as a non-binary TME person i used to think what i wanted out of gender was the shock you were talking earlier about, but the more i study transfeminism the more i realise i want away that shock too. i want to be genderless, not in a "transgressive" way. i often describe it as how kids are kids first and their gender secondly (which is a privileged view in itself but i thats a tangent of the conversation). i want that and i want to have no second. i dont want my masculinity nor my femininity to be seen as a proof of one or either. i want people to get to choose that for themselves. in some way im still stuck on whether that goal is consistent with my transfeminism or not. is it achievable? is it desirable? is my privilege blinding me to ways it would harm other people?
on a different note, I wanna know if you think there is any particular reason tme trans people see themselves as trans first and men/masculine second? i remember a long time ago seeing trans men say they felt as if they were "trans women" before coming to terms with their identity because they didn't get particular dissatisfaction from being women but from being cis, but i dont think i ever saw the inverse
my current running theory is that for a lot of them it's about their subconscious sex much more than their intrinsic gender, as in, they primarily want their bodies to look like ours. so they see trans women and they think we have everything they want: the body they want and the ability to dress it any which way while still being read as, in their eyes, "male." living in the same transmisogynistic society as the rest of us, they see our womanhood as superficial and unimportant, a thin coat of paint slapped over what we ~really~ are. and they want to be what we ~really~ are, thinking that being labeled as a woman doesn't really mean all that much anyway for us
this, I think, is a part of the danger of reducing gender to a game of labels and coats of paint. superficially trans women may appear to have what these men want if they ignore our internality and focus only on the outside. I imagine this is part of the allure of cis male drag queens for them. they envy that, underneath it all, the labels and the clothing and the performance and everything, these people are understood as fundamentally men because of their bodies. they see the prison that traps trans women and they think it's liberation
this is why it's so damn important to understand internality! do I envy trans men for being handed bodies and a perception of womanhood that I have to work toward? sure! but the thing is I don't envy trans manhood itself, because I know that a part of their trans manhood is not wanting that hand of cards they're dealt. to envy trans manhood as a whole would be kind of nonsense, because what I actually want is a card or two from the hand they were dealt, not the whole hand. the whole hand includes a goal card that says "get rid of these other cards"
