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enemyofperfectSomehow or other I ended up reading a lot of gendery discussion on Twitter tonight. One very interesting find is a working paper (which is to say, a baby study, not yet peer-reviewed) to the effect that over several centuries in Europe, reigning queens fought 25% more wars than kings, perhaps because married queens delegated more work to their husbands and thus were able to devote more of their own attention to warfare. Teamwork makes the dream of conquest work, I guess!
I also skimmed a thread arguing that trans men don't have male privilege really, and I have... complicated and frustrated feelings about that. So between discussion of transmisogyny and of transphobia more generally and the fact that I'm going to touch on some broader LGBQ stuff I don't necessarily understand as well as I'd like to, let's put the rest of this post behind a cut.
(Nota bene, although the thread I'm vagueblogging about spoke of transmasc and transfemme people rather than trans men and women, I feel the question of whether nonbinary people have male privilege is either extremely simple -- "if they don't identify as male, then they don't" -- or too complex for me to do justice to here, so I'll mostly be talking about the binary side of things.)
As I understood the thread, which isn't necessarily very well, there are two reasons not to equate trans men with cis men in terms of gender privilege: first, we're socialized as if we were female for the first part of our lives, and second, we are subject to (for example) domestic violence at rates closer to those experienced by cis women than cis men. And the second of those reasons seems very valid and important to me; absolutely, let's talk about that elevated risk.
The first reason, though, strikes me as really poisonously close to the TERF claim that trans women are dangerous because they were once socialized as men, and I'm deeply uncomfortable with it.
I mean, sure, we're all shaped by experiences in one way or another? It's true I spent a part of my life rebelling against female norms that presumably I had once felt applied to me? But taking that past a certain point just feels... really weird to me, like we're saying that on an oppression level, our assigned gender really is our true gender after all.
It isn't treating biology as destiny, but I don't like treating upbringing as destiny a whole lot better. There are all kinds of things about the way I was raised, both gendered and not, that I'd like to outgrow.
And what I found myself thinking about, as I looked at a chart (page 43 here) showing that transmasculine and transfeminine people suffer approximately comparable rates of violence, and as I was trying out different mental hypotheses, like trans men being viewed as still having women's bodies, perhaps, and hence as being subject to misogyny, even as trans women are also very clearly subject to misogyny, no matter how transphobic people might think of their bodies...
As I was doing this, I found myself thinking about the fact that negative attitudes towards bisexual people are measurably stronger than negative attitudes towards gay men or lesbian women. And thinking also, for that matter, about the study that found that although gay men who prefer to bottom are viewed less favorably than gay men who prefer to top, gay men who like both positions are viewed the least favorably of all.
It seems like the only thing worse than being the wrong kind of person, to a certain mindset, is being the wrong kind of person and breaking out of the understood categories as well.
Maybe being trans, regardless of your specific gender trajectory, is itself a risk factor for being mistreated by other people. Maybe it's not about who is like or is seen as a woman, but just about disrupting the neat little boxes enough to make people uncomfortable.
I really don't feel like we can say that trans men are honorary women without on some level implying that trans women are basically sort of like men, and that isn't an acceptable idea even to flirt with. That's an idea that kills people.
But maybe we can say that being trans scares people who like what they view as ambiguity even less than they like what they consider wrong or inferior, and that that gives us interests in common with people who object to the current gender hierarchy for other reasons.
I also skimmed a thread arguing that trans men don't have male privilege really, and I have... complicated and frustrated feelings about that. So between discussion of transmisogyny and of transphobia more generally and the fact that I'm going to touch on some broader LGBQ stuff I don't necessarily understand as well as I'd like to, let's put the rest of this post behind a cut.
(Nota bene, although the thread I'm vagueblogging about spoke of transmasc and transfemme people rather than trans men and women, I feel the question of whether nonbinary people have male privilege is either extremely simple -- "if they don't identify as male, then they don't" -- or too complex for me to do justice to here, so I'll mostly be talking about the binary side of things.)
As I understood the thread, which isn't necessarily very well, there are two reasons not to equate trans men with cis men in terms of gender privilege: first, we're socialized as if we were female for the first part of our lives, and second, we are subject to (for example) domestic violence at rates closer to those experienced by cis women than cis men. And the second of those reasons seems very valid and important to me; absolutely, let's talk about that elevated risk.
The first reason, though, strikes me as really poisonously close to the TERF claim that trans women are dangerous because they were once socialized as men, and I'm deeply uncomfortable with it.
I mean, sure, we're all shaped by experiences in one way or another? It's true I spent a part of my life rebelling against female norms that presumably I had once felt applied to me? But taking that past a certain point just feels... really weird to me, like we're saying that on an oppression level, our assigned gender really is our true gender after all.
It isn't treating biology as destiny, but I don't like treating upbringing as destiny a whole lot better. There are all kinds of things about the way I was raised, both gendered and not, that I'd like to outgrow.
And what I found myself thinking about, as I looked at a chart (page 43 here) showing that transmasculine and transfeminine people suffer approximately comparable rates of violence, and as I was trying out different mental hypotheses, like trans men being viewed as still having women's bodies, perhaps, and hence as being subject to misogyny, even as trans women are also very clearly subject to misogyny, no matter how transphobic people might think of their bodies...
As I was doing this, I found myself thinking about the fact that negative attitudes towards bisexual people are measurably stronger than negative attitudes towards gay men or lesbian women. And thinking also, for that matter, about the study that found that although gay men who prefer to bottom are viewed less favorably than gay men who prefer to top, gay men who like both positions are viewed the least favorably of all.
It seems like the only thing worse than being the wrong kind of person, to a certain mindset, is being the wrong kind of person and breaking out of the understood categories as well.
Maybe being trans, regardless of your specific gender trajectory, is itself a risk factor for being mistreated by other people. Maybe it's not about who is like or is seen as a woman, but just about disrupting the neat little boxes enough to make people uncomfortable.
I really don't feel like we can say that trans men are honorary women without on some level implying that trans women are basically sort of like men, and that isn't an acceptable idea even to flirt with. That's an idea that kills people.
But maybe we can say that being trans scares people who like what they view as ambiguity even less than they like what they consider wrong or inferior, and that that gives us interests in common with people who object to the current gender hierarchy for other reasons.
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Date: 2019-01-22 07:40 am (UTC)<3
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Date: 2019-01-22 07:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-22 07:59 am (UTC)Yes, I believe this is 100% correct.
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Date: 2019-01-22 10:15 pm (UTC)