How to get out of an uncomfortable egg culture situation with this one simple trick.
Real talk: Calling people eggs is a violation of the egg prime directive, and is considered invalidating as you are trying to say that a person is not the gender they identify as, that their identity is invalid. Don’t call people eggs, like ever, it’s extremely uncool.
This discourse pains me.
Oftentimes the pushback against it implies that being transfem is such a terrible fate that implying someone might be happier following such a course of action apparently makes you
a degenerate groomersomehow just as bad as the transphobes who want all such people to either detransition or die.There’s just such a strange buried seething resentment to it all, but then again this isn’t even a discussion about people having nuanced one-on-one conversations about gender, it’s a confused imaginary scenario where someone is attempting social forcefem irl via brute force.
Someone doesn’t have to be doing things as bad as the transphobes to still be doing something that isn’t ideal, or something that makes other people uncomfortable in a way that has nothing to do with transphobia. It feels bad for anyone to get told they’re doing gender wrong, even if the person doing it is trying to be helpful.
It doesn’t mean anyone doing that is evil, it just means gender is a messy thing to talk about and understand. People can’t always see that what is very affirming and clarifying for them may be constraining for someone else.
That’s a fair point of view, but I am still thrown that most people see the word “egg” as something outsiders use exclusively to coerce or out people since by the time such discourse reaches me it has devolved into people saying to never even consider the idea of respectfully discussing the idea of transing genders with anyone (rather than being a shorthand for “before I realized”).
Anecdotally I reached a stage in figuring things out where I knew what I was but was to batshit terrified to tell anyone, and anyone even considering discussing such a thing around me would’ve felt like a lifeline bordering on divine intervention. Instead I unintentionally played gender-identity chicken with a whole friend group who believed in the egg prime directive for like 8 months because my whole life is a long stream of sitcom-esque idiot plots.
This isn’t an imaginary scenario. FtM femboys and cis femboys do need to deal with these things. I’ve seen it happen for years, and even as an egg who hatched into a transfem, it always made me uncomfortable. It felt like an external force taking away the decision from people and enforcing new norms. It did not help me accept myself in any way, but it did give me more doubts to deal with.
There is no reason to do anything but affirm people’s stated gender. If someone is a trans medicalist gatekeeping other trans people, they are still their stated gender. If they are a troll identifying as an attack helicopter, consistently affirming their facetious identity is a great way to make them lose interest. If you think someone who identifies one way might be better fit by a different identity, an enby who might be binary or vice versa, keep that to yourself. If you somehow do know better than the person, denying will not have actually helped them, but increased the likelihood of them doubling down.
All of that is to say that toxic egg culture is real and harmful. No identity is a terrible fate, only not having your autonomy doubted by the people who should welcome you. People define their own gender, end of story, end of discussion. No good comes of denying identities.
Yeah calling other people eggs I don’t think is ever a good idea, since like you mentioned, whatever someone’s gender is, they are valid, and it is entirely their own decision. I don’t entirely agree with the person you replied to because being a femboy is perfectly valid and not at all a “terrible fate,” although as someone who calls their past self an egg, I sympathize with them to a degree because I feel like I can’t call my own self an egg. Idk, maybe a new word is needed because of the toxicity associated with the word egg, but I’m unsure that that would actually fix anything.
I think the problem of egg culture is a deeper issue, it stems from the idea that one can make another person come out, or that a person’s identity can be “known” by others, even against that person’s identification. That last part is where the problem stems, “against that person’s identification”. Until and unless we can get over the idea that one can go against the way a person currently identifies, any new term we come up with to replace egg has the potential to be misused and abused in the same way.
I understand that people can be in denial and that people can change their minds over time, but that is part of the process. The best one can do is to offer support and discuss the idea of gender to someone who might not understand. Without outright telling them they are wrong or that what they’re doing isn’t normal. Some people might say that that isn’t enough and that some people need force. But it’s their choice, and their life. If someone doesn’t want to open their mind or identify differently they have every right to dig in their heels. The idea they don’t is where and when it becomes toxic and where and when it largely stops being affirming.
TL;DR A new term could help, but we have to get over and cease the current pushiness, or it too will become corrupted and abused in the same ways “egg” is.
I fully agree with you here. Maybe it would be better to try to make it clear that egg is only for self referential use, unless the word egg is too corrupted to fix, in which case a new term is probably needed.
I’m not entirely sure if it is, it might be, but it also might be fine. It might just be a matter of changing people’s hearts and minds to think differently and use the word correctly. Which is why I think it’s better to try and make it clear it’s self-reference only, and that policing and labeling others is not tolerated.
Unfortunately the internet has a tendency to do whatever it wants with words, especially neologisms.
I disagree with this statement. It’s not the idea that being a woman/transfem is a bad thing, it’s that the person on the receiving end of egg culture just isn’t a woman/transfem. They identify as male and are perfectly comfortable as themselves but are told the way they present is a “sign” of being transfem and the way they identify isn’t respected. It isn’t wrong because being a woman or transfem is somehow insulting, it is wrong because it’s misgendering to go against how someone identifies themselves.
Adding to the fact that some of these people are transmasc, so being told in that case that it’s not wrong or insulting to be called a girl stings that much more because they know they themselves are literally a trans man and are being told their presentation is a “sign” they are a girl.
This reads like a bad faith argument, as if you are trying to imply that to question or critique someone else’s gender identification based on their clothing or presentation is somehow acceptable. Or to attempt to debate their gender and ask leading questions is somehow okay. These are not imaginary situations, they are unfortunately quite common in many trans spaces online, and unfortunately in real life too. Maybe you have not seen or experienced the nastiness before, I’m willing to give you the benefit of the doubt there, but it is very much a real problem that GNC people, including transmascs and enbies face, it’s not one of those “imaginary cis people problems”, and trying to spin it as such is disingenuous and harmful.
Unfortunately the blowback of such discourse in practice is just people giving me grief for trying to use the word as a shorthand to “me pre-realization” and indirectly calling me a creep if I even mention considering transitioning in any direction in a passive way because even being compared to a trans person causes certain people to damn near flinch reflexively.
What I am most confused by is people implying that it’s immoral to even consider asking someone (irl you’d just use your words - have you considered it? - the idea that the word “egg” implies that being trans is rigidly prescribed from the outside from some tactless strangers trying to blindly out other strangers rather than two peple who know each other politely asking one-on-one in a respectful conversation is kinda wild to me - am I just confused because I managed to dodge significantly stupider online discourse elsewhere and am instead taking this literally?).
Also do you think term “egg” only applies to people “suspected of being women”?
The whole egg discourse puts a bad taste in my mouth as well. I’ve referred to my past self as an egg and then had someone tell me to stop using that word because it’s groomer language. I’ve never violated the egg prime directive and never will, but I like using egg to describe my past self. However, now when I use the term I get worried because I just don’t want to deal with people who have a stick up their butt.