Genuine Certified CAMAB Person weighing in here:
i think this is a really dicey conversation b/c it’s often waged as a proxy argument for other things. specifically, you often get twefs arguing that transfeminine people 100% have male privilege b/c they want to exclude us from women’s spaces (and otherwise undermine the idea that trans women are women) and then naturally you have people pushing back against that arguing that no, actually trans women are women and therefore can’t have male privilege case closed end of story
and like, ultimately i think a lot of it comes down to a very specific, nitty-gritty question of how you define privilege? b/c a lot of Privilege Discourse does revolve around how other people treat you — resumes with male-associated names get better responses than ones with female-associated names; judges give white people shorter sentences than black people for the same crimes; things like that — and if that’s your privilege framework, then it makes sense to wonder if transfeminine people who (for whatever reason) present as masculine might have some degree of male privilege
but then by a totally analogous argument, it would be easy to argue that closeted gay people have straight privilege or that white-passing people of color have white privilege (setting aside issues of colorism, which i’m not qualified to talk about), and i think most people in the social justice crowd would agree that that Seems Very Wrong. and the way i’ve seen people navigate that is with the idea of the internal experience of privilege, that privilege is something you have without having to give anything up, and obvi transfeminine people who don’t feel comfortable presenting as anything other than masc aren’t getting that supposed male privilege for nothing; they/we have to give up living openly and authentically, which is kind of a big deal
and so then i think the question becomes: why do we care about this? b/c i feel like most of the time people are interested in the question of privilege to answer the question “does this person have the lived experience necessary to speak with authority on this topic?” — eg i’m not particularly interested in listening to straight people talk about what they think being gay is like, nor do i think it’s my place to speak for black people on issues of antiblack discrimination. and by that metric, no, transfeminine people absolutely don’t have male privilege b/c transfeminine people, regardless of external presentation, have the lived experience of going thru the world as a transfeminine person. and that’s obvi not to say that there’s One Single Unifying Transfeminine Experience that we all share — we’re not a monolithic hivemind — but it does mean people reading (and thus treating) you as male doesn’t somehow magically mean that you, a transfeminine person, don’t have an inner subjective experience of living in the world as a transfeminine person, an experience that you are qualified to talk about as a transfeminine person
if, instead, we’re after the question “why does this person approach the world the way they do?”, i think we’re in murkier waters, but i think those waters are always murkier. if i’m reserved with showing my emotions, is that because as a kid people thought i was a boy and discouraged me from showing them, or is it because i’m hella introverted and slow to trust people with intimate parts of my life? if i work behind the scenes to construct a web of contacts to help find employment/housing/etc, am i taking a “feminine approach” by doing the emotional work of building and nurturing emotional relationships, or am i doing the masculine-coded Old Boys’ Club thing? if i’m confident in and vocal about my opinions, is that because men are taught to be that way and people thought i was a man, is it because i’ve internalized messages that marginalized (ie in this case transfeminine) voices need to play a larger role in our general discourse, or is it because of other axes (race, class, education, physical ability) that i’m privileged on? for any given behavior, we can construct any number of “just so” stories about why the person is behaving like that, and i ultimately think it’s futile and pointless to try to answer those questions with ironclad certainty
because the thing is that like, the other way that i see privilege questions come up a lot has to do with calling people out for doing something shitty. and like, it’s tempting and easy to be like “ugh, that person is doing [frowned-upon thing] b/c they’ve internalized male socialization (or w/e)”, but that obscures the fact that people who aren’t men can do shitty things too. it’s shitty and invalidating to say to/of a transfeminine person “oh, you’re doing that b/c you’re ~really~ (on some level) a man”, but it’s also bad to be like “no, i can’t be doing [frowned-upon thing] b/c i’m not a man!” — being transfeminine doesn’t let me off the hook for treating others poorly. i think this is ultimately one of the less helpful aspects of Privilege Discourse and i would not be at all sad if it Stopped
. . . that is probably more words than you wanted, but yes, those are most of my thoughts
