#transemasculation

It sounds fancier than it is. The term is related to the concept of epistemic injustice. In essence, trans people have historically been subject to a form of epistemicide: our stories, histories, testimonials, ways of life, all erased and buried to maintain the patriarchal myth of dichotomous, naturalized, immutable sex.

We are then further marginalized through epistemic injustice, prevented from participating in the processes of knowledge-production, our testimonies devalued, our voices suppressed and our identities defined for us, not by us. The perception of us shaped by others, instead of ourselves. The conversation about us dominated by the voices of those who'd rather stamp us out, shouting over us constantly.

The primary oppressive modality that trans men / mascs face early in transition is something called regendering, this can simply be described as a pressure to reassert themselves as women instead of seeking to “rise above their station” via an assertion of masculinity or manhood, something that is seen as delusional by patriarchy due to manhood being a biologically nepotistic category. This is also the primary oppressive modality faced by trans children, which for both trans children and trans men / mascs stems from the status of both children and assigned-women as propertised, objectified classes that exist as forms of familial, patriarchal and national capital and signifiers of reproductive futurity.

The biological nepotism that underpins patriarchal manhood can best be described as a one way door, it’s a future designation placed upon people assigned-male, you can never enter it from outside that designation but you can most certainly leave it (or be pushed out of it via emasculation: see how men constantly try and call each other's masculinity into question as a policing mechanism). Leaving manhood leads to the counter-modality of regendering which is called degendering, we’ll be talking more about this later.

While trans men / mascs are never actually allowed to enter through the manhood door (a form of oppressive resistance called transemasculation), encountering that door whilst simultaneously being pressured to reassert themselves as women puts immense pressure on trans men / mascs to adopt normative signifiers of masculinity in order to be taken seriously, some of the more harmful signifiers being misogyny and transmisogyny.

This coupled with the often-inevitable internalisation of regendering pressure can lead to what I can best describe as the expression of a schizophrenic phenomena, where trans men / mascs are engaging in masculine self-assertion via harmful signifiers (misogyny and transmisogyny) and simultaneously regendering themselves as a form of woman or AFAB due to the aforementioned internalisation of regendering pressure. This is a phenomena that I not only believe remains unelucidated within a lot of trans male / masc communities online but is often actively reinforced.

So why is this phenomena so much more common amongst younger, early-transition and pre-transition trans men / mascs? The answer to this is surprisingly simple.

Regendering has limits.

Regendering functions like an elastic band, the further away from assigned-womanhood trans men / mascs get, the more pressure there is on them to return to the fold, but there comes a point in transition where recapture is no longer seen as possible, the trans man / masc is considered “too far gone” to be reigned back in and the elastic band snaps, but instead of finally being seen as men or sufficiently masculine they are instead cast into the limbo between sexes (a phenomenon known as third-sexing). They are abjectified, they are monstered, they are degendered.

The simplest way to understand degendering is as a Schrödinger’s box in which the degendered individual is seen and treated as male, female, neither or both depending on which designation(s) can enable the most harm in any given moment, a great unfortunately not-so-theoretical example of this would be a trans woman arrested for indecent exposure for being topless in public (treated as a woman for the purpose of arrest) and then thrown into a men’s jail for it (treated as a man for the purpose of punishment). This is the primary oppressive modality faced by trans women.

The fact that further-transitioned trans men / mascs face similar expressions of these oppressive modalities to trans women (despite there still being marked differences in how it can manifest) makes solidarity and understanding come more naturally, on top of those trans men / mascs no longer facing anywhere near as much pressure to constantly reassert their own masculinity or regender themselves as women, with all of the resulting problematic behaviour that that pressure can manifest.

So what do we do about it?

We talk, we elucidate the realities of how oppressions can manifest differently instead of trying to flatten everything and accuse people who dare to highlight those differences or express exasperation at trans men’s / masc’s problematic behaviour as being infighters or “transmisandrists” or what have you.

thats the thing here. thats the thing causing all the infighting, the 'who has it worse'. people are absolutely convinced that trans women actually have it The Worst out of all trannies bc they're somehow able to be Uniquely Hurt in a way that no other tranny can be hurt, even BY other trannies, and that's why people are foaming at the mouth at 'transandrophobia'.

because if they believe transmisogyny means men (cis and trans) oppress trans women, they'll conversely define transandrophobia as 'trans women oppress trans men'. and no matter how much we tell them that isnt what we're fucking saying it doesn't matter, because they're coming to the table with the dumbfuck moonlogic that transgender men are somehow able to access cisgender levels of power within the patriarchy. when in reality we can't. because we're transgender.

no, being thin and white and able-bodied and on hrt and middle class, (because that's the John Transman everyone has in their head) doesn't erase the fact that you're transgender. it doesn't give trans men power over trans women, because those are all things trans women can also be.

'but when you control for all those variables, you're just left with a man and a woman, and men--' if trans women never had access to male privilege, even while closeted or before their egg cracked, then trans men don't get it either, even 'post transition'. we've heard from trans women about how people could sniff out that they weren't actually men before they themselves knew-- you think that doesn't happen to trans men once they've transitioned? that cisgender people never think a trans man is performing maleness wrong?

It posits that the worst thing a man can experience is being emasculated, being treated like a woman, feeling like "less of a man". Most of the men I know and love really don't care about being emasculated at all. Honestly, for myself, that's probably one of the things I struggle with the least about being trans. The systemic harms I face for being viewed as a woman by society are harmful to me, but the act of denying that I'm a man is not where these systemic harms start and stop. I accept that I'm viewed as a woman by society at large but I know I'm not a woman. My resilience towards being misgendered and my understanding of my material circumstances in wider society do not discredit my identity. I've had woman/girlhood pushed on me all my life, it's nothing new to me, I'm still going to experiencing these things whether I'm validated as a man or not until transphobia and bio/gender essentialism are dismantled as systems. I have the language to communicate how misogyny harms me and have been an intersectional feminist since I was a teenager, I'm perfectly fine with collaborating and standing up with women to dismantle these harmful systems.

What I struggle with most as a trans man are the issues I deal with that do not have the mainstream socially acknowledged language to communicate them. My body that I built myself and love so much being viewed as disgusting and mutilated, being turned away from life saving services and resources for being a man, the fear of being treated like a predator because all men are viewed as predators, the fear that I, as a mentally ill, physically disabled trans moc will be treated as a threat for existing and have no place to turn because everywhere has turned their backs on us.

Trans men not being viewed as men is a real issue of course and some people are emotionally affected by it more than me (if someone goes "you're not a man" I just kinda go "ok whatever, you're an ignorant transphobe" and move on with my day) so I won't say it has no place in the conversation; but it can't be placed as the only form of oppression we face.