“Truscum”: Why Do They Hate The Way They Do?

An overall warning for deep discussion of transphobia: varying from general, internalized, and direct transphobia. Mentions of misgendering also included.

I really didn’t want to do this article. But one person with a Brooklyn Nine-Nine icon starts calling trans men transphobic, and sometimes a man (me) just breaks.

First, a lesson in terminology. If you don’t spend half of your day on social media, and especially if you aren’t trans, there’s a high likelihood you have no idea what the term “truscum” means. Hell, I’m trans, and it took me a while to understand what the term even meant.

A few varying definitions float around online- it’s not exactly known enough to warrant a spot in the dictionary, after all- but I managed to find one that fit well enough for our purposes:

Truscum (pronounced “true scum”), also known as transmedicalist[…] are trans people who delegitimize the gender of other trans people. They claim one can’t truly be transgender unless one experiences gender dysphoria, in this context it can sometimes be called physical dysphoria, as defined by cisnormative psychiatry and medicine.

Truscum, boiled down to their essence, are trans people (men, women, non binary alike) who believe that a trans person has to suffer from dysphoria in order to be “really”…