Thank you for this comprehensive breakdown and for attaching numbers and empirical work. I wish you did not have to, but that you did it is valuable.
The pervasive idea that GNC female children donât suffer âas much asâ GNC male children or that they are able to somehow escape the level of attention or stigma placed on GNC male children is something that drives me crazy. The fact that male gender nonconformity is symbolically more poignant or salient under this particular iteration of patriarchy does not mean that GNC girls and women are not punished and abused. Young GNC female people suffer variants of misogynistic abuse common to all female people: there are permutations of abuse found more commonly in the histories of people like butch lesbians and trans men (such as intense levels of physical abuse, as measured above, or institutional types of violence such as police brutality, chemical restraint, and being tracked into punitive systems like juvenile detention) but you can find these traumatic events heaped on other women for being resistant, incorrect, or merely inconvenient as well.
I sometimes wonder if this is part of the reason many female people continue passing on the idea that GNC male suffering must be more intense or more politically relevant. Women and girls are first and foremost taught not to see ourselves even having experiences worthy of sharing, but weâre also taught that if we canât see our experiences as specifically attention-worthy and unique then thereâs no point in talking nonetheless organizing. Itâs often said by woke-folks that thereâs no universal womanhood (a perversion of points made by black women to justify, raise, and support racial solidarity in the face of feminism that advanced the causes of specifically white, usually class-privileged women to the detriment of women of color) but disturbingly this is used not to elevate the voices of particular kinds of vulnerable or oppressed women but to deny the idea that one can speak from any womanhood at all.
Bizarrely, the fact that female people of many identities, situations, and backgrounds can share overlapping sets of experiences, including of abuse and oppression, and that sometimes, for various reasons, male people might share these experiences, too, is used to undermine solidarity between us instead of promote it. It is used to individualize our situations as something we are responsible for fixing or coping with alone rather than inculcate an understanding of how the various contexts in which we live affect our possible responses. It is used to righteously demand the withdrawal of empathy from certain groups of acceptably dismissable female people rather than note possible grounds and leverage points for extending our compassion and increasing our ability to understand others. It is used to tell us that there is no way we can reliably sort our experiences, individually or together, such that we can understand why this happened and happens to us, instead of allowing us to build a reliable pattern recognition in order to keep ourselves aware and safe. It is used to tell us that unless we consider a system of understanding where we lovingly and carefully inhabit the perspective and value systems of those who harmed us, our pain and calls for justice will be ignored, since we might possibly be committing a moral wrong by misunderstanding the experiences or identities of those who hurt us, even if we have named the dynamics of their abuse correctly, instead of telling us that we ought not to have been harmed and that the perpetrator(s) will be held accountable.
Calls to elevate the understanding of GNC male suffering, trans womenâs suffering, or of straight womenâs suffering are often made relative to that of GNC female people, trans men, or lesbians in a way that implies some sort of competition, as if these unacceptable AFABs are somehow bogarting all of the resources by having any at all. (âMenâs Rights Activistsâ often bring up the real experiences of male victims of rape in the same way.) The solution is never, somehow, to make specific groups for GNC men, trans women, or straight women focused on their particular issues, but instead to create a zero-sum distribution of attention and resources where unacceptable female people must inevitably lose. I am dreading internally what the exposure of these prevalence numbers above will bring, because if GNC female people donât lose, the goalposts will change so that they have to; does it really matter if more GNC female children suffer, or if they are more likely to suffer, if nobody wants to care that they do?
It is telling to meâ like in many situations with female peopleâ these unacceptable female people are not allowed to just take their ball and go home; it is somehow an egregious moral harm, one way worse than whatever it is that those AFABs experienced, for the unacceptable females to even peaceably refuse to accept the terms of this game and create their own ways, among themselves, to listen to others, support each other, and allocate resources. No, we have to remain in the game and play by the rules, which means continually disregarding ourselves and our lives, our no-selves all alone apart from each other.
It ought to be striking to anyone encountering this situation that although unacceptable female people supposedly do not form coherent groups they somehow are a coherent group by the rules of this very shitty game; when it comes to who is classed as worthy of dismissal, ridicule, and punishmentâ when it comes to who is not permitted to self-advocate or exercise solidarityâ thereâs suddenly a pretty obvious class of people subject to this. It is a lie that we are not a coherent group. And it is a lie that they believe we are not a coherent group, otherwise they would not know who to tell to shut up, who to guilt, who to blame. What they really believe is that women donât matter, and we definitely donât matter. Remember that.
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