Yeah, i get it. Even if we’d workshop something that sounds innocuous now, if you have a label for a community of people who are femme presenting but are actually in some cases cis men, it will at some point be weaponized against trans women and other transfeminine people to deny our transness. That’s kind of inescapable in a structurally transmisogynist society.

Obviously that shouldn’t stop gender nonconforming men from experimenting and from presenting in the way you like, i’m fully on board with people doing that. In fact, it’s also extremely important for unouted trans women that such communities exist. I have several transfem friends who used to identity as femboy or crossdresser before they had figured themselves out. And it was absolutely necessary for them to have a space where they could safely try looking like a girl without already committing to trans womanhood. I’m not saying anything against that.

But it doesn’t change the fact that the femboy label is pivotal for men outside of that community in telling trans women that one of us is, in fact, just a man who likes makeup. That isn’t the fault of femboys, it’s the fault of transphobes. I get that. I’m not blaming you for transphobia and trans erasure. I’m just saying, at least be mindful of in which contexts you use that label and who may appropriate it and who you may need to defend when you see it’s weaponized.