#but basically some 17yo decided it would be acceptable to derail a post about how demonization of maleness

[boyjadzia]

I really need to sleep but I can’t because the discourse is haunting me.

People really need to actually listen to transmasculine people and trans men when we talk about our experiences with masculinity and femininity. There is literally no other way to understand it; you’re not going to get it by assuming it’s the same as cis men’s (or women’s), but you’re also not going to get it by assuming that it’s just the exact reverse of transfeminine people and trans women’s experiences. It isn’t. It really, really isn’t, and it’s so frustrating and hurtful for me to see over and over again that whenever we try to bring this subject up, our posts get derailed by people (generally not trans women) claiming that our descriptions of our experiences— descriptions that make no attempt at generalization, no attempt at prescriptivism— are transmisogynistic and violent towards women at large, because we dare assert that maybe our experiences of masculinity don’t always align with the same privilege that cis men experience for being men.

If you’re not a transmasculine person/trans man, especially if you’re also not a transfeminine person/trans woman, and you feel hostile towards trans men who say they don’t feel like they had male privilege before transitioning— an experience that you have literally no authority to discredit— you really need to do some self-reflection and think about why your immediate instinct is to write a trans man’s claim to being oppressed by cis men, in a way that is specifically a result of those cis men’s cis male privilege, off as yet another symptom of male privilege and abuse. Because time and time again I see people try to explain this— that they did experience misogyny, however misdirected, before transitioning from those same cis men people want to group them with, and that they absolutely do not intend this to be a general statement about the nature of how one’s gender is perceived or privileged pre-transition– and get shouted down by claims that actually, saying that must necessarily imply the opposite for trans women, and therefore is transmisogynistic and sexist garbage.

Please, I am urging everyone, you have to understand that gender and the ways in which it interacts with gendered power structures is far far far more complex than a simple “you’re one or the other” privilege/oppression dynamic. There is literally no law out in the real world that says that if trans men are capable of not having male privilege before transitioning, it means trans women must always have it. Trans men and trans women are not opposites. We have vastly different experiences that do not benefit from being compared to one another. The power dynamic that exists between trans men and trans women does not influence the one that exists between trans men and cis men, or the one between transness and cisness.

There is nothing radical or revolutionary about hating trans men, especially for speaking to our own experiences with gender non-conformity and oppression by cis people. There is nothing radical or productive about telling trans men that they’re bad people for being male (because as a matter of fact, that’s exactly what cis people say). Please let us talk about this oppression without automatically conflating it with the privilege trans men have for not being subject to transmisogyny. I’m so tired. I’m so sick of being told I’m a bad person for being transmasculine by cis people, only to have the rest of the LGBT community turn around and agree that I’m a bad person for being transmasculine, and in particular that because I want to talk about the complexities of my experience I’m actively hurting others. Like I’m not even a binary man, I don’t really consider my experience to be “manhood” but I’m still so exhausted by this. You all are always putting words in our mouths, as though saying “my gender non-conformity is not privileged” or “my life pre-transition was heavily influenced by the misdirected misogyny I experienced” is somehow the same thing as saying “I was socialized female.” No one is saying that, no one is claiming that trans men have the same experiences as cis women. This is precisely why you need to actually hear what we’re saying, because you’re just deliberately not getting it, you’re deliberately choosing to interpret what we say about our own lives as an attack on others’. And that’s not helping anyone.