First let me get this out of the way - I do not condone TERFs or their rancid shenanigans. This post is not for you, fix yourselves or fuck off and die.
Even so, I think it's extremely unfortunate that TERFs have so aggressively latched onto gender socialization and misinterpreted and used it as a cudgel (especially against trans women), because it's not a bad concept in its own right, and it could even help with linking together other concepts like weaponized femininity, toxic masculinity, and cross-cultural intersectionality (the latter of which we DESPERATELY need people to understand better).
See, gender socialization does exist in the sense of how a pericis, heterosexual, patriarchal society tries to enforce its "ideal" traditional gender roles, and what kind of consequences exist for someone who tries to break from those roles.
(Brief sidenote - while standards of traditional gender roles do tend to have a lot of overlap, they can differ between different cultures, i.e. what is considered acceptable role and presentation for a white American man or woman is likely to be different from what is considered acceptable role and presentation for a Middle Eastern man or woman, which is where intersectionality becomes very important.)
Even for those who are optimistically raised up without being *directly*, forcibly subjected to those gender norms (such as by a parent/family), patriarchal society is still going to inundate you CONSTANTLY with messaging telling you what its actual "ideal" is. It's in the media, it's in the fashion, it's in the institutional power. It's the boy toys vs. girl toys, it's the transphobic comedy caricatures, it's the gendered dress codes in schools, it's the mutilation of intersex children to "force" them to fit into one gender or another, it's the tax breaks for straight married couples with children.
And nobody - NOBODY - is immune to this propaganda. Nobody is immune to this gendered socialization. Not transfems, not transmascs, not nonbinary or intersex people. Everyone picks up what basically amounts to the patriarchy's background radiation and gets poisoned by it, and has harmful ideas they need to unlearn. Because even if you *do* reject the standard traditional gender roles, there are still subconscious biases you might not be aware of (see: the current rise in transmedicalism and a lot of attempts at reinforcing the gender binary in "progressive" ways).
HOWEVER: THIS DOES NOT MAKE ANY PARTICULAR GROUP MORE OR LESS LIKELY TO HAVE INTERNALIZED HARMFUL PATRIARCHAL IDEALS.
Again, gender socialization in the context of patriarchy enforcing traditional gender roles does exist. And everyone is subjected to this. If you think you are immune, you are not.
The concept of "male/female socialization", in the specific way that TERFs go on about, is bullshit.
Transfems did not sit in some magical Clockwork Orange-style contraption and get brainwashed by Big Patriarchy to abuse and take advantage of cis women (and anyone else "perceived" as "female"). Transmascs did not get counter-brainwashed in the same contraption by Big Transgender to become "gender traitors" and to try and gain "abuser privilege" against transfems and cis women, either.
As an easy example of how the TERF ideal of gender socialization being unique to trans people is bullshit - the patriarchy states that cis white women are helpless and in need of protection from cis white men, especially from nonwhite men (who are seen as inherently "violent" and "sexually aggressive"). Being raised with this socialization can result in, at best, these cis white women exhibiting distrust or avoidance around nonwhite men, or worse, invoking the "white woman tears" phenomena that has gotten many nonwhite men attacked and even killed by white men on their behalf, for being "threatening" to them.
This is not to say that transgender people *can't* hold misogynistic/patriarchal ideals and *can't* cause harm (to each other as well as cis people), but again, this is not unique to transgender people. This is, again, gender socialization and the patriarchy affecting everyone.
This is why we can't throw the entire concept of gender socialization away to the TERFs and write it off as *pure* bullshit, because not only will they continue to misuse and weaponize it against trans people (again, especially trans women), but we will also struggle to catch ourselves when we exhibit our own biases that are the direct result of unexamined internalized patriarchal ideals.
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