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I get a little frustrated with the discussion over socialization that I see in current trans discourses.

Like, I get that being called "female or male socialized" is used as a cudgel by transphobes, particularly radfems, to say that we can't Really BE our gender cause we weren't "socialized" the same. I get that there is a valid knee-jerk dismissal given how it is bandied about as some sort of litmus test for if someone is oppressed or privileged or whatever the fck other box people want to say has no nuance or needs credentials for having an opinion about.

But like, socialization is a thing. it is a thing that happens to people, and it is a useful academic term for understanding acculturation and how social norms and practices are reproduced. Male and Female socialization are things that have coherent meanings, but are context dependent and nuanced. it feels kinda like throwing the baby out with the bath water when we categorically say that socialization is "bullshit" or "not a thing" because it absolutely is.

It just Also has nothing to do with whether or not someones gender identity is "Real" or "Valid". it actually does not matter whether or not a trans man or woman or non-binary person is female or male socialized, that does not make their perspective less real and valuable or make them less their gender. It just doesn't. It's a non sequitur. If we can understand that someone who was put into one sex category is and can be a different gender...why does their socialization suddenly matter for whether or not they experience that gender?

Honestly, I think it just comes down to people reaching for logical short cuts, for ways to control and gate-keep spaces/discourses by misusing social science as a purity test. People are very obsessed with trying to find the "truest" or "most oppressed" experience that they ignore that actually every human has a unique perspective and you actually have to look at their arguments and actions not some immutable characteristic that you can somehow use to explain their entire perspective.

The problem with people who make socialization arguments are that their arguments are bad. They don't actually prove anything, because socialization can't actually prove gender identity or amount/type of oppression someone faces.

socialization is a description of a process that has no guaranteed outcomes, not a some sort of black mark on someones soul.

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Okay I know talking about AGAB socialization gets you cancelled immediately but I think there is something in how some trans women view themselves as the sole arbiters of the Trans Experience TM. They’re so comfortable talking over anyone who’s not AMAB transfem and trying to control the terms others use, pushing aside anyone who was AFAB and saying no they’re not important, we’re the true important ones. And that reminds me so much of growing up with cishet men who have that exact same view. But if male socialization doesn’t exist, then those people never have to examine how they never unlearned that view of treating people who were AFAB as not important/not worth listening to.

And again, I don’t think this is all trans women! I think it’s essentially just people who went “oh I’m a woman now” and then carried on with their current world view from a society that viewed AFAB people as lesser without unpacking that.

sorry, but this is not it, anon

what you're observing isn't AMAB people being trained to talk over AFAB people, it's the (unfortunately) natural and universal human need to invest oneself with as much authority as possible especially via claims of victimization, it's literally the exact same thing TERFs do

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also. notice how every post about transfems and “male socialization” makes the assumption that every transfem was raised as a cis guy, treated + perceived as such, and didnt notice anything until 25 after which they had secured a comfortable life with their male privilege, only adjusting after that. even non transmisogynistic posts talk about transfem existence lik this.

idk what about the girls who transitioned socially at 13? the ones on e in high school? the ones who have dealt with misogyny passing as a feminine guy for a while? do these transfems not exist to any of you?

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im just begging people to stop saying shit like "afabs are always infantilized" "afab people can only be seen as victims by society" please. for the love of god. it's such a shallow take on misogyny. especially if you know anything about like antiblack racism or lesbophobia or whorephobia or. y'know. anti transmasculinity? we can and should talk about infantilization and it's deadly consequences but the way some of y'all talk about it is eerily similar to Those Kinds of white cis radfem-adjacent girls who are almost in love with the narrative of their own victimhood. maybe we only bring up infantilization once we already have an understanding that it is only one aspect of misogyny & its variants.

& frankly a lot of the time even when people talk about infantilization often it's in ways that i think fail to properly capture its harm because its being seen as the opposite of demonization instead of them being two tools in the same toolbox

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it kills me how much people love to speculate on the trans male experience. transphobes and even other trans people will conjure up ideas of what it must be like for us to live, how hormones affect us, and especially what society treats us like. they love to tell us how we live our lives; strawman after strawman about fictional trans men who started hormones and became "evil and ugly", completely fabricated stories about about how every trans man they know suddenly "gained male privilege" and never deal with misogyny or transandrophobia.

people who tell you how your transmasculine experience will go have no idea what they are talking about. even if they sound confident, they are not correct- each and every transmasculine person has a different experience in life- we do not automatically gain the societal privilege of cishet white men once we decide to socially transition. they cannot see what your future holds. you don't deserve to have someone telling you how you will experience your own life, it is yours, you are allowed to live your truth, pave your own way and prove that we have varied lives that transcend what transphobes think the trans male experience is.

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it kills me how much people love to speculate on the trans male experience. transphobes and even other trans people will conjure up ideas of what it must be like for us to live, how hormones affect us, and especially what society treats us like. they love to tell us how we live our lives; strawman after strawman about fictional trans men who started hormones and became "evil and ugly", completely fabricated stories about about how every trans man they know suddenly "gained male privilege" and never deal with misogyny or transandrophobia.

people who tell you how your transmasculine experience will go have no idea what they are talking about. even if they sound confident, they are not correct- each and every transmasculine person has a different experience in life- we do not automatically gain the societal privilege of cishet white men once we decide to socially transition. they cannot see what your future holds. you don't deserve to have someone telling you how you will experience your own life, it is yours, you are allowed to live your truth, pave your own way and prove that we have varied lives that transcend what transphobes think the trans male experience is.

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Thank you for sticking up for transmascs while being transfem. Not a lot of folks would do the same. It really, really means so much

I have trans masc friends who deal with it a lot and it's really frustrating to see them have to put up with this kind of bullshit in my name.

But it's also at least a little selfish, because the 'in my name' thing really fucks me up. TMA/TME discoursers want me to be the biggest victim in the room and they actively prevent me from feeling like that's true. Trans mascs getting ran through the dirt to elevate trans fems feels like I'm the Bad class of person the same if I were a cis man or something. It is literally accomplishing the opposite of their goal lmao. So, I try push back against that, and hopefully make trans mascs feel like they have trans fem support.

And like, for all they want to say that believing in transandrophobia is a TERF dog whistle, it's like, hello? The narrative that the trans community favors AMAB trans people and walks all over AFAB trans folk is a huge TERF thing, what the fuck are you doing walking into this bear trap. Making this fantasy scenario TERFs made up to paint being trans as a patriarchal psyop a reality does nothing but invalidate me and cause serious damage to the entire community.

The weirdest thing is that a lot of it is usually trans masc or otherwise AFAB folk. I'm not saying no trans fems do it, obviously, some do and I truly, truly hate them, but so many are 'TME' folks throwing themselves off a cliff trying to be 'one of the good ones' and it's surreal and kinna disturbing to supposedly be done for my sake. But the plus side to that is that they usually need to take my voice seriously, if they don't just ignore what I have to say.

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If you’d actually listen to trans men, you’d know every single one of us has said “transandrophobia is a mix of misogyny and transphobia”. We’ve been saying it from the start. We are fully aware it involves misogyny!!!

It’s medical misogyny and medical sexism, it’s social misogyny and sexism, etc etc.

But that’s not all!

Transandrophobia also involves how much society hates it when afab people act masculine. Butch women deal with this all the time. Little kids labeled as tomboys deal with it. Society really hates masculine afab people.

But wait, there’s more!

Transandrophobia ALSO involves how much society hates men who are men in the “wrong way”.

And one more thing!

Transandrophobia ALSO involves homophobia, because whether the trans man is straight or not, society views him as a woman. That means he’s treated as either a lesbian (though some trans men do identify as lesbians), or a straight woman, either way erasing his true identity.

And all of that is transandrophobia.

It’s not just transphobia. It’s not just misogyny. It’s not just those things separately. It is an interaction of those things that cause transmasc people to be uniquely abused by society - and a lot of that abuse is invisible, or shoved under “just misogyny” or “just transphobia”. But it’s not.

And - importantly - it does not imply that transmascs are “more oppressed” that other trans people, or that other trans people “oppress” trans men. That’s not how intersectionality works.

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radfems viciously opposed to top surgery always seems so strange and hypocritical to me. like sure whatever you hate all things trans yada yada but you’d think that afab people safely and voluntarily divesting themselves of unwanted body parts that are associated with discomfort, cancer risk, and child-bearing would not be the unspeakable ideological sin to be purged from the world they make it out to be.

like, okay, let’s say it’s mutilation of natural femininity or whatever—keep following that to the logical conclusion. tubal ligation is anti-feminist and birth control is wrong because both disrupt the natural wombyanly order.

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It’s very strange seeing people use ‘theyfab’ as a ‘progressive’ and ‘okay’ term. Like damn. Transmeds and 4channers have been using that word for years to describe ‘cis women who pretend to be nonbinary to be quirky’

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I think one of the ways that tranandrophobia seems to distinguish itself from the other forms of oppression it is connected to is in the way it attempts to convince you it is indistinguishable and that transmascs are always just collateral damage to everyone else's "real" problems.

One example is the very blatent tirf claim that transphobia on its own isn't real, that it is all misdirected transmisogyny, and that transmascs only experience oppression due to our association with transfemmes.

But there is also the insistence that anti abortion laws and similar things are targeted at cis women and therefore are "women's issues" - transmascs shouldn't complain about being excluded because it "isn't about us". Same with homophobia and butchphobia. Even the terf talking point that they are just protecting "little cis girls" from making irreversible mistakes pretends that actual the transmascs being harmed is just an accident and not the goal.

Trying to talk about transandrophobia is a constant stream of "It's just transphobia. It's just misogyny. No, you can't call your experiences misogyny because that isn't about you. You can't call yourself a lesbian or a butch or compare your oppression to lesbophobia. It isn't about you. Yes, terfs hurt you, but you aren't their main target. This isn't about you. Yes, you need abortions and experience medical misogyny, but you can't talk about it because this isn't about you. You were sexually assaulted because of misdirecred misogyny. Don't make it about you. You've never contributed to the history of gay men, or lesbians, or the trans community. It isn't about you. Those cross dressers weren't trans. Stop trying to make women's history about you. You can't reclaim cunt or faggot or dyke because those words aren't about you. I don't care how many times you've been called a tranny. That word isn't about you. Why must you make everything about you?"

Because sure, transmascs exist, and we might be impacted by everyone else's oppression, but it is always thought of as a theoretical consequence of what is really going on, if it is thought of at all. Transmascs are not considered to be oppressed in our own right.

This idea gives the lawmakers plausible deniability, allies an excuse to ignore us, and feeds into transmasc erasure. If we are never the actual target to begin with, then clearly, we can't be uniquely targeted. The law makers don't need to be held accountable for their transandrophobia because it isn't like they are trying to hurt transmascs, right? We need to let the real victims speak, the ones being targeted on purpose.

Nobody ever sees the way it all piles up, and even if they do, they think "well it's just an accident, right? If we fix the main problem, then this fringe issue will go away on its own" without ever considering that transandrophobia isn't as rare, fringe, or accidental as society wants it to appear and that actual effort needs to be put into dismantling it.

It isn't that they actually believe that transandrophobia isn't real. It's that they just don't believe it is about transmascs. Because even if we are the common denominator, we are still just collateral damage and could not possibly have anything of value to say. Because as collateral damage, our issues are never our own and thus never need to be discussed on our own terms.

100%. And I think this is exactly what this sort of cycle of erasure depends on.

We are erased, our problems are erased, and our oppression is erased, which means it's easy for people to ignore us, our problems, and our oppression. There's so little evidence, so few people talking about it, and they never really see or hear anyone name us in this violence, so surely, it isn't about us at all! It must be about the people they know about already, the problems they know about, and the ones who are always readily named in these conversations.

If we're speaking up, there's no reason to believe us; if anything, we come under scrutiny for trying to talk about these issues nobody else can see. We must be crazy, hysterical, whiny and overdramatic, or perhaps malicious. We're stealing attention, stealing space, and stealing help. We might be victims, but we are incidental and unworthy victims.

And ignoring us, our problems, and our oppression means we continue to be erased. Which makes it easier to ignore us, and erase us, and easier to perpetuate violence against us. And so on.

It's understandable, in a way, for people to ignore us; most people don't know about any of this in the first place, and when they do, they're not inclined to take any of it seriously. Even if they do see convincing evidence that our problems are real and worth talking about, it's easy for that to be a one-off that they eventually forget about. Everyone else is talking about everything else, so we sort of fade away.

It's not their fault; they're not trying to ignore us. They just haven't learned to recognize violence against us, and they just don't seek us out, and can they really be blamed for that? Can they really be blamed for the violence that continues because they and others don't see or try to stop it? We're so hard to find in the first place. You know, because we've been so thoroughly erased.

There are a lot of people who've been fighting this for a long time, and even more we don't-- and probably won't-- ever know about, who've been fighting for even longer. I think it's getting better; the organized backlash against us is, imo, a sign that our reach is getting stronger and wider. But it's a hard cycle to break.

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It always shocks me when I bring up trans men’s issues - specially issues common in the south/more conservative/rural areas - to someone who makes their whole thing being a ‘trans advocate’ and they just don’t know what I’m talking about .

I mentioned how common it is - especially in more conservative Christian places - for trans men to be set up with a husband by their family and then be forcibly impregnated as a way to make them detransition to someone who runs a whole blog about ‘spreading awareness about trans issues’ and she looked at me like I was crazy and said “woah I never knew that happened to trans men.”

She knew about and understood that that stuff happens to cis women, but she never thought it happened to trans men… like come on.

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*goes up to person who is being stalked by their abuser and is actively trying to avoid them* errrrrm have you considered why an ABUSER feels so comfortable in your spaces?????? other people get kicked out by abusers while they want to let you live with them, how can you not see how privileged you are???? you need to take some responsibility for how much your abuser wants to be around you. tbh you are probably also an abuser or will become one in a few years anyways. yes this post is about TERF conversion therapy directed at transmascs

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Only now does it strike me that a lot of egg joke discourse is people having two entirely separate conversations, completely talking past each other.

On the one hand, we have people saying it's fine to make "have you considered you might not be cis" comments...about friends. Because sometimes someone is giving egg vibes, consciously or subconsciously, as a means of looking for support, looking for the people they know and trust to still be cool with it or tell them what they're thinking is a valid option, and it's good to turn toward those bids and offer support.

On the other hand, we have people saying not to make those kinds of comments or jokes....about strangers. Because you don't know them, they might be trans in a totally different direction than you think, and second-guessing someone you don't know about their own gender - often in a way that treats nonbinary identities as a fake thing, a phase, just a step in a pipeline for people with only one foot out of the closet - is not the compassionate trans-positive action that a small but frustrating number of people think it is.

And the thing is, both of these things are true. You can't treat strangers the way you treat your bestie! You will do more harm than good if you try!

I just wonder how many internet slapfights would not happen if people could recognize that these ideas don't contradict each other; they're different advice for different situations.

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Do you really think its more plausable that a TERF knows the specific details of the Baeddel discourse so well that they can craft the perfect copypasta that refrences all the nuances of internal trans discourse (which I'm sorry but they don't really understand anything about our community) in such a way as to be the maximum level of offensive to the other side than the alternative, that there exists on this site a trans man capable of sexually harassing trans women who disagree with him? I

Are all trans mascs sexual harassers? obviously not. Are you responsible for that guy's actions in any way? No not at all. But I find the inistance that any sexual misconduct or transmisogyny purported to be from a trans masc is an outsider troll to be very off putting from the perspective of a trans woman. I think there is a problem of trans women being treated like sex objects by the broader trans community, (enby's trans mascs etc). The problem will never be resolved if we can't even aknowledge it exists without getting shouted down.

Yes actually because that is what Radfems on Tumblr do and have done and will continue to do for literally the entire time I've been on Tumblr.

Just being completely clear - I mentioned this already but to be extra extra clear - It was not even my original idea that it was probably a Radfem and I've directly said that. I honestly thought it was probably one of the trans guys that white knights extremely hard against the idea of transandrophobia trying to cause shit because of the typing style.

It was in fact my trans fem ex-gf and current very close friend who I still live with, who suggested to me that she thought it was a Radfem. And you know?

Her reasoning combined with my experiences with TERFs actively trying to recruit my friends and I into Radical Feminism because we're actively Feminist trans mascs - it would make a ton of sense.

You have probably not experienced this because you are not a trans masc, but there is absolutely a subgroup of Radfems on this website that try very hard to learn about trans infighting as a way to target trans mascs for recruitment.

Trans masculine people have HUGE targets on our back for Radfem recruitment on this website. It's something I've literally personally seen people fall into and detransition for. Radblr actively loves to target vulnerable, politically vocal trans mascs as recruitment targets, especially doing so by trying to pit us against each other, especially by trying to pit us and trans women against each other.

It's scary as hell. It's also not a new thing by any means. Like, "This has been happening consistently at least since 2015" level of not a new thing. So, I've learned to become very aware of it because I'm a trans masc who is a Feminist advocate who actively studies the history and tactics of Radical Feminism in order to protect myself and other trans people from it.

I'm also sorry, but there was literally an anon like that that went around trans masculine blogs a few months ago. Exactly the same premise but flipped in a "transandrodorks need to be fixed by being impregnated with girlcock" kind of deal. There was an almost immediate "we need to assume this isn't actually a trans fem and assume that it is a troll" response both internally and externally. If any of us had assumed it was actually a trans fem in the same way and projected our pain at trans fems in the same way this is getting projected onto trans mascs...? Could you imagine? The double standard would be insane.

I know this is something coming from a place of our own hurt, but where the hell was any of our support during that? What were we supposed to do besides assume that it was probably a troll? Like those are hypotheticals without real answers, but come on? You know?

Of course anything is possible. No one knows who that anon actually was. And it is an issue the way trans women are sexualized by the community, especially right now on Tumblr. It deserves to be addressed. But not in the weeds like this.

I believe what I believe based on what I know and the thoughts and feelings of people I trust. You can dislike that, you can even disagree with that, but a stranger coming into my askbox with a condescending tone isn't really going to contest my lived experiences or the shared opinion of someone I've known for the better part of a decade that easily.

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also, i genuinely have no idea why there's a popular post going around claiming that trans men who talk about trans men's issues are responsible for the current sitewide transmisogynistic mass report campaign? i have seen zero evidence for this, and if anyone has any evidence, i would love it if you could send it over so i can verify it.

everything i have seen firsthand indicates that the transmisogynistic mass report campaign is being carried out by, as normal, TERFs and crypto-TERFs, with a solid contingent of "people who are aligned with trans-positive spaces but hold radical-feminist-influenced anti-kink beliefs and align with radfems when told they're going against a Kinky Sexual Predator, meaning they carry out transmisogyny while supporting or even being transfem."

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Yeah sorry I deboned your boyfriend. I wanted to see how he would operate if I took all his bones. The answer is "not very good" but his bones are mine now. Sorry. He has very good bones, if that's of any consolation.