The Broker of My Broken Dreams

A trans man who passes may access some surface-level male privileges (e.g., being taken more seriously in a work meeting, walking down a street with less harassment). However, that privilege is entirely contingent on stealth and passing. The moment his trans status is known via an ID, a medical situation, or a slip, that privilege evaporates and is replaced by a visceral transphobia. Unlike cis men, trans men do not hold systemic, institutional power over trans women. They cannot write anti-trans legislation, control medical boards, or enforce gendered bathroom panics.

Trans women bear the brunt of a violent intersection of transphobia and misogyny that makes them hypervisible, fetishized, and disproportionately targeted for fatal violence.

Trans men, conversely, often face erasure, infantilization, and dismissal.

The conflict arises when trauma gets misattributed. For some trans women, the invisibility trans men experience looks like safety and social acceptance. Resentment builds when they see a trans man moving through the world without the constant, aggressive scrutiny they face. But this conflates passing privilege with cis power, which are entirely different social currencies.

Cis society does not protect trans man as men (because it doesn't truly see them as men more often than not), and the patriarchy does not grant them the immunity that cis men enjoy.

This makes them a socially acceptable target within certain queer circles. For a traumatized trans woman, it is psychologically safer to project their anger onto a marginalized peer who cannot fight back with systemic force, rather than confronting the terrifying, structurally protected cisgender patriarchy.

Tumblr thrives on binary morality and trauma-sharing. Nuance, like saying trans men can hold misogyny but are not structurally oppressive to trans women, is lost in favor of viral, black-and-white accusations. These spaces often flatten intersectionality, forgetting that a trans man also experiences misogyny pre-transition and continues to face gynecological/medical discrimination post-transition.

This infighting is horizontal hostility. When an oppressed group cannot effectively fight the vertical power structure (the cis-hetero-patriarchy), they turn inward and fight each other over crumbs of perceived safety or privilege. The real winners of this infighting are the cis politicians and institutions writing the legislation that harms both trans men and trans women.

junicorn

day 29