Because I was now a man, I could not speak about what it was like to be a woman. Because I had been a woman, I could never really speak about what it was like to be a man. Do the math: I could not speak. It was a double erasure, a double bind, in which every experience I had was false, and so nothing I said was credible. I could no longer derive authority from my experiences before transition, and shouldn’t even cite them — I had never “really” been a woman, so those things hadn’t happened — but those experiences could always be weaponized against me to prove I wasn’t “really” the man I claimed to be. They call it erasure, when this happens. I wasn’t prepared for how literal the term was. Every day, I could feel myself disappear.
— Eraserhead: On writer's block and being a gender traitor by Jude Doyle
There are many good paragraphs but this stuck out the most:
"If “man” and “woman” are opposed and mutually exclusive categories, if men can only ever be predators and women can only ever be prey, then trans men can’t exist. We are logically impossible under the terms of the current system. You either “treat us like men” by voiding out half our lives, or you write us back into womanhood by denying our male identities. I knew all that, at least in theory, but when I came out, I actually saw my life story disappearing into other people’s blind spots. I watched myself become unthinkable in real time."
Also these:
"This wasn’t about accountability. This was people tactically forgetting my entire life,including incidents from my life they had personally witnessed or been involved in, so that they could shame me for transitioning. It was bad for me to be a man; if I was a man, I was a bad man, I was all the worst things men are. I was hulking, I was threatening, I was predatory, I was violent."
"I was treated as both genders, but only the most monstrous stereotype of each one."
Because that is exactly it. Anti-transmasculinity is being both erased and vilified, and then gaslit out of speaking about those experiences by the people who are erasing and vilifying you.
This resonated:
"The idea that I had always occupied a privileged position within patriarchy was, frankly, untrue; nor did it seem to me that a trans person was any less gender-marginalized than your average cis woman. What privilege I had was conditional, and these books were no guide. Men who wanted to “forge a positive masculinity” (and everyone was very clear that I needed one of those) were encouraged to get in touch with their “feminine sides.” Maybe that was healthy for cis guys, but I had been forced to do feminine things, and present in feminine ways, for the entirety of my young life. Whatever liberation I had achieved came from giving myself permission to stop."
As did the ending:
"When I write these days, I try to remind myself that whatever I’m afraid of saying is already true, and denial will not change it. I remind myself that the wrong people benefit from my silence, and will use it to write a version of my life I can’t recognize, or just write me out of the world. There is no established story or role for me; I belong to a category the world is still learning to imagine. I cannot account for the world as other people imagine it. I cannot give you every man’s story, every trans man’s story, every trans person’s story; I don't know them. What I do know is that every new story helps map the territory. All I can do for you, from where I'm standing, is tell you how things are."
