Some Guy

When I was doing my criminology degree, I went to several professors with several thesis ideas, and all of them were denied. These were all ideas based on transmasculine crime and victimology stats. Every professor shot down every thesis I had on ideas related to transmasc victims of various crimes.

Their reasoning? There's no need for this. This is useless. Nobody is interested in reading about trans men and transmascs being victims of crimes. They wouldn't even let me do my thesis on estimating more accurate stats on transmasculine victims of homicide. Which is an INCREDIBLY important thing!

"Masculinity is always rewarded" Incorrect, women are encouraged to be feminine, not masculine, female masculinity is a marginalized version of masculinity.

In October 1890 a judge sent Dick/Mamie Ruble to the state insane asylum because of “a hallucination that she should wear men’s clothing and wants legal authority for doing so.” Ruble was arrested for violating cross- dressing law, but the case took a dramatic twist in court, when Ruble refused to identify with available gender categories and explained to the judge, “I’m neither a man nor a woman and I’ve got no sex at all.” While many cross- dressing offenders pled for mercy and claimed their crimes were innocent “pranks,” Ruble challenged the judge to locate femininity on his/her muscular body: “Did you ever see a woman with a hand like that Judge . . . ? Look at that muscle. Oh I tell you I couldn’t pass for a woman anywhere, even if I tried.” Unimpressed by Ruble’s declarations, the judge called in the police surgeon, who referred the case to the Insanity Commission, located in a small basement room in city hall. The two-member commission reviewed the case, declared Ruble insane, and ordered his/her indefinite commitment to the Stockton Asylum, where the admitting doctor noted that Ruble “imagines she is a hermaphrodite. Wears male clothing. Wishes to have legal authority to wear men’s clothing.” Such “evidence of insanity” doomed Ruble to life in the asylum; s/he remained there for eighteen years, until dying from tuberculosis in 1908. [...]

Similarly in 1899 the commission found Sophie Lederer to be insane, noting that the twenty-three-year-old domestic worker “talks irrationally— acts silly and claims to be a boy.” Pohlmann spent two months in the Stockton Asylum before being deported to Germany, while Lederer effectively received a life sentence, dying in the asylum of heart disease in 1908.

From Arresting Dress: Crossdressing, Law, and Fascination in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco by Clare Sears

Its just like. wow. we will never know how many cases of this there were. everytime someone talks about how "oh they just didn't care that much" "women crossdressing was never a threat" "trans men can pass effortlessly" like!!! survivorship bias!!! this book specifically highlights how wealthy socialite women were treated totally differently & could get away with crossdressing by appealing to their status and cisness. while poor, non-white, and sex worker people could not.

Although Murray always denied being a lesbian, she occasionally admitted to “homosexual tendencies” as the only available descriptor that people would accept. As for the report that she was taking hormones, nothing in her correspondence with doctors supports that claim. She wanted testosterone badly enough, however, that she may well have told the corrections officer that doctors had agreed to give it to her. Barry did not arrest Murray for hitchhiking but rather escorted her to the New York City Police Department, where officers decided to take her to Bellevue Hospital. There, Murray poured out her story to a psychiatrist, who gave her a diagnosis of “schizophrenia.” In the doctor’s view, she suffered from a delusion: she believed that she was a man. Permitted to call a family member, Murray contacted her “cousin” Mac. The next day, Mac checked her out of Bellevue and, probably on the recommendation of Dr. Chinn, took her to a private psychiatric facility, Dr. Rogers’s Hospital, at 345 Edgecombe Avenue, on the corner of 150th Street. Murray was lucky. If Mac had not come to her rescue, Bellevue psychiatrists were prepared to seek her commitment to one of the vast, overcrowded state hospitals for the mentally ill. On the typewriter Mac brought to her, Murray itemized the causes of her “nervous collapse”: overwork; lack of desire to either eat or sleep; anxiety over parental responsibilities; and the “temporary disappearance of a friend.” All of these factors played a part; however, Murray believed that the principal source of her emotional crisis was the same problem with which she had wrestled for a decade: the fact that she repeatedly fell in love with women without having any “opportunity to express such an attraction in normal ways,” that is, as a heterosexual male in love with a heterosexual female. The only people who seemed to accept her for who she was were “the unsophisticated people in the environment” [people like her aunts and the ever-loyal Mac] who “accept me pretty much as one of nature’s experiments; a girl who should have been a boy, and react to me as if I were a boy.” Doctors at the Rogers hospital proved no more willing to cooperate in Murray’s efforts to become the man she knew herself to be than those elsewhere. When they released her in mid-March, she had nothing to show for her stay beyond a medical bill for $80, which she could not pay.

As well as Dylan Scholinski, who wrote a memoir called "The Last Time I Wore A Dress" about their experience being institutionalized from ages 15 to 18 in the 80s for being a gender non-conforming girl. They recently re-released the memoir under their chosen name and with a new foreword; I recommend reading it but massive TW for all kinds of child abuse, sanism, and queerphobia. From this interview:

Alison Stewart: You were able to access your medical records and you put them actually in the memoir. Dylan Scholinski: Right. Alison Stewart: What did the medical records reveal to you about how the medical establishment was thinking about you and then they were thinking about your treatment? Dylan Scholinski: Well, some of it was very diagnose-based. Like I said, I think they saw the cure for my depression if I would just learn how to be more feminine. That was the treatment that I was supposed to learn about what boys like. They actually put me in some really unsafe situations, hoping to inspire sexual behavior in order for me to be more feminine. They were putting me in situations that seem really unreasonable and unsafe. Alison Stewart: Could you share a few? Dylan Scholinski: When I was put into my third hospital, they put me on an all-male unit. I was the only girl on an all-male unit. I was the first girl to be. That's when it switched to not being an all-male unit. That in and of itself, you're like a little piece of meat there in the middle of 20 young men. That would be an example, or having me in four-point restraints and having male patients sneak into my room while I had no way of defending myself. Alison Stewart: At one point, you had to start wearing makeup in order to gain good points for good behavior. Dylan Scholinski: Right. Alison Stewart: What did it feel like when you wore makeup? Dylan Scholinski: Oh, my God, you feel dead. It causes a separation from your body. That is kind of hard to explain. I was on a point system. I would receive points for good behavior and lose points for bad behavior. My treatment was I was supposed to learn how to apply makeup and then say something nice about myself. Nice not being like I'm really good at baseball or I can really hit the ball or I can run really fast or any of these other things, or I can draw things that I was really proud of. Instead, I had to say things like, "I love looking pretty." I would feel like such a liar that I was performing and deceiving. I think they were hoping if I repeated it enough that it would change who I was going to become.

@redliongeneral yes!!!! i wrote a whole post on jeanne d'arc & how her crossdressing was very much not just a protective measure, but something personally and spiritually significant in itself. And it was her commitment to wearing men's clothing that got her murdered.

From the transcript of her trial:

*lets go of microaggression to not out himself*

*puts up with microaggression to not out himself*

*doesn't comment on microaggression to not out himself*

*denies an entire part of his early life and refuses to comment on or relate to anything having to do with a uterus or experiencing sexism as to not out himself*

like bro this isnt privilege. denying whole parts of my identity isn't a privilege. its in fact very isolating and othering and doesn't feel good. I dont feel like im getting away with anything, I feel like no one in normal working life can ever truly know who I am as I have to constantly edit and filter myself.

I have had other trans people tell me to my face, flatly, that something I described (related to being transmasc) did not happen. It is straightforwardly an accusation of lying, but it's rarely phrased that way. Instead it's usually posed as a challenge to the idea that I could possibly have any idea what I'm talking about. "Are you sure that really happened?" in response to recounting an instance of transphobia, or "Want me to prove that's not true?" when a claim about some specific transmasc oppression is made.

And when concrete evidence is given that, e.g. transmasculine people as a class face more sexual violence than transfeminine people, the problem escalates. When we cannot simply be dismissed out of hand as wrong just "because," they have to find another way to discredit us. Since their dismissal of us is based in transphobic bias and not in any real grounding, it's not acceptable for us to prove that we're right about anything. This is where you get situations like r/trans censoring transmascs after one provided citations about violence against us, or people nitpicking studies and claiming their results are biased. It's also often when the slurs come out (if they hadn't already), because there is no greater defense against evidence than to simply stop engaging with reality and call the other person a fembrained theyfab instead.

It's part of a wider pattern, too, not just in interpersonal exchanges. The lies told by the groups oppressing us are taken at face value by the majority of people, including other trans people. "Trans men transition into privilege" and "trans men transition because of internalized misogyny" are literal TERF talking points that are also accepted uncritically as true by a portion of our own community. "AFAB only" spaces are imagined to be havens for transmascs when any of us with experience can tell you what the reality is. People that recognize transphobic lies about trans women willingly swallow those lies whole when they are about trans men.

Even when it isn't straightforward lies told by bigots, people tend to make assumptions about transmascs with no input or research and then treat them like unassailable truth. Writers like Julia Serano simply "suppose" that a person read on the street as transmasculine will face less violence or harassment than someone read as transfeminine. People will confidently say that they "feel like" the stats on violence against trans men must be wrong, based on nothing material. Someone speaking on queer history will do no research into the contributions of transmasculine people, and then assume that we did nothing.