long one incoming. so, obviously male socialization is a load of rhetorical bunk. im not really here to relitigate that, but when it comes up it makes me think about my particular upbringing.
throughout my adolescence, me and my brother were always put in opposition to each other. he was always treated as the boy brother and i was the girl brother, so to speak. he was a wannabe man who liked working out and hanging out with the Boys, and i was an obvious effeminate faggot whose stepdad always danced around questioning my sexuality or perceived maleness, he would always say things about "being a man" to me but never my brother, like he knew i was failing it.
anyways, within the household, there was an obvious gender dynamic applied between me and my brother. fundamentally, i got treated as the girl, but without any of the allowance to actually Be the girl. and, to be marxist about it, this was in a large part consistently reproduced through household labor. i was the one expected to do the "inside chores" while he did the "outside chores," and at a certain point in my teen years, my stepdad stopped even bothering asking me to work outside at all, fully making my expected workload to be the cooking and cleaning. and if i did not clean, i was reprimanded in the way of a bad woman, and if my brother didnt mow that week or something it was brushed aside because he was a mans man and the favored sibling as such.
the point is, both in and outside the household, i was not experiencing life being "socially male" and in fact the dynamics within my household specifically were reproducing gendered dynamics where i would be maintained as the woman through feminized domestic labor. because, guess fucking what, as trans women, even before were out, people can notice things about us and act accordingly and we genuinely truly get socially classed as women, and i think my particular experience was starkly important as it raises questions about the labor and domestic processes and the family and how these forces are literally foundational to the maintenance of gender class and its reproduction and how these forces position themselves to transfeminity. these questions which i mull over constantly.
like what do terfs and tme people who dont understand the transfem upbringing want me to fucking say? i got raised within the social class and expectation of woman, and this fundamentally affects my transfeminine experience and the way i move within any given dynamic now. like the expectations of the woman are embedded in me, both in labor and looks.
yes!!!! I had a similar upbringing, marked as the more feminine child in comparison to my other siblings, including my sister. I was treated as a workhorse of domestic labor, one of my main chores being doing all of the laundry (washing, drying (on the clotheslines during warmer months, even though we had a dryer) and sorting and folding for our 6-person household
and I was constantly being punished heavily for minor lapses in upkeep on this. if the washer finished running but I didn't get to it soon enough, I frequently had my phone taken away and frequently was forced to stay isolated in my room and be seen nor heard. large stretches of my childhood were spent with my stepfather not wanting to see me unless I was doing chores and then going straight back to isolate in my room. meanwhile my three siblings, again including my sister, were on much looser leashes, off playing sports and hanging out with friends and then coming home and being treated like people
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