If gender has nothing to do with sex, and socialization isn't real, why are the vast majority of people cis? I can't get past that. It must be one or the other.
You said “It’s just frustrating that many people seem to be more interested in like a sort of fatalistic self righteous masochism approach to misogyny than something that like… can actually be revolted against, and feel like preserving their singular status of oppression is more important than… ending oppression?” I’m a nb and feminine socialization hurts the most of ALL things. How can my oppression be ended if no one believes it exists… it will just be like “stfu… now, see? no oppression” (2/5)
I was never told about feminine socialization because I experienced it. Being trans, finding out that it’s considered a terf thing is honestly tearing me apart, because it’s undeniable. I tried to pretend it wasn’t real to deal with the dissonance but I felt gaslighted and spent hours in stress everyday. I wish I was kidding. I truly believe you’re just ignorant. I can’t just ignore it, apart from my body, it is the worst thing. My life’s biggest enemy. if it could not exist, id be free (3/5)
I have no idea what its like to be a trans woman, but you have no insight into what it is like to be raised to be a woman. And here, you are wrong. I understand why it’s scary and potentially dangerous with terfs around, but it’s still the truth. All socialization needs to be eliminated, and it isn’t the fault of trans women that it exists but until our reality is acknowledged we can’t be real allies. You don’t believe in a MAJOR oppression, yet it continues to exist. That’s libertarianesque too (4/5)
I am sorry for the spam, but I am saying this and wishing to engage sincerely and honestly. You can’t disprove experience and I am very torn over this as a result. I feel traumatized and gaslighted as I can’t turn to anyone who isn’t a terf for help with it. It triggers a painful social dysphoria that is unbearable. Like, what am I supposed to do? (5/5)
Sorry to everyone, but this is a long ask and it’s gonna be a long response.
So, as I’ve said a couple of times on here over the years, I think that the issues of ‘socialization’ are relatively complex, and I *do* wish that there were ways for us to talk about this; however, at this point, the term ‘socialization’ in regards to talking abt trans issues has become a byword for basic sex essentialism. That’s not because of trans women, and to like play this ‘maybe i’ll become a t**f’ kinda alliance hostage game while calling me ‘ignorant’ and 'libertarianesque’ for a strawman version of my thoughts on this is… gauche. Esp when like, the idea is that trans women have to have a certain political ideology in order to deserve to *exist*.
I would love for their to be more dialog around the effects of socialization, but tbh most of the times I have this w cis women and cafab trans people it is done in a way to deny my womanhood or try to place some sort of maleness on me. So acting like it’s “the truth” w no political aspect is unsatisfactory, and if we are talking abt dysphoria inducing situations, completely unnuanced views of socialization have been weaponized to make lots of women dysphoric so…
But like, I want to address this I guess even tho this ask feels like this is approaching the subject in a way that I feel like you have a 50% chance of just str8 up being one of those 'ex libfem’/dysphoric female blogs in a year.
At literally no point have I ever said that like, gendered socialization isn’t a real thing, or that gender expectations aren’t like a real thing. I just don’t think that like, fits into either my biography or any of my writing. At the end of the day, I’ve written multiple times abt how genders and gendered behaviors shouldn’t be imposed on children or on people more generally; this is a call for ending different gendered socializations (what I think you are meaning by 'all socialization needs to be eliminated’). What that looks like is another conversation.
My argument re: socialization isn’t that we don’t leverage that on children and that it doesn’t effect us later in life. My argument is that talking abt socialization in the ways that most cis people and transmisogynists do is untenable for a huge variety of reasons, to the point that like, the way I think a productive conversation around 'socialization’ could work is a completely different concept than how most essentialists use it.
I will point out that, if we didn’t have gendered socialization, people wouldn’t be 'free’ in any meaningful sense as long as systems of capitalism, exploitation, and other axioms of oppression were in effect. If your main problem in life is gendered socialization, I would ask that you think abt what ways your life might have missed some of the other major ways in which people are harmed and exploited in our world. I was ostensibly 'socialized male’ according to this framework, but I still got raped by multiple men as a child (and further as an adult), so socialization is clearly not the exclusive area of gendered oppression.
But I’ll point out my issues w cissexist ideas of socialization:
One of the issues that arises is this idea that socialization is basically a way to talk about CASAB, and that it ends. First of all, I know a 4 year old trans girl who at no point ever identified as a boy. What is her socialization? There are multiple people like this, and I feel like most people arguing for cissexist ideas of socialization are not interested in accepting these camab people as 'female socialized’, even tho clearly they would be.
Likewise, socialization is a thing we experience in childhood, but is something that is enforced on us throughout all of our adult lives. These expectations are always levied on us, and continue to influence us. I’ve spent about 90% of my adult life out at this point, I have no experience of what it would be like to have male expectations of my mid life on me. Not only that, but our socialization affects our beliefs if we think that we are above any sort of outside social influence. This is why you can have radical feminists take testosterone and then become MRAs or just general misogynists: our society is always in a state of resocializing us to our current circumstances. If trans people could ever be said to have their assigned socialization, this resocialization process along w the contexts of being considered yr gender would make that a temporary situation (which no one who argues for essentialist socialization ever accepts).
Another issue is that we internalize the socialization of both genders. The most shitty form of this is that a man knows what is 'acceptable’ for a woman to wear outside, because men also know what behaviors and attitudes women are socialized into having; they just don’t have to follow them and in fact are a primary (tho not exclusive) agent of enforcing them. Even if a trans woman comes out later in life, that doesn’t mean she hasn’t been intaking these messages, and when her social position (internally or externally) shifts, that she won’t have to grapple w these messages.
The other issue with socialization is that any recourse to it will bring abt the sort of paradox: if socialization affects us all equally, then how is it that trans people or even gay people exist? So, obviously 'male socialization’ in the traditional essentialist way includes both the messages that boys never become women, nor do they have sex w men. the fact that gay people and trans people are so heavily penalized in our social context actually shows how internally contradictory and weakly socialization affects all of our behaviors. Rules (legal or social) don’t have to be made to forbid things that no one would ever think of doing. To answer yr question: I think that socialization can work in a uniform way for some people (just not all people, and esp people have shown themselves to not properly take in key parts of that socialization like gay and trans people), and the stakes of acting outside of those expectations are too high for many people to do otherwise. There’s active penalization of acting outside of gender norms.
And like, at the end of the day, even tho I didn’t come out as trans until early adulthood, I can look back and see that I was clearly taking in a lot of socialization aimed at girls (both because in retrospect I wasn’t a boy, and that was recognized in some form, if violently, and also because I was attracted to men). At this point, I’ve been dealing a lot w like what expectations and messages I have for myself due to what I’ve heard throughout my entire life; it’s been hard because of exactly the sort of idea that I couldn’t have possibly had female socialization- I’ve learned experientially that the situation is actually quite a bit different than that.
So what I’m saying isn’t that socialization isn’t real or that it doesn’t fuck us up (i was beat a lot as a child for crying, and I’m still trying to let myself do that without guilt, for example!). What I’m saying is that the ways that socialization affects all of us and the way it comes down to us can’t simply be done in a way that makes this unnuanced approach that people of certain CASABs have uncomplicatedly certain socializations, or that socialization is completely determinative and unchangeable. Socialization, like all of society, is nuanced, complex, self-contradictory in certain cases, changed by other social positions, and always contextual, not just a way to say that trans people have behaviors and attitudes in common w their assigned gender.
