The Rules of Anti-Transmasculinity
1. Your body is not your own.
1a. Your body is a site for other’s desires.
If they want you to be beautiful, it is cruel of you to deny them that. If they want you to be feminine, it is cruel of you to deny them that. If they think you should reproduce, it is cruel of you to divest yourself of reproductive duties.
1b. Your body is owned by the state.
Reproductive laws that can affect cis women also affect you, but you cannot weigh in on them, because you are not a woman.
Anti-trans laws affect you, but you must not bring this up; you are never the “real” target, even when you are, because you are not “really” trans.
When the legislation talks about “protecting” your fertility, you should feel lucky to be safeguarded from yourself.
2. Your experiences are not your own.
Your childhood does not exist. You cannot claim girlhood if you are a man, and you cannot claim boyhood if you did not grow up within it, and no other visions of childhood may exist. Your history, however you define it, is fundamentally incompatible with who you are.
Forms of sexism which are aimed at women, by a binary logic, cannot be aimed at men or mascs. If your experiences contradict this, either you are invalidating your identity, or you are appropriating womanhood.
It is your duty to blithely dissociate yourself from any trauma patriarchy may have inflicted on you. Men cannot be affected by these things even if it happens to them personally. A “real” man must be stoic and uncaring.
3. You are a “default” body.
You are to be assumed affluent, perisex, binary, and passing, with no legal or situational barriers to medical or social transition, and no reproductive concerns to speak of — unless your nonconformity can be used to dismiss you.
You are assumed to be able-bodied, sane of mind, white, and thin — unless your mental health or appearance is good for mockery.
You are to be treated as essentially cismasculine. Being treated as if you are cis is a compliment, even when it is erasing your lived experiences, and even if it is known and true that transfems have their own unique struggles from cis women too.
4. You are an “aberrant” body.
4a. Your body is a site of fascination. You (are presumed to) have a gestative capacity, and a fun extra hole. These traits are relevant when others assess your attractiveness and their kinks. They are not relevant in the context of your health. You’re a submissive little bottom, right?
(Your body is something to conquer and claim. This may be done to emphasize your femininity, deny your androgyny, or defang your masculinity.)
4b. Your body is a site of disgust. Any steps you may take to masculinize yourself are “ruining” your “female” features, regardless of any joy you personally take from the changes, and regardless of if you engage with medical transition or not.
(You are killing the woman you are supposed to be. Stand trial.)
4c. Your body is too unattractive to be sexually violenced. It doesn’t happen. When it does, you have anatomical privilege, because you are (presumed to be) in possession of a vulva, and victims with those are of course always believed. But it doesn’t happen, because you are essentially a cis man, and of course men don't get raped.
(It is not possible to be targeted for this violence because you are transmasculine. It is always misaimed violence, intended for someone else. Apologize to her for taking up her space.)
4d. Your body is a proxy for other’s ideas about activism. Womanhood is good, and manhood is bad, and things in-between are uncomfortable and hard to classify; therefore, a detransition back to cisfemininity would be a preferable state of being, wouldn’t it?
(Your transition is at odds with good feminism.)
4e. Your body is a joke. Men don’t menstruate. Men don’t gestate. Men don’t lactate. Men can't have breasts. If the suggestion sends people into hysterics, you must take it lying down.
(Remember; comedy is subversion, and you are an “abberant” body.)
4f. Your body is a hypothetical and not a lived reality. If men could menstruate or gestate, that would fix patriarchy. It would not result in men being denied at the door of the gynecology office, surely.
(To entertain your existence is a rhetorical inconvenience.)
4g. Your body is a source of put-down. You are a cunt, a pussy, a fembrained bitchmoid — and it isn’t sexist to refer to you as such, because you are a man. Your disinclination to be reduced to bioessentialist biogotry is simply proof that your masculinity is fragile. It is not proper for you to object to it, even when it is the same rhetoric spewed by patriarchy itself, and even if it would be equally galling to say to a woman, cis or trans.
(Have you not considered that your trans body is privileged under cis patriarchy?)
4h. Passing is universal to all transmasculine bodies and all life situations. Closeted, clocky, queer, or femme trans men and mascs cannot exist, and are not subjected to the same violence as women or other queer men. Legal gender markers don’t matter. Medical access isn’t a concern. People from your past cannot possibly be vindictive enough to out you, because queer or not, you have male privilege.
(Have you considered that you simply aren’t trying hard enough to pass?)
5. If you are inadequately masculine, pre-transition, nonbinary, or bi-gendered, you cannot “really” be a man.
Remember; you are a lost little girl when you need to be talked down to.
Remember; manhood and womanhood are diametric opposites, exclusive states of being.
Remember; poverty is not an excuse.
6. If you are inadequately feminine or too masculine, you cannot “really” be queer.
Remember; you are a “default” body.
Remember; you are essentially cis.
7. If you are too assertive or too unwilling to serve as a punching bag, you cannot “really” be a feminist.
Remember; men cannot be feminists.
Remember; men cannot need feminism.
Remember; your masculinity is most readily acknowledged when it provides a rhetorical threat.
8. If you really insist on your masculinity, then it must be in service to others. You owe them labor, defense, money, and deference.
You are not owed equality or reciprocity, because men are responsible for patriarchy. You are on the hook for the patriarch’s debt, and you are presumed to share his wallet.
(A man is a protector and a provider. I thought you wanted to be a man?)
9. Your interest in your own autonomy is indistinguishable from power-grabbing.
Your self-determination and self-advocacy aligns you with patriarchal interests, or is a sign that you are too battered by patriarchy to self-determine in the first place. Someone else must decide these things for you. Someone else must speculate on your motives. You do not get to speak for yourself.
10. Your inclusion and representation is not important.
10a. When you notice your absence from culture, art, and storytelling, others ask; why do you not simply project your experiences onto cis men? Remember, you are a default body. Surely you are different from other queer people who need direct representation.
(When you try to do that, you are classically fembrained and illiterate for thinking a given character could have transmasculine subtext or themes.)
Projecting onto cis women is akin to killing them.
Why are you not satisfied with mpreg fanfic?
10b. When you make your own art and stories, you are playing with dolls. It is unimportant, juvenile, and easily dismissed much in the way that people discuss teenage girls who act as culture-makers.
(If transmasculinity is not present in the world of art, it must be because it has no artistic merit.)
11. Your erasure is proof that you have nothing to offer.
The muffling of violence done to you or your brothers is proof that no violence occurs in the first place.
The muffling of you or your brother’s contributions is proof that none of you contributed in the first place.
The removal of your brothers from the historical narrative is proof that they didn’t exist, or that they never stood in solidarity with other feminists and queers.
Silence is proof that you need not speak.
12. Denying any danger that you may be in is affirmative to your masculinity, because men cannot be harmed.
There are no statistics that say otherwise if we never read them.
There are no patterns of abuse if we never speak of them.
There are no dead if they are recorded as femicides.
There are no victims if we do not speak their names.
These contradictory impositions are not aimed at transmascs alone, but they are the recurring patterns I notice as a transmasculine feminist. We are not the only ones in danger, but we are queer all the same, and all queerness is targeted under patriarchy.
