yikes

Simply not mentioning trans women (when the conversation is explicitly about someone else) can be seen as transmisogynistic. I’m someone who is trying to approach this diplomatically, who genuinely wants to make sure I’m not putting down the trans women in my life. At this point I’m resigned to the way that I’m going to have to keep centering someone else in order to reassure and reach the broader community when talking about what I face.

Then realizing that is exactly how I felt before transitioning when I was in misogynistic spaces

and then you grow up to be a trans man and people will say to you “oh i thought you wanted to be a man, that means you have to put up with [abusive behavior]”

“Tme’s” chose labels for fun” ???? okay first. They’re totally talking about cis men and cis women totallyyyy totallyyyyyy tme totally isn’t just a word for trans men

> socialization theory is bioessentialist!

No, its the opposite, nature vs nurture. It states that gender roles and expectations are socially imposed, not biological or innate.

> socialization theory implies all people were raised exactly the same way with no nuance!

No, the fact that socialization varies based on time, place, culture, etc is key to the framework

> Socialization theory implies that people can never unlearn the roles they were forced into!

No, people are constantly being socialized 24/7 and socialization changes and evolves over time. One can learn to question or resist socialization

> I can't have been male / female socialized because I was punished for not fitting into those gender roles!

Yes, the punishment of gender nonconformity is a key part of socialization. Enforcing gender roles is like the whole point

> I can't have been male / female socialized because it traumatized me!

Yeah, socialization is often traumatic.

> I can't have been male/ female socialized because everyone could secretly detect my innate male / female essence!

This is unfalsifiable because the concept of a gendered soul or essence is a spiritual / metaphysical belief, but even if that were the case - again, punishing people who don't conform is the whole point. That's still socialization

> I can't have been socialized because I resisted all socialization by being trans / queer / marginalized!

I always thought that the justification for making sweeping negative generalizations about men was their disproportionately high rates of violence, murder, sexual assault, abuse, coercion, harassment, objectification, belittling and overall disenfranchisement of women on a systemic scale.

They talk down to and over us, insist that we are not reliable or trustworthy narrators of our own lives and experiences, reduce us to our genitals constantly (theyFAB, heFAB, pooners, etc., essentially dogwhistling at us being fundamentally unserious cis women larping transness, all while claiming that we are actually the ones doing it to ourselves by "clinging" to our "afab wombyness" for daring to acknowledge that having been coercively assigned "female" against our will continuously affects our lives, yes, even if we come out and transition) and only pretend to view us as actual men when it's rhetorically convenient to frame us as oppressors, with all of the power and privilege that cis men have, regardless of whether or not we have only ever been on the receiving end of misogynistic abuse, or are even perceived and taken seriously as men in our real lives.

It's plain to see that many transfeminist trans women subconsciously believe that anyone born with a vagina is incapable of the same depth of interiority they possess, that our mistreatment, our dysphoria, our systemic erasure and silencing, our suffering are of inherently lesser importance or even altogether non-existent due to our lack of a penis, and there is no incentive to unpack that deeply-ingrained sexism because "cis women are misogynistic too", which is certainly true, but doesn't really excuse or explain away the fact that the specific ways in which we are condescended to, mocked and policed by some of these women very closely resemble the way cis men have spoken to us our entire lives.

I avoid online trans spaces as much as possible these days because nothing has made me more dysphoric or uncomfortable with other trans people, including pick-tme trans men, than being incessantly barraged with rhetoric about how we are innately less trans, and less so our gender than trans women are, how we "don't even try" or "don't even want to be" men unless our highest aspiration is to look like a caricature of a cishet gymbro, revise our own histories for their comfort, "take accountability for" and die on the cross for the sins of cis men (who they rarely even mention, despite being the ones responsible for the vast majority of transphobic violence).

It just feels hopeless. No matter what we do, our natal genitalia will always be thrown in our faces to paint us as innately unserious, hysterical, whiny, bitchy, "pretending" to be oppressed, and so on.