‘an intentionally nonsensical word, created to mock the linguistic productivity of /tttt/ slang; in recent months, I have observed this word evolving into a pejorative term, meaning: a trans woman who is frustratingly dismissive to other trans women, with added connotations of frequenting Reddit and having poor taste in fashion’.
3. Hon can be compounded with nouns and adjectives to refer to the characteristics which make passing and/or alleviation of dysphoria difficult for a trans woman. This is most often a form of self-description, e.g.: ‘My face is okay, but I’m a shoulderhon. I hate my frame so much, it makes me wanna die. I wish I could get surgery to fix it.’
4. If you do not believe me, ask yourself why you dislike slavery. The ordinary reason is the lack of payment; the fact that enslavement is coercion is rarely considered. Today’s capitalist morality loves forced work, but only when it is compensated by a wage. Why? Because capitalism functions via wage labour. If capitalism thought itself immoral, it wouldn’t last very long. Morality does not exist because it is inherently ‘good’; it exists to justify the world around us.
5. Alternate paragraph: The intracommunity antagonism, then, is not merely transphobia between trans persons. It is class hatred. In capitalist society, wage labour is the most moral thing of all. Trans women who do not pass, and consequently have trouble finding or coping with work, are therefore morally bankrupt individuals. This is the subconscious cognitive process underlying the various antagonisms in the trans community – passoid versus hon, youngshit versus lateshit, highbie versus lowbie. In each of these conflicts, the former group resents the latter because of their (perceived or real) inability to produce value. Since this resentment has a subconscious moral character, it rises to the surface as accusations of misogyny, racism, transphobia, etc. – these are the easiest ways for the superego to make sense of that resentment.
6. There is an additional dimension to the dynamic of the trans loser and the trans winner in the online world: profiting from the misery of trans losers. The often strange and abrasive posts of trans losers make for excellent interaction bait, which can increase social capital, and direct clicks to whatever a trans winner is hoping to sell. In pure class terms: petit bourgeois artisans create a spectacle of the lumpenproletariat online in order to peddle their wares. This is not likely always done consciously, as the performative hatred of the lumpenproletariat is socially enforced (after all, you don’t want to be like those stinky tttters, do you?).
7. To be clear: the surge in people who are trans is because of the proliferation of information about transitioning. Without the internet, most trans people would manifest as sad cis people who would struggle to keep a job or relationship and often end up committing suicide. Even among some trans people, this is controversial – even in the face of the ‘John, 50’, the older trans woman with a wife and family who comes out as trans very late in life.
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