A Lean Mean Hyperfixation Machine

sometimes a trans woman wins against a cis woman. sometimes a cis woman wins against another cis woman too. yet only one of them is allowed to win without facing consequences.

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.

One of those ways is how when cis people talk about someone's transition, they talk about it as if it happened in a day. Like, when a trans person talks about their transition, they usually say "I started transitioning in [date]". Where as the cis person will say "X transitioned in [date]".

They think transition is surgery. It's a surgery. They think trans people go under, get bottom surgery, breast implants and ffs all in one go and wake up all transitioned.

They think it's possible to change the shape of your body, but not its function. It's all superficial, just changing your appearance. You might even look like the opposite gender, but nothing meaningful actually changed. You have breasts now? That doesn't mean you can ever produce milk. And if you do something so you can? That milk would probably be harmful to a baby.

That's why you'll never be a woman.

They think it does something, but not that that something is equivalent to an endogenous puberty. Like, they'll interfere with your development and make you sterile. They definitely affect you in some negative ways, but they will never produce meaningful results. After all, boys and girls are genetically different.

I'm sure they think someone assigned male a birth taking estrogen is going to get larger breasts. But they don't think those breasts are the same as a cis girl's breasts. They will never look like real breasts (unless you get implants, but those are just for show) and they will never function like real breasts.

I think a few years ago most cis people would not know that HRT is a thing. It's only become common knowledge because conservatives have been fearmongering about giving hormones to minors.

It imagines a historical time and place where gender transgression was once equally harshly punished in both directions, a time and place that has never existed.

It presumes that historical transfeminine people didn't also fight and die for their right to be feminine.

It counters a claim about the state of the world today by just suggesting one theory about how the world ended up that way, which even if true is irrelevant to the question of the justice of the world as it is now.

It presumes that transmasculine rights are naturally within the realm of feminist activism, while transfeminine rights are not.

It ignores that the relative lack of interest from cis and transmasc feminists in defending transfeminine rights is just another example of the inequality being complained of in the first place.

It seems to suggest by symmetry that a "masculinist" movement made up of principally cis men would be the natural vehicle through which transfeminine rights might be won, the utter absurdity of which idea is yet another demonstration of the underlying inequality to which the word "transmisogyny" refers.

It positions the current severity of transmisogyny as a failure of activism (or a failure to convince the wider public that we're not a threat), which is just victim-blaming.

It presumes an ignorance of feminist history on the part of the transfem who is being argued with, a presumption which is in itself transmisogynistic.

It ignores that conditions have generally improved somewhat for transfeminine people too.

Depending on the phrasing, it often but not always presumes (without acknowledging that it is doing so) a US-centred understanding of feminist history that may have little relevance to the transfem being argued with if she e.g. lives in India.

It's quite amazing really how many problems there can be with such a brief argument.

TMA = trans women, transfeminine nonbinary people.

Both categories include women and nonbinary people

Both categories include people with penises, and people with vaginas, and people with ambiguous genitals.

Both categories include intersex people.

TME includes cis and trans men.