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[–]CaptainMooseEx-Bathhouse Employee 15 insightful - 1 fun15 insightful - 0 fun16 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I agree with a lot of what you said. I went down this rabbithole because, when I was working at a pop-up bar, I offered the contact information of the owner because some lesbian women I was acquainted with were complaining about a lack of spaces for lesbians in the city. They declined and shied away from the reasons why, so I started looking into lesbian only spaces online and found r/truelesbians. That's where I started seeing the complaints lesbians had about TRAs and started to see the parallels with my own experiences as a gay man. Up until that point, I thought that lesbians as a whole were on board with what was being spewed because many of them were in academic positions spewing it, were online reinforcing it, and seemed to generally go along with it.

It took breaking a boundary to find out what was really being felt.

That being said, I don't think the same is being done when it comes to what is directed at gay men. What "transmen" do is nothing short of what I, and other gay men, have experienced from women on the whole. The harassment for saying no, the sexual misconduct/assault, trying to get into explicitly sexual male-only spaces... this is just run of the mill behaviour I've experienced in schools, workplaces, roommate situations, and clubs.

I work in a men's only space (bathhouse) and we experienced a harassment campaign for months because a pre-everything FtM had her boyfriend try and see if we would let her in. We said no and we proceeded to receive threatening phone calls. Before COVID hit, we had a transman come in to lecture us on why it's discrimination not to let FtMs in, both myself and the other gay employee (the rest are bi, safe for the owner) brought up the fact that gay men cannot enthusiastically consent to vulva and that many of us have long histories of being sexual violence from women in our lives and don't want to relive them in one of the few spaces that prioritizes us. This has been no different from the times we have received death threats and harassment from opposite sex couples and women for not letting women without dysphoria into the space. I even had one bisexual women try and lecture me on how she "knew all about being gay" to which I told her she clearly didn't since she would understand that gay men don't want to see her naked or interact with her pussy unless under duress and to fuck off. All of this happened within 6 months of working there.

In the spaces I've been in online, I've seen the same comments you've seen. It got to the point where I decided to only interact with other gay men and a few lesbians. I saw them try and dismiss the rape of a gay, autistic man by an FtM and harass him into silence. I experienced harassment for saying that gay men, too, can be and are correctively raped.