We really have to stop talking about thing like socialization and privilege like they’re objective reality rather than just rhetorical analytical tools built from a specific lens.
Those lenses almost universally exclude trans people, so the tools aren’t really useful for us.
The concept of male privilege is a tool of academic rhetoric created to analyze the power dynamics between cis men and cis women. It’s a very *useful* construct, but it won’t tell you anything all that useful about trans people as general class because it wasn’t DESIGNED for that
Socialization is similar. Discussing “gendered socialization” in broad terms can be a useful insight into how social milieu influences cis folk. But trans folks are too complex a class with too complex a relationship to gender to make that tool useful.
This is *why* queer and trans academic and theorists develop alternative lenses and analytical constructs for our experiences, why queer critique and gender studies exist.
Things like transmisogyny, cissexism, oppositional sexism, cis privilege, etc etc…
TL;DR: If a framework of analysis was designed to examine the broad strokes of gender power and experience, it’s going to break down when applied to trans people, and especially to individual trans people because we are gender’s complex edge cases.
A root problem of much of this is that society has forced trans folk to be grounded in gender theory, psychology, sociology, anthropology, genetics, endocrinology, and embryology to justify & defend their existence at any moment.
That doesn’t leave much space for nuance.
So we have many, many trans people who have memorized rigid defenses to every transphobic attack on their existence (and rightly so) because transphobes keep us backed into a corner, and take any allowance of nuance as weakness.
So all this analytical frames become weapons.
I would love for us to be able to have open, complex, nuanced discussions about how gendered experienced and gendered power play out within the trans community and interlocked with the wider gender power system.
But y’all gotta stop trying to crush us out of existence first.
Whelp, since this thread looks like it’s gonna do numbers:
If you find my words educational, consider tipping? I’m a very overworked healthcare professional trying to make the jump back to academia for my sanity and it’s gonna be a big financial hit:
The feminine urge to set your entire life on fire because you’re tired of feeling stuck and directionless
Almost 20 months of living in pandemic healthcare professional life suddenly happening right when you were trying to change careers and make major life changes will kind of turn your brain to mush.
If there is a purgatory, this is what it feels like.
Literally all the positive momentum I had finally built up in late 2019 just went right in the goddamn toilet.
Sorry to nest threads, but this is important to consider about the “kink at pride” discourse.
Sex-negativity and trans-exclusion rhetoric are closely bound, as the original T*RF movement grew from 2nd wave sex-neg camp. It’s not *universal* but it is *common*.
This is also why SW*RF and T*RF are so often two sides of the same coin. You essentially won’t find anti-trans rhetoric without sex-negativity. (The racist/fascist connects are newer.)
There are definitely exceptions in the sex-neg root material. MacKinnon was trans-affirming.
It’s interesting to see that sex-neg rhetoric filter through Gen Z as a reaction to the Gen X and Millennial highly sex-pos attitudes (drawing its roots from 2nd wave sex-pos, who really did “win” the Sex Wars).
They pick up more on respectability and “protecting people”.
1. Blanchard’s study was TERRIBLY underpowered, his subject selection criteria contained tons of bias, & he utterly failed to account for social desirability biases. All things that any undergrad social science student could see
2. Blanchard’s: AGP survey instrument was based in yes/no questions. Like “have you you ever aroused by ___?”, so even a single instance of what we now refer to as “female embodiment fantasy” is scored as “positive” for AGP behavior.
If the identity terms I use for myself offend you, I kindly invite you to Get Fucked.
Yes, I identify as transsexual, which I recognize as existing under the wider transgender umbrella. I identify this way because my experience of transness is rooted in physical dysphoria.
My needs as a trans woman centered around physical/medical transition. That is MY experience. Transsexual as an identity gives me space to both honor that specific experience and advocate for those needs.
It has *nothing* to do with having or needing bottom surgery to be trans
MANY trans women have reclaimed transsexual as an identity that they find affirming for their experiences.
Please don’t project *your* baggage with terminology onto others, or make ridiculous, facile assumptions about my beliefs based on a single word in my profiles