This viewpoint of invisibility as a privilege is a display of one function of antitransmasculinity that rewards people for upholding the idea that most transmasculine people are white, cis-passing, hyper masculine, educated and able-bodied, as these are the only configurations of a transmasculine person that would receive an invisibility that would be more rewarding than it would be isolating and suffocating. [...]
Invisibility as a term for this dynamic is a fallacy in and of itself as what transmasculine people are suffering from is not invisibility, which suggests accident, but is instead deliberate erasure. Trans men, transmasculine people and transmasculinities have historically been intentionally erased (through not just expunging records but by creating new records entirely) explicitly so that violence against this marginalized group can continue to be ignored.
This ignorance creates a dynamic where transmasculine people who actually do rise to any level of power are then made hypervisible (cough, buck angel, cough) and the general perception of a transmasculine person remains an image of a privileged, white, cis passing transsexual, who ‘acknowledges biological reality’, who has lived flawlessly as a man 6 months into t or instead an impressionable young (white) girl who has been infected by a social contagion.
This cycle of highlighting only a few different stereotypes of trans man / transmasculine person further contributes to the erasure and harm done to trans men and transmasculine people who do not fit into those very niche groups that attain all the visibility and are said to represent the entire demographic. This deliberate erasure of the actual majority of trans men and transmasculine people exists primarily so that violence can continue to be enacted against them behind closed doors. It is so often not only transmasculine people themselves that are made invisible, but rather it is anti-transmasc violence, including militant state violence, interpersonal violence and a medical + psychiatric violence, which makes transmasculine people, through a process of essentialization, aggressors without aggression and victims without words.
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