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knight-says-ni · 7 hours ago

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as a transfem, what's your insight on the way transmascs are treated when talking about their experiences?

i ask because i've seen so much harrassment towards transmascs when talking about the transphobia specific to them, and they get called transmisogynists as a result. i mean, sure, there are transmascs who are also transmisogynist and i will never excuse that, but some people get accused of hating trans women just for....talking about their own issues?

i keep seeing posts about how 'trans men don't experience a unique transphobia,' and transmascs' issues seem to be seen as less important for some reaosn

bte i am aware that most of the people heavily hating on/opressing transmascs are CIS people, both men and women. transfems who take part on this really are a minority, so please please don't take this as me resenting trans women!!

(ps. have a nice day, your blog is freaking cool and i enjoy it a lot and i hope this wasn't a very weird or complicated ask)

I'm a sociologist and I'm so very sorry. But this is one corner of something complicated.

My personal perspective is that if we are radically inclusive, if there is no easy way to break systemic oppression or groups into "most oppressed" or "least oppressed" then that means any time we step up and declare that any group isn't affected by systemic oppression we have to re-examine how we understand systemic oppression.

As a person who has grown through "I'm fine with my cis gender" to "I'm a trans woman on HRT" and from "lol men are garbage" to "men are people who struggle with a hierarchical and authoritarian society like everyone else" I can tell you that's at the heart of it. There are other ways of phrasing this like "if a TERF agrees you've probably fucked up" or the classic "putting my money where my mouth is."

As a sociologist, let me explain in excruciatingly indulgent and repetitive detail. I'm going to use toxic masculinity as an example, because everyone loves it but it gets used wrong a lot.

How it's commonly used is something like this: Toxic Masculinity refers to traits of men which are generally expressed harmfully and oppress women. It's not unusual for this to be short-handed to "men have bad characteristics and oppress women." If I made a chart it would have "Toxic Masculinity = Males" at the top, with an arrow labeled "oppresses" and pointing to "Females" at the bottom. Probably recognize this as radfem talking points.

It's upside down and backwards. Toxic masculinity is not something innate to masculine people, or even kind to masculine people. It's a system of hierarchical enforcement and it's directed at men, women, trans people, BIPOC, intersex people, non-Christians, poor people, queer people, etc. My corrected chart would look something like "Toxic Masculinity = System to Enforce / Maintain Hierarchy" and multiple arrows with labels like "punish deviation" or "reward compliance" pointing to a list something like the one above.

Now it also maintains hierarchy such as by supporting forms of sexual dominance (heterosexuality), racial dominance ("white"), religious dominance (christian) gender dominance (cis male / cis female only), wealth dominance (rich) and so forth, and you could probably draw an arrow from all these to the broader umbrella of Cultural Dominance (Western Culture) which is often described in terms of colonialism.

If you review that list, you'll find that you have to tick a lot of boxes before anyone can enjoy the unqualified support of Toxic Masculinity (and it's not even a compleat list) for a place at the top of the hierarchy. In point of fact, almost anyone regardless of gender, can become the subject of violent enforcement (or yes also rewarding compliance) at the hand of Toxic Masculinity.

All things being equal, sure, there is a patriarchal aspect to colonialism. However, all things are almost NEVER equal. In fact, they are so far from equal that none of us can effectively make any sort of claim to know with certainty about a group experiencing greater or lesser systemic oppression. When we talk about how the "oppression olympics" isn't useful, that's what we mean. It's not possible to get a special gold star of "most oppressed" that grants unique privileges of being "most deserving of care."

When it comes to systemic oppression, we have to look to the mechanisms by which it operates, and how it is present in our everyday lives, as well as try to make ourselves more aware of ways it operates that we sometimes don't see. This is what it means to "not speak over" a group - not that you can never cross contribute from people with one experience to another, but that we all need to listen to experiences different from ours, and try to find ways we can operate in the world to reduce systemic oppression based on that experiences.

For example if a black guy says something is racist, listen and try to change. If I say something is transmisogynistic, I hope people who aren't trans women listen and try to change. But also if a black guy points out how his experiences of racism relate to my experiences of transmisogyny, it helps nothing if I try to tell him he can't do that because he's a cis male. In fact, it helps us see commonalities in the hierarchical systems used to oppress us both. The two things are not the same, but if we happen to see similar mechanisms of enforcement at work, now we know one thing we can try to correct that helps multiple groups. See, we are in it together.

Sooo, with all that process understood, I'm hoping it's starting to become clear that in fact trans masculine people can and do have unique experiences of systemic oppression directed at them for being transgender and for being masculine. Transmisandry, transandrophobia, any term this part of our community happens to use to describe those experiences is a real thing. And it's good to have that terminology. We learn more about the means by which hierarchical systems of oppression maintain their control, we learn things we have in common, we get new information, we make new friends, we grow as a group and those are all really good things.

I guess this is off track. But to try and connect the dots, reacting to trans masculine experiences by suggesting there's no such thing as misandry or oppression of masculinity in general does not serve any other purpose except to maintain an oppressive hierarchy.

To try and connect the dots, I think the idea that trans masculine folx cannot experience any form of oppression related to their masculinity comes from the idea that masculinity is something which is not capable of existing in an oppressed state, or in my way of speaking they'd argue that masculinity is always rewarded in a hierarchical system, that masculinity is a form of compliance with hierarchy, which is patently untrue, but also feels very true because compliance with a very specific aspect of masculinity (cisgender binary male) is in a general sense rewarded.

But to continue on this digression, intersectionality helps us understand how masculinity can be used to apply punishment for deviance.

Ask any black person what white people make of masculine black people. What police make of black men. How western civilization in general characterizes black masculinity. I'll spoil it for you, it's really bad. The majority of white people think black masculinity is scary. Police get away constantly with treating black men as inherently violent. Western civilization as a whole built a shitload of power on the backs of treating black men as literally bestial. And there is a BIG conversation about the systemic oppression of black men via defining their masculinity as inherently dangerous as it pertains to black trans people. Which said conversation is going on for anyone who cares to listen to black trans voices.

It kinda pisses me off when I see broad condemnation of men or masculinity in general either short-handed as or openly used to describe a position of absolute privilege because just blackness alone disproves generalized unilateral male privilege, and it's REALLY OBVIOUS AND WELL KNOWN. We have been talking about police violence against black people specifically for years and years. We have prison statistics about it. It is so obvious, so widespread, that I frankly cannot believe there are people who can just talk about "male privilege" by itself like they don't know. Or like... suicide statistics of men in general. Less well known but if 50% of the population is more likely to kill themselves that suggests to me there's not really any clear cut 100% masculine privilege.

To try and connect the dots again and again, I think acting like there's no violent punishment of men for deviation from the hierarchical requirements of masculinity isn't good for other trans people either. Okay, what if a random guy, lets say an imaginary wealthy straight cis heterosexual Christian English speaking etc etc guy type guy, let's say he wants to wear some cute kicky boots and a comfortable dress. He might trend on TicTok, but he will face some form of systemic repercussions. It may be something as marginal as a few nasty comments on his videos. Or he could go out for a walk and someone could just directly kill him. That's enforcement of masculinity.

We could say all kinds of things like if he wears a dress he can't be cis or heterosexual or whatever else, but if he's comfortable being a cisgender man wearing a dress, a hierarchy which benefits from rigidly binary gender norms that reward a very specific definition of male is going to punish a cis man in a dress exactly the same as anyone who is trans. It could be a trans woman, it could be one of all sorts of nonbinary folx, it could be someone trans masculine also. It doesn't matter, because society is enforcing masculinity and punishing deviance. And most cis men will not wear a dress, because they are rewarded for conforming and punished for deviance. And some of those people definitely aren't cis, but they are very afraid of being punished. And some cis men might be less cis than they believe.

I could go on but somewhere around here I think I've gotten to the heart of the matter. Not to be cheesy but we are all connected. Humans as a social group need one another to function and grow and develop. We need one another to find ways to change and adapt and leave ourselves and our environment better than it was when we're gone. We cannot do that under an authoritarian heriarchy designed to maintain power and control in the hands of a very small part of the population, and we cannot use their systems of control as a means of becoming better humans in a better world. Repressing trans masculine voices, and being opposed to that is just one part of my whole... existence in the personal and political and social, and just happens to be the way my beliefs are intersecting with with Tumblr, but it's not the only way.

I try my best. I take whatever good I can get. And then I try to do better. That's all I can suggest and all I can do.

* I'm taking "some trans masculine people are transmisogynistic" as not intentionally being transandrophobic, but as point of order this type of language is used as a debate tactic to ascribe a general negative trait to a specific group to make that group seem uniquely negative. For example radfems like to characterize trans people as racist. However we also live in a very racist society and of course you'll find examples. Racism is a general social trait, not a unique trans characteristic. Likewise transmisogyny is a general social trait, not uniquely occurring. I don't think anon meant it this way, but I see this linguistic tool a lot.

** It also wouldn't matter whether or not mostly cis people are discounting trans masculine experiences but, again, this is more like a larger social aspect than unique. The world is mostly cis people. Of course mostly cis people would be doing anything.

*** Hierarchy itself is not innately bad. Some form of hierarchical organization is often beneficial to society when it comes to extremely large, long term, or complex processes where attempting to have everyone operate under equal direction would make the project impossible. Or, more succinctly, leadership should be a duty, not a form of control. While we can't easily say at what point a hierarchy goes from beneficial to harmful, it's safe to say the modern authoritarian hierarchy of capitalism and western civilization became harmful a very long time ago, and presently exists to preserve the wealth and power of a very small number of individuals, rather than benefit humankind as a whole.

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