#instead of like theory/discourse/hypotheticals or whatever that don't give you a solution to changing in gendered locker rooms n whatever

[transgenderteensurvivalguide]

Do trans men have male privlege?

Lee says:

Privilege in the trans community is a controversial issue, and often one discussed in bad faith with very binary black-and-white thinking.

Many groups have been debating about to what extent marginalized & oppressed men have access to male privilege for a while now.

Sometimes you'll see "men's rights activist" types who will deny that trans men could experience male privilege because they don't believe that any men have male privilege, or you'll see "trans exclusionary radical feminist" types who will deny that trans men could experience male privilege because they don't believe that trans men are men.

In response to the above, you'll see often trans-supportive folks tack hard in the other direction, and insist that as soon as someone self-identifies as male they gain access to male privilege, following the "trans men are men, and all men have male privilege, and therefore all trans men have male privilege" train of logic.

Then in response to that group, you'll see other trans-supportive folks take the opposite stance and claim that it's actually impossible for trans men to experience male privilege because trans men and cisgender men aren't treated in the same way due to transphobia, and therefore male privilege is restricted to cisgender men.

(And yes, all those are oversimplified examples, but it gives you the gist of their beliefs)

Other people will say that it's more simple than that-- if the people that you interact with see you as a man, then you have male privilege. If people you interact with don't see you as a man, then you don't have male privilege.

But that stance raises questions as well-- if passing stealth trans men have male privilege because they're seen as men, do non-passing closeted trans women have male privilege because they're also seen as men?

Laverne Cox tweeted:

"I was talking to my twin brother today about whether he believes I had male privilege growing up. I was a very feminine child though I was assigned male at birth. My gender was constantly policed. I was told I acted like a girl and was bullied and shamed for that. My femininity did not make me feel privileged. I was a good student and was very much encouraged because of that but I saw cis girls who showed academic promise being nurtured in the black community I grew up in in Mobile, Ala.

Gender exists on a spectrum & the binary narrative which suggests that all trans women transition from male privilege erases a lot of experiences and isn't intersectional. Gender is constituted differently based on the culture we live in. There's no universal experience of gender, of womanhood. To suggest that is essentialist & again not intersectional. Many of our feminist foremothers cautioned against such essentialism & not having an intersectional approach to feminism. Class, race, sexuality, ability, immigration status, education all influence the ways in which we experience privilege punished my femininity and gender nonconformity. The irony of my life is prior to transition I was called a girl and after I am often called a man.

Gender policing & the fact that gender binaries can only exist through strict policing complicates the concept gendered privilege & to lift up diverse trans stories. For too many years there's been far too few trans stories in the media. For over 60 years since Christine Jorgensen stepped off the plane from Europe and became the first internationally known trans woman, the narrative about trans folks in the media was one of 'macho guy becomes a woman'. That's certainly not my story or the stories of many trans folks I know. That narrative often works to reinforce binaries rather than explode them. That explosion is the gender revolution I imagine, one of true gender self determination."

If you're interested in a more in-depth discussion of the issue, the article Seeing Privilege Where It Isn’t: Marginalized Masculinities and the Intersectionality of Privilege might be of interest to you; that article doesn't explicitly address whether transgender men have male privilege, but it gets into a similar discussion about how other marginalized people can experience male privilege. If you copy the DOI into Sci-Hub, I believe the full text should be available...

Here's the abstract:

"When discussing privilege, we often consider it a zero-sum quantity, one either has it or one does not. Since privilege is distributed along a range of axes, we consider three sites in which male privilege is compromised by marginalization by other statuses: disability status, sexuality, and class. Employing a Symbolic Interactionist approach, derived from Erving Goffman's Stigma (1963), we observe strategies employed by disabled men, gay men and working class men to reduce, neutralize, or resist the problematization of masculinity as a constitutive element of their marginalization by class, sexuality, or disability."

There are plenty of other scholarly analysis articles about privilege that you might want to explore, but I personally don't get too deep into theory discussion because gender studies/sociology/social science isn't really my forte.

But even for the disinterested, learning the basics about privilege can be useful because it helps people recognize why certain groups continue to be disadvantaged. It's necessary to acknowledge when there is a systemic problem that is contributing to negative outcomes instead of blaming the outcomes on the group themselves, and admitting that privilege exists can be the first step towards using the privilege that one has access to help lift others up.

Even if one holds that male privilege is conditional on being seen as a cisgender man and therefore could be revoked at any point if a person were to be outed as male, and that one person may not have male privilege all of the time in all areas of their life, it's still possible for a trans man to have access to male privilege in certain situations and that doesn't mean that the experience of having that access to privilege "doesn't count" just because it's conditional.

For example, if someone is pre-op but otherwise male-passing and has an issue with the receptionists at the gynecologist because they're legally male and pass as male but still have a vagina and need an appointment, in that moment they don't have male privilege even though they're passing as male.

But if that same person can walk to work without being catcalled and their boss is more likely to think they have leadership potential because of the boss's implicit bias, they do have male privilege at that moment, even though they didn't have it in another context.

Someone can have privilege in some situations and not others, and this hypothetical person's struggle with transphobia at their doctor's office doesn't "negate" their advantage in their own workplace office because life isn't like that.

These situations where someone has brief periods of male privilege or privilege in some contexts and not others are more common when someone is partially-transitioned and not deep stealth, but it goes to show ya that someone can be subject to transphobia, and even sexism while also have male privilege at times.

Another thing I'd recommend reading is the essay Becoming a Man by P. Carl. It was published in the New York Times around 2 years ago.

Here's an excerpt from the essay:

"One night I was in a Lyft talking to a guy who was a dental technician trying to join the Navy. He told me he was doing it “for his woman.” “I think she’s the one,” he said tentatively. “They only want your money, and I’ve told her I haven’t got any, but I’m making her sign a prenup anyway.”

I heard myself say, “Yeah, man, I feel you — all that bullshit about women’s rights.” He laughed and said, “Yeah, you know, my man, you know what I’m saying.” I tipped him $10 and gave him five stars for letting me indulge my inner sexist jerk.

My friend Lee tells me it’s my job to correct this behavior, and sometimes I do, but sometimes I dive right in, trying to grasp at some false sense of power that I know has been used against me a thousand times in another life. It feels good to blow off steam with another man for just a moment. Becoming a white man visibly is like a newly found superpower — when Spider-­Man suddenly realizes he can scale the sides of buildings but doesn’t quite know how to control his own power and smashes up against a concrete wall on his first several attempts.

I am always doubling as different selves in different spaces, sometimes as trans Carl who lived half a century in a woman’s body, still holding all of Polly’s memories, and sometimes as “dude” Carl along the Interstate and in the back of some Lyft. I am still learning how to navigate the multiple truths this body inhabits."

(Disclaimer: I'm not the Lee mentioned in this piece and I don't know the author!)

I included that snippet of the essay because I think it's indicative of an experience that many of our younger followers haven't had to reckon with yet.

This blog is primarily focused on providing teen-centric advice which means most of the people asking us questions are not grown adults who have lived any period of their lives post-transition and stealth.

If you're a 14-year old trans boy who is pre-everything medical and you don't pass and you're trying to find a way to get a binder and wash your menstrual cup at a communal summer camp bathroom without people noticing and you're out to your friends who all use your pronouns but you still can't get your parents call you by the right name, you're not dealing with male privilege.

And you're probably not friends with many (or even any) fully grown trans adults who are post-transition and living stealth either; you likely just haven't had the opportunity to cross paths with these folks since you're not really in the same stage of life, and if they're living fully stealth they probably wouldn't have come out to you. So your viewpoint on whether trans men can access male privilege is going to be a refection of your experiences and the experiences of your friends-- and their experiences are likely to be pretty similar to yours.

I'm not a "Trans Elder" by any means, but I applied to be a mod on this blog when I was 15 and pre-everything, and now I'm in my early 20's, I've graduated from college and I live with my partner and have a full-time job, I've been on T for half a decade and I've had top surgery, a hysterectomy, and phalloplasty.

I'm pretty close to what I'd consider "post-transition" at this point; there are a few things left on my transition-related to-do list; I'm getting an erectile implant to deal with the erectile dysfunction that occurs with phalloplasty, and I might get some more electrolysis done and then medical tattooing, but these aren't necessarily things that would influence my ability to "pass" or be stealth at work.

Before I had my bottom surgery I didn't know any deep stealth people (for obvious reasons; they have chosen to not be an active part of the broader transgender community anymore), but I have made friends with a lot of stealth men of trans experience since I've joined the post-op community online and IRL, many of them older than myself.

Despite identifying as genderqueer and non-binary and transmasculine in my personal life, I choose to be stealth at work and my coworkers assume I'm a cisgender man. And that means I now have more in common with these men than I used to, although I don't live the same type of life as they do.

When I’m at work, I can tell that the way I’m treated is sometimes different than the way my female coworkers are treated (I have a few unfortunately memorable conversations in mind here where men said sexist things to me about the competency of female providers that I’m confident that they would never have said if they thought a woman was in the room) so yeah, I do have male privilege sometimes even though I’m not actually even a man.

And while I would never say that my experience is More Relevant or something than someone else's, I think it can be harder for people who are not able to pass and live as stealth to answer this type of question because they haven't had the lived experience that showed them that it actually is a possibility for some people, even if it is not something that is possible for them.

So my personal opinion is that some post-transition cis-passing stealth trans men may experience some level of male privilege at some points in their lives within certain contexts and situations, but that doesn't negate that other non-passing out or closeted trans men may not experience any level of male privilege at all; it means that the transmasculine community is broad and varied and diverse, and some but not all members of the community may experience male privilege.

Setting the nebulous questions about whether all members of a group have a particular experience aside, the most important thing is to be an ally in real life in real ways.

And being an ally means not only changing your behavior but also working to change what other people are doing; your privilege comes at the expense of someone else.

That doesn't mean you can just ignore it and it'll go away though. Even if you don't like it and don't want to have it, it's still there, and not taking advantage of it to use it to redirect power back to the marginalized means you're complicit in the system of oppression.

If you, anon, are a post-transition trans man who is living your life stealth, then you have the same responsibility as any other man when it comes to correcting other men who say and do sexist things and choosing to do the right thing yourself.

That does not excuse non-stealth and non-passing trans men from being sexist, but there is an additional responsibility that people who are treated as cisgender men have because you will need to be alert to situations when you do have male privilege so you can use this privilege to help others.

You need to notice the microagressions that other men are committing and act to address them; for example, if your male coworkers listen to your ideas but brush off the comments of your female colleagues, you need to be paying attention so you're aware of the gendered dynamic in your workplace and then speak up to help amplify the voices of your coworkers.

If you're living as a gender-conforming post-transition stealth man, there's a good chance that you do have male privilege, even if you also are subject to other forms of discrimination like ableism and racism and so on that mean that your masculinity is diminished or weaponized in some ways. If you’re a passing Black man, you may not have the same access to privilege as a white man, continuing the example, but you may still have more privilege than a Black woman within the Black community.

But again, this situation may not apply to you, and you know what's happening in your own life better than any stranger online. If you don't have access to male privilege then you don't; I'm addressing those of us who do.

I'm not here to say "All X people have Y privilege, and all Z people have no privilege," and I don't have the kind of authority to make that type of claim anyway, I'm just saying that when you're at the point in your life when you realize that you, personally, do have access to a privilege that you may or may not have had before, you have a responsibility to admit that to yourself and then do the right thing and basically be a good decent person.

I'm sure that the people who are passionate about theory will jump to fighting about whether trans men do or don't have male privilege as soon as I hit "post" on this reply, but I don't really think that tearing each other down over theory actually accomplishes any significant and real change in the actual world, so I would encourage you to exert your energy in more productive ways.

So while I usually end my posts by asking our followers to chime in with their own advice and opinions in the reblogs and replies, I'm ending this post with the equivalent of "proceed with caution"; I have a block button and I will use it! While you are welcome to share anecdotes illustrating your own personal experiences, this is a safe space and not a forum to make inflammatory statements just to stir up a fight.

tl;dr - Sometimes some trans men have male privilege, sometimes they don't. If they do have male privilege, they shouldn't deny and ignore it, but use and leverage it for good as an ally.