If gender has nothing to do with sex, and socialization isn't real, why are the vast majority of people cis? I can't get past that. It must be one or the other.
You said âItâs just frustrating that many people seem to be more interested in like a sort of fatalistic self righteous masochism approach to misogyny than something that like⌠can actually be revolted against, and feel like preserving their singular status of oppression is more important than⌠ending oppression?â Iâm a nb and feminine socialization hurts the most of ALL things. How can my oppression be ended if no one believes it exists⌠it will just be like âstfu⌠now, see? no oppressionâ (2/5)
I was never told about feminine socialization because I experienced it. Being trans, finding out that itâs considered a terf thing is honestly tearing me apart, because itâs undeniable. I tried to pretend it wasnât real to deal with the dissonance but I felt gaslighted and spent hours in stress everyday. I wish I was kidding. I truly believe youâre just ignorant. I canât just ignore it, apart from my body, it is the worst thing. My lifeâs biggest enemy. if it could not exist, id be free (3/5)
I have no idea what its like to be a trans woman, but you have no insight into what it is like to be raised to be a woman. And here, you are wrong. I understand why itâs scary and potentially dangerous with terfs around, but itâs still the truth. All socialization needs to be eliminated, and it isnât the fault of trans women that it exists but until our reality is acknowledged we canât be real allies. You donât believe in a MAJOR oppression, yet it continues to exist. Thatâs libertarianesque too (4/5)
I am sorry for the spam, but I am saying this and wishing to engage sincerely and honestly. You canât disprove experience and I am very torn over this as a result. I feel traumatized and gaslighted as I canât turn to anyone who isnât a terf for help with it. It triggers a painful social dysphoria that is unbearable. Like, what am I supposed to do? (5/5)
Sorry to everyone, but this is a long ask and itâs gonna be a long response.
So, as Iâve said a couple of times on here over the years, I think that the issues of âsocializationâ are relatively complex, and I *do* wish that there were ways for us to talk about this; however, at this point, the term âsocializationâ in regards to talking abt trans issues has become a byword for basic sex essentialism. Thatâs not because of trans women, and to like play this âmaybe iâll become a t**fâ kinda alliance hostage game while calling me âignorantâ and 'libertarianesqueâ for a strawman version of my thoughts on this is⌠gauche. Esp when like, the idea is that trans women have to have a certain political ideology in order to deserve to *exist*.
I would love for their to be more dialog around the effects of socialization, but tbh most of the times I have this w cis women and cafab trans people it is done in a way to deny my womanhood or try to place some sort of maleness on me. So acting like itâs âthe truthâ w no political aspect is unsatisfactory, and if we are talking abt dysphoria inducing situations, completely unnuanced views of socialization have been weaponized to make lots of women dysphoric soâŚ
But like, I want to address this I guess even tho this ask feels like this is approaching the subject in a way that I feel like you have a 50% chance of just str8 up being one of those 'ex libfemâ/dysphoric female blogs in a year.
At literally no point have I ever said that like, gendered socialization isnât a real thing, or that gender expectations arenât like a real thing. I just donât think that like, fits into either my biography or any of my writing. At the end of the day, Iâve written multiple times abt how genders and gendered behaviors shouldnât be imposed on children or on people more generally; this is a call for ending different gendered socializations (what I think you are meaning by 'all socialization needs to be eliminatedâ). What that looks like is another conversation.
My argument re: socialization isnât that we donât leverage that on children and that it doesnât effect us later in life. My argument is that talking abt socialization in the ways that most cis people and transmisogynists do is untenable for a huge variety of reasons, to the point that like, the way I think a productive conversation around 'socializationâ could work is a completely different concept than how most essentialists use it.
I will point out that, if we didnât have gendered socialization, people wouldnât be 'freeâ in any meaningful sense as long as systems of capitalism, exploitation, and other axioms of oppression were in effect. If your main problem in life is gendered socialization, I would ask that you think abt what ways your life might have missed some of the other major ways in which people are harmed and exploited in our world. I was ostensibly 'socialized maleâ according to this framework, but I still got raped by multiple men as a child (and further as an adult), so socialization is clearly not the exclusive area of gendered oppression.
But Iâll point out my issues w cissexist ideas of socialization:
One of the issues that arises is this idea that socialization is basically a way to talk about CASAB, and that it ends. First of all, I know a 4 year old trans girl who at no point ever identified as a boy. What is her socialization? There are multiple people like this, and I feel like most people arguing for cissexist ideas of socialization are not interested in accepting these camab people as 'female socializedâ, even tho clearly they would be.
Likewise, socialization is a thing we experience in childhood, but is something that is enforced on us throughout all of our adult lives. These expectations are always levied on us, and continue to influence us. Iâve spent about 90% of my adult life out at this point, I have no experience of what it would be like to have male expectations of my mid life on me. Not only that, but our socialization affects our beliefs if we think that we are above any sort of outside social influence. This is why you can have radical feminists take testosterone and then become MRAs or just general misogynists: our society is always in a state of resocializing us to our current circumstances. If trans people could ever be said to have their assigned socialization, this resocialization process along w the contexts of being considered yr gender would make that a temporary situation (which no one who argues for essentialist socialization ever accepts).
Another issue is that we internalize the socialization of both genders. The most shitty form of this is that a man knows what is 'acceptableâ for a woman to wear outside, because men also know what behaviors and attitudes women are socialized into having; they just donât have to follow them and in fact are a primary (tho not exclusive) agent of enforcing them. Even if a trans woman comes out later in life, that doesnât mean she hasnât been intaking these messages, and when her social position (internally or externally) shifts, that she wonât have to grapple w these messages.
The other issue with socialization is that any recourse to it will bring abt the sort of paradox: if socialization affects us all equally, then how is it that trans people or even gay people exist? So, obviously 'male socializationâ in the traditional essentialist way includes both the messages that boys never become women, nor do they have sex w men. the fact that gay people and trans people are so heavily penalized in our social context actually shows how internally contradictory and weakly socialization affects all of our behaviors. Rules (legal or social) donât have to be made to forbid things that no one would ever think of doing. To answer yr question: I think that socialization can work in a uniform way for some people (just not all people, and esp people have shown themselves to not properly take in key parts of that socialization like gay and trans people), and the stakes of acting outside of those expectations are too high for many people to do otherwise. Thereâs active penalization of acting outside of gender norms.
And like, at the end of the day, even tho I didnât come out as trans until early adulthood, I can look back and see that I was clearly taking in a lot of socialization aimed at girls (both because in retrospect I wasnât a boy, and that was recognized in some form, if violently, and also because I was attracted to men). At this point, Iâve been dealing a lot w like what expectations and messages I have for myself due to what Iâve heard throughout my entire life; itâs been hard because of exactly the sort of idea that I couldnât have possibly had female socialization- Iâve learned experientially that the situation is actually quite a bit different than that.
So what Iâm saying isnât that socialization isnât real or that it doesnât fuck us up (i was beat a lot as a child for crying, and Iâm still trying to let myself do that without guilt, for example!). What Iâm saying is that the ways that socialization affects all of us and the way it comes down to us canât simply be done in a way that makes this unnuanced approach that people of certain CASABs have uncomplicatedly certain socializations, or that socialization is completely determinative and unchangeable. Socialization, like all of society, is nuanced, complex, self-contradictory in certain cases, changed by other social positions, and always contextual, not just a way to say that trans people have behaviors and attitudes in common w their assigned gender.
