also the thing about "we need to focus on the people most vulnerable, and transmascs may be vulnerable but not more than trans women!" is that it doesn't consider transmasc erasure as an active force.
its a take from the perspective that trans men are "vulnerable" is some vague abstract generalized way, not in a way which would behoove anyone to adjust their behavior or take action on their behalf. its the erasure of erasure; the assumption is that trans men probably have enough resources and support anyways, which could not be farther from the truth. some local communities may have more transmasc-focused resources, but many others do not. transmasculine people are left out of vital conversations, are excluded from vital resources, are ignored and forgotten when they are abused and killed.
it treats transmasc erasure as something which is passive in itself and which can be solved passively. which is erasure itself in action. i do not really give a fuck about "who has it worse," it is not about that. it is about the fact that if YOU do not make an ACTIVE EFFORT to advocate for transmascs, to make transmasc suffering and oppression visible and legible, it will not happen. it simply will not happen.
erasure is an active force. we all internalize transmasculine erasure and we can all easily contribute to it; we are expected to contribute to it. trans men&mascs cannot afford the model of "well we only need to raise awareness for the most vulnerable" because our vulnerability is defined by being ignored.
this is why unlearning anti transmasculinity has to start from (un)learning erasure. once you start to see it as an active force/tool of the patriarchy you realize it is the lynchpin that holds so much (especially intercommunity) anti-transmasculinity together. transmaculine absence is so normalized people experience our presence as an intrusion, and people genuinely do not understand why we would ever need to be more visible than we are. it is fucking everywhere.
like idk i remember reading about a trans man in India who, after he came out to his family, was literally locked in a room in their house. just shut up in a basement somewhere, out of sight and out of mind, until he managed to escape (and even then, there's also a trans man in India whose parents sent the police to track him down and kidnap him from a shelter meant specifically for trans people).
or trans men like Sophie Lederer, who was only 19 when he was arrested for "talking silly and claiming to be a boy" in the early 20th century, and the only other thing I know about him is that he spent the rest of his life, over a decade, institutionalized for his transmasculinity. god only fucking knows what was done to him in those years by his wardens.
that is the image of transmasculine erasure. it is boys and men locked in closets and basements and prison cells disguised as hospital rooms for years until they are dead and buried as women. if they even get a headstone at all. it is dead-eyed mothers with three children who have no income or job experience and are married to a cis man ten years older than them who they know would kill them, and possibly their children, if they even mentioned being trans. if you think of transmasc erasure or "invisibility" and imagine a white cis-passing guy working stealth at his office job, congrats! transmasculine erasure is already living like a fungus in your mind. i am trying to make you feel the horror the patriarchy has trained you out of feeling about the state of transmasculine oppression.
if you've followed me for any length of time you've likely already seen this quote, but i wanna talk about it in this context again:
"Unless they present hyperfeminine, butches don’t have access to the job market. You will not be considered if you don’t wear nice women’s clothes. If you set up catering, you will get told, “I am disgusted; a woman who thinks she’s a man is cooking for me.” So butch lesbians normally have an assistant, or their femme partner if they have one, who is more feminine-looking to run the front so customers don’t know a masculine-presenting person is cooking behind the curtains. Many of us become sex workers [due to lack of job opportunities].… But then when police raid brothels and homes, the masculine lesbians get treated “like men.” This means more forceful handcuffing, kneeling, and stripping their shirts off." – Rosa, lesbian and sex worker rights defender El Salvador
i was thinking about this when it comes to how we describe vulnerability in our community, specifically mentioning someone is a "femme" to indicate their need for extra support. i don't know i've ever seen the same be done for butches. i genuinely cannot remember ever really seeing people talk about butches and their economic and social vulnerability, the way i see people talk about femmes.
its not that being feminine doesn't cause genuine vulnerability! but because people have such a binary attitude towards gender (and more broadly), the way we talk about gendered vulnerability leads to this view that feminine people are always more vulnerable than masculine people, that "this femme needs help" to many queers and feminists feels more urgent than "this butch needs help."
the erasure of anti-transmasculinity is so pervasive and harmful and the erasure itself is then erased. and the thing is, the nature of benevolent sexism has always made it that femininity (mediated by race and class and social belonging, amongst other things, Its More Complicated Than That) is seen as inherently vulnerable. people seen as masculine lesbians are "treated like men" in the sense of being treated harsher with more physical violence, while still being subjected to sexual violence out of both misogyny and queerphobia, and also being economically vulnerable because of the disgust aimed at people perceived as masculine women. and who talks about it? not the people who refuse to understand gender oppression through anything other than a binary lens (while pretending that's not what they are doing).
honestly i think on a broader level, we have been seeing the erosion of genuine queer/trans theory for a while in favor of this idea that queerphobia is reducible down to misogyny. & i do think all queerphobia does innately involve misogyny. but i feel there's been this growing aversion to attributing anything to a hostility to gender non-conformity/genderqueerness itself, in favor of attributing it to a hatred of femininity. there is no true analysis of transphobia or misandrogyny as their own forces, its just a side effect of the hatred of femininity.
this is where we get the constant refrain of "the patriarchy likes masculinity, so masculine people are always seen as better than feminine people" & why people may find it incomprehensible that there may be situations where being feminine may be a protective factor in comparison to being masculine.
another example of this from this article:
The trio made their way down a busy street in the Santiago suburb of Pudahuel, close to where Carolina lived with her mother and father. Carolina and Estefania chose not to hold hands to avoid offending anyone. Suddenly, Carolina felt a force to the back of her head. Then darkness. She had fallen unconscious, and would remain in a coma for a week. She suffered a fractured skull, a broken nose, internal bleeding and permanent damage to her hearing. There were two male attackers. One had used a large wooden pole to hit her repeatedly on the back of her head, only stopping when Estefania threw herself on top of Carolina, using her body as a shield. This is significant, says Carolina's mother, Mariela. Because unlike Carolina, who identifies as a camiona and dresses accordingly, Estefania is femme - a more feminine lesbian identity. The attackers targeted Carolina and not Estefania, says Mariela, because she represented an "unacceptable" face of womanhood. It was not just her sexual orientation that prompted violence, it was her appearance as a camiona. "I want to make it very clear they were trying to kill her," she adds. "There is no other way of looking at it. The fact that she is here is a miracle." Carolina knew one of her alleged attackers. "Before this attack he threatened me. He said, 'I am going to kill you.' He said he was going to shoot me with a gun. He called me a lesbian and swore at me. He said, 'Why do you dress like a man?'"
there are people who have been nearly (or successfully) violently murdered for being seen as a masculine woman, while their femme girlfriends were not targeted or were not the main target. but if you reduce everything in patriarchy down to "m > f" you will miss this. and
even in this article, the discussion of violence focuses on lesbianism and misogyny - which, while clearly central to the violence, one has to wonder what becomes of transmasculine individuals who are targeted by this same transphobic lesbophobia, the same transphobic misogyny, whose experiences with violence cannot be made legible through the same narratives as those who identify as women? who cannot appeal to the terms "femicide" and traditional feminist narratives as easily?
i feel like the fact that there is virtually no discussion of how trans men are affected by femicide even when including trans women in the conversation, and how basically every study or systemic review of studies looking at violence against trans men will discuss how little research has been done on this topic, and how the largest global review of studies on violence against transgender people (94 studies, 65,608 participants) found that while nearly all (96%) of the studies included transgender women, just half (49%) included transgender men and less than half (37%) included nonbinary people, should lead us to understand that the picture of how transmasculine people are impacted by transphobic and misogynistic violence is itself violently incomplete.
hope it's okay for me to trail back and add on to this:
trans men&mascs cannot afford the model of "well we only need to raise awareness for the most vulnerable" because our vulnerability is defined by being ignored.
i fully understand and agree with the point (defined by being ignored), but it's not exactly accurate that we cannot afford to do that; that is precisely what we need.
the "most vulnerable" thing isn't about finding some above-all-else most vulnerable group of people and only focusing on them. that's impossible. the world is far too complex for that.
what "most vulnerable" means is this: when you are working as a community on an issue, you must prioritize the most vulnerable to that issue. there can be multiple highly vulnerable groups. there's no rule against that. people say things like "queer people, people of color, children" all the time when talking about current events for a reason.
the disability justice community prioritizes tons of different subgroups - mainly by risk of interpersonal and systemic maltreatment (ex: the institutionalized, the mobility aid users, the undiagnosed, etc) intersectionality is integral to prioritizing the most vulnerable. without that, you are not prioritizing the most vulnerable. and no, treating queer femininity as universally more vulnerable is not intersectionality. it's not even theory of gender 101. it's cisheteronormative. "boys dont cry," remember? (you all remember that movie, right?)
what "most vulnerable" would look like here is people actually talking about how transmasculine and trans-nonbinary people are affected by queerphobic violence. talk about how we have high rates of lifetime SA, medical neglect/abuse, and domestic violence. talk about corrective rape. talk about forced detransition as a tool of patriarchal coercive control. talk about it. talk about how ~70% of indigenous nonbinary people (who were assigned F at birth) in the US Trans Survey reported they had been SA'd in their lifetime. it has been boiling my blood for years that i have never seen a piece on trans rights that included this statistic at all. one of, if not the, most abysmal SA stats i have ever seen.
