I hate that people keep pretending that trans men’s being men isn’t related at all to their oppression.
If a trans man weren’t a man, he wouldn’t be trans.
His claiming of man as his gender is the exact thing he is being oppressed for.
This is how intersectionality as a framework is supposed to be used to look at this, not, “man doesn’t add another oppressive force.”
And before I get, “but if man doesn’t add an oppressive force, how can the oppression be intersectional. Isn’t that just transphobia now?”
That’s still a huge misunderstanding of intersectionality, and I’m not sure I’m going to be able to be the one to help here.
But simply, the best try I have, is that the patriarchy and sexism still create something else which oppresses trans men that isn’t “just transphobia”. It targets them specifically for claiming manhood, as well as for anatomy they may have been born with as trans men which society uses to see them as being not men, and social knowledge of them “having been a woman”…
Manhood doesn’t add protection for trans men except in the extreme circumstance of being absolutely stealth (as in you’ve managed to have a life where no one you have to interact with for the rest of your life will ever be able to figure out that you’re trans, and you’ve cut off anyone who knew you pre-transition).
And it fascinates me that people like to claim that non-passingness means that trans men will be seen as precious little girl flowers who are cherished. Because often we have mixed sex characteristics. And intersex people and trans women talk extensively about how having mixed sex characteristics is dangerous. But we’re never thought of as having mixed sex characteristics, only as perfectly stealth or pre-everything. And why is it that stealthing privilege is considered for trans men, but not trans women?
Oh, because women are oppressed anyway so they can’t be safe really? Okay then why are pre-everything trans men so safe? If a person who is assumed a woman is actually a trans man, that’s someone who will be treated as harmless and beautiful, and if that person assumed to be a woman is actually a trans woman, that someone will still be at the mercy of misogynists? How does that work? Are we really doing a fucking “they can always tell”?
Or maybe it’s that a trans man can state that he’s a man and the oppression would stop? I can tell you that the opposite is true; that asserting you’re a man when someone has assumed you’re a woman and is mistreating you for that, only gets you treated worse. And again, why is this something only available to trans men? Can people not lie to try to be safer? Is that not what stealthing and closeting are to a degree?
Anyway, that got a little off the rails from my original point. But it does show the absolute absurdity that you have to accept to disbelieve a marginalized community trying to speak on the oppression they face.
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