I somehow was made to see a post by a notorious transmasc poster on here who I had already blocked, saying that the reason so many trans women believe there is minimal connection between themselves and gay men is because of a combination of RuPaul's Drag Race convincing us we have nothing in common, and our own racist ignorance of our history (from later comments I am interpreting this to mean US ballroom culture). Leaving aside this US-centric analysis, the pseudo-colonial attitude towards discussing the supposed motivations of a marginalised group that the poster isn't even a member of, and the implied misgendering ofc, it also just annoyed me because it shows how little understanding there is of our thought processes even from those who think of themselves as our allies and/or fellow-travellers.
Just speaking for myself, I was forced to be around basically exclusively boys from the age of 7 or 8, because my everything-phobic mother didn't like the fact that all my close friends had been girls. I had very little in common with boys, and I found them misogynistic and obsessed with power and domination, particularly in single-sex environments where they believed no women were present. Young boys love bragging about assaulting women, even when it's stuff they've just dreamed up in their own heads, and the patriarchy encourages them to think and talk like this, they get an increase in social status for doing so. I knew plenty of openly gay boys too, and honestly they were barely any different from the straight boys. They were still extremely misogynistic, and they were no less likely to hate women and believe them sub-human. Spending time around straight or gay boys, either way was incredibly isolating because, well, they're still boys. Spending time around girls was always far preferable to me, although I was sometimes frustrated by straight girls' veneration of men (understandable given how the patriarchy works, but still frustrating) given that I knew what these men were saying and thinking in return. Lesbians were basically the only group I ever felt at-home with, because they were the only group where the conversation wasn't entirely about men, which I much preferred even though I assumed I myself was a man.
My attitude towards men is not based on bioessentialist ideas of genetic predisposition to bad behaviour or anything, nor is it just arbitrary dislike. We just live in a world where men are rewarded for hating women, and so they do, there really doesn't need to be much more to it than that. Growing up as the only "man" I knew who didn't hate women, it became obvious that I couldn't fully be a man precisely because of that total lack of interest in asserting my own power. I was never capable of doing manhood correctly at all, and that failure caused me to receive misogynistic bullying, and that experience of misogyny from a young age is what made me realise that my life makes far more sense understood as a woman's life than a man's life. This is not a universal transfem experience by any means, we have a lot of diversity, but it is not an uncommon one either.
I have simply spent so much time around men of all kinds, and suffered for it, I really just don't want to spend even more time around them. And yes, that includes gay men. You can choose to site my experience within the context of the history of gay men if you like, but that's your imposition from the outside, both as a non-transfem, and as someone from the US who doesn't realise that not every queer culture around the world is identical to your own.
I had never heard of RuPaul growing up, the US Drag Race didn't even start until after I left home and I have never watched an episode of any Drag Race even now. The drag performers I encountered growing up as an Irish kid were pantomime dames like May McFettridge and Lily Savage, who, while I'm sure they were influenced to some extent by the US ballroom culture started by Black and Latina trans women, were primarily the descendants of the English working class Music Hall tradition which was itself totally revolutionised by Black performers from the US who toured Britain in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Popular styles of music, dance and even acting in Britain were totally upended by the new injection of Black American culture. Racist performances by white actors in blackface had been incredibly popular among British audiences in the mid 19th century, but after the end of the US Civil War increasing numbers of Black performers began to tour Britain and show up their white predecessors as the crude and laughable racists they were. As so often seems to happen, Black performers and particularly Black women like Amy Height and Belle Davis not only had to take on the job of countering the racist assumptions of their audiences, but also in doing so breathed new life into a stagnant and backward-looking white imperial culture with little acknowledgement or financial compensation. That's the context of the theatrical tradition from which the pantomime dame of my youth emerged, as a heavily evolved version of the male actor playing a female role from back in the days when female actors were illegal. There was a massive influence from Black US culture on British pantomime dames of the 1980s and 1990s, but a lot of that influence actually occurred a century earlier around 1880-1910 rather than directly from the later US Ballroom scene.
In Britain there was essentially a parallel history of sincere transfeminity and performative transfemininity, and they were treated very differently by the general population and the law. You can follow the line from Italian Commedia dell'Arte to Shakespearean theatre to Music Hall to Variety Show to modern-day pantomime, and this meme of the male actor playing an elderly flirtatious female character persists throughout it, not stigmatised in itself but hinting at scandal elsewhere for the purposes of humour. But while this is all going on, the "scandal elsewhere" is also going on in parallel. This is the history of Molly Houses, where people we would today understand as trans women (or perhaps specifically trans lesbians) would meet in private to dress as they wished, dance, and have sex. These houses were often raided and the women arrested and sometimes even executed for their crimes. The case of Fanny and Stella is another example that we would today understand as an example of sincere transfeminity being penalised in a way that performative transfemininity is not: they were arrested for "crossdressing" but charged with conspiracy to commit sodomy with the son of a Duke, Arthur Clinton. Stella referred to herself as Clinton's wife and wore a wedding ring. The fact that they were ultimately found not guilty (of conspiracy to commit sodomy) was used as precedent to more harshly interpret "crossdressing" (already a misdemeanour in its own right) as evidence of sexual crimes.
The reason I'm going into this distinction is that, growing up, I never felt that pantomime dames like May McFettridge or Lily Savage were in any way the same kind of thing as me - a boy who, seemingly uniquely from my PoV at the time, didn't hate women but cherished my friendships with them, and resented the other boys for not feeling the same. And looking at the whole history of performative transfemininity in Britain, I don't relate to any of it at all and I never regarded it as "for me" in any sense. Ultimately, May McFettridge is a character played by a man called John Linehan, Lily Savage was a character played by a man called Paul O'Grady, the insincerity of their transfemininity bleeds into the performance and makes it much harder to relate to compared to literally any actual woman, trans or cis. The same goes for gay men's culture more broadly: my transfemininity was rooted in a love and affection for women, something that it seemed no other man I knew felt, why would that lead me to spend more time with men? It makes no sense. But learning later on about cases of sincere transfemininity, Molly Houses or Fanny and Stella, I do see myself in those examples, I do relate to that history a lot, and if that had been the kind of transfemininity I had been exposed to as a kid, I might've realised I was trans much earlier on.
And, just to add, it is absurd that I have had to devote so many words here to discussing the history of transfemininity in Britain, which is the colonial power that ruled and still partly rules my country. The culture I grew up with in terms of TV, radio, theatre, etc, was heavily British because Irish culture, history and language was deliberately suppressed. This is the perspective of the colonised who knows more about the history of the coloniser than she ever really wanted to know, but knowing it is necessary to understand my place in it. And honestly, reading a transmasculine person from the USA telling me that my disconnection from gay men's culture is due to a single transmisogynistic American drag queen I've never even seen, that doesn't feel that different to an English person lecturing me about how the famine was Irish people's fault due to our supposed ignorance of crop rotation.
I know that I shouldn't take arguments like this in good faith. The point of the argument is really to (1) say that trans women are a type of men, (2) say that trans women are white/bourgeois/uniquely racist compared to other queer groups, (3) stealth argue by implication for trans men's inclusion in lesbian spaces, and (4) say that trans women are too stupid and/or bigoted to understand our own culture and history. And yet a lot of otherwise-intelligent people seem to take this seriously as a genuine point, and it's maddening.
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