Letâs all stop calling it âhyper invisibility of trans menâ or âtrans men erasureâ and call it what it actually is - damnatio memoriae
It was a practice the Romans used to punish dead individuals and their contributions they made towards society by destroying anything they made, forbidding anyone to mourn them, completely erasing their memory and existences from public record and history. By erasing everything from public memory, there was no evidence the person ever truly existed
Sound familiar? Because trans men, especially those who are not white, able bodied, etc, endure this
the intricacies of transmasc invisibility, and fallacies of strictly gendered transphobia
Invisibility as a term for this dynamic is a fallacy in and of itself as what transmasculine people are suffering from is not invisibility, which suggests accident, but is instead deliberate erasure. Trans men, transmasculine people and transmasculinities have historically been intentionally erased (through not just expunging records but by creating new records entirely) explicitly so that violence against this marginalized group can continue to be ignored. This ignorance creates a dynamic where transmasculine people who actually do rise to any level of power are then made hypervisible (cough, buck angel, cough) and the general perception of a transmasculine person remains an image of a privileged, white, cis passing transsexual, who âacknowledges biological realityâ, who has lived flawlessly as a man 6 months into t or instead an impressionable young (white) girl who has been infected by a social contagion. This cycle of highlighting only a few different stereotypes of trans man / transmasculine person further contributes to the erasure and harm done to trans men and transmasculine people who do not fit into those very niche groups that attain all the visibility and are said to represent the entire demographic. This deliberate erasure of the actual majority of trans men and transmasculine people exists primarily so that violence can continue to be enacted against them behind closed doors. It is so often not only transmasculine people themselves that are made invisible, but rather it is anti-transmasc violence, including militant state violence, interpersonal violence and a medical + psychiatric violence, which makes transmasculine people, through a process of essentialization, aggressors without aggression and victims without words. As you continue to read this interrogation of how the erasure of transmascs, trans men and other affected groups is performed, it should become more clear how this erasure does not function as a privilege or a shield from violence. If you have any desire for legitimate solidarity between marginalized demographics of people, I implore you to see how this function of erasure and invisibility is not the shield from violence it is so often represented as, but is instead a cloak that intentionally obscures piles of gender marginalized martyrs robbed of a full life. It is an intentional burial of history.
