There's so much asymmetry between transmasc and transfem experiences, but one that always stands out to me is how common it is for early-transition trans men to appear to be reluctant to be considered fully men by wider society. I've recently had a trans man friend (a really great guy usually) complain that he is unfairly considered "not fully a man" by the cis men at our climbing gym, then a few minutes later declare that trans men are not a threat to women because they're "not men in the way that cis men are". Is he really expecting the cis guys to be less transphobic towards him than he is himself?
The most absurd example I've seen of this is in the coining of the term "malgendering", where the example is used of the Ukrainian military insisting that both trans women and trans men count as "men" for the purposes of the draft. I find the idea that this gender validation constitutes a kind of specific oppression of trans men hard to understand: I can only speak for myself, but if the women in my country were all expected to undergo some horrible experience I would not want to be exempted from it on the grounds of my birth sex, I would expect to suffer alongside them, it's called solidarity! Also how is your first instinct on seeing that that it is trans men rather than trans women who are the victims of the greater injustice?
There is a meme about certain trans men that they don't believe transition does anything, that they regard themselves as a type of woman who is called a "man", rather than actually a man. This is has a kind-of parallel in transfemininity in the internally-transphobic trans girls that are quite common on places like 4tran, who hyperbolically regard any transition that starts after the age of 16 as doomed. But I don't think these are fully mirrors of each other, because the hypothetical internally-transphobic trans girl regards a "passing" transition as something desirable but available only to the young or rich, the trans men I'm talking about seem to regard a "passing" transition as a genuine impossibility for everyone ever (even while so many of their trans male peers are living happy, often stealth, lives as men). It's less doomerism and more unfounded bioessentialism.
I think this comes back to the issue of asymmetry. A lot of trans men initially come out as men only to find that society merely shifts from viewing them as "weird girl" to "deluded girl", the misogyny doesn't stop, it just gets combined with an increase in transphobia. Meanwhile, for a lot of trans women, their coming out experience is the sudden transition from "weird boy" to "T-slur", there's a massive and immediate change in life experience that comes after asserting "I am a woman" that doesn't really have a transmasculine parallel. The joke slogan "trans 👏 people 👏 are 👏 women" has a grain of truth in the sense of how wider society views early-transition trans people, irrespective of transition direction. For transfems, the mere act of coming out (even if you don't transition medically) massively changes your social positioning in a way that doesn't really happen in reverse.
I think a lot of the reluctance of early-transition trans men to consider themselves fully men is simply down to a material assessment of how wider society views and treats them. It's no surprise that trans men who are far into medical transition tend to be much more willing to regard themselves as fully men, since at this point many others are treating them that way too. The difference with transfems is that we are treated as particularly marginalised women immediately on coming out, and (depending on how the closet went for us) often even well before that, maybe for our entire lives.
There's a similarity to the "double-empathy problem" in which autistic and allistic people struggle to understand whichever experience they haven't had themselves. Growing up as a closeted trans girl, the way I interacted with the closet was to ignore the heavy social pressure to perform "manhood" and just be myself, resulting in me facing a whole lot of misogyny from basically the moment I could talk. I used to think the closeted trans boy equivalent of me was undergoing an opposite experience at the same time, one of actually being treated like a boy to some extent, but in fact he was just also facing a whole lot of misogyny too. We were both treated like girls, although the only one of us allowed to name ourselves as "girl" was the one who didn't want that in the first place. That's not to say our experiences were the same: the transmisogynised occupy a much lower social position. Only that the attachment a lot of early-transition trans men seem to feel towards womanhood is understandable given that they still occupy a misogynised social position.
I think understanding this asymmetry is key to understanding trans experiences generally. I only wish that the sizeable chunk of early-transition trans men and other transmascs who recognise their misogynised social role were more aware that their transfem equivalents do not have the inverse experience. We are not treated like men in the same way that they are often treated like women. The totally reasonable transfem resentment at being excluded from support for the misogynised is not based on some putative wish-fulfillment desire to be misogynised rather than seen as men, but merely a reflection of the reality that we are actually heavily misogynised from (at the very latest) the moment we come out. That experience doesn't have an equivalent for you, but that's the reality of living in a patriarchal system.
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2087
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