Telling a group of people who start getting cat-called by the age of like 12 and spend their entire childhoods being sexually harassed that they couldn't possibly ever understand misogyny ,feminism or patriarchy is never not funny to me.
Like AFAB childhood experience is (& obvious CW for CSA, DV etc):
- Being told to cover up, not wear particular clothing and "close your legs" CONSTANTLY by adults around you explicitly to not be "unladylike" "slutty" "skanky" or "gross" from like the age of 4+ sometimes even younger, like I cannot exaggerate enough how constantly you are told to "CLOSE YOUR LEGS!!" as an AFAB child, it's fucking insane, literal toddlers unable to play without being policed and slut shamed for sitting/existing naturally. I loved having my pyjamas shirt unbuttoned as a child and viscerally remember being like 7 and being slut shamed into not doing that while my brother walked around the house shirtless in boxers
- Constant sexualisation from peers throughout childhood, when I was 8 years old a little boy who was my friend declared Fridays to be "mating days" and every lunch and recess he would chase me around the playground jumping on my back and humping me
- I viscerally remember eating an ice cream around male friends at age like 14 and accidentally taking too big a bite, this group of like 6 boys crowded around me chanting "spit or swallow" while I tried to eat my ice cream
- 1in3 AFAB children get sexually abused, I was one of them, many of my friends were too, AFAB childhood and teenage hood is watching most of your friends get sexually abused and/or assaulted and/or becoming victims of DV
- I viscerally remember watching one friend who I knew had been abused by two adult men by this point (age 14) being greeted by her aunt's new boyfriend and the visible discomfort when she was forced to accept a kiss from him, because, did I mention that AFAB childhood also includes having to accept kisses on our cheeks and hugs from literally any adult stranger thats being introduced to us in a social setting, sometimes they'll even throw in some light assault by grabbing/rubbing your hips or ass
- The catcalling, like I said my friends and I started being cat-called around age 12, grown men would catcall and yell insults at us in public, I remember being 14 and a drunk man insulting and getting into the space of me and my friend on the train, leering over us, I remember being around that age and when my friend and I yelled back at a car of men who catcalled us they followed us for a block driving slowly next to us and filming us on their phones out the window
- When I was 12-13 a boy in our class would intentionally squat down next to us or under the verandah to look up our skirts, in conversation with girls he'd constantly say things like "now give me a blowjob" "how about we go to the bushes now and you blow me" one time I was climbing a tree and he ran up, smacked my ass and ran away while a bunch of other boys who dared him to giggled about it
- I remember the first girl in my year to grow armpit hair and when people noticed in PE she was horrifically bullied about it until she shaved it, we all started shaving around ages 12-14 to spare ourselves this bullying
- Being called sluts more times than we can count
- From about age 13+ you get to watch usually one or more of your friends get groomed and abused by an adult man, sometimes this abusive relationship will last well into adulthood
- One time for a laugh when I was like 15 all the boys in my friend group chased me down one lunch time and hogtied me with duct tape
- They taped another girl to a pole
- A grown man catcalled my 14 year old friend and I once and then when we got to her mum's car at the gas station he pulled in and we had to have a friendly conversation with him, in which he mentioned catcalling us because we "looked so gorgeous in our skirts" or some shit and laughed about it with her mum because they knew eachother
- Being terrified of being kidnapped from age 7 or so and onwards, I remember being constantly terrified when walking alone from this age and remember other little girls talking about cars following them home and all of us being hyper vigilant about this
- Never going to the bathroom alone, I was I think 8 or so when an 8yo girl in my country was raped and murdered by a man in the bathrooms, I can still remember when I heard about this and "always stay together" was DRILLED into us our entire childhoods, I also remember two girls of maybe 12 telling me about how a man stalked them through the shopping centre and they had to go into a shop and hide behind the counter to be left alone, stories like this from girls, teens and women are the norm
- I remember being 17 in line at a concert and a HUGE drunk man in his 30s kept falling back and leaning on me in the que, as a joke I leant back on him for a second and he forcibly grabbed me and kissed me
- When I was working in at age like 18-19 retail an old man would come around to our store (he did this almost every day at two shopping centres to all the stores with girl and women workers) to say things like "show us your legs" "don't get on your knees for me" (if we were stocking a lower shelf etc he would also come up behind you and hug you, we would hide our underage staff in the backroom when we saw him coming, a different man there grabbed and kissed one of our 15 year old staff one day too
- The demographic with the highest rates of DV against them are girls/women aged like 16-25 or something like that btw so the majority of trans men have experienced that first hand (I did) or spent at least their teen years if not their 20s watching their friends be abused
These are just SOME examples from the first TWENTY TWO years of my life when I was not out of the closet and still identified as a girl/woman although I have (and still do) experienced misogyny & gender based violence since then.
I ID'd as nb from 22-27 and only from 27-30(current age) have I presented as a man/been on HRT, my point being that 27/30 years of my life I have presented socially in a way where I was perceived as a cis girl/woman and have experienced the misogyny attached to that...the commonality of trans people being able to transition (socially &/or medically) as children, teens or young adults is extremely extremely new and is NOT the average experience of a trans person, I'm only 30 and didn't even know trans people existed until I was 15, I don't think I heard of being non binary or trans mascs existing until my early 20s, the overwhelming MAJORITY of trans mascs have lived DECADES of our lives presenting as and being treated as women.
By age 17 my best friend and I were growing out our armpit hair, posting pics of it online to protest and reading feminist authors at school during lunch, on the weekends we were getting those books signed by those authors and attending women's organisations in our community. I was attending feminist talks at this age too.
Me and my highschool girlfriends frequently discussed feminism and feminist issues during and outside of school. By 17 I knew what intersectionality was and was discussing feminism through an intersectional lense.
Tha majority of my experiences of misogyny and oppression here are the experiences that many trans masc and non binary AFAB people have had throughout childhood and for many of us feminism has been and still is the framework by which we have been able to understand, engage in and begin our own liberation and journeys towards understanding ourselves as trans people and living our lives authentically as trans people.
Feminism gave me the liberation to question why I had to "be ladylike" all the time, it gave me the liberation to grow out my armpit hair and my leg hair, it gave me the liberation to wear button up shirts and ties, it gave me the liberation to cut my hair short, get piercings and act in ways which went against traditional femininity
Intersectional feminism gave me the framework and analytical language to begin understanding gender as a construct and as a mechanism of a wider oppressive system of white supremacist, colonial, patriarchal capitalism, it aided and informed my journey to trans masculinity from my teenhood onwards and it has aided and informed many AFAB trans people journeys with their trans identity in similar ways from similar ages.
For many of us learning about and understanding feminism from a young age was essential for us and our friends to survive and understand the patriarchal violence inflicted upon us.
No I don't believe AFAB trans people have a monopoly on feminism but to dismiss the overwhelming patriarchal and misogynistic violence, abuse, harrassment and socialisation that many of us have endured from birth well into our adulthoods is absurd.
To pretend that people who have more often than not spent at least their childhoods and teens and quite often their early adulthoods being slut shamed, silenced, spoken over, disrespected, condescended to, abused, mocked, endangered etc are somehow strangers to the concept of misogyny and feminism is fucking absurd.
Pretending we are coming at feminist analysis from the perspective and lived experiences of cis men is fucking absurd, more absurd even than trying to say the same of AMAB trans people, which I don't believe to be true.
I agree that AMAB trans people don't experience childhood and patriarchy the same as cis boys BUT I think pretending AMAB trans people are magically immune to the societal and social pressure or patriarchal conditioning and somehow magically come into adulthood as perfect feminists with no biases, behaviours or beliefs based in growing up treated as boys under patriarchy is ludicrously deluded and I think that then completely ignoring said conditioning and labelling anyone who mentions it as an evil transmisogynist while positioning trans femmes as the authority on feminism is similarly deluded.
Multiple things can be true at once, nuance is everything and to me those of you who do try to claim that AFAB trans people don't understand misogyny or feminism and that trans femmes are the ultimate authority on it and also are incapable of perpetrating misogyny, patriarchy or harm and should never have to even entertain discussions around that are the ones who are actually showing your asses as newcomers to feminism who haven't actually ever engaged in deep intersectional feminist analysis.
Your Play-Doh children's feminismt analysis begins and ends with "ALL WOMEN GOOD ALL MEN BAD" which is poor feminism in the first place and not remotely intersectional, decolonial or anti-capitalist, but, you then extend it to fucking trans people and try to simplify analysis of trans people's experiences under the fucking cishetero normative, colonial, gender essentialist patriarchy down to fucking CEO girlboss feel good corporate vibes based feminism and then throw a tantrum when trans mascs ask you to maybe go a bit deeper and more nuanced with your analysis.
I fucking assure you AFAB trans people understand feminism, it's been essential to our survival since childhood and has for many of us been the path to our liberation as trans people, we are not outsiders or newcomers to feminist analysis, understanding misogyny or being an oppressed gender under patriarchy and treating us as such reflects much more poorly on you than anything.
If your analysis is that anything we say about feminism or anytime we push back on analysis made about us (without us) is just "men under patriarchy acting like men" then you haven't been listening, your feminism isn't remotely intersectional and you're actually the newcomer working off of a childish, gender essentialist, shallow and counter revolutionary framework.
You are at best woefully ignorant and uninformed and at worst disingenuous and engaging in feminism purely as a means to validate your own biases and protect yourself from having to engage in any unlearning, introspection or radical inner work.
