the thing about the concept of gendered socialization is that so many people use it as like another kind of gender essentialism. you know it's not an immutable trait right. you can literally overcome it.
"i'm like this because women are socialized to be shy and quiet and subservient" okay good on you for recognizing it, but that's only the very first step. the next few steps are that you Stop Doing It. feminist thought vs feminist action.
and when ppl see a trans woman being confident and unafraid to take up space and decide it's because of her evil evil male socialization, i'm always like "wait you're saying this woman was raised as a child to be loud and confident and take up space? that's awesome, i thought that's how we WANTED people to raise girls? why exactly is it a problem now? 🤔"
like WHY are you telling trans women that they literally have to make themselves smaller and conform to the WORST gender exceptations of women to be seen as real women. since when is it evil and masculine to be confident, i thought we were supposed to be doing that. i thought that was feminism.
They also treat socialisation as some indelible artefact of the past, not an ongoing process. Women aren't just more shy and cautious on average because they were taught that as small children; they're like that because of the environment they're still in at forty or fifty. It's not some irremovable childhood brainwashing, it's a reasonable reaction to current circumstances. A great many trans women become more shy and quieter after coming out or transitioning because the people around them socially punish them for not doing so, same as previously shy and quiet cis women become more confident and take up more space when put in environments that don't punish them for it. They act like someone's personality and behaviour are branded into them based on whether they have a penis at eight years old, but that is simply not the case.
Whenever I see people who are like "trans women are all loud and aggressive and uncouth (/negative)" I automatically think "do you think black women are all loud and aggressive and uncouth (/negative) too? Because that's what you sound like. You sound like someone who met two or three women from an oppressed minority that were more confident than you wanted them to be, and decided that the whole demographic was beneath you in a different way for daring to not stay in their place."
