#seriously I've seen people saying mexican is an ethnicity

[manualamadrugada]

Ok, saying this because it seems some of you desperately need to hear it.

Neither Latino nor Hispanic are races or ethnicities. Someone from Spain and someone from Peru won't have the same ethnic background. Hell, two people from Peru may not even have the same ethnic background! Being Hispanic means you speak Spanish, nothing else. And latinoamerica is a region (and an incredibly diverse one too), not a race.

Some of you just label anything that isn't Usamerican an ethnicity because you see the US as the default.

[caffeineandsociety]

Trans men are in an interesting place with the dynamics of sexism, and I hate how much infighting it causes for trying to create a singular hard and fast rule about whether Society sees becoming a man as an "upgrade" more than it sees being trans as a "downgrade" because there IS no singular rule about it.

Gender conformity is a big part of it. If you're Just Some Guy(TM), if you style yourself very masc and pass well, then of course in most external aspects - with people you pass with - you're going to start getting treated, well, like a man, with...most of the benefits that typically entails. The external ones, at least. In fact, sometimes even if someone finds out you're trans, that first impression will be enough to keep them taking you more seriously, or at least, once they find out, they may treat you less seriously than a cis man but more seriously than a cis woman.

But if you're GNC? Like me? That...has NOT been my experience. Far from it, in fact. I often find people take me much less seriously than they did when I was presenting as a cis woman. They'll compliment my technicolor hair or my nails, but unless they're also visibly queer, they'll look to someone else for an opinion on what might be wrong with their computer, or car, or whatever else - even if they KNOW I've been in tech and mechanics all my life - and I often spend MORE time waiting to be seen in the ER or urgent care, not less.

Speaking of wait times in the ER, here's something interesting: I have more luck getting people to take my disabilities seriously if I have someone presumed to be a cis woman to advocate for me, than if I have someone presumed to be a cis man doing the same job, unless that man is my actual biological father. Why? Well, my working hypothesis is that people see me with a man roughly my own age and just write us both off as a couple of melodramatic attention-seeking faggots; when they see me with a woman they start going-

-to figure out what her deal is and why she'd be hanging out with me and settle on thinking of her as a Mama Bear-type? It's something I'd have to do much more study on to be sure about!

There's also how it intersects with race - I have ethnically ambiguous facial features that read as much less white on a man than on a woman, and my skin tone is very sun sensitive, going from ghostly pale in the winter (which often gets me read as half white-half East Asian) to fairly dark tan in the summer if I go out a lot (which often gets me read as Mexican). You know the whole dual stereotype of trans men as pathetic baby transtrender babygirls looking for attention vs. evil roid raging groomers? Yeah, for SOME reason, I get looked at as the former more often in the winter and the latter more often in the summer.

Body type also plays into this. It's undeniable that men have a much larger window of body types than women that we can have before we're considered ugly, but...my weight fluctuates such that I go between midsized and Certifiably Fat depending on a lot of disability-related factors, almost like the myths about how weight works for most people. I get treated better as a man while my weight is at its healthy lowest than I did as a woman, but at its highest? ...people don't like GNC men when they're not skinny white guys. I speak from experience. Before I transitioned, I was treated as a Fat Woman no matter what - bullied, condescended to, every health problem blamed on my weight, the whole works. After, my lowest healthy weight often won't be considered fat at all, but if shit happens and I put on my Sickness Weight, I'm not a Fat Man in the way a lot of sitcom leads are allowed to be, I'm not even a Fat Man in the sense of that one fedora guy we unfairly ascribed predatory behavior to, I am seen as a Fat Man in a horrible transmisogynistic caricature kind of way. And we wonder why GNC transmascs have such a high rate of eating disorders, or blame it on ~female conditioning~?

What I'm saying is, once again, intersectionality! It's a whole industrial size barrel of worms! And we need more formal studies of gender dynamics that take transness and presentation into account! And stop trying to make singular hard and fast rules about How Trans Men Are Seen!