@gaytrashfire I wanted to reply to you specifically because of this, in good faith. Yes, this does translate into the real world. I’d like to share a personal experience with it, but tw for CSA and medical abuse.
I have a friend who is a cis woman, who I’ve been friends with since high school. She knew me before I came out as a trans boy, and she’s known me since. We are the best of friends- I go to doctors appointments with her, we go on vacations together, we buy each other food, we babysit each other’s pets, we run errands together. I’m going to be in her wedding party next year, and she’s going to be in mine the year after. We’ve been best friends for nearly 20 years.
A couple years ago, we went on vacation together to a beach, along with both of our fiances. We were driving through a beach town, and a man was walking on the sidewalk next to our car as we were driving. He happened to glance at our car, then kept going on his way- my friend said she was so disgusted that a man had looked at her that she wanted to ram her car into him.
Let me reiterate: a pedestrian, who happened to be a man, glanced at our car that was driving a couple feet from him, and my friend was so disgusted by his mere existence in a public space that she wanted to murder him with a vehicle.
This wasn’t the first time she had said things like this, but it was the most violent of the bunch so far, and it was the moment that crystalized things for me. Every comment she had made dating back about hating men, about fearing them, about being disgusted with their existence. Every time we were in public and she got anxious near a man- who was doing nothing to us- and she subsequently started to lash out at those men and at us, her friends. Every comment about how, being bisexual, she disparaged being attracted to men and thought of it as a curse. Everything came to a head then. Because I was a man in that car- the only man in that car.
My friend has a lot of trauma. She was raped as a child (I don’t know how many times), and continuously abused by doctors- particularly male doctors- about her weight all through her life, from childhood onward. She pathologically avoids doctors even when she’s extremely ill- sometimes I have to go to check ups with her, because she cannot go on her own. She’s been misdiagnosed with high blood pressure because that’s how stressed she gets knowing that a man is going to potentially be around her touching her body, like a check up. She has an unmedicated anxiety disorder and PTSD, and because she’s scared of doctors, she won’t seek treatment.
The men who hurt my friend deserve to rot. I’d put them there myself if I had the ability.
But that random beachgoer on the sidewalk wasn’t those men. Neither were the men in walmart, or the gas station attendant, or our male professors, or any other random man we encountered ever that she despised. I wasn’t those men.
We had to have a long talk, because her ideology only left room for two possibilities: 1 she hated and feared every man in existence so much so that she must also hate and fear me, or 2 the reason she did not hate me was because she didn’t truly see me as a man. Either I was a monster, or I was misgendered. The way she spoke and thought about men left only those options, as all bioessentialism does. Man evil, women good. People who not evil must somehow be women or women-adjacent: this is how she justified still caring about me, a trans man, and our nonbinary friends of any agab. She never used the wrong name or pronouns with me; never referred to me as a woman. But in her head, that was where she was sorting me. I couldn’t be a good or safe person and be a man; the two were mutually exclusive.
When I told her this, she broke down. It was a rough week of pouring our hearts out. That was a few years ago, and she’s made so much progress as a person since then. I honestly think I may have stopped her heading down the radfem pipeline. My existence forced her to address the failings of her binary worldview, and to come to terms with the nuances not just of transmasculinity but also manhood in general.
It’s hard to acknowledge that there is no one thing that makes terrible people do terrible things. My friend wanted to blame the evil of her abusers on them being men, but evil is not an essential trait. To do evil, to hurt another person, is always a choice, and it’s a choice anyone of any gender is capable of. Evil people are people, and to see them as complete people- like ourselves- is frightening. It’s confusing and complex and reminds us that we too are capable of hurting others, if we choose to. Healing is messy, and it’s been very messy for my friend.
But since that talk she’s never spoken like that again. She still gets anxious around men who get too close to her in public, or loud male voices, and I still go to the doctor with her. But men can exist around her- and she can exist around them- without curling up into a ball of panic and violence. She has a long way to go, but she’s come a long way too. And most importantly she’d learned to lay the blame for what happened to her where it belongs- on the fuckers who hurt her- and to stop using it to bludgeon everyone else around her. The things she said, the venom behind them, those hurt the most marginalized men and masc ppl in her life: me, a trans man, our AMAB nonbinary friend, her butch fiance. We had to hear her vitriol; we had to live with it. My friend was driving that car at the beach- I was at her mercy, in the back seat, wondering if under any other circumstance would it be me she was gunning for. The men who hurt her had power and privilege, which is why they used it to abuse a little girl. Her thoughts and her comments never reached or hurt them. She couldn’t touch them. But she felt she had to hurt somebody, so she hurt us, because we were what was in reach. And as a cis woman, she felt she had some modicum of privilege over us trans and nb and gnc people, so she punched down. And if that sounds familiar to you (terfs, radfems, tradwives) then you are correct. Same line of logic; same bioessentialism, applied and misapplied for maximum damage.
I wish I had a better end to the story, but our story isn’t over yet. She and I have healing to do- her while she navigates her trauma in a patriarchal society, and me while I grow into being a man. But our story is true, and painful, and it’s just one story of hundreds of thousands. My friend was poisoned and made ever more terrified by the encouragement of this kind of online shit, but it didn’t leave her when she logged off. She took it with her and weaponized it in real life, just like hundreds of thousands of others will. You may not experience it, but please believe us when trans men and transmasculine people say we do.
