The Article About Internalized Transmisogny literally ends by making a point about manhood and masculinity and misandry in queer/feminist spaces:
I hate that the only effective response I can give to “boys are shit” is “well I’m not a boy.” I feel like I am selling out the boy in baseball pajamas that sat with me on the bed while I tried to figure out which one I was supposed to be, and the boys who I have met and loved from inside my boy suit—who believed they were talking to a boy. I feel like I am burning the history of the naked body that sits on the floor of my shower. The body that went to prom in a boxy tuxedo and coveted the dresses.
Because I am not a boy, but I had a boyhood. I was, and am, made to live as a boy and I cannot suspend the perspective that gave me and join in when it’s time to fluster one of those clueless fuckers into anger by calling him a fuckboi and then tell him his anger proves he’s a fuckboi, or to humiliate one with an OKCupid screenshot because we’ve willfully conflated the clumsy ones with the threatening ones so we can grab those solidarity faves. It’s fucked up. It has metastasized.
More than a few out transwomen have told me, privately, they they are uncomfortable with these things, but are afraid that speaking up about it would cause ciswomen to like and trust them less. “I play along,” one of them told me, “because in the queer community the only people who defend cisboys are cisboys. I don’t want to give up finally being read as a girl.”
Another says “I do the misandry stuff because it’s an easy way to earn queer cred points, but when I think about it it makes me uncomfortable.”
Another: “It’s a coping habit I’m not proud of. If I agree ‘girls rule boys drool’ it makes me feel more like a girl.”
Have you noticed, when a product is marketed in an unnecessarily gendered way, that the blame shifts depending on the gender? That a pink pen made “for women” is (and this is, of course, true) the work of idiotic cynical marketing people trying insultingly to pander to what they imagine women want? But when they make yogurt “for men” it is suddenly about how hilarious and fragile masculinity is — how men can’t eat yogurt unless their poor widdle bwains can be sure it doesn’t make them gay? #MasculinitySoFragile is aimed, with smug malice, at men—not marketers.
This conclusion—widely shared—is a product of insulated discourse. What I am NOT saying is: “open the floodgates, let in the shitty male trolls!” I know the trolls—they have tried to be my friends, they have tried to sneak into feminist spaces with no desire to learn or listen. I understand not trusting men who loudly and constantly hold forth on women’s issues and refuse to accept when they are mistaken. I’m not encouraging anyone to trust blindly. I am pleading to the discoursers: consider that this insulation has effects and try to mitigate them, if your priority really is finding truth amid a muck of concealed patriarchal lies. Check to see if maybe you are saying things and reproducing things mostly because it sounds good and feels good and nobody is challenging them.
These are not discursive problems that only apply to an “undercover” transwoman, these are discursive problems that are seemingly only visible to an “undercover” transwoman forced to carry multiple perspectives like bactrian humps.
Because I am interested in complicating your definition of maleness and of boyhood. I was born into that shitty town, maleness, in the remains of outdated ideals and misplaced machismo and repression and there are some good people stuck living there. They are not in charge. They did not build it. And I don’t feel okay just moving out and saying “fuck y’all — bootstrap your way out or die out, I was never one of you.” I want to make it a better, healthier place—not spend all my time talking about how shitty it is and how anyone who would choose to live there deserves it. And to me that means considering them with charity, even when they make it difficult to. [...]
Because it’s not a small deal that the words “not all men” have become entwined inextricably with male fragility and whininess. It makes it awfully easy to insulate the (largely cis-)female perspective on what males are. To begin a statement with those words—“Not All Men”—is to give grounds to anyone who wants to laugh at the rest of it. But here is the truth: not all men are what you think they are. Man does not mean what you think it means. Generalizing harshly and broadly but implying “you know which ones I mean” is an intellectual and rhetorical laziness that is not allowed to pass anywhere else in these communities. Because we don’t get to choose who our words and behavior affect, we are obligated to choose them carefully.
