Violet

I've had many awkward interactions when trying to argue that trans women were not "male socialised", as the occasional transfem will jump in to contradict me and say that she did have a "normal boy childhood". I've been told at times that, by describing my own life, I make transfems who don't understand their youth as a "girlhood" feel like they're fake or inauthentically trans.

I've often struggled with this, because so much of how I understand my own life is through the lens of desperation to find the words to describe a gender expression that has barely changed since I was a kid. Understanding myself as a woman has helped make sense of experiences in my youth that made no sense otherwise. Why was I talked over all the time? Why was I sexually assaulted so often? Why did I struggle to turn academic success into career success? Why was I underpaid compared to my peers? Understanding that I was viewed as a kind of girl (even as I was denied the right to name myself "girl") sites my experiences within the long history of women who have faced exactly the same kinds of marginalisations.

I understood "transition" as a kind of acceptance of a reality that has always been there, just a reframing of my self-image rather than a fundamental change in how I interact with the world. So discovering how many trans women didn't have childhoods like mine has been a bit of difficult experience, I've had to rework how I understand transition to make sense of it.

I now understand it like this: every "boy" enters the world without any particular idea of which kinds of behaviours are aligned with "manhood" and which with "womanhood". Childhood is the experience of pushing boundaries, seeing what happens, and adapting accordingly.

Every "boy" has likely had the experience of once doing something that aligns far more with "womanhood" rather than "manhood" (whether it be being softly-spoken and meek, crying over the suffering of others, calling out the misogyny of their peers, wearing a feminine item of clothing or make-up, expressing interest in a feminine hobby or piece of media, or anything else) and then being told such a behaviour is not an appropriate one for a boy, it's something girls do. The vast majority of boys will quickly learn and adapt. They will not feel any kind of internal struggle between their performance of masculinity and a deep desire to behave differently, they just think "Oh, ok" and go along with it.

Then there are the small number of "boys" who, in spite of being told it's inappropriate, continue to feel that deep desire to do whatever it was that was deemed feminine. These "boys" have two options:

They can keep doing the feminine behaviour, even as the social punishments, exclusion, bullying, etc, roll in. They will be under immense pressure to change their behaviour, but for whatever reason (perhaps autism boosting resistance to conforming to social norms) will just continue to do what they are told is "girly", often not even understanding why they should not be "girly" in the first place.

They can adopt a masculine mask, feigning no inclination towards the feminine behaviour even as they continue to feel it. This will confer certain superficial privileges, in the sense of avoiding the social punishments that come with "girliness", but at the severe mental cost of inauthenticity. Many autistic people who mask as allistic experience severe burnout when the mask has been up for too long, and so will it be for these "boys": inauthenticity and performance are so draining and make it impossible to live a full life.

If they keep performing even a small handful of behaviours that are socially read as "feminine", the "boys" in group (1) will experience misogyny from a very young age, and if they go on to transition will correctly assess their youth as a time when they lived as girls, being treated as girls, but without the language to describe it accurately until later. Transition is not so much a change in their behaviour as an acknowledgement of what their behaviour has always meant.

The equivalent "boys" in group (2) may avoid explicit misogyny for a long time, but, to use a phrase from gay and bi activists, "the closet is not a privilege". To be required to perform manhood to avoid punishment, even as you know it doesn't fit you, even as you really want to behave very differently, is not a "normal boy childhood". "Normal boys" do not suffer like this. Still, if they go on to transition and remove the mask, it will not be a mere perspective-shift but a major change in how they interact with the world.

To be a closeted trans girl is to be placed in an impossible bind: either be yourself and experience the most horrific social punishment, or mask and experience awful internal strife and self-hatred.

Q. You want to raise every boy as a girl? Yes.

Q. Why? A boy will learn to hate girls as long as he is raised in such a way where he is treated as better, and superior to, his girl peers, whenever he is cruel to girls. So, instead, we raise boys as girls.

Q. What if they say they are not a girl, and want to be acknowledged as boy? Then you know they are a boy, so you must make sure to understand them as boy, and not a girl.

Q. What does it mean to be 'raised as a girl'? That's up for you to decide. The only difference is that you should not raise boys any differently than you raise girls, since you raise every boy as a girl.

Q. Girls and boys are raised in specific ways for specific purposes, so it does not make sense to raise boys as girls. If you raise every boy as a girl, then there is no being which is not raised as a girl, so anyone raised as a girl necessarily must learn to do anything and everything to grow up, without restrictions on tasks, labours, or interests.

Q. But boys and girls are different. All two girls are different, and raising girls in one specific way destroys this individuality in favour of moulding girls to serve the same master. Still, the girls resist to live life on their own terms. If girls can be raised such that they know they can do anything they want, including not being girls, so too will boys raised as girls.

Q. Why not raise every girl as a boy? Because if a girl does not exist among boys, then the girl is made.

Q. Why not raise girls and boys as themselves? The self must be made in a world where girls and boys can first and foremost be themselves. One step towards this goal is to raise every boy as a girl.

Q. The way people raise girls is cruel, so why would you raise boys with that cruelty? If you raise girls with cruelty, then you should stop being cruel to girls.

i must, obligitarily, note: a higher amount of transfem cast members (or the presence of them, period) does not necessarily mean a completely safe environment for transfems, either viewers or cast members alike. but at the very least, it demonstrates a marked effort to platform and support trans women as valued community members. an effort which, notably, dropout tv has not bothered to make. nrb in specific, the channel this happened on, is one of the botc community channels striving to make this effort, with one of the key and beloved members in their botc series being mara joy (who is a trans woman, noted not to tokenize her in specific but to highlight her)!!

so, to lay it out more specifically, sam reich made this joke on a platform that is expected to be a safe space for transfem viewers. he was a guest star on a show which has far less social pull than dropout tv, was one of the only white cishet guys in the room, and took advantage of that. i cannot stress this enough: sam reich went to a community that has a general expectation of being a safe place for transfems, as a guest, likely for the purposes of promoting his latest kickstarter, and he used that platform to make a "joke" about transfems being pedophiles.

it was also directed towards a gay man, who, like… well, we all saw the clip, it's my opinion that he looks pretty genuinely uncomfortable for a moment before trying to hide it by playing it up for the camera. tbh i find it disappointing that said joke ended up in the final edit at all! but the fact that sam felt so comfortable dropping that kind of quip given the setting and the current overall climate is so frustrating and gross.

remember that time they aired an episode where Chris Grace said "Esk*mo kiss" and, in response to the backlash, they and Grace separately issued statements + edited it out of the episode? still waiting on Reich's statement about this

it is that simple, yes. a rich, powerful white man essentially said, "funny to be called a pedophile by a man wearing a lot of makeup" and expected everyone to laugh at it.

it's notable that the response was confusion. they knew that what he said was objectionable, they were trying to find a way to avoid that conclusion and couldn't find one. I also had this moment of confusion.

we, all of us, have been taught to dismiss and excuse transmisogyny. we've internalized it, the confusion happens automatically. deliberate effort is required to overcome that impulse to dismiss, and even that relies on us having noticed it happening at all.

YES!