I wonder if actually laying things out like this would like… help anything…
So, in the work which coined the term intersectionality, the example given is of the experiences of a black woman in trying to be hired. This was at a time when workplaces are now required to have a certain percentage of minority workers by law. Many places of work would hire white women to fill their requirement for women in the workplace, and would hire black men to fill their requirement for hiring black workers, and would have no black women on staff as a result, making it harder to be hired as a black woman even though women and black people both had employment protections in terms of there needing to be certain percentages of those minorities in the workforce.
Intersectionality is the tool used to identify that, even though protections are in place, there are people who should theoretically be double protected who will fall through the cracks of those protections being isolated from each other in practice.
Now, let’s talk about trans men.
According to many people, trans men don’t need specific language to talk about the intersectionality of their position in the world. This is because men are prioritized already. Therefore, by hearing out cis men (because society forces us to), cis women, and trans women, we have the full spectrum of what things look like and don’t need a trans man’s perspective. The perspective of men is forced on us already, and so the trans man’s perspective would add nothing, supposedly.
Except, well, we’ve cut out a whole perspective because those things are already covered individually by other groups, and so that combined perspective of trans man is not ever taken into account.
Isn’t this sounding a lot like how black women were left out of workplaces because they’re supposedly double protected by both laws protecting women and laws protecting black people? And how making that assumption and working with it made a world where most people dismissed the experiences of black women as already being covered when they weren’t?
You can “but those were both minority statuses coming together and trans + man isn’t” all you want, you’re still excluding an intersectional perspective because you think you can cobble together what those experiences must be by looking at other groups and squishing them together instead of looking at the identity trans man together the way intersectionality says we should be. And in doing so you ignore the ways which trans men are falling through the cracks of feminist and trans (and transfeminist) action.
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