i am alive! alive! alive!

Transandrophobia exists, in part or in whole, as a response to the term trans-misogyny.iv Trans-misogyny was coined by Julia Serano in 2007 to describe the specific intersection of misogyny and transphobia as experienced by trans women.v This has proved a useful term that has produced a vast body of trans-feminist literature. However, transandrophobia as a counterpart term is nonsensical. The term seems to describe the intersection of transphobia and “androphobia”, or, systemic discrimination against men. This is nonsensical — in the male supremacist world in which we live, there is no systematic discrimination against men. Men may be punished for other traits or characteristics, but never for the mere fact of their being a man. The false parallel between trans-misogyny and transandrophobia becomes more apparent when the term trans-misandry is used. Trans-misandry is sometimes used as a synonym for transandrophobia and has, shockingly, been used in a published academic article.vi The frameworks of transandrophobia and trans-misandry rely on the notion that there exists such a thing as a systematic oppression of men, an inherently antifeminist notion. Thus, the terms are by their very nature misogynistic. To argue that men are just as oppressed as women is to argue that women are not really oppressed.

Transandrophobia is positioned as an intersectional feminist term. Intersectional feminist terms are used to describe the experiences of groups that face oppression simultaneously on two or more axes, such as misogynoir (the oppression of Black women, who are oppressed both for their gender and their race), lesbophobia (the oppression of lesbians, who are oppressed both for their gender and their sexuality), or trans-misogyny (the oppression of trans women, who are oppressed for both their gender and their trans status). Transmisogynoir, a term used to describe the specific oppression faced by Black trans women, describe the experiences of a triply-oppressed group. However, trans men are not a doubly oppressed group. They are men who are privileged “but for” their trans status; if they were men who were not trans, they would not be oppressed.vii Trans women, conversely, are not privileged either on the basis of their gender or their trans status — if they were women who were not trans, they would still be oppressed for being women.

That trans men are privileged over trans women is apparent from comparisons between the experiences of the two groups. To quote from a previous essay of mine:

Trans men have an easier time “passing” than trans women.viii Trans women are more likely than trans men to be discriminated against at rape crisis centers after they are targets of sexual violence.ix Trans women are more likely to be excluded from family events, harassed, assaulted on the street, or sexually assaulted than trans men.x Trans women are more likely to be accused of soliciting sex or accused of not disclosing their HIV status than trans menxi — both of these playing on persistent stereotypes that paint [trans women] as “rapists” or “sexual deviants”. Trans men, unlike trans women, are not on the receiving end of a decades-long moral panic painting them as irredeemable sexual predators.xii

Furthermore, trans men on average make more money than trans women,xiii and in over 80% of trans homicides, the victim is a trans woman, usually a Black trans woman.xiv Recent U.S. Supreme Court arguments have suggested that it would be permissible for laws to discriminate only against trans women but not trans men,xv a form of blatant legal discrimination eerily reminiscent of the court cases that prompted Kimberlé Crenshaw to originally coined the term intersectionality.xvi

The reason that transandrophobia is the wrong framework is that it posits some form of structural opposition to maleness or masculinity. This is, simply put, not an existing force. By positing that such a structural oppression of men exists, those who theorize transandrophobia situate themselves firmly within the traditions of men’s rights activist (MRA) movements, movements that attempts to undermine feminism by theorizing that men are just as oppressed as women. Trans men have a long history of articulating such frameworks.xvii Those who argue for extant transandrophobia sometimes argue that LGBT spaces have a bias against masculinity — a patently absurd assertion when the most popular and best-funded queer spaces are run by and for gay men. These spaces are often highly transphobic, but hardly anti-masculine. Transandrophobia, as a framework, exists to do what male anti-feminists have always done: to chastise feminists for being too mean to men. Because, in this case, the men are trans, it is their demographic peers — trans women — who are most directly hurt by the anti-feminism of the transandrophobia framework. Trans women’s experiences can only be adequately understood through a properly feminist lens; the transandrophobia framework rejects this lens entirely. The framework is antifeminist, and “Antifeminism is a direct expression of misogyny; it is the political defense of woman hating.”xviii

Transandrophobia is the wrong framework for understanding trans men’s oppression. It points our analytical compass and entirely the wrong direction, leading us down a dead end path that that can only end in resentment towards trans women. Freed then from the shackles of this dubious framework, let us briefly theorize an understanding of trans men’s oppression.

Two primary forms of sexism structure gender relations: traditional sexism and oppositional sexism. Traditional sexism is the ideology that men are superior to women; oppositional sexism is the ideology that man and woman are mutually exclusive categories with no overlapping traits.xix Oppositional sexism targets people of either gender, beating them into line as gender-conforming men and women — but traditional sexism primarily targets women, privileging men over women. Men may be targeted by traditional sexism insofar as they have proximity to women (such as if they are gay or “effeminate”), but all women are targeted, regardless of gender presentation.

Prior to transition and in the early stages of transition, trans men who are punished for masculine presentation are targeted by oppositional sexism. This oppositional sexism will cease to be a factor when the trans man “passes” as male. In the early stages of transition, many trans men are denied reproductive and bodily autonomy, consistent with traditional sexism, as trans man in this phase are perceived as being “female”. This is structured by race — white trans men are considered “valuable breeders” by the white supremacist patriarchal state, while trans men of color are not.xx Once trans men pass as men, they experience violence primarily to the extent that they are marked as queer or feminine.xxi This violence bears many similarities to forms of homophobic violence against queer men, but violence against trans men carries the additional force of regendering, that is, the attempt to return the trans man to the subjugated position of woman.xxii This has also been theorized as a form of transemasculation, ejection from the category of man.xxiii In addition, so long as a trans man continues to have “female” reproductive organs, he will face the same misogynistic struggles with reproductive autonomy as cissexual women, plus additional struggles — “women’s” healthcare clinics are often not prepared to treat people who visually appear to be men. This is not a permanent state of being; the organs in question can be removed via surgery.

Although the term transandrophobia has existed for a number of years, it has never received extensive study in feminist or academic literature. I have yet to find any writing on the topic longer than a single blog post. The person who coined the term, Tumblr user st-dionysus, has been working on a book for years. To date, only four pages have been released, riddled with typos and dubious analysis. But the fact that transandrophobia has been undertheorized does not mean that there is no writing about trans men — it just means that transandrophobia is the wrong framework. In the interest of pointing the reader towards further reading about the experiences of trans men, I will share some of my favorite passages that analyze trans men through a feminist framework. From Jamison Green,

I think when trans men fail to see how they benefit from male privilege simply by being seen as men, they are living with the kind of blindness that may — in Blake and Kim’s case — be caused by racial sensitivities, which in the United States can be more demanding as a survival issue on a day-to-day basis than gender concerns. Other factors could be at play, too, for any trans man, such as conditioning that keeps him from experiencing his maleness fully because he is always on guard about being discovered and labeled a transsexual. ... All trans men have male privilege even if they aren’t aware of it, and they have opportunities to manage it differently than cisgender men. Their male privilege may be taken away from them along with the recognition as males if their transness is discovered by those people who refuse to acknowledge the veracity of their gender, but male privilege is not what most transsexual men are seeking.xxiv

From Jude Doyle,

Even within trans communities, there’s a tremendous amount of flailing and confusion around trans men’s relationship to misogyny: How can someone be subject to sexism in some ways and benefit from sexism in other ways? How can someone be hurt by misogyny without being a woman, or fail to accrue full benefit from patriarchy despite being a man? (Most men don’t accrue full benefit from patriarchy.) Maybe it’s actually all about capitalism. Maybe there’s some analogy to race. Maybe it wasn’t actually misogyny — maybe it was some different thing, with a different name, that makes it different from what women go through. Maybe we’re just imagining things. Maybe it wasn’t that bad.

From Catharine MacKinnon,

Under male dominance, in transitioning, trans women lose status, trans men gain it. Trans women are doubly intersectionally discriminated against as women and as trans, triply if of color. Trans men, although their gendered social standing is documented to be improved, may be seen as lesser men the ways gay men and racially subordinated men often are. Trans women, as women, become newly sexualized as targets for incursion, abuse, and devaluation; trans men, as men, no longer occupy that social location, except to the extent they may continue to appear to the male gaze as feminine men, marked by femininity for sexual and other violence (especially dangerously if it is “discovered” that they have female genitalia).xxvi

From Viviane Namaste,

FTM who are raped are told, through the act of sexual assault, that they are “really” women, and they will be treated as such. Biology is destiny. The rape of an FTM declares that “women” have no right to be out in public — especially when unaccompanied by a man — and that these individuals have no right to act “as if” they are men. This instance of violence is more than a mere attack on someone perceived to be a gay man; it is fundamentally about policing one’s gender presentation in public sites. The act of rape functions as an aggressive reinscription of the FTM individual’s biological sex and social gender.xxvii

From Talia Bhatt,

… the reason that transfemininity has been more visible across both time and cultures is that the veneration of manhood is highly central to patriarchal modes of organization. The idea that manhood can be failed, an individual can fail to live up to its mantle and be stripped of manhood’s privileges and protections is a useful schema to ensure ideological investment in patriarchal society. The transfeminized serve as examples of what happens to gender traitors. The transmasculine, by contrast, are ignored or treated as little more than delusional, as people who reach above their station and are doomed to never succeed. In that sense, transmasculinity is subject to regendering. Where transmisogynistic forces marginalize and ostracize the transfeminine from society, rendering us unworthy of any fate outside of being treated like sexual chattel, transemasculative forces deny the transmasculine any possibility of escaping reproductive exploitation and seek to re-gender the transmasculine — viewed as lapsed reproductive assets — back in the confines of womanhood. These forces are complementary and interrelated, but not identical.xxviii

From Jules Gill-Peterson,

While trans-masculine or nonbinary people are occasionally deemed rescuable by people like Shrier if they were to renounce and detransition — a horrifically demeaning genocidal prospect in itself — anti-trans politics has proven itself strident in its goal of eliminating trans womanhood by any means necessary, to the point that when right-wing media targets trans men or trans-masculine people for harassment or misinformation, they often misgender them in a way that implies they are trans women.xxix

The forces of sexism, traditional and oppositional, act upon trans men in distinct ways. Good theorization has been done on this topic, and there is always room for more. I have taken a crack at this theorization myself.xxx But it is always crucial that these theoretical frameworks not steamroll over the specific experiences of trans women — and it is precisely this steamrolling that is transandrophobia‘s wont. Although trans men do face certain specific challenges, and a wide variety of intense forms of oppression, the term transandrophobia is a fundamentally inaccurate and antifeminist framework for conceptualizing trans men’s oppression. To use the term is to reveal oneself to be either ignorant or a reactionary misogynist.

i st-dionysus, “What Is Transandrophobia and Why Is It Called That? By the Guy Who Coined It and Is Kind of Tired of Seeing It Defined in the Opposite of What It’s Meant to Describe.,” Tumblr, June 10, 2024, https://www.tumblr.com/st-dionysus/755668731267629056.

ii Kira Leigh, “Why Don’t Trans Men Have a Word for What We Go Through?,” An Injustice!, October 12, 2021, https://aninjusticemag.com/why-dont-trans-men-have-a-word-for-what-we-go-through-582d75dd20ed.

iii Evan Urquhart, “Elliot Page Is a Grown-Up,” Slate, March 19, 2021, https://slate.com/human-interest/2021/03/elliot-page-trans-men-infantilization.html.

iv Some authors are upfront about the fact that the term response to trans-misogyny. Others deny this fact. It seems difficult to deny when the word’s etymology can be traced through the earlier trans-misandry, a rather obvious response to trans-misogyny. See Leigh, “Why Don’t Trans Men Have a Word for What We Go Through?”; st-dionysus, “None. Transandrophobia Is Not the Opposite or the Mirror of Transmisogyny.,” Tumblr, March 13, 2026, https://www.tumblr.com/st-dionysus.

v Julia Serano, Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007; 2nd ed., Seal Press, 2016).

vi Elías Cosenza Krell, “Is Transmisogyny Killing Trans Women of Color?,” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 4, no. 2 (2017): 234, https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-3815033.

vii cf. Kimberle Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” sec. 8, University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989, no. 1 (1989): 151, http://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/uclf/vol1989/iss1/8?utm_source=chicagounbound.uchicago.edu%2Fuclf%2Fvol1989%2Fiss1%2F8&utm_medium=PDF&utm_campaign=PDFCoverPages.

viii Viviane K. Namaste, Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People (University of Chicago Press, 2000), 145.

ix “SEXUAL VIOLENCE & TRANSGENDER/ NON-BINARY COMMUNITIES,” National Sexual Violence Resource Center, 2019, 1, https://www.nsvrc.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Transgender_infographic_508_0.pdf.

x Cecilia Chung et al., Positively Trans Report 3: See Us As People (Transgender Law Center, 2016), Table 4.B.

xi Chung et al., Positively Trans Report 3: See Us As People, Fig. 1.

xii Sara Moiseff, Against Tranny Hate: A Radical Transfeminist Manifesto (Self-published, 2026), 9.

xiii The Wage Gap Among LGBTQ+ Workers in the United States (HRC Foundation, n.d.), accessed March 19, 2026, https://www.hrc.org/resources/the-wage-gap-among-lgbtq-workers-in-the-united-states.

xiv Kelley Robinson and Tori Cooper, The Epidemic of Violence Against the Transgender & Gender-Expansive Community in the U.S. (Human Rights Campgain, 2024), https://reports.hrc.org/an-epidemic-of-violence-2024.

xv Amy Howe, “Supreme Court Appears Likely to Uphold Transgender Athlete Bans,” SCOTUSblog, n.d., accessed January 24, 2026, https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/01/supreme-court-appears-likely-to-uphold-transgender-athlete-bans/.

xvi Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.”

xvii Aaron H. Devor, FTM: Female-to-Male Transsexuals in Society (Indiana University Press, 2016), 541, 546.

xviii Andrea Dworkin, Right-Wing Women, First Picador paperback edition (Picador, 2025), 186.

xix Serano, Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity, 13–14.

xx Jude Doyle, DILF: Did I Leave Feminism? (Melville House, 2025), chap. 3.

xxi Catharine A. MacKinnon, “A Feminist Defense of Transgender Sex Equality Rights,” pt. 88, Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 24, no. 2 (2023): 94.

xxii Namaste, Invisible Lives, 147.

xxiii Talia Bhatt, Trans/Rad/Fem (Self-published, 2025), 76.

xxiv Jamison Green, Becoming a Visible Man, Second edition (Vanderbilt University Press, 2020), 68–69.

xxvi MacKinnon, “A Feminist Defense of Transgender Sex Equality Rights,” pt. 88, p. 94.

xxvii Namaste, Invisible Lives, 146–147.

xxviii Bhatt, Trans/Rad/Fem, 76.

xxix Jules Gill-Peterson, A Short History of Trans Misogyny (2024; Verso, 2025), 139.