I end up complaining about transmascs a lot on here. The reason is that I am not really friends with many cis people irl because of their transphobia, except one or two friends I've had since childhood. And my transfem friends don't antagonise me very much. So basically transmascs make up a sizeable proportion of my social network because they are generally tolerable, but they are also where most of the problems come from because of the dynamics of oppression. It probably looks like I'm fixated on this one demographic, but really it's the fact that the demographic is generally good that means I am friends with them at all.
Anyway, with that out of the way, I want to talk about my trans guy friend Tom (not his real name). Over the last year or so there's been a pattern of:
I say or do something innocent.
He aggressively accuses me of bad behaviour.
I explain that he misinterpreted what happened, but apologise for it all the same and promise to do better.
He grudgingly says "OK".
We never mention it again.
It's got so bad that I panic whenever I get a message from him, and if it is one of his aggressive ones I go into a days-long anxiety spiral.
On Saturday I arranged a trip to Trans Pride in London for a group of trans people near me. I didn't want to arrange it because I'm burnt out, but there were a few people I knew who wanted to go but didn't want to go alone, so I felt I had a duty to arrange something for their sake.
One of them was a wheelchair user, so I made this detailed plan for how we would navigate our journey to and from the march avoiding steps and calling ahead to train stations to warn them if they needed to get a manual ramp ready for us. I posted this and Tom read it and thumbs upped it. In the end the wheelchair user couldn't come, so we used a different route instead.
On the way back from the march, I made a comment about how difficult the route we were taking would be if we had a wheelchair with us, because the station we were in had a load of steps. I also explained how there was a different route I had planned for wheelchair users. I was wrecked after that day, and honestly just wanted a week of being left alone to recover.
The next day, Tom messaged me to say he was really upset about the ableist comment I had made and he called me a hypocrite because I have previously criticised others for ableism. It turned out he interpreted "this would be really impossible with a wheelchair" as "wheelchair users are such a burden". He is not a wheelchair user himself fyi, although I have been in the recent past, and he knows this.
I apologised that he had been upset by what I said, but explained that my words didn't mean that, they were a reference to the plan I had made about wheelchair accessible journeys. He claimed he hadn't heard me explain this at the time, and he didn't remember reading my post about accessibility that he had thumbs-upped.
I was obviously in a spiral at this point because, not only was I the only person in our network who had shown any interest at all in helping a wheelchair user (which Tom could've done himself, but didn't), but also I was the only one being called out and called a hypocrite when I hadn't even done anything wrong.
My wife saw my reaction to this and she got annoyed on my behalf. She has seen how much I panic around messages from Tom and, since she was actually at Trans Pride and present at the time I made the "ableist comment" she knew it was bullshit. She sent a message to Tom saying that the way he talks to me is not fair and is totally disproportionate to the alleged offence, and that she has noticed that he never talks to her like that. (She was implying but not stating that there was a transmisogynistic motive behind Tom's different behaviour towards us, since she is cis).
Tom then went berserk. He started accusing my wife and I of talking about him behind his back, and basically accused her of letting me take her phone and harass him on two fronts. I weighed in to say I didn't ask her to get involved, she is just concerned about how he treats me.
There has since been 24 hours of me trying to explain how the way he talks to me is part of a wider context of trans women's actions being uncharitably misinterpreted and blown out of all proportion. I said that he could've said "Hey, what did you mean by this thing you said yesterday?" before going directly to accusations of ableism and hypocrisy which it turned out were unfounded. I said he could talk to me like a friend who cares about and knows me, and not like someone writing a complaint to a dodgy business or their MP.
He then started going into how he has learned a lot about communication styles and he is just doing best practice by naming the harm that was caused, that he is willing to be more gentle in future but that's a concession he is making because of my "fragility and defensiveness to criticism" and he is unhappy that I am not making any concessions in return. Never mind that I immediately apologised and promised to do better, even though I didn't even do anything wrong in the first place.
His position now is that my wife and I have ganged up on him and derailed what was originally a critique of my ableism into a barrage of unfair criticism of him, and we are fragile and defensive and he is sad that people who seemed good on the surface can be so different underneath.
He keeps using therapy-speak and social justice-speak to undermine any attempts by me to point out issues. If he is rude it is "best practice" and I am implied to be uneducated for not knowing that. If I mention something he did wrong, it's "derailing". If he accuses me of something I didn't do, it's him "naming the harm that was caused".
All this comes in the context that he has never engaged seriously with "transmisogyny" as a form of oppression, on the many times I've brought it up.
At one point, I was trying to explain why I felt the way he talked to me was unreasonable, so I reached for a recent situation where I felt he had done something wrong to show how I behave if the roles are reversed. I referred to a time 2 weeks ago when he said the world would be a better place if everyone with a Y chromosome died. At the time I thought "Wow, that's gross" but I said nothing because I used the wider context of knowing him to infer that he probably didn't mean it (and honestly I find it hard to call out men's behaviour, because they rarely react well to it). This was probably not the best example, because it's really an example of me being afraid to call him out, but it's what I reached for in the moment.
I brought this up and he said "It was just a joke". A day later I responded to explain how it's a transmisogynistic joke that at best only transfems can make, and it's not appropriate for him to be saying it. He then said "Yeah, I realised it was bad immediately when I said, I probably should've said something at the time."
So the pattern is:
I do something innocent.
He interprets it badly.
He accuses me aggressively.
I explain what I actually said but also apologise and promise to do better anyway.
vs
He does something actually bad.
He doesn't apologise in the moment.
I point it out much later in a different context.
He dismisses it as "just a joke".
I press the point.
He then says he shouldn't have done it.
I don't know how he sees these situations and sees me as the fragile and defensive one.
I have tried to explain to him how transmisogyny so often manifests as uncharitable interpretations of neutral statements that are blown out of all proportion, and that when he sends me a message doing exactly that it sits within the context of how this has been done to me and other transfems for our entire lives, and normally results in social exclusion.
Messages like his accusations are a Pavlovian bell to transfems that warns us social exclusion is coming, we know it because it has happened so many times to us. He says I should go to therapy and not put the burden of my anxiety on him to accommodate my irrational reaction to criticism. He won't accept that it's not irrational.
There's a social group we are both in. At a meet-up a few months ago, a trans girl said "I feel like the word 'bisexual' should perhaps be replaced by 'pansexual' or some other identifier to be more non-binary-inclusive." That's a perfectly normal thing to say, especially because this girl is bi/pan herself, and this discussion point is a very common one in bi/pan circles. After she said that we talked about how the meaning of "bisexual" has changed over time, about descriptive vs prescriptive identifiers, it was a good discussion. Also at this same meet-up, one of the transmasc organisers called all the transfems "guys" (I didn't hear this at the time).
After the meet-up, the same transmasc organiser privately messaged me and the other organisers to say they were concerned about the behaviour of the trans girl who had been saying "biphobic things". A few hours later, the trans girl (unprompted) posted a message in the group chat to say she was sorry if anyone had interpreted her statement about bisexuality badly, she said she is nervous and sometimes says things wrong, is really sorry and will try to do better. I calmed her down by saying that, as someone who has identified as "bisexual" myself, simply because it's the identity name we used when I was young, I thought her comments were perfectly reasonable and she had absolutely nothing to worry about. That drama blew over. Then a month or so later the transmasc organiser randomly mentioned that they felt bad for calling transfems guys at that meeting but didn't feel like they should apologise for it.
I think it is clear that the trans girl's reaction in this situation is a trauma response by someone who has been repeatedly socially excluded for her words being misinterpreted and blown out of proportion. She is panicking hard that she's going to get kicked out of the group, and wants to apologise in advance to head that off, even though she did nothing wrong. Meanwhile the transmasc actually did something wrong but didn't bother apologising and no one brought it up and no one expects any consequences for them.
That is the difference between being perpetually on the edge of social exclusion vs not being, that is transmisogyny in action.
Tom refuses to see it in this light. He only sees that he called out my ableism and suddenly my wife and I had turned the tables and were calling him out. He doesn't realise that him being called out this time is the result of a pattern of behaviour that's gone on for a year, it's the release of a build up of so many times he's called me out when I did nothing wrong and I had to apologise anyway to calm him down.
Perhaps it would be fragility if this had happened the first time he unfairly criticised me for something I didn't do. When it's the tenth, and I've been apologetic all the previous times, it's just me finally standing up for myself.
I know I should just stop being friends with him, it's what I would advise anyone else, but it is so hard when you're in the midst of this situation and your social lives are so intertwined as mine and Tom's are. It can be easier to just apologise and let him think he's won, then let the friendship die slowly over months rather than in a blaze of righteous indignation. I still don't know which of these paths to choose but I will have to pick soon.
