Trans men having male privilege doesn't mean trans men dont experience transphobia. It doesn't mean we don't experience oppression at all. it just means that we can leverage our position over trans women and get away with it. We can destroy their lives and face 0 repercussions. It means if it comes between a trans man's word and a trans woman's word, he is more likely to be believed. If you're a feminist this should anger you and you should work to make sure that you're aware of this and never do it. If this makes you defensive, you're probably already doing it. Fix your heart.
Any other term is really misgendering trans men. Theres this idea that trans men are not fully, really, truly men and thats .... transphobic. Some trans men like the idea of not REALLY being men when it confers privilege for them to do so.
I'm a super queer looking guy, and yet people respect me more. They don't interrupt me. My competence is assumed. I'm credible by default. I get jobs and promotions and pay raises easier than before I transitioned.
Of course trans men often dont experience male privilege the same way cis men do. Especially early in transition. But black men don't experience male privilege the same way white men do either. Disabled men don't experience male privilege the way abled body men do.
And of course, many trans men do experience a very similar amount of male privilege to cis men AND ADDITIONALLY use their "men lite" status to avoid taking accountability for their role in misogyny and transmisogyny.
The fact that not all trans men receive these benefits equally is not a point worth considering because even cis women have privilege over trans women. Theres no transition state where trans men are free from risking destroying trans women if they arent actively being aware of transmisogyny.
I expect better of supposedly woke queers. do we know how to listen to marginalized people or do we not?
The reality is a lot of tme people don't view trans women as women. Even if they say otherwise, they treat transfems as male interlopers...and actions speak louder than words
Author of those tags here, thank you for responding! I was genuinely curious when I said āIām wondering,ā I didnāt mean to come across like I was making a passive-aggressive declaration. Your explanation makes sense!
The reason I was confused is bc one significant miscommunication in this whole conversation has been the idea that ārelative privilegeā means āno oppressionā ā a lot of transmasc TME folks seem to think that transfeminists donāt recognize the transphobia that trans men do face, which isnāt true. The statement ātrans men have male privilegeā often gets taken as evidence of this though, because itās taken as meaning ātrans men get all the same societal privileges as cis men.ā
Your point about other axes of oppression makes sense. Black men have male privilege, disabled men have male privilege, etc and we never feel the need to qualify those with different terms. But those men are still unquestionably and universally thought of as men, because the axis upon which they are discriminated (race, ability, etc) is not related to gender at all. I think issues at the intersection of sexism and transphobia are uniquely complicated, in that they both deal with gender discriminationā just in different ways. One deals with gender-based discrimination within a fixed binary, the other deals with discrimination of those who transcend that binary. Trans men are men, yes, but thereās a significant chunk of our society that doesnāt see them as such, and treats them accordingly. Thus the need to differentiate between the type of privilege trans men have versus the type of privilege cis men have: both are related to being male, but in different ways and to different degrees. Claiming that trans men have the same privilege as cis men would be just as inaccurate as claiming that trans men donāt have any male privilege at all.
Of course none of this makes trans men immune to or exempt from being just as transmisogynist as cis men. They can and do leverage their masculinity against trans women just as muchā and to just as devastating an effectā as cis men do. In relation to trans women specifically, trans men have just as much power as cis menā if not more, due to their access to āAFAB-onlyā resources within feminist and queer spaces (among other things). This applies to other axes of discrimination tooā disabled men can leverage their masculinity against disabled women just as much as abled men do, etc.
But I think itās worthwhile to acknowledge the bigger societal picture, if only to avoid perpetuating the idea that transfeminism completely disregards the transphobia endured by trans men in society as a whole. That misconception is one of the things that drives a lot of TMEs into the arms of transandrobro rhetoric.
