#Trans male privilege discourse

[lord-radish]

imagine thinking that trans men are inherently bad or evil or predatory on the basis of gendered privilege and societal power structures. cringe

[frog-wash]

I see the discourse around the existence of anti-transmasculinity (some say transandrophobia/transmisandry/etc but I prefer ATM) as the same type of discourse around bisexuals, around aspec people, around the use of the term "queer," around butch/femme discourse, etc. etc. etc.

it really just boils down to "this group of people aren't actually oppressed by their experiences/can't use this word to describe themselves or their experiences/aren't actually queer/queer enough" every time, it's just a new target each time because some type of radfem has convinced enough people that [type of queer person] is doing queerness wrong and is actually attacking other people's identities somehow

[cyberdank]

radfems are just the female equivalent of mgtow at this point

[wild-at-mind]

I’ve now read many, many accounts from trans men of being ostracised, treated cruelly and ultimately traumtised by the reaction from their queer communities upon coming out to them. This is clearly something that has happened to a lot of people. I’m not the queer community but we clearly need to fucking do something because this is very dark and sinister.

[genderkoolaid]

so much trans discourse is just different groups of trans people throwing "no YOU guys are the ones irreversibly tainted by Male Privilege and who serve the patriarchy, WE'RE actually oppressed by misogyny and need cis feminists to support us!!!!" back and forth at each other. radfeminism traumatized us so bad none of us take five seconds to ask why trans people have to be divided into Privileged Oppressive Basically-Cis-Men and Untainted Oppressed Basically-Cis Women in the first place. stop trying to make cisfeminist frameworks fit trans experiences!

[sandybuny]

not gonna lie im really feeling the danger in the world rn. this site has really doubled down on transmisogyny. its always been bad but lately its absurd. ppl responding to trans women being sexually harassed en masse by calling us hysterical and crazy to b upset. every week the discourse focuses on a new transfem who dared to be unpalatable in ways that are perfectly fine for tme ppl. the obsession with our sexual lives whether its our kinks or just demanding sexual availability. the revival of a thousand year old slur for "effeminate males" to hurl at us when were inconvenient and loud. the expectation that we all stay quiet and tiptoe around other ppls hangups n discomfort, deny ourselves liberation where it would cause others a loss of privilege. its fucking bleak.

[autolenaphilia]

The anti-kink moral crusade rests on a lot of transmisogynistic assumptions.

Of course it’s no surprise, since it rests on ideas from the moralizing arguments about bdsm made by radfems in the 70s. The only change is that they are being massively hypocritical and inconsistent about which kinks are bad now, as I pointed out before. Now it’s only certain kinks, like consensual non-consent and fauxcest, that are bad because they “fetishize abuse”, and not bdsm as whole, despite that being inarguably true about bdsm.

And that’s purely to broaden the appeal of such arguments, so that even self-described “leatherfags” can moralize about fauxcest. The morals and principles are frankly just “It’s okay if gay men call their boyfriends “daddy”, because I find that hot, but if a trans lesbian couples pretend to be sisters it’s evil.”

And you can’t really appropriate the radfem arguments about kink without taking their transmisogyny onboard, since they stem from the same transmisogynist bio-determinist root ideology. Janice Raymond in The Transsexual Empire explained trans women through a lens of pathological sadomasochism. Years before Blanchard’s autogynephilia concept, radfems have seen transfemininity and kink as the same thing.

The image of the trans woman painted by radfems then and now, is of privileged males appropriating the pain and suffering of real wombyn, and playacting this suffering for their own perverted sexual amusement. And that is the same image painted of trans women with incest and cnc kinks in modern callout posts. They just remove the explicitly terfy language to make it less obvious. Instead of making a mockery of misogyny in general, we are instead accused of mocking the experiences of the survivors of sexual abuse.

And that boils down to the same thing. Survivors of sexual assault are often as a group assumed to be afab. This ties into a specific transmisogynist discourse. It’s one that argues that afab children are more often sexually assaulted, and that trans women are not targeted by sexual violence pre-transition, and comes to the conclusion that this proves that trans women are male socialized and privileged. This is the fairly nasty transmisogynist undercurrent here.

And it’s proven when in discussions about the transmisogyny of callout culture, a common cliché line in response is that “clearly some people’s worst oppression is being told they are freaks for shipping incest.” This treats transfems as ultra-privileged and transmisogyny as not real at all.

Of course in reality, transfems are disproportionate targets of sexual violence even in childhood and pre-transition. And many survivors of childhood abuse have these problematic abuse-fetishizing kinks, and use it to deal with their trauma, including many of the kinky transfems being called out.

And even if no one involved in the sexual roleplay and fiction being criticized have trauma, the trauma of other non-involved people is not a good argument for its destruction. It’s a reasonable demand to ask for triggering material to be tagged properly so you can avoid it, it’s unreasonable to demand it shouldn’t exist.

Yet transfems are expected to accede to the latter demand. And I think this is because of what May Peterson calls transfeminized debt. It’s how we trans women in feminist circles are expected to be perfect women and perfect feminists to be acknowledged as women at all, instead of as monsters to be destroyed. Of course because nobody is perfect, this leads to every trans woman eventually being thought of as a monster.

We are treated as having to pay off the debt of male socialization/privilege to get basic human rights. And this in practice means conceding every disagreement with TME people, and agreeing to every demand they make of us. Or else we get the hot allostatic load treatment.

And that’s why kinky transfems are expected to fulfil the ridiculous demand from certain puritanical TME people that “I’m not involved in your kink, but I have trauma relating to it, so you can’t do it.” And are treated as evil monsters for not fulfilling it. It’s clearly transfeminized debt and transmisogyny, we are treated as privileged perverted monsters, inherently exempt from sexual violence. And that is used to justify sexual harassment, in the form of callout posts for our sex lives.

[familyabolisher]

do you not believe in gendered socialization? not trying to be a bad faith ask btw im a leftist and i generally agree w all ur takes but i do pretty firmly believe in gendered socialization being like a thing w material consequences so im interested in ur take if you’re willing to give it

no. "gendered socialisation" is about a stone's throw away from "sex-based oppression" if we're being real about it. in discourse terms, it gets pulled out to denote an ineluctable state of "womanhood"-subjectivity in those coercively assigned femaleness and ineluctable "manhood"-subjectivity to those coercively assigned maleness; in other words, it gets used as a cudgel for gender essentialism coming from "progressive" types by which the claim that trans women/otherwise TMA people have "male privilege" ("male socialisation") can be smuggled into the discourse; the experiences of cis women and trans men/otherwise transmasc people are privileged as a standardised form of 'female socialisation' that pits them not as agentive within social forms of gender (and as beneficiaries of transmisogyny) but as unilaterally 'oppressed' to the unilaterally 'oppressive' male-socialised. there is no one coherent form of "gendered socialisation"; how gender is coercively socially imposed varies along countless axes that cannot be accounted for under one sole framework. if you want to say that experiences and subjectivities are shaped by misogyny or patriarchy then simply name misogyny and patriarchy as deciding factors. it suffers from the same fundamental issue as many contemporary feminisms ie. that even in its most charitable form, it attempts to present a complete account of "womanhood" and account for transfemininity only after the fact via hamfisted exceptionalism, rather than beginning with transmisogyny as the lynchpin of gendering and developing itself from there.

+ in general i try not to overrely on the language of "socialisation" and "conditioning" to describe behaviours and relationships -- unlike "coercion," which i think identifies the discourses of power + antagonism present in these modes of subject-creation, the language of socialisation and conditioning conjures up this idea of a non-agentive, immutable relationship to gender (one in which gender is not something we do but something that is done to us) which stands fundamentally at odds with what transness should articulate. i guess another way of putting it is that i don't really believe in appeals to what people do or do not "experience" [x does or does not "experience" misogyny etc] as a cogent way of developing an actual theory of oppression + liberation.

[socialistexan]

Transphobes really are this fucking dense. It has to be intentional.

What do you mean you thing trans women aren't afraid to go for a run at night or stop at gas stations or be too afraid to go to a bathroom without fear being attacked (an utterly BIZARRE claim given this discourse around us using the restroom for the past decade)

I'm a trans woman and not only am I afraid of those things, my partners are afraid of me doing those things!

On our last road trip I barely left the car and we planned our pitstops at companies that have been vocally pro-trans where I know the odds of my being assaulted for even daring to exist as a trans person in a public space are slightly lower. A public space where I have been yelled at and called slurs.

They really do think trans women just wear womenhood as a mask and take it off at the end of the day and enjoy all the benefits of male privilege instantly.

[nothorses]

You guys love suggesting trans women are aligned with males and trans men are aligned with females so badly that it's just gross at this point, transphobia with progressive wording is still transphobia ❤️

Yall really love your binaries, huh? Genuinely wild that you think the only way a trans person can be valid is by being widely socially recognized as a single binary gender accurate to the single binary gender they identify with.

I for one am a firm believer in the fact that transphobia exists, and as such, trans people are positioned outside of the cis man/cis woman socio-political binary & allowed access to neither unless and until it conditionally supports the system's ability to do them harm, like, for example, by:

aligning trans women with women when enacting misogyny against them, but not when valuing (mostly white) women as pure, valuable, and worthy of protection

aligning trans women with men when fearmongering about "dangerous male predators infiltrating women's bathrooms" (i.e. weaponizing autonomy granted by the patriarchy), but viewing them as "failed men" otherwise, and generally not valuing them as men in the context of determining who is deserving of male privilege

aligning trans men with men when discussing the "horrors" of transition- acne, body hair, balding, bottom growth, "becoming ugly"- but not when valuing men as worthy of male privilege, or when understanding them to be autonomous

aligning trans men with women when enacting misogyny against them (typically revoking autonomy), but not when valuing (mostly white) women as inherently "safe" or The Victim; or otherwise understanding them to be "traitors" to womanhood

Trans people occupy a different social/political position than cis people do. This is not new information.

You shouldn't be participating in gender-related discourse if you genuinely cannot grasp the idea that there might be a third experience.

[machine-saint]

i think fundamentally the problem with "do trans women/men have male privilege" discourse is that it tries to reify male privilege as this thing either you Have or you Don't Have, rather than a collection of benefits/lack of punishments (these are separate concepts!) that various people will or will not have in various circumstances. this is compounded by the fact that "always knew they were trans, was raised as their actual gender", "always knew they were trans, hid it" and "was fine being cis until 20" are both legitimate ways to be but will have very different experiences!

and I don't think this reification originates from this discourse; rather, "privilege" has sort of coalesced already, and this unhelpful understanding is a cause of that piece of eternal discourse. like, why does it matter whether trans women/men have male privilege? what are you actually trying to get at? ask that question instead, and be willing to accept the fact that the answer will vary greatly depending on the person in question!

[txttletale]

not the same anon but ive often seen transfems complain that transmascs will “refuse to let go of femininity” and “misgender ourselves” when we talk about how being treated as girls/women during our entire lives affects us materially and also psychologically. ive never understood that. where do you stand on that? Important clarifications: 1) i dont believe trans women, closeted or otherwise, pre or post transition, have male privilege. i dont believe the upbringing “discourse” is a zero-sum game (where if being raised female means tm experience misogyny, being raised male means tw have male privilege). 2) i dont believe in transandrophobia in any shape or form, I believe trans men suffer bc of misogyny and transphobia, and trans women bc of the same + transmisogyny. 3) im not trying to gotcha you or pick a fight i mean this entirely neutrally. im ready to accept that im wrong i simply want to understand why.

yea i mean, like -- obviously this is a subject that's really easy to bad-faith on either side but i think you're approaching in good faith so i'm going to answer in turn: i don't think any (serious) transfeminists begrudge that trans men have a lifetime experience of suffering directly from misogyny or that they discuss these things. i think there are obvious common experiences and solidarity to be found in these common experiences!

the times where i often see the argument that transmascs are 'misgendering themselves' is when they weaponize transmisogyny by self-infantilizing to paint an interaction they had or disagreement with a transfem as the transfem being 'predatory', 'threatening', etc -- transmisogynist trans men will very often do this, implicitly misgendering themselves by invoking the transmisogynistic spectre of the Big Scary Autogynophile sexually threatening the Poor Innocent Wombyn.

secondly, transmisogynistic transmascs will absolutely weaponize their own misogynistic trauma in disagreements with trans women -- it's not uncommon on this website for trans women trying to discuss transmisogyny to be met with paragraphs of transmisogynistic transmascs graphically describing their own experiences with sexual assault and violence, which again plays into the exact same stereotypes to the advantage of the transmasc in the situation.

similarly, transmisogynistic transmascs will also use language that groups them with cis women in an implicitly self-misgendering way for the sake of being transmisogynistic and excluding trans women. the most infamous version of this is the phrase 'women and AFABs' which gets tossed around quite often in so-called 'queer spaces', but there are also accusations of a universal 'male socialization' (used to paint trans women as aggressive, entitled, dangerous, etc, while trans men are harmless, demure, talked over by loud scary trans women, etc).

so tldr: i don't think any serious transfeminist begrudges trans men for talking about how misogyny has shaped their lives. when accusations of 'self-misgendering' come in is when (certain) trans men align themselves politically with transphobic cis women over trans women and use their own history with misogyny as a cudgel against trans women, or purposefully twist self-misgendering transmisogynistic narratives against trans women for their own personal advantage.

[spacelazarwolf]

It is a good thing that they saw him as his true gender. Most trans women can’t experience that. That’s literally your friend experiencing male privilege, he is seen as the gender he says he is and that gender is male

i........... genuinely don't even know what to say anymore.

for context, this is in reference to a response to an ask where i mentioned my friend, who is black trans man, being told that he should consider it "affirming" to experience more police surveillance and violence. i seriously cannot fucking wrap my brain around how utterly disconnected from the real world you have to be to assert that a black person experiencing more police violence is not only good but privilege?????? like. how do we come back from this? how in the world are we supposed to redirect discourse that has gone this far off track? i am genuinely at a loss here.

[hadeantaiga]

Radfem Trans People

I want to talk about the different flavors of radical feminist trans people I have personally encountered, because the ways radical feminist / terf / gender critical rhetoric bleeds into trans discourse is fascinating to me. There are very few trans radfems, but they do exist, and how they internalize radical feminism varies.

At the core of radical feminism is bioessentialism: this needs to exist for radfem philosophy to make sense. Males have to be biologically stronger, females have to be biologically inferior, these differences must affect your personality, and they must be immutable differences that carry on even if the person is trans.

Radfem transfemmes believe that men/males are inherently bad, but that most of the badness of males/men is attached to the "man" part and socialization, and that if you are not a man, you're fine. BUT, they aren't totally divorced from the bioessentialism of radfems, because they do still believe that a transmasc who starts taking testosterone "becomes" dangerous and predatory. They also believe transmascs are "inherently transmisogynistic" and for some reason more "prone" to transmisogyny than literally anyone else on the planet.

There is a group of radfem transmascs who are the transmasc equivalent of radfem transfemmes. They believe most of what the radfem transfemmes believe, with with some minor tweaks. They believe men, regardless of birth sex, are always two seconds away from turning into monsters and must thus constantly be kept in check. They also believe that as transmascs, they are exempt from misogyny of all forms and have privilege over women of all kinds.

But, there is another flavor of radfem transmasc. This second group of radfem transmascs are basically indistinguishable from cis women radfems. They are full-blown male-haters and transmisogynists. They hate males and transfemmes so much. They believe transfemmes were "socialized male" and are still "male", that transfemmes are "predatory" and "dominate" trans spaces, etc. Every negative stereotype associated with men/males, these radfem transmascs attach to transfemmes.

Oh and nonbinary trans folks can fit into any of these groups, as well. Being nonbinary doesn't exclude you from turning into a bigot nor does it exempt you from being targeted by bigots!

Some trans radfems (of all varieties) also believe that trans men didn't experience misogyny or sexism as children - even if we didn't know we were trans at the time, even if we fully viewed ourselves as cis girls. And in some cases, these radfem trans people claim that even if transmascs weren't out and didn't know we were trans, we still somehow experienced "male socialization". Apparently all the misogyny and sexism we experienced retroactively disappears when we come out.

[autogyne-redacted]

Ok, so let's talk about "misandry."

(Heads up that I use terrible US foreign policy as an example of underlying gender ideology, Death to America of course)

1) if we're working within a social justice, privilege-oppression type framework, there is no systemic oppression of men as men, or trans men as trans men (beyond transphobia). Within these privilege oppression frameworks treating misandry or transandrophobia as a real thing is gonna have disastrous consequences.

2) But we need to be abandoning the identity politics social justice orthodoxy as fast as we can. Occupying a position of privilege within the discourse is dehumanizing and hellish, it has a terrible track record with transmisogyny (not a coincidence), and trying to map gendered power just by looking at identity groups means you miss a ton of what's happening within the groups, and in less straight forward ways.

3) a huge part of the gender binary is between camab ppl as (instrumental) subjects and cafab ppl as (responsive, feeling) objects. And this is fucked all around.

To pick one of the more egregious examples, US military directives make heavy use of the category of "military aged males." People outside this category are (theoretically) assumed to be non combatants while "military aged males" in ~warzones~ are basically valid targets by default. https://tinyurl.com/4skt53tx

This category also faces extra exclusion from refugee and asylum status: https://tinyurl.com/4txsmepy

We could explain this as a symptom of misogyny. That women should also be recognized as being capable of enacting violence and treated equally. This is the most straight forward application of orthodox gender theory and likely the worst.

Or we could say that there's something about the intersection of being Arab/Muslim/young/read as male that leads to a unique oppression.

But it's not like it's just this intersection. If we look at prison populations, or who gets hit by police violence, or weaponized accusations of Sexual Assault the logic is actually fairly consistent here, if a little messy to talk about.

Ppl seen as men are seen as capable of wielding power and this leads to benefits if they're seen as basically good. If they're seen as crazy, dangerous, evil, hostile, or at risk of being any of these, being seen as capable of violence makes shit way worse. Lots of intersections push you further towards being viewed as a threat.

(A pretty good bite sized model of transmisogyny is that it misgenders us as men + we get negative respect since we rejected masculinity + it frames us as crazy/dangerous).

Ppl seen as women are going to be seen as less competent, in need of guidance, control and protection by default. But it comes with certain (conditional) protections. Violence against women certainly happens, but the fact that it's a special protected category says a lot. (There's a lot to say about how much these protections are worth, who they really apply to and when they disappear and what happens then, but it's very clear that they exist and that they mean something).

4) so am I arguing for the existence of misandry? Absolutely not*. Gender is just a fucked up system of division and control all around. Privilege frameworks suggest that women are going to experience the same shit as men they share identities with + misogyny + possible extra intersectional oppression. And while this approach is sometimes helpful, I think a better default framework is that gender is just a way to create more social categories for a more complicated system of control with common threads like the subject-object binary that can play to different ways in different contexts.

The whole thing needs to be dismantled and we need to see ppl across gender categories as whole human beings with a meaningful interiority, the capacity for violence, etc. And if we recognize that gender is a complicated system of control, it follows naturally that our gender discourse shouldn't all ask men to sit down / shut up / listen.

5) the issue with transandrophobia BS is that it really wants to exceptionalize the trans masc experience. "It's fucked up that I'm being seen as suspect and capable of violence like terrible cis men, I'm obviously one of the good ones." And as they fight for the best of both worlds ("I should be respected like a man but still seen as incapable of chauvinism") it pushed naturally for trans fems to get the worst of both worlds.

6) returning to feminist "man-hating" there's a lot i oppose for being essentialist or doubling down on subject-object binary. Beyond that, a lot of it is just mean. And like, ppl can be jaded and mean sometimes. But a lot of social justice feminist dogma was ppl developing a bristly defensiveness from constant harassment and trolling. Ppl defending this as an understandable response, and then that shifting into codifying and valorizing it. And I just think it's a miserable way to live and it's miserable to be on the receiving end of it.

I think some grace and understanding for ppl being jaded and bristly is rly helpful but I'm done with valorizing it.

7) all of this said, basic feminist takes about men having lots of pressure and motivations to be chauvinist still apply. And they certainly apply to trans men. But there's a difference between having social expectations that you be a chauvinist and bowing to that pressure. And lots of men are chill and nice! Yes even cishet men!

It's easy to want to draw a hard line where you're "one of the good ones" and are categorically separated from the possibility of being sexist (ontologically incapable of violence, even?) and that goes really poorly.

(most of my beef with transandrophobia is that it's doing this + exceptionalizing trans masc experience in a way that fucks over trans fems).

But I'm not gonna ask ppl to constantly self flagellate or be hyper vigilant to make sure they don't slip up. Sin frameworks are miserable and it's not like being interpersonally shitty in a way that lines up with oppressive systems actually has consequences that much worse than just being an asshole.

So much of the more aggressive side of social justice just feels like ways to treat enemies, not your friends or ppl you want to be in community with.

I'm glad we've been moving on from it.

*editing a footnote since this has already come up a couples times / this post seems to be leaving my immediate circles: by saying misandry isn't real I mean: there isn't a systemic oppression of men as men that parallels misogyny. Gendered oppression isn't a "both sides" situation. When "egalitarian" or mra types brought "misandry" into the discourse this is what they were pushing for.

While I object to the idea that all men evenly oppress all women, patriarchy absolutely has men at the top. It's a complex and multi-directional system of power but there is an overall gendered slant to it. My framework here is still a feminist framework.

[genderkoolaid]

do you have any thoughts on why there's such a huge disparity in the number of trans feminine headcanons for canon guys, as opposed to the trans masculine headcanons for canon girls?

i'm not trying to start anything, just kinda looking for a opinion from someone who's usually got pretty good insight and takes on stuff like this.

My thoughts rn are that its a combo of

There seem to be more femboy characters that are extremely feminine out there than there are butch women characters that are extremely masculine (or even really that butch...)

Femininity is seen as more interesting in the "oooh shiny!" sense than masculinity. Turning a man into a beautiful woman has a sense of allure because the end product is Pretty Thing, while turning a woman into a man, even a handsome man, is in the eyes of misogyny just ruining the Pretty Thing

In leftist spaces, turning a male character into a woman tends to create less conflict than the reverse? This isn't black and white obviously, there's been whole discourses about transfems "stealing rep" from feminine cis men. But from a cisfeminist perspective, making a male character transfem means you take an otherwise privileged character and use them to create rep for women, specifically marginalized women. The reverse, however, means taking female representation and making them male, which creates a lot of complex questions around marginalization and how transmascs fit into the schema. And generally when transmascs make people have complicated confusing feelings they don't react well.

Transmasculine erasure means that people just straight up do not think about transmasculinity and that covers a range of sins.

But that's what I've thought could be behind the disparity. I think its probably largely subconscious too, and there could be a whole ton of other things influencing that data so don't take this too seriously.