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check for information on protests, donations, and other resources worth sharing on palestine and other causes i care about here (sometimes i forget to tag things so there may be more on my blog in general than on the tag alone)

trans men are no different. when transphobes say that we only transition due to internalized misogyny or whatever, the equation going on in their heads is "being a woman objectively sucks, no one would want to be a woman + being a man is objectively better, everyone in their right mind would want to be a man + girls have done boy stuff despite patriarchy since time immemorial, so trans men are on the whole stupid". like nsambu za suekama explained, anti-transmasculinity is the "trojan horse" for transmisogyny. you can't get "so, since you were born a boy, you don't really experience misogyny" without "misogyny defines the experience of girls". the latter sentiment, when taken as "misogyny is intrinsic" instead of "misogyny is imposed", works in combination with masculinity being exclusive to give transphobes the impression that trans men's transness must be contingent on misogyny - since "real men" don't have these problems, our "born womanhood" must be the defining factor of any possible gender-related feeling or decision we could have. this contributes both to our erasure and the vilification of trans women at the same time

the problem is that we're only describing explicit attributions as given, where masculinity is just as much of a given in that it's exclusionary. in other words, we only talk about masculinity in terms of a "real man" rather than everyone who's masculine. additionally, the construction of "woman = victim man = perpetrator" makes it easy to assume that the only way you can talk about oppression is through cultural shorthand designating "oppression" (ie "woman"), it's an acknowledgement of oppression only for the sake of justifying putting people into boxes so they can be easier to understand according to an arbitrary set of rules on how the world "should" work.

this makes it super easy to paint essentialism in seemingly progressive language, such as seeing it as offensive or degrading when women are adjacent to men. is a fujoshi a misogynist/homophobe/transphobe for relating to feminine male ukes over female characters? does a woman have internalized misogyny just because she prefers to wear low-cut tops and have casual sex? is a woman a "pick-me" for preferring to hang out with men? is the archetypical butch/tomboy really intrinsically different from "real men" despite them having the same gender presentation? if she is, is it because she's gentler, kinder, and more thoughtful than "real men"? if she isn't, is that unforgivably terrible? or are women supposed to be pure, weak, and victimized, and men sexual, strong, and threatening, so the power dynamics we're projecting onto these situations are making us uncomfortable?

reducing us to "confused girls" is more than anything binary reification - they care about the idea of a "confused girl" (who more often than not is also white in the western context), not actual trans men, otherwise they'd be making noise about stuff like this. using our birth assignment to explain our oppression primarily on that basis is essentially doing the same thing, especially since a lot of what we get can be easily connected to the flack men who are seen as insufficiently masculine including in terms of appearance get. i'm not saying that what we face has nothing to do with our birth assignment, this is solely about rhetoric/framing. the solution isn't to look at it through what positionality should theoretically indicate, but attribute + positionality. trans men aren't oppressed for being men because cis men aren't oppressed for their gender. we also aren't oppressed for being women because we aren't women. we, like all other marginalized men, are oppressed for being "fake" men. imo anti-transmasculinity is best understood as anti-effeminacy

i'd put it this way: men, masculine people, and people perceived that way are expected to use the "grown man" inside them to suppress their internal "little girl". trans men, being at the very least seen as masculine, are subject to this. because we're also trans, we're at the same time judged on the basis of the harm our "grown man" is perceived as doing to our "little girl". this can function as crocodile tears at the crier's own expectations ("trans men have internalized misogyny") or assumptions of selfishness and arrogance ("trans men are misogynists") because "grown man harming a little girl" is culturally coded as the epitome of evil. it can also be questioning our gender or assuming we don't know what we're doing whenever even a slight indication of the girl shows up (including stuff like not wanting to go bald, which many cis men don't either) because do we really want to be men if we don't fully suppress her? (honestly, people tend to use "woman" to refer to us where they'd use "faggot" if were we cis.) if "grown man" and "little girl" can't exist side-by-side, we can't exist