the thing about "trans guys have it easier" is that when you look into it its really more of a folk myth than anything. people come up with all sorts of stories to explain this "fact." people will tell you that people seen as men are gender-policed much more harshly than people seen as women and every little deviation towards femininity is noticed and punished, and that's why trans guys have it easier. but you'll also hear people tell you that people seen as men have so much more wiggle room, men can be all kinds of sizes and shapes meanwhile people seen as women have to fit into this tiny little box, and that's why trans guys have it easier.
these are two entirely contradictory lines of logic, but they lead to the same conclusion. because the conclusion is the point. its a backformed theory of gender. people believe, for whatever reason, that "trans guys have it easier" is an objective fact, and then storytell an explanation for why that is that sounds right to them. and this isn't necessarily something that's done maliciously, which is key. its not about people twiddling their fingers and thinking about how to contribute to a massive conspiracy against transmascs. its about people just feeling, on a gut level, that trans guys must have it easier, by which they really mean, transmasculine suffering isn't socially visible, and it isn't natural for me to imagine it, therefore it must not exist; yet, trans suffering in general clearly exists, so there must be some reason that transmasculine suffering feels so abstract and immaterial to me and others.
this is why anti-transmasculinity theory is so important. all kinds of people come to this conclusion, and the best explanation for why this strange thing happens and why no one talks about it is anti-transmasculinity & erasure as a social force which people internalize.
also note that both lines of logic above come from trying to use traditional cisfeminist thinking to make sense of transmasculine experiences.
even though the explanations are entirely flipped (one relies on male gender performance being highly policed and that affecting trans people assigned male more than those assigned female, the other relies on female gender performance being highly policed and that affecting trans people transitioning towards femininity more than those transitioning towards masculinity), they are both trying to take the model of "women suffer because they are women and men benefit because they are men" and contort it to explain transmasculine experiences.
this is why these explanations make very little sense when you really look at them. when you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail; when you can only analyze gender through a cissexist lens, everything looks fundamentally cis.
cisfeminism struggles greatly to actually deal with social hatred for androgyny and intersexuality and transness, because you can make feminist arguments and feminist theory that can explain many (though clearly not all) women's experiences without ever questioning the binary.
but you fundamentally cannot do that for trans (especially nonbinary) people or intersex people, and so the framework has to bend and break itself into a contradictory and often reactionary mess in order to try and explain our experiences without giving up the binary. once again, y'all are always on that damn exorsexism and it makes your feminism shitty!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
gonna add my definition of cissexism from the notes here:
"cissexism it is the ideology which promotes the beliefs of:
gender being an oppositional binary between men and women,
gender being inherent/objective/unchanging,
people of certain genders having certain innate traits,
gender (identity/performance) should/must be socially and institutionally policed, and
cis people's experiences of gender are the most real and important and that trans experiences of gender must be able to be put into the boxes used by cis people in order to be real or meaningful.
"trans men have it easier than trans women because [cis] men of other marginalized groups have it easier than [cis] women" is an example of cissexism as it assumes that, amongst other things, trans men are an intersection of some vague "transness" and "manhood" as defined by cis men's experience with manhood, as opposed to being a socially unique gender position under patriarchy."
(note: I mostly left out intersex people from this definition because there exists the term "intersexism" for a reason. while both forms of sexism build off each other, & fundamentally cissexism is intersexist and intersexism is cissexist, i don't think its actually helpful, as an intersex person, to use any term (cissexism or exorsexism) that is primarily used by trans people to describe non-intersex-related trans issues, to describe intersex issues. intersexism is far more than one or two lone bullet points in a definition otherwise focused on gender and trans people as a group (including the majority of perisex trans people) and everyone should learn more about intersex activism and intersex terminology rather than simply trying to make intersex people a small part of terms and concepts that are not centering us when we desperately need that. sex and gender are constructs defined by each other but it is still useful to understand how they differ, especially when intersex people are constantly made into a side note on trans issues and people think that being a good trans ally automatically means you are a good intersex ally. tl;dr cissexism is inherently intersexist but that doesn't mean cissexism should be used to describe intersexism; instead we should talk about both and the inherent connective tissue that links them.)
