Carbon-Copy Carbonara
Memetic Transphobia and Intellectual Laziness
Introduction: Angel-Hair Analogues
The process of coping after one has received The YWNBARW Copypasta follows a sequence of steps not unlike the Kübler-Ross model of grief. Denial—how could something so unoriginal and ludicrously melodramatic hurt you? Anger—you rage at your aggressor. “Bargaining” is trickier to overlay; maybe, for some, the sense that if you work harder to pass, you won’t be barraged with The YWNBARW Copypasta again. Depression: the emotion the YWNBARW Copypasta is designed to instill. Acceptance: you’ll be fine. Maybe one day, you’ll even laugh about it.
Lest that series of steps seem like a histrionic reaction to something so sillily-named, this is The YWNBARW Copypasta1:
You will never be a real woman.You have no womb, you have no ovaries, you have no eggs. You are a homosexual man twisted by drugs and surgery into a crude mockery of nature’s perfection.
All the “validation” you get is two-faced and half-hearted. Behind your back people mock you. Your parents are disgusted and ashamed of you, your “friends” laugh at your ghoulish appearance behind closed doors.
Men are utterly repulsed by you. Thousands of years of evolution have allowed men to sniff out frauds with incredible efficiency. Even trannies who “pass” look uncanny and unnatural to a man. Your bone structure is a dead giveaway. And even if you manage to get a drunk guy home with you, he’ll turn tail and bolt the second he gets a whiff of your diseased, infected axe wound.
You will never be happy. You wrench out a fake smile every single morning and tell yourself it’s going to be ok, but deep inside you feel the depression creeping up like a weed, ready to crush you under the unbearable weight.
Eventually it’ll be too much to bear - you’ll buy a rope, tie a noose, put it around your neck, and plunge into the cold abyss. Your parents will find you, heartbroken but relieved that they no longer have to live with the unbearable shame and disappointment. They’ll bury you with a headstone marked with your birth name, and every passerby for the rest of eternity will know a man is buried there. Your body will decay and go back to the dust, and all that will remain of your legacy is a skeleton that is unmistakably male.
This is your fate. This is what you chose. There is no turning back.
The first time I received The YWNBARW Copypasta (the acronym: “You Will Never Be A Real Woman”), I was almost… maybe the word I’m searching for is “impressed”? If you don’t know that it is a prewritten screed intended for quick, mass-communicable transphobia, you could be forgiven for mistaking it for a high-effort attempt at salting the earth with brainworms. After all, the text is very revealing of the fears transphobes think most deeply motivate our behaviors (we’ll dissect those brainworms later).
Let’s back up a bit. Why is Agatha writing about Mirror Macaroni? Replica Rigatoni?? Multiplicated Manicotti, is that anything? MimeOrecchiette seems like a stretch2.
I. Lookalike Linguini
Goddammit, have I committed to the running gag of pasta fakery? Fine. The phrase copypasta originates back to a 4chan neologism that first popped up in 2006—a portmanteau of everyone’s favorite pinky-killing keyboard shortcuts copy and paste. Not all Forgery Fusilis are transphobic poison, of course—I am rather fond of ironically sending folks the Navy Seal Copypasta. And who could forget the copypasta that is just the entire script of the Bee Movie?
Reproduction Raviolis are just another form of memetic communication, no different than the image macro (other than, well, the lack of an image), and they trend toward a hyperbolic length that lend them an air of unhingedness and yes, that’s a word now, I’ve decided. I have the power to decide that. I bet my English B.A. against the devil in a fiddle contest and won.
And of course, the internet being the malodorous corpse-pile that it is, copypastas have unique emergent interactions with The Culture War. Take A Drive Into Deep Left Field by Castellanos, the immensely-dunkable consequence of Thom Brennan’s botched attempt to apologize for having used the phrase “one of the fag capitals of the world”:
3–0 ballgame with the Reds in front of the Royals as we go to the top half of the fifth inning, Castellanos to lead things off. Jim Day's gonna be taking us the rest of the way through this game as Holland takes over on the mound. Um, I made a comment earlier tonight that I guess went out over the air that I am deeply ashamed of. If I have hurt anyone out there, I can't tell you how much I say from the bottom of my heart I'm so very, very sorry. I pride myself and think of myself as a man of faith – as there's a drive into deep left field by Castellanos, it will be a home run. And so that will make it a 4–0 ballgame. – I don't know if I'm gonna be putting on this headset again. I don't know if it's gonna be for the Reds, I don't know if it's gonna be for my bosses at Fox. I want to apologize for the people who sign my paycheck – for the Reds, for Fox Sports Ohio, for the people I work with, for anybody that I've offended here tonight. I can't begin to tell you how deeply sorry I am. That is not who I am. It never has been. And I'd like to think maybe I could have some people ... that could back that up. I am very, very sorry, and I beg for your forgiveness. Jim Day will take you the rest of the way home.
There’s something very chain-email chic about the Twinning Tortellini that helps ensure its continued cultural resilience. It’s accessible! Depending on the channel through which you are communicating, it may even be less effort to send than an image macro! It maintains an initial guise of authenticity that the image macro does not—to the unenlightened, first instinct would dictate that this Duplicascatelli3 is a bespoke, genuine attempt at communication. The joke played on the recipient is, of course, the rug pull: you spent so much more time reading this, and thinking about it, than I put into sending it. Viewed this way, the copypasta is a peculiar weaponization of disparity in temporal capital.
At its most innocent, Doppelganger Ditalini is irony-poisoned noise—of the fun variety! Barraging a chat with one, or using it in place of a real response, is common practice demonstrative of our shared, twisted paths of meaning-making. Of course, like any poison, irony is weaponizable. Bombarding communication pathways with white noise is an immensely powerful strategy used by both sides of the anarchist political spectrum, including the far-right. I’m reminded of one online event I took part in that was hijacked by Zoom-bombers who inundated the chat with identical tracts from Mein Kampf.
The strategy is even built into some social mediums: barraging users with weaponized, facetious use of the self-harm reporting button is a annoyance strategy on Reddit, transforming an (admittedly tepid) attempt at taking mental health seriously into a communication-jamming device. That receiving an unprompted Care Message is considered a rite of passage among trans Redditors is no big surprise. After all, after The YWNBAW Copypasta, the Reddit Care Message is the second most common boilerplate annoyance transphobes send us.
II. The Facsimile Fagottini
Yes, that’s a real pasta. It is typically filled with carrots, green beans, ricotta, onion, and/or olive oil. It sounds delicious, and there was no multiverse in which I wasn’t going to shoehorn this one in. I would have made it the title, but, uh, that might be coming on a little strong.
YWNBARW is predated by an earlier copypasta: YWNBAW (You Will Never Be A Woman—notice the absence of the word “Real”) seems to originate, like many communicable illnesses, from early 2010s 4chan. While the alphabet salad eventually became a way of telling on oneself to some circles, the initial origin is obviously, well, not particularly optimistic about the viability of trans existence4:
“This is a seriously bad idea OP. Know this. No matter what you have cut off or put in, you will never be a woman. Hormone therapy won’t make you female. A vaginoplasty won’t make you female. Breast implants won’t make you female. You will never bare [sic] children, you will never go through what a woman does every day, you will only end up mutilating yourself and regretting it later. Another thing you are doing is maximizing your potential salary at about seventy percent of what a man makes. If you want to be a homosexual that’s just fine, it’s tolerated in most places and accepted in some, go for it but don’t mutilate yourself to try to be something that you are not and can never be. The medical tech to make you female is about fifty to a hundred hears away so I won’t even suggest that you wait for it. There is no magic spring that will turn you into a girl. The surgery you’re looking to go through hurts all through recovery and depending on how good your doctor is it can hurt constantly afterwards. I’m not being a bastard [sic] or trolling you [sic]. A friend of mine went through the whole thing, he [sic] had to get one of the surgeries re-done because the first doctor was a fucking hack ad [sic] did a lot of nerve damage. Ten years after the first surgery he [sic] could pass for a woman. He [sic] ended up committing suicide five years later when the love of his [sic] life found out that he [sic] wasn’t as advertised and dumped him. Fucker didn’t even come to the funeral.
Under the auspices of care, this message cautions the original poster to which it is responding not to transition, bringing up the well-debunked notion that trans people regret transitioning. That’s why we kill ourselves, right? Not because society is hostile toward trans existence, right?
I could theorize several reasons that this seminal text, YWNBAW’s maiden5 voyage, has not been pointed my direction nearly as many times as YWNBARW. Frankly, it’s trying too hard to wear a facade of sympathy—the author positions themself as concerned for OP’s safety, and is attempting to appeal to oppressive material realities. Yes, trans people, particularly trans women, do make significantly less money than other groups. Yes, we face obstacles in the dating realm. Botched surgery happens, though at much lower rates than transphobes inCISt (see next section). But the YWNBAW text also contains falsehoods about the viability of medical transition, passing, and regret statistics. Still, it still feigns pity; transfemininity is painted with the brush of victimhood.
The YWNBARW Copypasta, of course, makes no such mistake. As best as I can pinpoint, and I’m backed up here by Know Your Meme (who better to consult on memes? They know them!), the earliest recoverable instance of this particular Parallel Penne goes back four years:
On November 10th, 2020, a copypasta was uploaded to the subreddit /r/copypasta in which some wording from a 4chan post earlier that day is used to create a longform copypasta to use in threads against Transgenders. The copypasta gained 650 upvotes before the creator and several comments were deleted, and exists below in it's [sic] entirety.
I… would not recommend viewing that comments section. Half of it is redacted by moderators, though it’s somewhat interesting (stomach-churning?) to see what comments weren’t redacted.
I’m more intrigued by the implications that arise from the fact that the genesis location of The YWNBARW Copypasta seems to be a subreddit designed for the archiving of copypastas. If this is the oldest version of the text, then that would seem to indicate that, unlike most copypastas, which mutate into copypastas through memetic spread, YWNBARW was written expressly FOR mass-production. It was cynically designed to manipulate meme culture to gain prominence—not like that’s a new strategy.
III. Straining the Samesies Spaghetti
The YWNBAW Copypasta, of course, sacrifices individual, laser-guided transphobia for replicable and rigid screed rooted in a superficial understanding of trans women and their struggles. Let’s go phrase by phrase:
You will never be a real woman. You have no womb, you have no ovaries, you have no eggs.
Ruh-roh. Seems like your definition of “real woman” accidentally doesn’t include a bunch of people with XY chromosomes that your worldview is supposed to consider real women! Okay, let’s keep going, I wanna hear if the Transphobic Cultural-Zeitgeist Self-Insert makes a point somewhere.
You are a homosexual man—
Wow, we didn’t get very far before having to stop again! If I, like many, am (or as you’d say, iDeNtIfY aS6), a trans lesbian, wouldn’t that make me, in a transphobe’s logic, a straight man? Gosh, Recreation Rotini, I’m starting to think you haven’t been super well-thought out. You’re undercooked—IdenticAl-Dente! Wow, I am scraping the floor beneath the bottom of the barrel.
—twisted by drugs and surgery into a crude mockery of nature’s perfection.
Not all trans women go on hormones, and not all trans women go under the knife. The latter in particular is expensive as heck. Sure, I’m on hormones, but if I ever really, really wanted to7, a ton of the effects would be reversible. “Chemical Castration” this ain’t. Also, “nature’s perfection”? If nature were perfect, the human body wouldn’t contain an appendix, and lengua burritos would grow plentifully from every tree.
All the “validation” you get is two-faced and half-hearted. Behind your back people mock you. Your parents are disgusted and ashamed of you, your “friends” laugh at your ghoulish appearance behind closed doors.
The burden of proof on my end to deflate this is incredibly low. I’m sure there are people I know who “don’t get it”, but the idea that every single person in my life secretly mocks me is statistically pretty laughable.
Men are utterly repulsed by you. Thousands of years of evolution have allowed men to sniff out frauds with incredible efficiency. Even trannies who “pass” look uncanny and unnatural to a man. Your bone structure is a dead giveaway. And even if you manage to get a drunk guy home with you, he’ll turn tail and bolt the second he gets a whiff of your diseased, infected axe wound.
This one’s a doozy. First and foremost, if men are utterly repulsed by me, I’m fine with that. Again, lesbian here. And yes, many lesbians, cis and trans alike, have been in relationships with trans women. Rather than hyperlink, go explore Google.
Second: men are not, in fact, repulsed by trans women. Many of the people proposing restrictions on trans life are the same people who search for trans porn. The bone structure stuff is, well, pretty wrong for many people, and relying on bones pretty clearly helps dismantle biological notions of sex, not the opposite. “Axe wound”, often used to refer to a vulva, has gained specific use by transphobes to refer to a trans woman’s neovagina. I’ve had the term slung my way more than once—it reframes vaginoplasty as a mutilative act rather than a practiced surgical procedure. The idea that neovaginas are diseased, prone to infection, and smelly is an oft-repeated TERF fantasy that seems to have little reflection in reality past the occasional horror story of a botched surgery or predatory surgeon. It is a fiction that thrives in a world in which most people’s understanding of bottom surgery starts and stops with Family Guy and South Park. There are so many places to learn more; please do.
You will never be happy. You wrench out a fake smile every single morning and tell yourself it’s going to be ok, but deep inside you feel the depression creeping up like a weed, ready to crush you under the unbearable weight.
Eventually it’ll be too much to bear – you’ll buy a rope, tie a noose, put it around your neck, and plunge into the cold abyss. Your parents will find you, heartbroken but relieved that they no longer have to live with the unbearable shame and disappointment. They’ll bury you with a headstone marked with your birth name, and every passerby for the rest of eternity will know a man is buried there. Your body will decay and go back to the dust, and all that will remain of your legacy is a skeleton that is unmistakably male.
This is your fate. This is what you chose. There is no turning back.
I won’t repeat myself on why trying to meme trans women into killing themselves is, well, fucking stupid. The hyperbolic, unhinged length archetypal of copypastas as a meme category evinces itself in this repetitive, over-the-top finale in which the sender tries to goad trans women into suicide. Whereas YWNBAW at least expressed remorse over the death of trans women, to YWNBARW, that outcome is inevitable. In which case… why send the message in the first place? The ultimate, unintentional joke of YWNBARW—the reason it has spawned countless mocking iterations8—is that if one buys into its logic, they must also necessarily believe that the message doesn’t need to exist. If trans women will naturally kill themselves without outside intervention, why spend 291 words convincing them to kill themselves?
The answer to that last question is that I get to be stuck spending over 3,000 words trying and struggling to prevent someone trying to convince me to kill myself from getting under my skin.
I spent so much more time reading it, and thinking about it, than you put into sending it.
Conclusion: Violence and Homogen-Gnocchity
I needed to put myself through this deep dive to help work through some feelings after my most recent brush with the Proliferated Pappardelle. Dissecting it provides something akin to catharsis, though it still doesn’t feel great to know that somebody—so many, in fact—could send a message so intentionally cruel yet so thoughtlessly easy. Doing so likely required fewer taps of a phone screen than it would take me to order Italian food.
I deserve some emotional-support Italian food.
The intellectual laziness of not only copy-pasting a putdown, but worse, copy-pasting a putdown, written first and foremost to manipulate meme culture, that is factually inaccurate regarding even basic information? It’s an audaciously conformist step towards industrializing reproduction of transphobic rhetoric. Dehumanization-via-mass-message forgoes the need to individualize acts of violence, because, well, why put effort into harming someone you don’t see as an individual?
I’ve rendered the quote with strikethrough because fuck this noise.
Orecchiette is made by dragging dough across a board to create a curve, and often classified as a “stretched pasta”. I made a Smart Joke!
I’ve preserved the misgendering because, well, it’s a copypasta. I’m trying to preserve the textual artifact as closely as possible to retain its impact. However, I did note all errors in the copypasta with [sic].
Teehee.
I don’t identify as a trans lesbian. I am one. “I identify as” is qualifying language that waters down/attempts to apologize for my reality, and that’s why it was so easy for the right to coopt into shitty memes like the “I Identify As An Attack Helicopter” meme. I’ll begrudge any non-cis folk who use the term when describing themselves, but if you are cis, consider avoiding it.
This is the least possible hypothetical I can think of. Death Before Detransition, baby!
See the previously-linked Know Your Meme citation.