As a genderfaun person whose fluidity leans masculine (I often describe myself as a genderfluid trans man), the rhetoric of “trans men are men and therefore have male privilege” bothers me so much.
I’m a binary man sometimes. I’m nonbinary other times. I’m often a genderqueer man. When I’m a man, I’m sincerely a man. By the logic of “trans men are men and therefore have male privilege”, I must be bobbing back and forth between having male privilege and not! I’ll have male privilege when I feel like a man and then *poof* it disappears when I’m feeling more unaligned nonbinary.
Except this doesn’t fit with my experiences at all. This isn’t how it works. Being a man doesn’t automatically give me male privilege that I’ll then lose in a moment by no longer being a man.
Personal gender identity isn’t the source of privilege. Privilege is not solely determined by who you are inside, it’s determined by society and how it interacts with you. You can only get male privilege if you are societally recognized as a man, it’s a prerequisite, which is just not true for the vast majority of trans men. Also like this reasoning doesn’t account for nonbinary or genderfluid people at all. Male privilege is a really complex and individual topic when it comes to trans people especially,
