you know i usually avoid this topic to avoid invalidating other trans women, but i do consider myself "male socialized." i do this and i have to be really careful with it. women will let me cut them off and i do take up a lot of space and people do look to me first and give me a totally undue amount of respect and all of those things we associate with men.
i was raised as a man whether i like it or not and sure there are ways i break from that. a lot of those ways are also ways i align with my cis male friends and the reason we get along so well. male socialized isn't code for male, it is literally what it means and if you transitioned young especially, yeah it's not gonna apply. for me, it just makes more sense.
none of that makes me a man, but it also is part of my lived experience.
if anyone wants to respectfully engage with that, go for it, but im not going to carry out an argument or "discourse" because fuck that
I think this is important.
How you were socialized is not your gender.
And
Socialization is real and impactful and to deny that is to refuse to engage with a lot of reality.
These are both true.
A lot of very important race theorists focus on the fact that how we present impacts how we move through the world, how we are treated, and what we intuively expect from others.
Talking about socialization isn't essentially saying that trans people are their agab.
It's acknowledging that the way they were treated their whole life has impacted them in both obvious and subtle way.
And if this triggers your fight/flight instinct, the appropriate thing to do is self regulate.
Someone being ignored and talked over by cis men doesn't debunk "male socialization" because it actually shows male socialization at work. In this case, a trans woman was taking a feminine role, something many but not all women have learned to do.
In my personal experience, one's ability to break into these conversations has to do with practice in the social role and vocal pitch. Trans woman with voice training is going to have similar problems to cis women. But a group of trans women who aren't using vocal training will still talk over someone whose voice is pitched to higher octave, regardless who is wearing pants. And no one will notice, because it's intuitive. That's been my experience.
That doesn't mean these women weren't women. Or that they weren't desperately harmed by the time the world was trying to construct them into men.
And it doesn't mean that the person with a higher pitched voice is a woman.
But that shit does happen, and pretending that anyone who notices it
or has a background in sociology and theory
is essentially denying one's gender isn't very productive.
