Testosterone made my voice low. Really low. So low that I am almost impossible to hear in a loud bar or a cacophonous meeting, unless I speak at a ragged near-shout. But when I do talk, people don’t just listen: they lean in. They keep their eyes focused on my mouth, or down at their hands, as if to rid themselves of any distraction beyond my powerful words.
Pretty remarkable for someone who spent 30 years being tolerated (at best) or shunned (at worst) in work environments. Before testosterone, my beardless, androgynous body was troubling, unprofessional. At a corporate job, I was once asked explicitly to not meet with important clients, as the very sight of me might “send the wrong message.”
[...]
Once, after my transition, I nervously prepared to ask for a raise. I spoke to several people in similar roles who made significantly more than I did, and I had a stellar list of measurable accomplishments that exceeded my goals. My friend, a woman who had recently come back from maternity leave to her senior-level role and successful negotiated more pay and a four-day work week, gave me the standard advice: To approach my boss rationally and unemotionally, root my ask in my accomplishments, and not feel guilty for asking for what I’m worth. That last one is what got me. I was worried about my boss feeling bamboozled by the ask.
“I think this is your female socialization,” my friend observed wisely.
I think she was right. Repeated studies have found that there is a social cost for women who negotiate pay raises that doesn’t exist for men. (After all that, I walked into the meeting, ready to hardball, and my boss offered me a raise along the lines of what I’d wanted.)
Some researchers believe that hormone therapy activates dormant genes present in you all along, revealing a kind of twin of yourself. I like to think that we all have a male or female version of ourselves, tied up in our genetic make-up. I remember that every time I lobby for a raise on behalf of one of my employees who may not believe she deserves it, or point out the accomplishments of a female colleague that may have gone unnoticed.
Most of us have the bodies we occupy because of luck of the draw. For those of us who have had to fight for them, the process offers startling insights into what helps and hinders us as we move through space; the costs and benefits assigned to us by our culture; the destructive ways our voices can be silenced. And the way they can also be, so suddenly, heard.
From: Until I was a man, I had no idea how good men had it at work (2016) (emphases mine)
This a fun little transphobic story isnt it? This article is from almost ten years ago, but it showed up in my Mozilla recommendations for some reason. It's great to see that the needle hasn't shifted on this at all lol
An interesting equivalence keeps being made throughout this article: a citation to gender bias research (a social scientific subfield) to back up claims of biological differences between men and women. The link provided for hormones "activating dormant genes" is broken and leads to a defunct site called genetics.thetech.org - the only non-academic citation. Some researchers believe, indeed! I wonder who those people are. It's also the most brazen causal link made in the article, although the author is too much of a coward to say it outright, leaving it implied for the reader to piece together: 'female socialization' arises out of our genetic code, something that cannot be erased but can be made secondary by taking testosterone and activating our capital-m Male genes - the mechanism that produces salary raises in white-collar office jobs.
A testosterone-induced deep voice is apparently what makes people listen to this guy on the job! I'm sure every woman with a deep voice has the exact same experience. It's a shock how fragile patriarchy is if it can be defused with some elevated T levels. One wonders why you'd need to make the case for workplace misogyny at all if this is all it takes to escape it. But of course this guy still gets the best of both worlds with this little genetically-induced female socialization trick: a gendered dual-citizenship that can explain both his elevated professional standing as well as his continued camaraderie (and .: oppression) with cis women. Not because he is a feminist, of course (although the author takes pains to explain how often he helps women) but because he shares a deep genetic bond with cis women, one he's apparently quite comfortable with.
On the surface this article is ostensibly about the unique position trans people are in to "see the other side" as it were, confirming that patriarchy does indeed exist to a very normative cissexual readership. But it does so by affirming every logic undergirding patriarchy - that we are fundamentally biologically different, that men are genetically and hormonally superior, that gender bias is biologically mediated, and that sex assignment is a "luck of the draw." If this is the case then why bother researching gender bias at all, especially as a social scientist? You can't have your cake and eat it too - you can't make an equivalence between testosterone, genetics, and 'socialization' and then make the case that we all need to undergo unconscious bias training, or that "our culture" is misogynistic. Under this assumption, the units of measurement in gender bias research are not social processes or structures, but biological ones; every feminist academic has now been revealed to actually be studying bio-science by proxy. In fact why do the social sciences exist at all, if social processes are merely eternal reflections of our biology? This makes his repeated citations of social scientific research all the more (supposedly) baffling - why not cite a biology paper instead of Harvard Business Review, or Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes? Feminism is a useless discipline if you take any of these claims seriously, a conclusion I assume the author does not want us to draw given his repeated insistence on his own feminist commitments.
And of course this resolves out to transmisogyny, another unstated conclusion made by this coward - male socialization, the unforgivable stain of testosterone, all the usual canards thrown around by transmisogynists. Locating male privilege within the exclusive domain of a testosterone-induced deeper voice or one's own genes leaves trans women with no possible explanation for their own misgendering, let alone any other form of oppression they face (as opposed to the many constituent and mutually-reinforcing elements of socially-sanctioned manhood. I can see that Mr. McBee has taken it upon himself to change his professional name, and I can assume he also changed his office attire once he began to transition, though I'm sure those aren't relevant factors in him passing as a man). It's not merely a theory that fails to explain basic elements of transphobia that half of all trans people face, but one that actively excludes the possibility of them existing at all.
This is a sloppy article written by some rich shithead who works in an office, so it's not at the same level as an official transphobic report or academic research or statement made by a hate group. But it is legitimating all of those things under the banner of being feminist, and it's an extremely common talking point amongst both transphobic cis and trans people alike. Bioessentialist claims always lead to these conclusions, and they somehow (somehow!) always end up at transmisogyny.
And like you don't need to do this lol. It is in fact very easy to articulate the mechanisms of male privilege that trans men experience - we are men. A position made shaky by transphobia, yes, but patriarchy has had centuries of social, economic, religious, and political development. It is a very well-tested and durable set of social structures, and transphobia is not a threat to those logics. I am authentically a man, actually a man. Not for all intents and purposes, not only when I pass, I am just a man, and I am still a man when I am misgendered or discriminated against by doctors, administrators, teachers, landlords, and employers. Patriarchal power operates in all of these spheres of society, granting and revoking different sets of powers within different circumstances.
I think people accept this much more easily when thinking about autism diagnoses, for example - an official diagnosis from a psychiatrist can be a very powerful and beneficial outcome, one that grants you access to medical and pharmaceutical insurance, disability benefits, workplace accommodations, legal claims to human rights violations when faced with persecution, access to social services, and so on. But it also has the power to oppress you by revoking elements of your legal and social personhood, allowing you to be placed in conservatorships, opening you up to medical and psychiatric discrimination, forced institutionalization, widespread social persecution, horrific emotional and physical violence within the education system, and so on. None of those things "make you" more or less "actually" autistic, just as transphobia or a failure to pass doesn't "make me" less of an "actual" man. These are all mutually-reinforcing theatres of power, and one privilege does not negate the oppression they cause.
Anyway this article sucks ass. and while it's more sloppy than some of the other transphobic feminism I've read, it's no less diluted or ideologically committed to transphobia
