Trans femmes were never “socialized male,” and do not have “male privilege.”
My socialization was bullying and mass societal abuse of the core of my being.
I was socialized “terrified,” and my privilege was to “hide myself until I die.”
I’m also really sad to see some trans people repeat this TERF talking point. They tend to be of the Buck Angel variety but still.
The interesting thing is, I probably had some legit female socialization. I loved most of my life online as a teen. I was on the internet every hour I was not at school. I was fully presenting female there.
Some well meaning trans people internalize the transmed/TERF talking points.
What they don’t realize is what looked like privilege was a lie, a poison pill that in many cases functioned as a literal one given suicide rates. To call that vile concoction male privilege is obscene.
Someone QTd in German and I just had to share it here in English:
For cis people, socialization and privilege operate as a teacher-student relationship.
For trans people, it's a violence-trauma one.
Don't mistake our traumatic responses for "privilege" and "socialization."
I should also note that there is a level of survivorship bias in trans women who see themselves as the beneficiaries of male privilege rather than the victims of it.
Many of us quite literally don't survive that victimhood, and for those of us that do, the scars remain.
If you can boil down "I thought, wrongly, you were male and tried to give you privilege that nearly led to you taking your life and decades of lost years, while also abusing you with violence into repression" into a contrite phrase that is not "male privilege", I'm all about it.
But I think this is why I feel this framework absolutely falls apart. Male privilege is an oversimplified red herring for what trans femmes like me experience.
To use the word "male" to describe what we experienced is obscene.
We are victims of male privilege, not recipients.
I want to say this as politely as possible...
If you are not a trans femme and have no experience with being trans femme, do not center your opinions on this discourse here.
This includes trans mascs who feel like they _have_ to weigh in here and on Facebook.
This whole discourse gets incredibly problematic when people, who tend to be on the transmed/TERF-adjacent spectrum (a space that has WAY more trans people than trans twitter cares to admit), start to say that
"Trans women have learned maleness and pose a risk because of it."
(And I'm already seeing it in my QTs, timeline, and Facebook groups reacting to this)
It would seem there is some sort of "debate" going on as to whether or not transmisogyny is real.
And like... I don't even understand how that can even be a question.
Misogyny is real. Transphobia is real. They intersect, and multiply each other in magnitude.
Women are treated as "lesser," "weaker," and "submissive" in our patriarchal society.
Trans people threaten the legitimacy of gender discrimination and the patriarchy, because it assumes our gender roles are not set in stone.
Trans women voluntarily leave the "powerful" role.
It's for this reason why most anti-trans laws passed demonize trans women instead of trans men. The "Trans woman predator in the restroom" is a trope that is cited in almost every legislative body seeking to outlaw our existence. The "trans woman taking over women's sports" too.
Alert! Just dropped! Texas special session includes a bill to detransition trans youth, pull them from puberty blockers, and force them through the wrong puberty. It defines getting trans care for trans youth as child abuse. It will out trans children and irreversibly harm them.
This bill treats giving trans youth the GLOBAL, MEDICALLY ACCEPTED transition care as child abuse in the same categories as
- Sexual assault of a child
- Physical abuse of a child
- Substantially harming a child
- Creating child pornography
Texas is trying to kill trans kids.
There are trans people in Texas who are stealth, completely live as their gender, 15 years old... who under this bill, in front of their friends and classmates, will develop a deep voice, facial hair, etc. after living their lives as their gender.
It’s that time to remind everyone The Matrix is a trans allegory written by two closeted trans women.
“You’ve felt it your entire life, that there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.”
You can read a great in depth article on this written by @emilyvdw