#but the rhetorical framing came to me in a dream and articulates something I've been trying to get out for a while

[crouton-girlfriend]

The Feminist Boy's Talk

If you are a boy, and you want to be a feminist, then sooner or later someone is going to give you the Talk. I got the talk from my mom, back when I was a boy. Plenty of people get it from friends, partners, family, teachers, comrades - somebody, eventually, is going to give you the Talk. It goes like this:

"As a man, every second of your life you have benefited from the social system of patriarchy. Every time you've spoken, others have let you talk over women. Every time you've work hard to get something, it's been given to you over women who worked just as hard or harder. The world has been designed to be welcoming to you, and hostile to the women around you.

If you want to make things right, you will have to be watching for it constantly. When you speak, your first priority has to be making sure the women around you get the chance to talk - your own ideas come second. When you work for something, your first priority has to be lifting the women around you up. The power, and the responsibility, to change the shape of the whole world falls to you.

Nor is this a special sacrifice, this constant self-awareness, this endless paranoia of your social body. This is only a fraction of some of the mildest miseries of patriarchy, an echo of the nightmare some of the people around you are living through.

And so, if you want to be a feminist, you have to choose. You can volunteer - even put in work - to be exactly as free as the meanest of your sisters. Or you can ignore this horrid truth, and forget you ever heard any of it at all, but one day you will become a self-conscious misogynist."

As near as I can tell, in order to achieve their actual goals (discussing and deconstructing the social system of transmisogyny, especially in queer circles) the tumblr transfeminists had to give trans men on tumblr the Talk. "Transandrophobia" truthers seem to be made up of the men who didn't like what they heard.