A Few Quotes on Transmasculinity and Feminism
"The Society for Women in Philosophy (Pacific Division) meeting on May 20, 1995, provided the first occasion upon which I presented an academic paper on an overtly transgender topic from an openly ftm subject position. [...] Later that evening, I asked SWIP members who had stayed to share salad, pizza, wine, and conversation if they thought I should continue teaching “Philosophy and Feminism.” I was temporarily reassured to hear the verdict they reached after a long discussion: having seen the world as a woman and as a man, I would have a unique perspective from which to approach the subject. During the fall of 1995, I asked the same question on SWIP-L, an email list. Although there was much that was useful in the ensuing discussions, I met three distinct types of erasure: 1. Responses in which I was classified as still a woman; this was usually accomplished by use of feminine pronouns, sometimes through use of my former name. 2. Responses that invoked oppressive, totalizing, distorting constructions of transsexuality, abundant in medical, psychotherapeutic, social science, and some feminist and critical studies discourses [...] 3. Responses in which my question was figured—reconfigured, that is—as tantamount to asking “Can men be feminists?” Responses to that question I had not asked differed. Some people thought it was a tired old question that feminist philosophers had long since answered or dissolved, others held strong views about how it should be answered, and some proposed conditions under which it would be acceptable for a man to teach a feminism course. It may seem strange that I took the third as an erasure, especially since I took being classified as a woman as an erasure. Leaving aside for a moment the varieties and complexities of ftm self-identifications, embodiments, and subjectivities, as well the problematic assumption that | am or self-identify as a man, one reason I took this as erasing the specificities of my subject position was that the paradigmatic men about whom these questions have been asked, the paradigmatic men whose participation in feminist politics and theorizing has been the site of contestation, are non-transsexual men. The discussion ensuing from this paradigm elided differences between ftms' and non-transsexual men’s relationships: to feminist theory and feminist practice, as well as erasing differences between our relationships to other cultural structures of power, oppression, and regulation. This set of erasures came as no surprise, since it results from a familiar coupling: the bipolar assumption that one who is not a woman must, therefore, be a man, conjoined with the normatively paradigmatic status of non-transgendered people, in—and on—whose terms most feminist, queer, anti-racist, post-colonialist, and other resistant discourses are conducted."
— C. Jacob Hale, "Tracing a Ghostly Memory in My Throat: Reflections on Ftm Feminist Voice and Agency" (2009)
"On one hand, the rhetoric and historical practice of women’s studies as a discipline self-mandates—in the form of a gender-panicked, sometimes tearful plea over “what’s happening to the women of women’s studies”—an unproblematic and unmediated focus on the lives of women where we understand “women” to mean biologically born women. On the other hand, a trans feminist logic necessitates a profound challenge to the ease with which that “woman” is conceptualized and exchanged as an essential truth. Critical trans perspectives should be making it much harder to make truth claims about the universalizability of “women”—experientially or otherwise—without at least using it with much more precision to identify a relation to “woman” no longer reducible to the female body or the nefarious “women’s experiences.” If trans as critical mobilities across or as undoing of categorical terrain (again, not to be reduced to the clinical transsexual body) accomplishes its work, especially in women’s studies, then the universality and territorialization of the term “woman” should be problematized somehow, beyond the additive and tokenistic practice that includes writing “women and trans people” but making no consequential conceptual, curricular, epistemological nomenclatures or modifications day-to-day modus operandi transformations of practice (such as the exclusive use of female pronouns to refer to faculty and students). Doesn’t the gender-panicked imperative to “remember the women” mark an unequivocal gender fundamentalism, where such fundamentalisms themselves—not unlike those of nationalism, military-state, white-supremacist, or Christian, to name only a few—function to ground a feminist imaginary and its methodology of social, moral, and biological coercive normalization."
— Bobby Noble, "Trans. Panic. Some Thoughts toward a Theory of Feminist Fundamentalism" (2012)
"For me, this is ultimately the core tension of transmasculinity. As adamant as some may be, no one’s entirely sure how to relate us back to the male/female paradigm. A few transmasculine theorists, and many more cis female theorists of transness and/or gender nonconformity, have tried to address this over the years, reaching various conclusions. In his 1998 essay “Reading Like a (Transsexual) Man,” Henry Rubin taxonomizes multiple feminist approaches to trans men, which were as present in 1998 as they are now. He criticizes approaches that uphold trans men (“FTMs,” in his words) as feminist subjects due to our essential womanhood and those that reject the potential of trans male feminism due to our status as men. To Rubin, however, this is no different than approaches to cis men’s feminism. He rejects the idea that trans men have in some capacity had female experiences as incompatible with transsexual subjectivity; therefore, as with all men, our reconciliation with feminism is only possible through a feminism that centers action rather than identity. This conception of feminism as something one does, rather than something one is by nature of birth or identification, is of definite value to building solidarity against oppression across genders. And it’s quite possibly the most comforting conclusion for transsexual men, as it allows us manhood without relegating us across enemy lines. But even then there’s something lost by relating us to feminism in the exact way we relate cis men. More recently, in his 2017 article “Trans, Feminism: Or, Reading Like a Depressed Transsexual,” Cameron Awkward-Rich has critiqued Rubin along these lines, noting that alternate conceptions of transness exist beyond “I was always my gender,” and that vehement transmasculine disavowal of female experience tends to reproduce male power over women (what he calls m>f). Unlike Rubin, Awkward-Rich holds that the tension between feminism and transness is ultimately unresolvable, and in fact need not be resolved. He likens this position to a politicized depressive identity, which accepts bad feelings as a neutral part of life rather than a problem to be solved. Feminism and trans studies, he writes, are “in love” insofar as they both want something from each other that the other cannot provide, yet remain in a relationship with one another in the hopes of gaining “something that will ensure [their] own endurance.” Trans men in particular need feminism to understand the harms we experienced for failing to be women, but want from feminism something it can never give us: to be acknowledged as men within a m/f paradigm, without reproducing m>f."
— Noah Zazanis, "On Hating Men (And Becoming One Anyway): Transmasculinity, feminism, and the politics of online" (2019)
"It is just never safe to be trans, no matter how you slice it. It is never safe to be any kind of gender-marginalized person within a patriarchy, and it never will be. That is why it’s imperative for cis feminists to reckon with transmasculinity: People are being exposed to sexist oppression, but left out of the circle of feminist soldarity and concern. You “affirm” our genders by not giving a shit about us, which is not affirming, but, pretty explicitly, punishing somebody for being transgender. And why? Because you don’t want to deal with an extra data point. Because people’s actual oppression matters less than keeping your theory perfectly coherent. And that — I’m sorry — is TERF shit. It’s the core TERF fallacy: People’s experience of gender conflicts with your theory of gender, so you throw out the people and keep the theory."
— Jude Doyle, "Eraserhead" (2024)
"Being treated like an enemy and a traitor because we had the temerity to survive is seemingly one of the core transmasculine experiences. If you can’t deal with that, you can’t deal with us, and you need to deal with us, because we are dying. Trans men are literally dying in the closet, just to prove to you how good they are, how not-toxic and not-sexist and not-selfish they are, how committed they are to "changing womanhood from the inside," how much they care about you and about women and about feminism – they're dying, and they're still trying to keep you comfortable, and you can't be bothered to care about them for one brief second. Take that thought home, sit with it, eat with it, let it sing you to sleep. What does that tell you about who you are?"
— Jude Doyle, "TERFS, Transmascs, and Two Steve Feminism" (2025)
