The thing about saying trans women are “socialized male” is that it’s a fundamentally anti-feminist stance.
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Misgendering? That’s bread and butter for Black women, for Pacific Islander women. To treat it as if it’s an absolute moral failure when it happens to a white trans femme ignores the racial hegemony of the system. “I should never be misgendered” is a less effective statement if you never process whiteness because it’s whiteness that is effecting you in that moment.
So often I see people map white trans femininity (or, rather, their rejectionist attitudes towards it) onto PoC trans women, as if our experiences are analogous. We neve had a chance to fit in to this society, so we come to trans femininity already de-centered. Living in a Black male experience was one where we were centered only as a threat or an other. At best, I was “exotic,” and fetishized.
It’s simply a different experience. In a way, armored and prepared for othering.
@FinalGirl My opinion (as a black trans woman) is that no trans person, regardless of race, deserves to be misgendered, ever. Racism unfortunately makes Black trans women more likely than white trans women to get misgendered and treated as a male threat, and it makes me dysphoric. -
@Melezioh "How am I supposed to know you meant something different?"
You ask. You seek clarification. You talk about it instead of going straight to accusations of intentional erasure.
The fact is that me limiting my post to trans femininity was specifically because I was talking about an explicitly trans feminine aspect regarding the rejection of trans femininity on the grounds of a deterministic and immutable socialization. And in fact I was limiting my post to that specifically because I was leading toward a discussion of the overlay of racism onto trans femininity. Like I barely started and you're on me, bruh.
I was not "ignoring" you any more than I was "ignoring" latine trans femmes in my argument. It's just not the context of my experience nor the one I can talk to in this moment. I was limiting my argument to the context I was discussing… which we literally must do to frame anything.
Like dude I appreciate you are sensitive to exclusion, but coming straight at me with "you're trying to ditch that all together" puts me immediately in a position of enmity that was never necessary.
Just ask.
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White people tend to have an expectation of centering and implicit respect. This is especially true of the white male experience. And this is something that has to be processed and re-interpreted by white trans femmes. Often, they reject it.
We see this in the pattern of white trans femmes treating certain inconveniences as if they are extremely damaging and emotionally horrendous experiences. In truth, they probably are—to them—because they have rarely lived an existence where such experiences are normalized.
It’s no surprise that the trans femmes who are most separatist are also often the ones who are most racist. They are simply holding on to the centering.
Unless race is processed, this pattern tends to dominate. But it’s often seen (esp. by white cis women) as “male.” The better framing is “socialized in power.”
@FinalGirl @rusty__shackleford
Thank you for wording this far better than I did:
RE: https://mastodon.social/@rusty__shackleford/115925696178452244
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@FinalGirl My opinion (as a black trans woman) is that no trans person, regardless of race, deserves to be misgendered, ever. Racism unfortunately makes Black trans women more likely than white trans women to get misgendered and treated as a male threat, and it makes me dysphoric.
@LunaDragofelis I, of course, never implied that anyone deserves to be misgendered.
My statement was that, as a class, Black folk, including cis Black folk, experience more oppression than white trans people ever will. But that the experience of many white trans people seems to be one of seeing those experiences as analogous–or, often, winning "the oppression olympics"–more than actually fighting the forces that imprison all of us. Since those forces still have a protective effect on them.
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Misgendering? That’s bread and butter for Black women, for Pacific Islander women. To treat it as if it’s an absolute moral failure when it happens to a white trans femme ignores the racial hegemony of the system. “I should never be misgendered” is a less effective statement if you never process whiteness because it’s whiteness that is effecting you in that moment.
So often I see people map white trans femininity (or, rather, their rejectionist attitudes towards it) onto PoC trans women, as if our experiences are analogous. We neve had a chance to fit in to this society, so we come to trans femininity already de-centered. Living in a Black male experience was one where we were centered only as a threat or an other. At best, I was “exotic,” and fetishized.
It’s simply a different experience. In a way, armored and prepared for othering.
@FinalGirl when the thread about this was popping off the other day and I was too mentally fatigued to form decent sentences, this was exactly one of the things I wanted to bring up about why we need to talk about socialization not as some property of a person but as processes of power flowing through relations, and why we should instead consider what question a person is really talking about when they bring up “male socialization” of trans women. Because like you said, to grow up being perceived as a Black boy or man is a very very different experience than growing up as a white boy or man, and there is a HUGE assumption there about what male socialization means as being about hegemonic masculinity.
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@FinalGirl when the thread about this was popping off the other day and I was too mentally fatigued to form decent sentences, this was exactly one of the things I wanted to bring up about why we need to talk about socialization not as some property of a person but as processes of power flowing through relations, and why we should instead consider what question a person is really talking about when they bring up “male socialization” of trans women. Because like you said, to grow up being perceived as a Black boy or man is a very very different experience than growing up as a white boy or man, and there is a HUGE assumption there about what male socialization means as being about hegemonic masculinity.
@JoscelynTransient to be clear, I didn’t see a thread about this that I remember, so there might be some embedded context of which I was unaware. I was actually talking about IRL events. But yes, that’s what I was getting at. It is a non-equatable experience that favors both whiteness and patriarchy.
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@JoscelynTransient to be clear, I didn’t see a thread about this that I remember, so there might be some embedded context of which I was unaware. I was actually talking about IRL events. But yes, that’s what I was getting at. It is a non-equatable experience that favors both whiteness and patriarchy.
@FinalGirl oh, didn’t think you were subtooting or something. Just, these conversations have been going around and I was trying to get at something similar but it was after some of my last TMS sessions and struggling to make words work. So I was just expressing that I appreciate your words and framing
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Misgendering? That’s bread and butter for Black women, for Pacific Islander women. To treat it as if it’s an absolute moral failure when it happens to a white trans femme ignores the racial hegemony of the system. “I should never be misgendered” is a less effective statement if you never process whiteness because it’s whiteness that is effecting you in that moment.
So often I see people map white trans femininity (or, rather, their rejectionist attitudes towards it) onto PoC trans women, as if our experiences are analogous. We neve had a chance to fit in to this society, so we come to trans femininity already de-centered. Living in a Black male experience was one where we were centered only as a threat or an other. At best, I was “exotic,” and fetishized.
It’s simply a different experience. In a way, armored and prepared for othering.
Another frustrating thing about this is the argument of “socialized male” so often comes with examples as proof that you are not a real woman.
Like playing chess? Not a woman.
Like sports? Not a woman.
Like woodworking? Not a woman.
Like building things in the yard? Not a woman.
Like painting? Not a woman.
Like cabinetry? Not a woman.
Like cooking? Well you would be a woman but you cook complex things so not a woman.
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Another frustrating thing about this is the argument of “socialized male” so often comes with examples as proof that you are not a real woman.
Like playing chess? Not a woman.
Like sports? Not a woman.
Like woodworking? Not a woman.
Like building things in the yard? Not a woman.
Like painting? Not a woman.
Like cabinetry? Not a woman.
Like cooking? Well you would be a woman but you cook complex things so not a woman.
That’s all literally shit I’ve been told. Like I learned cabinetry from a cis woman, but somehow if I do it it’s “men’s stuff.”
I’ve been told I hate classical music because I’m a man (I had a subscription at the time to BBC Music Magazine, which sent a classical album every month.)
I’ve been told I hate musicals because I’m a man (like I literally sing them all the time and still know the words to Mystery of Edwin Drood).
In the weirdest twist, I was told I was still basically male because I love playing woman’s roller derby. Like how’s that even work?!
There no winning.
Like the amount of shit that gets mapped onto me as proof that I was “socialized male” is absurd, but if I fight one then there’s always One More Thing.
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The thing about saying trans women are “socialized male” is that it’s a fundamentally anti-feminist stance. If all it took to make someone irretrievably gendered was a bit of socialization, then cis women fighting against patriarchy with be a lost cause since they are socialized female in a society build around the belief they are and will always be less. The belief that we are nothing but socialization is just masked patriarchy.
Thank you. Yes. I am a cis woman and the older I get, the better I can see the social, patriarchal thumb that has been pressed down on me through my life.
If the patriarchs of our society perceive transwomen to be a threat, because they 'were not brought up right', they are sub rosa saying they have manipulated womens' power to where they like it (subjugated), and they don't want trans-spies letting that cat out if the bag.
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