saying "how would YOU know anything about the lived experience of women?" to a trans dude is like asking a butterfly how it knows anything about being a caterpillar.
like at this point you're just being needlessly obtuse and obnoxious. c'mon now.
like, again its that really weird transgender algebra. there are people who think that for their identity ti be valid, it needs to always have been. okay, cool, cool. "i was never actually a boy i was always a girl and didn't know it" is a valid way of expressing your experience of your gender identity, no problems there.
but it's when someone else says "yeah i used to be a girl and now im a man" and you... for some fuckin reason, decide that means he's saying "if i used to be a girl that means you used to be a boy" when... that's not what he said, and it wasn't about you at all... like we all get how that's a fuckin problem, right?
when people get hung up on transmascs still being connected in some way to their agab im like. well yeah thats because thats related to an axis of oppression that they experience. if a trans dude grew up being perceived as and perceiving himself as a cis woman then that means he experienced the same oppression that cis women do. that oppression informs your experiences and how you move through the world.
but i guess if your first contact with feminism is transfeminism and you're not really invested in feminism beyond what it can do for you personally, then yeah i guess that wouldn't really be intuitive.
