Trans women who present a certain way do it as a form of protection. Girls who are pre transition and still present as ‘masculine’. If someone like myself goes out and wears feminine clothing and/or makeup there’s a good chance i’m going to get harassed or possibly killed. So me refraining from doing so is not because I want to but because i HAVE to for my own safety. This is not “male privilege”. Saying that a marginalized group has privilege by conforming to an enforced societal norm as protection is idiotic. This would be like saying that a cis woman has “make up privilege” because she wears make up to not be ridiculed, brutalized and ostracized in society. It doesn’t make sense. At all.
And then this whole myth of trans women being socialized as male. The first issue is that the only people saying this are people who are NOT trans women. It’s mainly cis women who have no idea about how life is growing up as trans women that legitimately think that a trans woman and a cis man have the same exact experiences growing up. This is a very blatant form of oppression. A group in power assigning a blanket generalization in order to delegitimize the experience of the marginalized and further the violence against them is oppression. A man saying that women are naturally physically weaker for example is a myth created by men as a tool to further oppression. The myth of male socialization works the exact same way. Trans women are telling you our experiences and you are constantly denying them because they do not fit into your preconceived narrative that allows you to continue to contribute and enable our oppression.
This other idea of trans women not really being women because we do not grow up being mocked for our vaginas is utterly juvenile. Women do not have to check a boxes of instances of oppression to be considered women. Not every woman, cis or trans, interacts with patriarchy exactly the same so even implying that if a woman isn’t oppressed in a certain way then they aren’t a woman doesn’t hold weight. A white woman does not go through the same struggles a black woman but that does not erase either group’s womanhood If a woman is never mocked for her looks then is she not a woman? The same concept applies to trans women.
Trans women are not socialized as male. We are socialized as trans women. There are trans women who start presenting at a very young age. I personally know girls who have been on blockers since before they started puberty and have been out since then as well. The other girls who may not have started hormones till later in life or not at all are still not “socialized as male” just the same as a closeted lesbian woman is not “socialized as straight” and doesn’t have straight privilege because she grew up closeted and presented a certain way. A majority of the time trans women are abused for displaying any sort of feminine behaviour in our child hood. These lessons that our fathers and mothers attempt to teach us about “being a man” don’t absorb the same way they do for cis men because we are not men. These lessons only harm us and reinforce the message that we have to be hyper feminine in order to be accepted. Trans women do not interact with cis women even close to the same as cis men. Whenever a trans woman becomes aggressive, particularly if she’s black, a cis woman will say that this aggressiveness is a result of “male socialization” rather than a natural response to oppression. A trans woman getting angry at being called a man, something that gets us killed and keeps our people homeless and in constant danger, is not a result of being “raised as a male” but a result of constantly being exposed to violence for existing.
At the end of the day trans women are constantly being brutalized, disenfranchised and murdered for simply existing. So for self proclaimed feminists and just women in general to ignore this is oppressive. For these women to see this violence and dismiss it and thus promote it is oppressive. For these women to push the idea that trans women are just men in wigs which gets us murdered is oppressive. For these women to allow this extermination of trans lives to happen and not lift finger when one of us has our lives taken because we at trans is oppressive. Implying that a trans woman is trying “infiltrate womanhood” is oppressive. We just want to be able to exist in safety. That’s literally it.
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