here's a hot take: the fact that whether trans men are as oppressed as trans women is even a talking point at all is a sign that something is Wrong.
people have argued for years that asexuals don't belong in the lgbt+ community because they're less oppressed, and push back against that idea is framed as aggression or outright homophobia.
people who other m-specs from the community or even are just openly bigoted towards them cite things like "passing privilege" to prove that they have it better, that they're lesser within the community
panphobes paint pan people as biphobes and biphobes paint bi people as transphobes while m-spec people are pitted against each other by people who hate them as a whole
transmeds and truscum argue that people who don't transition aren't Really trans, they create images of hypersexualized stereotypically feminine people and argue that all tucutes are read as (and really Are) cis women and don't have to face real discrimination because of it
and they all take notes from terfs who've perfected the art of painting marginalized groups as privileged invaders and aggressors
over and over and over again intracommunity violence is bred, spread, and justified with the insistence that the group being spoken of is actually privileged and therefore Deserves it. silencing, othering, exclusion, and sometimes outright violence and harassment are justified on the basis of those people being painted as privileged invaders who either don't belong at all or who exist as lessers who should sit down, shut up, and take what people give them.
and the fact that the insistence that trans men be treated as Equals within their Own Communities is presented as Violence on their part is as absurd as it always is frankly. the fact that trans men have to Openly Testify themselves as lesser in order to be taken in good faith At All is fucked up.
and it's two parts really. the first is that as a community we don't treat all members this way. if you believe that gay men are a valuable part of the community then you don't argue that they're lesser than lesbians because they don't face the same kind of misogyny. you accept them as Different but Valuable parts of the community. you listen to them when they talk about their experiences. you don't even Consider if they're lesser, it doesn't cross your mind. just like people who aren't aphobic don't wonder if aspec on the whole are less oppressed before they boost the voices of aro/aces.
the second is that for Years I've seen and been actively Pressed to "admit" that trans men Baseline face less violence than trans women, when statistically that just isn't true. trans men often aren't reported on to the same extent that trans women are because of a lack of visibility and misreporting as cis women, but when they are the statistics are Comparable. and it just makes me wonder Why.
why I see the same things coming from exclusionists in every stripe and yet again and again and again people fall for it and normalize it until we're forced to take half measures in denying our own oppression and lived experiences just to be heard at all.
I feel like part of this is the idea that the second trans men transition they are able to get access to male privilege. Which is simply not true.
Hell, even trans men who pass don't have access to all aspects of male privilege. A lot of it absolutely! But not all.
NO aspects of male privilege. stop feeding into this bullshit that we get little a male privilege, as a treat.
obviously individual situations vary but as a whole? absolutely fucking not.
even transmasc folks who ""pass"" 90% of the time still do not fucking get male privilege. shut up Please
I'm a trans man who passes (except over the phone for some weird reason). Please don't tell me to be quiet when I'm discussing my own experiences with gender and sexism (or lack of).
I absolutely do have access to male privilege. Since I started passing consistently...
- people listen to me when I talk, without needing to prove first that I'm an expert in my areas of expertise.
- I don't get talked over by men in conversation anymore.
- I'm not seen as bitchy or bossy if I dominate a conversation.
The above are giant advantages in my field of work. So much so that I haven't had to work as hard as I used to (pre-T) for the same, or better, results.
- I haven't been sexually harassed by a stranger in four years.
- Nobody gives unprompted comments on my body size or what I eat anymore.
- I'm not expected to spend large amounts of money and time on personal grooming. Noone comments on my lack of makeup or hairy legs anymore.
- I'm treated seriously in every shop I enter.
- Noone asks me when I'm going to have kids (and there are plenty of people in my life who don't know I'm trans).
- When I express anger, it's more socially acceptable.
Before I passed, I could not have said anything in this list without lying out of my ass. If these aren't privileges that I have gained because people started perceiving me as male, then what else are they?
And these are not just me either. Like one guy i know, once said that strangers stopped negatively judging him for his tattoos and started complimenting them instead. Tho people have also started giving him shit about his flower socks, but that's kinda beside the point
@notusuallyprepared tagged: "geez louise. "Male privilege as a treat," naw that's not how that works in my experience. Its not a treat it's an accident or a by product of transition. And it's a responsibility to use that privilege to raise the voices of people who don't have it ( they don't have a voice because people don't listen when they talk I mean). I should note that I am white and that combines with male privilege. Like e.g. Aboriginal men aren't treated like experts even if they are, and the whole anger thing too and probably others I'm not realising right this moment (because it's 1am and I should be asleep). There are many aspects of male privilege I don't have because of being trans but on balance I think there are more that I do." [End transcription]
I understand what you're saying, but what's being described is "passing privilege." which is highly situational and largely dependent on the person in question being closeted or not outed.
if you pass and are gender conforming your coworker might take you more seriously because they're interpreting you as a cis man. if that same coworker is transphobic then you Very Likely won't get that same privilege if you're outed to them, if they pick up on aspects of toxic masculinity that you don't perform to their liking, or if you aren't gender conforming. and in fact you can very easily face active harm from this person.
this is of course, as you mentioned, heightened by other aspects of oppression.
it's not a privilege to be terrified of being outed. it's not a privilege to walk on eggshells because you know your career, your social life, or your Life could be at risk if you don't. it's not a privilege to have to choose between your presentation and your safety.
what you've just described is the equivalent of insisting that m-spec people have privilege over gay people because they can be in relationships with people of a different gender.
yes it's true that your boss can see a picture of your wife and kids and assume that you're a straight man. yes it's true that your boss can look at someone with a masculine presentation, flat chest, deep voice, and masculine name and assume that he's a cis man. that doesn't change the fact that whatever social advantage that gives you can be taken away under the right circumstances, which isn't inherent privilege.
I'm a gnc trans masc person living in alabama. right now I'm pre-t which means that when I wear dresses and skirts and makeup people don't bat an eye. in fact I get much more positive attention when I do because they read me as a cis woman successfully performing femininity (when at other times I'm read as a gnc woman). that doesn't make being pre-t a privilege or gender non-conformity in trans mascs a privilege, it means that I have an advantage in a certain social situation because of a highly specific set factors being met. and when I do eventually go on t those factors will be different. I Will have to choose between my presentation or my safety because of where I live and who I am.
Thanks for your thoughtful explanation and correction (I especially appreciate because the person who came to my post from like, a week ago, to tell me to shut my face, responded again and then blocked me before I could read it. I like knowing what my mistake actually was so I don't make it again, rather than being told off but not told why)
I had totally forgotten about passing privilege being a thing so was conflating it with male privilege. Though passing results as a trans man is rather different than it is for trans women (E.g. They tend to get more stranger harassment and trans men less), which is the angle I was approaching the argument from but didn't say so outright.
I do think that it's important for trans men, at least those who pass and have other privileges, to be really aware of it. Like it would be easy for me to use the advantages I've gained to talk over women, be intimidating on purpose to get my way and so on. People listen to me now and I need to at least try to use that to have them listen to the people they normally don't listen to
of course ! that person was certainly, Upset lets put it.
I think mostly it just came off as a little tone deaf because of the context of the post itself (expressing frustration with people insisting that certain marginalized groups are more privileged than others as a baseline and using that assumption to influence how they treat them within queer and activist spaces). certainly not to the degree that reacting like That was necessary, but you know.
that said, I think it's also worth noting that it's an intersectional issue! all marginalized people can have situational advantages depending on a variety of conditional factors. a cis woman can have a social advantage over a trans man depending on the situation just the same as a trans man can have a social advantage over a cis woman depending on the situation. that doesn't make either group privileged for their marginalized status, that's just how the cookie crumbles.
(or, as I mentioned in another thread on this post, there are pre-e trans women who can be interpreted as cis men by someone they aren't out to. they can experience the exact same kind of situational social advantage that you're describing, but that doesn't translate to privilege.)
what it comes down to is not pinning certain marginalized groups as privileged, but asking everyone to recognize how the people around them are being treated and to try to lift them up when possible (or at least watching their own behavior when interacting with them).
I think there’s also this tendency to see male privilege as an individual thing, rather than a systemic thing, and to let our own experiences with individual benefits from passing crowd out the actual systemic circumstances of trans men. This is partly due to how pop-feminism focusses on individual ways that cis men have male privilege in an attempt to get them to change their behaviour, but a side effect is that it sets the frame for discussions of privilege in general.
Like, you got a raise at your job after transitioning? Good for you! All the research we have on trans income says that trans men generally don’t get an improvement in their income from transitioning, and that on average we make half the annual income of cis people.
You’re not afraid to walk down the street at night any more? Awesome! A much greater percentage of trans men report being victims of rape than cis women.
People take you more seriously now? That’s great! 30% of trans men have avoided getting a driver’s license and 27% avoid using banks due to discrimination.
There are no transmasc politicians in my country. There are no transmasc judges, CEOs, heads of government services, heads of universities or anyone with any kind of institutional power. Being treated well on an individual level because you pass has very little bearing on whether trans men as a group have male privilege at the systemic level, especially male privilege compared to cis women.
exactly !! people get so caught up in whether or not trans men can have social advantages in specific situations that their systemic oppression gets swept under the rug with the assumption that they face a lesser form of transphobia.
it's easy for someone in a privileged position (a financially stable white person with access to transition and the medical care that they needed, for instance) to look at social improvements they've faced and say that they have it better now than they did before. but that shouldn't trick people into assuming that that translates to privilege for trans mascs as a whole Or that that represents the norm.
