i haven't fully put this into words, but i do think there is something fundamentally transphobic about this argument.
there's a lot of talk about "basic transphobia" and "just transphobia" and whatnot. but like. it feels like in the desperation to be accepted into cisfeminism, we often cede the ground that transness in itself — not merely when validated by a binary, cis-accessible gender identity — is bad theory, because it blurs the lines too much.
like. what is being critiqued here? trans men correctly identify that, in our material lived experiences, we are not the same as cis men, and that understanding our material political-social circumstances requires starting from that understanding.
this is not incompatible with insisting on trans men's manhood. if this woman actually spoke to a large number of these trans men, she'd find there's a large amount of diversity — including people who aren't even actually trans men, they are just transmasculinized and thus need these conversations as well. there are trans men who feel strongly their gender is just "man" and that they are a man in the same way a cis man is a man, and yet, also must make sense of his lived experiences of being treated as a woman and a dyke and a tranny far more than he is treated as a cis man. analyzing your experiences as a man does not require sacrificing analysis of your experience as trans.
is he supposed to ignore his material position... for what? for the ideological purity? he needs to prove to... who, exactly, that he's a Real Man by insisting he's the positionaly same as cis men? should he just roleplay as a cis man for your comfort?
and again, why must we downplay trans people's transness? why is this not allowed to be central in our analysis, even moreso than the specific (almost always binary) gender identity? why do we treat transness as a just modifier for a binary, cis-centric idea of gender? this idea of a transfeminism that is only for women who happen to be trans, with transness pushed as far to the periphery as possible but excused because the people doing the pushing are trans, so that makes it trans + feminism, right?
just like. as a nonbinary person, it is so incredibly obvious how exorsexism / misandrogyny / transphobia warps our idea of transfeminism. people who consider themselves "transfeminist" get mad at trans men for centering their transness. why the fuck even bother calling it transfeminism if you are gonna get mad when other trans people go any deeper than "cisfeminism but with diy E" !! this is the same kind of person who insist that there is no material analysis to be done of nonbinary experiences, that nonbinary gender identity is all counterrevolutionary bourgeoisie idealism.
it's dressed up in Marxism, but fundamentally, i truly believe this attitude comes from deep and unanalyzed internalized transphobia that people like her can justify to themselves, because it's the kind of internalized transphobia that hurts other kinds of trans people first.
