Been yelling too much at the Disc Horse

Watch, I'll do it right now:

I, a white trans woman, have privelege over all racialized trans women. All the transmisogyny I face is amplified a thousandfold for them because that transmisogyny intersects with the racism they also face. And I will never be able to truly understand that as they do.

Did the transmisogyny I am subjected to dissapear? Lol, no.

Do I feel a need to invent some bullshit term like "transmisogynblanc" because they have the term "transmisogynior" to describe the specific form of oppression they face at the crossroads of transphobia, misogyny, and racism? Lol, no. I'm not at those crossroads. I'm just at the intersection of misogyny and transphobia. There isn't even an "anti white racism" road to intersect with those other two, it doesn't exist.

Indeed, are people actually saying "transmascs don't benefit from patriarchy" or are they rejecting the claim that all transmascs categorically benefit from patriarchy? Because those. Those are not actually the same thing. Similarly, are people talking about specifically societal dynamics that punish transmasculinity actually claiming misandry or androphobia are real structural forces, or are they looking for a term that describes the way the intersection of transphobia and misogyny that they face is distinct from the one usually referred to as "transmisogyny"?

The extent to which different axes of oppression can be decomposed varies. For the interaction of white supremacism with cissexism it's simple enough: At least within a gender binary (which is of course itself a white-supremacist construct), it's easy to say that X effect is white-supremacy and Y is patriarchy and Z is an intersectional interaction between them. When it comes to gender in a cissexist world, though, trans men and other transmascs are treated (as categories; we are talking about group dynamics here after all) by society at large as women who are actively trying to behave inappropriately. They are subjected to specific kinds of violence that are informed not just by their being trans but specifically by the varieties of trans that they are.

this was on Y'ALL to pick a better candidate to back in the primary because WE FUCKING TOLD Y'ALL

not only is it internally incoherent (in that it posits a very arbitrary stopping point after which I guess how you're socially received and responded ceases to matter at all?)

but also if we accept it as What That Term Means it makes any discussion of socialisation in any context kind of incoherent??

anyway here's my beef.

Socialisation is a process by which social structures are reproduced (a process, which is why 'socialisation' and 'social reproduction' aren't synonyms). It includes both the teaching and the learning of social roles, and it's about how we internalise behaviours and attitudes in response to what's socially incentivised, punished, or idealised.

It's got a lot of components, because it's Basically Everything About How You Move Through A Social World, but some important ones are:

How we respond to others

How others respond to us

The rules and ideas we're taught about what different sorts of people are

The self-image we build out of what people tell us about ourselves

The behaviours that are rewarded or punished

The things that are treated as normal, unusual, or taboo for us to explore

and from that we develop

a) a nuanced sense of self which is in conversation with the social responses we get (doesn't necessarily align with, but is shaped by, how others view us)

b) a complex subconscious understanding of the social rules and behaviours we are expected to follow, which is significantly deeper and denser than what we could verbally explain

The TERF version of gendered socialisation is, effectively, focused on formative training. and that is part of what socialisation is but only a relatively small part. The TERF version is only concerned with external incentives, and it operates from the assumption that you get socialized once, in an extremely consistent way, and it is both time-limited and irreversible.

One way in which this is incoherent is that gendered socialisation isn't a one-and-done.

Cis people, as well as trans people, are resocialised at multiple points in their lives. For example, a lot of the struggle of adolescence is that the gendered behaviours of a child are not acceptable in the gender behaviour of an adult. Similarly, a lot of women at menopause find that behaviours which have previously been rewarded become unacceptable and vice versa, and that the modes of interaction with younger women, peers, young men and men their age have shifted substantially. What it means to be gender-conforming changes over your life (an example might be how hyper-femininity in a little-girl mode can become a nonconformist gender expression in adult women, or how grannies are granted social permission to be much more pragmatic and hands-on without undercutting their womanhood).

Socialisation is a constant process, and as your positionality changes, so does your social experience. A 13 year old girl may know all the spoken social etiquette of being an adult woman; it still takes years of being received and responded to and thinking of herself as a subject of womanhood to start to get a handle on the nuance of navigating the social landscape of womanhood. During that time she will be clumsy, she will over- or under-perform signifiers of womanhood, she will struggle to locate herself within the idea of A Woman, and as a result she'll often be considered awkward or annoying or incomprehensible.

Generally, the teenage girl gets an amount of grace for the fact that this is a socially accepted learning stage. But that doesn't stop her or her peers being neurotically aware of where she's not measuring up, where she's misjudging social cues, and so on.

The teenage girl is being socialised as a woman. It's a new learning process. But that doesn't mean she wasn't subject to gendered socialisation before that! Before she was expected to resocialise as a woman, she was already almost always socialised as a girl child. Even if he parents tried to protect her from it, gender is embedded in the social language of almost every culture, and so her behaviour, her approaches and her sense of self have been shaped by being raised as a Girl Child.

But she's not a Girl Child when she's 25 - she's a young woman, and the behaviour and affect and presentation which was ideal in a girl child is received as inappropriate and aberrant as an adult. Obviously she remembers being socially a Girl Child. She may remember the rules of being a Girl Child - more likely a lot of them have been overwritten by the process of learning how to meet the social role of an adult woman.

(The same is extremely true of boys as well, btw. I focus on feminine socialisation because it's what I have most experience with but boys and men resocialise at several life stages. These cisgender transitions are more obviously marked in cultures with coming-of-age ceremonies, like a naming ceremony or a coming out, but even then I think they tend to largely focus on the earlier transitions and not so much the gender transitions in adulthood, of which there are several)

For the record, this isn't new and it's not originating from transfeminist thinkers. This is what de Beauvoir means when she says "one is not born, but rather becomes, woman"

(de Beauvoir is also not a pure advocate of social construction of gender, she has a lot of evopsych and biological fatalism mixed in there. but the second half of The Second Sex is largely concerned with the socially enforced Ages of Woman - how women are socialised into distinct gender roles dependant on age and stage, and how social behaviour and self-image are reinforced through socialisation)

So like, inevitably the question has to be: we can see that in cisgender people, socialisation is dynamic. We can see that one moves from one gendered social role to another. Why and how would the clock suddenly stop for a Boy Child transitioning into a Young Woman, or for a Middle-Aged Woman transitioning into an Elder Man? By what mechanism could cis people be resocialised frequently throughout their lives based on how they're socially received and how they understand themselves in relation to social mores, where a trans person who both understands themselves and is met as their transitioned gender is fully excluded from that?

It's incoherent. Like it is literally incoherent. This extremely flat and static idea of gendered socialisation is often held up as evidence of why even a cis-passing trans person is existentially Not Their Gender - but that doesn't make sense with how socialisation observably works.

What causes me to be socialised as a woman is

a) that I am received as a woman, and subject to the incentives and disincentives of social behaviour for women

b) that I understand myself as a woman, and reflect and internalise my sense of self through the lens of how women are socially expected to behave

But like. There is no tangible difference between my positionality there and the position of a trans woman. She has past experience of not being socialised as a woman - but so do I.

When I was 10 I was not a woman. I looked at women and tried to learn from outside what a woman is and does, because I had understood myself as a girl who would at some point expect to be a woman, but I wasn't socialised as a woman. I was socialised as a girl. If I behaved and presented as a woman that would have been received as inappropriate, or humorous, or odd, or unacceptable. As a cisgender girl child, womanhood was something I viewed and learnt about from outside, with the potential of moving into it later.

What about being partially or fully socialised as a boy-child or as a man precludes having the same experience? You can learn about it from outside and later resocialise from inside.

One thing I find super objectionable about the acceptance of the TERF definition of gendered socialisation is that I think it makes it way harder to acknowledge the common realities of gender transition.

Which is to say, at risk of starting shit: I think that when they socially transition, trans women are coming from being socialised as male and trans men are coming from being socialised as female. And social transition is very much the same process of gendered resocialisation as most cis people experience in adolescence (and middle age, and old age), which is to say that it's a steep learning curve as you move from watching from outside to trying to navigate a lot of complex unspoken rules.

People undergoing social transitioning - whether from opposite gender socialisation or from child socialisation - often start out struggling with the nuance of when physical or emotional intimacy is and isn't appropriate; of the social behaviours that are suitable for spheres they were previously excluded from; of the very fine detail of social mores and expectations that go unspoken and look effortless from outside. We carry in the rules we've previously learnt were correct, cause we have to behave in some way, and there's a years-long process of learning where they still apply and where they've changed with our positionality. It does take a long time, and the process of trying to realign how you move through the world is frequently hurtful, embarrassing, awkward, neurotic, and super super super exhausting and frustrating. You know that you already are the thing you're striving to become but you still seem to be doing it wrong. And it often feels like that for years. I mean socialisation is a constant process but over time you settle yourself into it - you largely learn your end and get on an even footing with your peers, and if the rules or your positionality changes you have a bit more solid footing to adjust to it.

But I really don't know what you'd call the process by which this social transition happens if not gendered socialisation. It's the combination of how you're socially recieved and how your sense of self is filtered through the lens of social experience.

A common response to the TERF version of gendered socialisation is that you're not socialised as male if you understand yourself to be female, and vice versa. To a degree that's true, but socialisation isn't a binary state.

Simplifying - socialisation consists of both a) how others see you and b) how you reflect your social surroundings in how you see yourself.

If you understand yourself as a girl, but you are understood and treated as a boy, that does impact your social experience. You are punished for expressing feminine behaviour as a boy, and behaviours and affects which would be encouraged in children seen as girls are punished in children seen as boys (and vice versa). That does affect your sense of self - not necessarily in that you accept that you're a boy, but that you accept that you're a girl who's treated as a boy and will be punished and rewarded in line with how boys are meant to socially move through the world.

The thing is that doesn't say anything about your innate reality. It says something about social survivability. Socialisation is how we learn to navigate and survive a social world. It teaches you what parts of yourself will be accepted and what has to be managed or suppressed in order to maintain social safety and support.

The worst thing about the TERF conception of socialisation is that it's flattened down to an innate trait about you. A True And Unchangeable Fact. In this conceptualisation, saying 'you have male socialisation' and saying 'you are innately male and always have been' are the same sentence. But this is so fundamentally at odds with what socialisation actually is that it makes me see stars.

Socialisation isn't about a static fundamental self, it's the method by which we learn what will be welcomed and what will put us in social danger. The lens we view ourselves through is also shaped by that - if I act in a way that is socially unacceptable for a woman, not only am I in danger but it's something Wrong About Me. If I'm trying to understand who I am and who I should be, I necessarily reference my social experience and conditioning - but socialisation is the lens, not the object.

I filter my view of myself through someone who both is a woman and moves through the world as a woman - I reference myself against it. Sometimes I say 'this thing about me is wrong, it doesn't fit the social schema of womanhood' and sometimes I say 'I'm like this and it's not in the social script for a woman but I am a woman so it's a thing women can be.'

that's more complicated obviously if you both know you're a woman and know you're being recieved as a man. But this is also where we need to acknowledge that socialisation is complicated and intersectional, and that agreeing with how you're seen isn't a necessary component of socialisation.

Especially when it comes to socialisation as a member of an underclass - socialisation as female, as gay, as Black or racialised, as working class, etc, how socialisation shapes our internal sense of self is often through direct conflict.

In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon talks at length about this process - about how he as a Black child was socialised to understand Black and Creole people as inhuman and threatening and White French people as human and innocent, and the ways that being socialised to behave as if these things are true creates enormous internal conflict and a fractured sense of self against a lives experience of being a human and vulnerable and intellectually complete person who is under regular threat from white people.

de Beauvoir pulls out something similar about womanhood - a woman is socialised to perform and understand herself in reference to the idea that women are unpeople, incapable of independent thought and human feeling. But a woman also necessarily understands herself as a person with thoughts and feelings. Her internal sense of self is therefore structured around the impossibility of being what she's socialised to be. As with Fanon, there's a fracturing sense of self, which she can respond to by pushing herself to achieve womanhood, by understanding herself as a failure, or by cognitive dissonance.

What I'm saying is that being Socialised As is not the same thing as internally Experiencing Yourself As. Socialisation is necessarily reactive and mutable and it doesn't necessarily at any point align with your fundamental self.

You can move through the world as Thing A your whole life, and it will shape you and traumatised you but it will not fundamentally stop you being Thing B. But also the fact that you are Thing B will shape your experience of socialising as Thing A.

For this reason, gendered socialisation is a really valuable concept for feminist thinking because a lot of the unequal ways that gendered hierarchies are reified is stuff we learn and reproduce through socialisation, and it's really hard to make sense of without that lens.

but like

a) this only applies to the idea of gendered socialisation which is Socialisation, Specifically Along Gendered Lines, and not to the incoherent transphobic pop definition of gendered socialisation which is a synonym for Inborn Gender That You Can Never Change. (which DOESN'T MAKE SENSE AS A WAY TO DEFINE SOCIALISATION. SOCIALISATION IS A DYNAMIC PROCESS.)

b) once you understand gendered socialisation as a dynamic and ongoing process where all of us resocialise into changing gender roles throughout our lives, the fact that having been socialised as one gender isn't a permanent state makes for some really interesting conversations, because every transition (cisgender transition or transgender transition) is a process of discovery around the invisible ways we actually have been socialised to think and behave. cisgender transitions come at specific points in a person's life and include cultivation towards the next gender stage, so it can muddy the waters, but when people 'jump the tracks' it is really really interesting what comes up through that transition.

eg people who move from being socialised as female to male social experiences often express a lot of shock about the isolation involved, and the ways in which they were previously protected and are now exposed.

people who move from being socialised as male to socialising as female. well. harder for me to unpack that honestly because I've been socialised as female all my life, so what jumps out is that I'm like fuck. wait. that's not a pain or a poor treatment that is universal? that's to do specifically with how people treat women? (I am not a very observant feminist)

if we are serious. about unpacking gendered hierarchy and gendered injustice. I genuinely believe we have to engage with the concept of gendered socialisation and resocialisation. That's one of the best lenses for understanding how misogyny replicates and reifies itself. and we have to be able to do that through a transgender lens.

we don't have to call it gendered socialisation if that term's been too poisoned by the absolute nonsense version spouted by TERFs.

I don't like ceding the word, because their definition is obviously and transparently Not What The Fuck Socialisation Means. but if we can replace it with an alternative that keeps a clear meaning I will stop using it. so far I haven't come up with one though so I keep using socialisation which does make me worry about being misinterpreted also because obviously the offensive nonsense definition is the one with broad traction. So maybe I need to stop digging my heels in on this.

But I do think it's important to acknowledge a) that trans people's behaviour and sense of self is inevitably affected by how people gender them and respond to them b) that this can change over time as people move into different genders positionalities c) that gendered resocialisation is a learning process which d) everyone regardless of transness goes through to some degree and which e) teaches us to navigate and reproduce invisible and unacknowledged mores which we, as people sharing a given class identity in a given culture, reflexively understand unprompted and could not explain or define in words.

meanwhile, trans women are almost exclusively framed as middle-aged or older. This allows them to be viewed as more mature and cunning compared to younger people. In addition, older women are less likely to fit traditional beauty standards, so this gives them an easier time making a “gross ugly predator” argument.

however, when forced to acknowledge trans people of other age groups, they pretty much stick to the same playbook. Older trans men are no longer treated as pitiable women, but as some sort of gross third gender, similar to trans women. They are considered part of the ring of predators trying to steal your children. And, importantly, are considered ugly. Transitioned trans men are not seen as attractive to “normal” men or women. conversely, young trans women are treated very similar to young trans men. The “they’re trying to cut off your son’s dick” line is well-used. And they are not treated as a weird third gender like adult trans people, and rather are categorized as vulnerable boys being preyed upon by the “actual villains”, adult trans women.

"You don't want to ruin the pastor's reputation over a MISTAKE, do you?"

"You don't want to ruin the lead quarterback's reputation over a MISTAKE, do you?"

"You don't want to ruin your coworker' reputation over a MISTAKE, do you?"

"You don't want to ruin your step parent's reputation over a MISTAKE, do you?"

"You don't want to ruin your teacher's reputation over a MISTAKE, do you?"

"You don't want to ruin this poor, vulnerable trans woman's reputation over a MISTAKE, do you?"

It's the same shit, repackaged, and every single one of us who has been the target of sexual violence has heard it at least once. "You can't punish people forever! It was an accident! It was a mistaaaaake, they didn't meeeean too, you're just eeeeevilllll!"

The punishment, in this case, isn't even jail, it's literally just not having a popular trans voice beg for birthday money on a rapist's behalf. Like, hello? THAT'S worse than death, huh? THAT'S "social lynching," a white woman not having her birthday fundraiser shared? Fuck's sake.

not only is it internally incoherent (in that it posits a very arbitrary stopping point after which I guess how you're socially received and responded ceases to matter at all?)

but also if we accept it as What That Term Means it makes any discussion of socialisation in any context kind of incoherent??

anyway here's my beef.

Socialisation is a process by which social structures are reproduced (a process, which is why 'socialisation' and 'social reproduction' aren't synonyms). It includes both the teaching and the learning of social roles, and it's about how we internalise behaviours and attitudes in response to what's socially incentivised, punished, or idealised.

It's got a lot of components, because it's Basically Everything About How You Move Through A Social World, but some important ones are:

How we respond to others

How others respond to us

The rules and ideas we're taught about what different sorts of people are

The self-image we build out of what people tell us about ourselves

The behaviours that are rewarded or punished

The things that are treated as normal, unusual, or taboo for us to explore

and from that we develop

a) a nuanced sense of self which is in conversation with the social responses we get (doesn't necessarily align with, but is shaped by, how others view us)

b) a complex subconscious understanding of the social rules and behaviours we are expected to follow, which is significantly deeper and denser than what we could verbally explain

The TERF version of gendered socialisation is, effectively, focused on formative training. and that is part of what socialisation is but only a relatively small part. The TERF version is only concerned with external incentives, and it operates from the assumption that you get socialized once, in an extremely consistent way, and it is both time-limited and irreversible.

One way in which this is incoherent is that gendered socialisation isn't a one-and-done.

Cis people, as well as trans people, are resocialised at multiple points in their lives. For example, a lot of the struggle of adolescence is that the gendered behaviours of a child are not acceptable in the gender behaviour of an adult. Similarly, a lot of women at menopause find that behaviours which have previously been rewarded become unacceptable and vice versa, and that the modes of interaction with younger women, peers, young men and men their age have shifted substantially. What it means to be gender-conforming changes over your life (an example might be how hyper-femininity in a little-girl mode can become a nonconformist gender expression in adult women, or how grannies are granted social permission to be much more pragmatic and hands-on without undercutting their womanhood).

Socialisation is a constant process, and as your positionality changes, so does your social experience. A 13 year old girl may know all the spoken social etiquette of being an adult woman; it still takes years of being received and responded to and thinking of herself as a subject of womanhood to start to get a handle on the nuance of navigating the social landscape of womanhood. During that time she will be clumsy, she will over- or under-perform signifiers of womanhood, she will struggle to locate herself within the idea of A Woman, and as a result she'll often be considered awkward or annoying or incomprehensible.

Generally, the teenage girl gets an amount of grace for the fact that this is a socially accepted learning stage. But that doesn't stop her or her peers being neurotically aware of where she's not measuring up, where she's misjudging social cues, and so on.

The teenage girl is being socialised as a woman. It's a new learning process. But that doesn't mean she wasn't subject to gendered socialisation before that! Before she was expected to resocialise as a woman, she was already almost always socialised as a girl child. Even if he parents tried to protect her from it, gender is embedded in the social language of almost every culture, and so her behaviour, her approaches and her sense of self have been shaped by being raised as a Girl Child.

But she's not a Girl Child when she's 25 - she's a young woman, and the behaviour and affect and presentation which was ideal in a girl child is received as inappropriate and aberrant as an adult. Obviously she remembers being socially a Girl Child. She may remember the rules of being a Girl Child - more likely a lot of them have been overwritten by the process of learning how to meet the social role of an adult woman.

(The same is extremely true of boys as well, btw. I focus on feminine socialisation because it's what I have most experience with but boys and men resocialise at several life stages. These cisgender transitions are more obviously marked in cultures with coming-of-age ceremonies, like a naming ceremony or a coming out, but even then I think they tend to largely focus on the earlier transitions and not so much the gender transitions in adulthood, of which there are several)

For the record, this isn't new and it's not originating from transfeminist thinkers. This is what de Beauvoir means when she says "one is not born, but rather becomes, woman"

(de Beauvoir is also not a pure advocate of social construction of gender, she has a lot of evopsych and biological fatalism mixed in there. but the second half of The Second Sex is largely concerned with the socially enforced Ages of Woman - how women are socialised into distinct gender roles dependant on age and stage, and how social behaviour and self-image are reinforced through socialisation)

So like, inevitably the question has to be: we can see that in cisgender people, socialisation is dynamic. We can see that one moves from one gendered social role to another. Why and how would the clock suddenly stop for a Boy Child transitioning into a Young Woman, or for a Middle-Aged Woman transitioning into an Elder Man? By what mechanism could cis people be resocialised frequently throughout their lives based on how they're socially received and how they understand themselves in relation to social mores, where a trans person who both understands themselves and is met as their transitioned gender is fully excluded from that?

It's incoherent. Like it is literally incoherent. This extremely flat and static idea of gendered socialisation is often held up as evidence of why even a cis-passing trans person is existentially Not Their Gender - but that doesn't make sense with how socialisation observably works.

What causes me to be socialised as a woman is

a) that I am received as a woman, and subject to the incentives and disincentives of social behaviour for women

b) that I understand myself as a woman, and reflect and internalise my sense of self through the lens of how women are socially expected to behave

But like. There is no tangible difference between my positionality there and the position of a trans woman. She has past experience of not being socialised as a woman - but so do I.

When I was 10 I was not a woman. I looked at women and tried to learn from outside what a woman is and does, because I had understood myself as a girl who would at some point expect to be a woman, but I wasn't socialised as a woman. I was socialised as a girl. If I behaved and presented as a woman that would have been received as inappropriate, or humorous, or odd, or unacceptable. As a cisgender girl child, womanhood was something I viewed and learnt about from outside, with the potential of moving into it later.

What about being partially or fully socialised as a boy-child or as a man precludes having the same experience? You can learn about it from outside and later resocialise from inside.

One thing I find super objectionable about the acceptance of the TERF definition of gendered socialisation is that I think it makes it way harder to acknowledge the common realities of gender transition.

Which is to say, at risk of starting shit: I think that when they socially transition, trans women are coming from being socialised as male and trans men are coming from being socialised as female. And social transition is very much the same process of gendered resocialisation as most cis people experience in adolescence (and middle age, and old age), which is to say that it's a steep learning curve as you move from watching from outside to trying to navigate a lot of complex unspoken rules.

People undergoing social transitioning - whether from opposite gender socialisation or from child socialisation - often start out struggling with the nuance of when physical or emotional intimacy is and isn't appropriate; of the social behaviours that are suitable for spheres they were previously excluded from; of the very fine detail of social mores and expectations that go unspoken and look effortless from outside. We carry in the rules we've previously learnt were correct, cause we have to behave in some way, and there's a years-long process of learning where they still apply and where they've changed with our positionality. It does take a long time, and the process of trying to realign how you move through the world is frequently hurtful, embarrassing, awkward, neurotic, and super super super exhausting and frustrating. You know that you already are the thing you're striving to become but you still seem to be doing it wrong. And it often feels like that for years. I mean socialisation is a constant process but over time you settle yourself into it - you largely learn your end and get on an even footing with your peers, and if the rules or your positionality changes you have a bit more solid footing to adjust to it.

But I really don't know what you'd call the process by which this social transition happens if not gendered socialisation. It's the combination of how you're socially recieved and how your sense of self is filtered through the lens of social experience.

A common response to the TERF version of gendered socialisation is that you're not socialised as male if you understand yourself to be female, and vice versa. To a degree that's true, but socialisation isn't a binary state.

Simplifying - socialisation consists of both a) how others see you and b) how you reflect your social surroundings in how you see yourself.

If you understand yourself as a girl, but you are understood and treated as a boy, that does impact your social experience. You are punished for expressing feminine behaviour as a boy, and behaviours and affects which would be encouraged in children seen as girls are punished in children seen as boys (and vice versa). That does affect your sense of self - not necessarily in that you accept that you're a boy, but that you accept that you're a girl who's treated as a boy and will be punished and rewarded in line with how boys are meant to socially move through the world.

The thing is that doesn't say anything about your innate reality. It says something about social survivability. Socialisation is how we learn to navigate and survive a social world. It teaches you what parts of yourself will be accepted and what has to be managed or suppressed in order to maintain social safety and support.

The worst thing about the TERF conception of socialisation is that it's flattened down to an innate trait about you. A True And Unchangeable Fact. In this conceptualisation, saying 'you have male socialisation' and saying 'you are innately male and always have been' are the same sentence. But this is so fundamentally at odds with what socialisation actually is that it makes me see stars.

Socialisation isn't about a static fundamental self, it's the method by which we learn what will be welcomed and what will put us in social danger. The lens we view ourselves through is also shaped by that - if I act in a way that is socially unacceptable for a woman, not only am I in danger but it's something Wrong About Me. If I'm trying to understand who I am and who I should be, I necessarily reference my social experience and conditioning - but socialisation is the lens, not the object.

I filter my view of myself through someone who both is a woman and moves through the world as a woman - I reference myself against it. Sometimes I say 'this thing about me is wrong, it doesn't fit the social schema of womanhood' and sometimes I say 'I'm like this and it's not in the social script for a woman but I am a woman so it's a thing women can be.'

that's more complicated obviously if you both know you're a woman and know you're being recieved as a man. But this is also where we need to acknowledge that socialisation is complicated and intersectional, and that agreeing with how you're seen isn't a necessary component of socialisation.

Especially when it comes to socialisation as a member of an underclass - socialisation as female, as gay, as Black or racialised, as working class, etc, how socialisation shapes our internal sense of self is often through direct conflict.

In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon talks at length about this process - about how he as a Black child was socialised to understand Black and Creole people as inhuman and threatening and White French people as human and innocent, and the ways that being socialised to behave as if these things are true creates enormous internal conflict and a fractured sense of self against a lives experience of being a human and vulnerable and intellectually complete person who is under regular threat from white people.

de Beauvoir pulls out something similar about womanhood - a woman is socialised to perform and understand herself in reference to the idea that women are unpeople, incapable of independent thought and human feeling. But a woman also necessarily understands herself as a person with thoughts and feelings. Her internal sense of self is therefore structured around the impossibility of being what she's socialised to be. As with Fanon, there's a fracturing sense of self, which she can respond to by pushing herself to achieve womanhood, by understanding herself as a failure, or by cognitive dissonance.

What I'm saying is that being Socialised As is not the same thing as internally Experiencing Yourself As. Socialisation is necessarily reactive and mutable and it doesn't necessarily at any point align with your fundamental self.

You can move through the world as Thing A your whole life, and it will shape you and traumatised you but it will not fundamentally stop you being Thing B. But also the fact that you are Thing B will shape your experience of socialising as Thing A.

This is transandrophobia.

Ough, yeah, if you actually read up on the history of the term [link], it has never been specific to trans women. In fact, its origins are completely unknown - trans & gender diverse people of all kinds have been using it for years.

It's always been about "coming out of your shell", about growing into what you're meant to be, hatching out of the embryo stage.

The "chick" definition was just a fun add on that trans women were using within their own circles, and instead of remaining silly wordplay, it got twisted by transandrophobes and exorsexists into...whatever this nonsense is.

Today is Lou Sullivan's birthday

actually adding my tags. ik op also talked about Stormé in the notes but like. i really do find it so frustrating how he has been completely neglected as a historical figure. to the point where there's a lot of people who will, when talking about the erasure of Black trans people from Stonewall history, will immediately jump to talking about Marsha P. Johnson (who, while a vital figure in US queer history who deserves the attention she has started to receive from the community, did not start the uprising and arrived to them later) and continue to credit her with "throwing the first shotglass." but they don't even know who Stormé is, despite again, it being at the very least equally if not more likely she was actually involved with sparking the uprising.

and its even more frustrating because part of the reason its likely isn't just Stormé's own recollection, but because there are other reports that the uprising was kicked off when the cops arrested, specifically, a person seen as female who was wearing male clothing and was being violently arrested for FTM crossdressing. FTM activists were trying to raise awareness about this in 1989. like people specifically saw (even if it wasn't Stormé) a butch dyke getting arrested explicitly for wearing too many men's clothes and not enough women's clothes.

and yet, no one ever. fucking talks about this. no one who specifically is trying to talk about the erasure of trans people from queer activism mentions this. and we should all be asking, ourselves and each other, why? a lot of people don't want to have this conversation because it asks a lot of us, but that's exactly why its so vital to have responsibly.

Stonewall is as much myth as it is historical event, especially at this point in time. and how we choose to narrate it matters, even though we (should) all know that we will never know the full exact story, nor do we need to because, again, much of its importance is serving as a grounded myth of the birth of organized queer resistance in the US. And the fact is, there is every reason for us to tell a version of this myth which highlights that the inciting moment for queer people being fucking done with the constant acts of violence, was a mixed Black transmasc woman, a drag king who identified as a transgender warrior in Leslie Feinberg's book of that name, being violently arrested for his transmasculine presentation.

and not only is that not the version we tell, there's often no trace of transmasculinity at all in how we remember Stonewall or any queer historical events. & op is so. so incredibly right in prompting people to critically examine that absence. because i do believe if Stormé was a femme lesbian, people would be a lot more invested in making sure people know about the lesbian woman who started Stonewall. almost like, on an unconscious collective level, we see transmasculine figures as undesirable when it comes to being community icons, martyrs, heroes, theorists, creatives, etc.

anyways, for those curious, here's Stormé's recollection of Stonewall, from this interview:

The conversation turned to the night in June of 1969 at the Stonewall Inn where she made history. Quite a few friends, writers and historians over the years have identified her as the tough cross-dressing butch lesbian who was clubbed by the NYPD, which evoked enough indignation and anger to spur the crowd to action. She was identified as the Stonewall Lesbian in Charles Kaiser’s book The Gay Metropolis, and her scuffle with the police has been mentioned a few times in passing by The New York Times in the past couple of decades. Then in the January 2008 issue of Curve Magazine she identified herself as the Stonewall Lesbian in a detailed interview with writer Patrick Hinds, an excerpt of which is below: I asked her if she still remembered that night. She answered in the affirmative. After the cop hit her on the head, she socked him with her fist. “I hit him,” she said. “He was bleeding.” A natural protector, she has worked as a security guard at a few of the lesbian bars in the city. I spoke to her friend, Lisa Cannistraci, who has known her for around 25 years. Now one of the owners of lesbian bar Henrietta Hudson, Cannistraci said that DeLarverie worked as a security guard at the original Cubby Hole, located at 438 Hudson Street, starting in 1985. Cubby Hole eventually moved to the corner of West 4th and West 12th. Then Henrietta Hudson opened at the 438 Hudson Street location, and DeLarverie continued working there until 2005. “Until she was 85 years old?” I asked her. Cannistraci said yes.

also, just to drive home the point, the community ignoring Stormé was not a harmless act. he developed dementia later in life and did not receive the support that she fucking deserved from the community:

In March, Farrell, who lived next door to DeLarverie at the Hotel Chelsea, found DeLarverie disoriented and, uncharacteristically, asking for help. DeLarverie was shaking and dehydrated, and she was taken to and treated at the nearby St. Vincent’s Hospital. No next of kin has been located, and she no domestic partner. Friends say that she had a long term relationship with an aerialist and burlesque performer, but that was “a long time ago.” With no one in her life legally able to make health care decisions, she was given a court appointed a guardian: the Jewish Association for Services for the Aged (“JASA”). She remained at the hospital as doctors ascertained her ability to care for herself. When St. Vincent’s went bankrupt and closed abruptly, she was transferred to the nursing home. SAGE, an advocacy group for elderly members of the LGBT community, has also been offering assistance. Her friends say that communication with the aforementioned groups has been inadequate and a source of frustration, and they feel powerless to improve her situation. [...] DeLarverie continued emceeing and singing after Stonewall — at gay events and at benefits. Her friend Williamson Henderson, President of the S.V.A., told me that she hosted an annual gay nightlife event, The Gay Bar People’s Ball, where all of the movers and shakers of NYC gay nightlife would congregate and receive awards. “It was an event that was well known and a big deal,” he said. In Sam Bassett’s film, DeLarverie said that she continued to sing at benefits for battered women and children, remarking “Somebody has to care. People say, ‘Why do you still do that?’ I said, ‘It’s very simple. If people didn’t care about me when I was growing up, with my mother being black, raised in the south.’ I said, ‘I wouldn’t be here.'” What does the future hold for DeLarverie? Cannistraci told me that she is currently in the process of petitioning for legal guardianship of DeLarverie and hopes to move her into a brighter, more modern nursing home with a larger staff and activities for the residents — and one where a friend of DeLarverie’s already resides. “She was a protector of the community, and [her situation] is heartbreaking,” she said. [...] DeLarverie’s situation is, unfortunately, not unique, and it highlights some of the issues faced by gay and lesbian seniors. It is unclear whether DeLarverie has no surviving family members or whether she has surviving family members but simply lost touch with them over the years. Many elders become isolated from their families, either because of family disapproval or because they moved away from their families to a big city with a large gay and lesbian population, thereby becoming out of sight and out of mind. If they do end up in a retirement home or nursing home, there is also the issue of whether other residents will have a problem with their sexual orientation. Furthermore, in many states, same-sex partners cannot be legally bound, and if there is no next of kin, one can end up being a ward of the state. If the Rosa Parks of the gay community can end up in a nursing home among strangers like other forgotten elderly men and women, it is certainly a wake up call.

^^^ all of this + Gavin Grimm not only did that, but he didn't benefit basically at all. he graduated before the case was decided, and he only got $1 from it. Gavin was left traumatized and poor and has since struggled with housing. And I personally have never heard his name mentioned in discussions of vital modern trans activists in the US. Sounds familiar, doesn't it? Fuck, I've barely heard his name ever, and I'm a queer from the DMV (region in the northeast USA) who has been pretty involved in my local queer community, so there's really no excuse.

You can still donate to his GoFundMe if you'd like. From this article:

As Donald Trump rolled back LGBTQ+ rights, including banning trans servicemembers from the military and authorizing homeless shelters to exclude trans people, Grimm won repeated court victories. But his school district appealed. One court of appeals judge compared Grimm to the historic American plaintiffs who challenged slavery, Japanese concentration camps, segregation and bans on interracial and gay marriage. A 2020 ruling offered a “resounding yes” in favor of the constitution and civil rights laws protecting trans students from discrimination. Grimm graduated before the case was resolved and never got to return to his school’s boys’ bathrooms. In 2021, the supreme court allowed Grimm’s victory to stand, and the school board was ordered to pay $1.3m in attorney’s fees. Grimm, however, only got a symbolic $1. To secure damages, Grimm would’ve had to give the opposition’s lawyers access to his medical records to scrutinize the cause and extent of his emotional distress, a process he couldn’t stomach after years of fighting. The idea he’d have to prove his anguish was unbelievable to his mom, who can’t shake the memories of her son becoming suicidal. Grimm doesn’t regret moving on without damages. But he desperately could’ve used financial help – especially as the trauma of his childhood began to catch up with him. [...]

while we're here, might as well add on that not only was the Stonewall Uprising likely kicked off by a transmasculine person resisting state violence because of their masculine presentation, but the transmasculine people & other queer (perceived-)women of the nearby Women's House of Detention rioted in solidarity:

"The House of D [was] 500 feet from the Stonewall Inn," Ryan says. "On the first night of the riots, people incarcerated in the prison could actually see what was happening out their windows, and they started a riot all their own, setting fire to their belongings and throwing them down to the streets below while chanting 'Gay rights! Gay rights! Gay rights!'" By the '50s and '60s, Ryan estimates, "around 75% of the people incarcerated in the House of D are queer in some way." In the 1960s, the prison began marking gay prisoners with a "D" for "degenerate," and placing them into solitary confinement because they were considered a "danger to other women."

Nobody listens to trans men + how the demonization of masculinity harms trans people.

Getting misgendered in the news, if they even make it that far.

My friend Lucas Redbeard was shot last month and at first, they didnt even report his name.

An independent journalist from another state (PGH Lesbian) had to be the ones to make the connection.

I knew him on Threads, he invited us to his property once. He posted often.

I didnt find out he had died until three WEEKS later.