Why is it that we always discuss trans men who pass as if they
1. Pass 100% of the time once people start seeing them as masculine. It remains super fucking variable tbfh, me and all the other trans men and mascs I know will get gendered correctly at one interaction and then be promptly called ‘missy’ around the next street corner even when there’s been no change. If I can get called a man at work that doesn’t mean I don’t have coworkers clocking me, it doesn’t mean our customers and clients all see me as a man, and it certainly doesn’t mean that I don’t get repeatedly treated as if I am most certainly NOT a cisgender man. We’ve forgotten, it seems, that there is a difference between passing as a certain gender to strangers a portion of the time and being genuinely stealth in that you’re read as 100% cisgender male 100% of the time, and stealthness is pretty much unacheiveable for the majority of transgender men for a wide variety of reasons. Stealth passing is also NOT AN OPTION FOR ANYONE WHO ISNT TOTALLY BINARY THATS JUST BEING IN A DIFFERENT CLOSET.
2. As if when we DO pass as cisgender men, that we pass as STRAIGHT ones. Almost all the trans men I know, REGARDLESS OF THEIR SEXUALITY, are generally read as queer men when being assumed as men at all. Including myself. And for any transmen and mascs who AREN’T 100% normatively attracted only to heterosexual women (and like, are we forgetting the comments that mixed sex and gender T4T couples get???) then it’s like. Okay so you can attempt to closet your sexuality or just get called a faggot/sissy/etc. just like any other fucking gay guy and for the ones who ARE just binary, perisex, heterosexual and heteroromantic you either get constantly accused of being a gay man or just called a fuckin lesbian if a single little bit of your stealth passing gets found out.
3. Trans men and mascs who do pass, stealth or otherwise, somehow magically are not affected by homophobia and every other piece of hate and prejudice directed towards queer men of all sorts. Trans men and mascs who pass as male but are GNC, who are not straight, who have men or mascs or otherwise NB people as partners, who crossdress or who do drag face the exact same fucking hate that a cisgender AMAB person in those situations face. No one has EVER asked a man they intend to hate crime for being a faggot if they were trans first, nor has a hate crime ever stopped because some one was. It only ever escalates.
Passing as a man in the eyes of the general public only means that I’m treated as a queer man, until I’m clocked or outed, in which case I’m treated as a broken woman.
There’s no such thing as “passing privilege”, because it does not exist in a meaningful way. Your assumption that the cashier calling me “sir” means I am magically immune to transphobia, homophobia, and any other intersecting axis of oppression is childish and WRONG.
