How are we at a point now where "trans men and transmascs don't experience gender euphoria" is a real fucking take that I'm seeing people post and agree with? "Oh, trans men and transmascs will never understand the moment when you finally put on a dress or skirt and feel like yourself-" chest binders. Packers. Getting a short haircut. Being called "sir" by a stranger instead of "miss" or "ma'am." Growing facial hair. What's even really being said here, that we don't experience gender euphoria, or that our gender euphoria is less significant?
Weirdly, I believe this is a knock-on effect of misogyny.
See, if women aren't real people, then the things that gender-mark women are real gender markers that identify them as not-people, but the things that gender-mark men are just normal people things, not gendered. Because the male gender doesn't exist, it's just women and people.
So you can't be gender-euphoric about becoming a man; all you're doing is shedding gender and becoming a genderless "normal person", because normal person is male.
It is really really weird that misogyny against women ends up, through a circuitous route, as redefining men as genderless, but this is the effect of generations of men being "normal" and women being "gendered".
Trans men, of course, know better; they can clearly see the gender marked-ness of masculinity, and feel euphoria when they reach it, because they're specifically looking for it. But cis men don't see it because women are the gender-marked class, and trans women might not see it for that reason and because they've been trying to achieve gender-markedness. Maybe they haven't put enough thought into the construction of the gender they're trying to leave behind to recognize that in fact masculinity is marked. (Any enby could have told them that, but it can be genuinely hard to recognize how marked masculinity is because even feminism falls into the trap of "women are the gender marked class and everyone else is just a person".)
Given how hard people have to fight to be seen as "manly" you'd think we'd all understand how very gender-marked masculinity is... but the fight to be manly is often constructed as the fight to not be womanly. Like, this is how normal people behave, and this is how girls behave, and you don't want to be a girl, do you?
"Trans men don't experience gender euphoria" needs to be called out as a belief that's caused by patriarchy, and a form of internal misogyny if it's a woman (cis or trans) saying it. It's the belief that only women have gender... which comes from the belief that only men are normal humans.























