Being a trans man is bizarre. Because you grow up being treated as a girl and sexualized as one, mocked and diminished and dismissed as one. “Oh you’re just a whiny little hysterical girl, shut up.” You’re constantly gaslit about your interests and experiences and trauma. You know what it looks like when someone sees you as small and insignificant, unworthy of listening to. You have femininity forced onto you and get punished if you disobey. If you’re Asian, you’re even more sexualized and infantilized due to fetishization. And if you’re black or brown, society never considered you innocent to begin with. You’ve been an adult from the moment you were born. Being socialized as having a white girlhood is a very particular experience. But if you’re on the internet and in queer spaces you learn that femininity is always really good, actually, that it never punishes anyone, and that you can be anyone except a man. You can be a lesbian, you can be non-binary, you can be butch, you can be transmasc, as long as you don’t Step Over The Line to being a man. As long as you Stay Good. These ideas slowly deep into your head and stay there, sometimes being what keeps you from realizing you’re a man.
And then you realize you’re a man. And you still have all those experiences, you’ve still been hurt by misogyny in the same way, you’ve still had violence enacted upon you. But now it’s somehow worse, because the same people who supported you when you were butch, or a lesbian, or transmasc but not a man, suddenly they’re gone. You can see the distaste they have for you. Suddenly those “jokes” about men you and others made out of pressure and internalized self-hate affect you, and it hurts. So you speak up, say that actually, you’re a man and you’re not bad. And they laugh at you. They say that either “oh we didn’t mean YOU,” or “if you’re a man, then you’re included.” And what are you supposed to say to that? Either all men are evil but you’re not evil so you can’t be one, or you become a victim of a kind of violence resulting from 2010s Buzzfeed “progressive” gender essentialist bullshit feminism, where you have to tolerate demonization of your identity as a man to be acknowledged as a man. Sometimes you’ll take it, because you want to be seen as a man so bad that even being complicit in your own dehumanization is better than being forced into womanhood. (I’m also talking about you, pick-me trans guys. If you grew out of it, good in you, but this may be a wake up call you need.)
So you go on the internet for a supportive trans community and you find that things have shifted since you thought you were still an identity of Not A Man. You still have the same experiences, but now you can’t complain about them. People call you “a whiny hysterical little girl,” but in different words. Now you’re “an aggressive toxic man.” Keep in mind, you’re still regularly misgendered and treated as a girl offline, but that doesn’t matter to these people. You’ve crossed that line, and now you’re Bad, and there’s nothing you can do about it. You can’t talk about experiences, you can’t talk about prejudice, you can’t talk about issues that uniquely affect trans men. You can’t talk about how cis women throwing a tantrum at inclusive reproductive language is at words meant to include trans men, not trans women. You can’t talk about how afab socialization still effects you, that it keeps you from speaking out at this very moment. You can’t talk about the rate of violence, or of murder, or of sexual assault. Suddenly the people who know full well how inherently violent it is to misgender trans women in death are saying “but terfs like trans men, they just want to save you, you don’t die like we do,” and you don’t know what to say. Because it’s so untrue.
You know exactly how terfs attack trans men, all the fear-mongering about “poor autistic lost lesbians,” and “amputating healthy breasts and fertility,” and “internalized misogyny, they did this to escape the patriarchy.” You know the fear-mongering about it and where it comes from, because you’ve seen it from the day you were born. It’s the language of putting men who they see as deviant women back in their place. And yet no one besides you and other trans men seem to see it. When JK Rowling comes out with her transphobic manifesto, she talks just as much about trans men as she does trans women. And yet the only response you see to her is “trans women are women!!!!”. And generally, that’s the only response you ever see to any type of transphobia. That trans women are women. This gets so ingrained that anyone other than you is completely unprepared for how to defend trans men against transphobia, because they think transphobia only affects trans women and don’t understand the unique language. It also doesn’t help that most of them already believe the same things (mainly, that being a man is Bad and Not Progressive) and they can’t argue against what they believe.
And so here you are, still experiencing misogyny and violence, still being misgendered and threatened, uniquely in danger for being visibly trans, but you can’t talk about it now. Because you use he/him now, and that makes you evil. Other trans people, who are supposed to be your family, think you’re evil. They project their hatred of cis men and masculinity onto you, and you’re bewildered. You realize they can accept you for being trans, but they can’t accept you for being a man.
They’ll try and get you to separate those parts, say nonsense like “all transphobia is only based on trans women,” when you know for a fact it affects people in different ways. If you say telling all men to die is problematic, they’ll call you transmisogynistic and sexist as though you don’t know misogyny like the back of your hand. You try telling people who have been dehumanized for being trans that you don’t want to be dehumanized for what makes you trans, and get demonized even further. You get the worst combination of all. You get diminished and mocked and condescended and dismissed, “Oh you’re just a whiny little hysterical girl, shut up,” turns into “Oh you’re just a whiny little hysterical man. Stop speaking over women.” You’re still constantly gaslit about your interests and experiences and trauma, because liking masculinity is seen as bad now that you’ve realized you’re a man. You know what it looks like when someone sees you as small and insignificant, unworthy of listening to (especially as growing up as a Jewish girl, and now a Jewish man). They see you as not only small and insignificant, unworthy of listening to, but they justify it with your identity. Before, it was that “women” weren’t worthy of being listened to because they were stupid and insignificant, and now it’s that you’re a man, and men shouldn’t talk about their experiences fear because they’re Evil. You had femininity forced onto you and got punished if you disobeyed, and now you get that again! But now you’re a toxic man if you hate being misgendered. You get the misogyny of being treated like a woman and the demonization of being a man, and you can’t talk about either. “You can’t complain now,” they say, “you asked for this. You chose this.”
They use the same language of those “he’s only pulling your hair because he likes you” teachers (“terfs want to forcibly detransition you bc they care about you”) or “you were asking for it” adults after being catcalled for the first time at age 12 (“you chose to be a man”) or the same fucking language as terfs, who they claim to hate. They use this same language, except now it’s a chance for them to project their trauma with masculinity onto you. You learn a lot of people only hate terfs because they don’t include trans women, not because they’re fascists who believe in innate gender essentialism and that your genitals determine everything about you. You learn a lot of trans people are terfs in everything but name. They believe in gender essentialism, in radical feminism, that all men are evil, just including trans women. In their view, they slot trans women into the status of white womanhood as eternal victims, and trans men into the status of white manhood as eternal oppressors. Except that doesn’t work.
(Not to mention that non-binary people can also be men or/and women, and are entirely left out in all of this except to fit into this oppression point calculator developed in a previous un-invented circle of discourse hell)
You find a small circle of trans men and mascs talking about the same stuff you’re talking about. You realize that realizing you’re a trans man means you have to become an activist for trans men. Every word you think of to describe your own experiences is, again, mocked and dismissed. You’re gaslit even more heavily than you were before, by the same people who claim you have power over them. People who have never talked to a trans man in good faith spread misinformation, that testosterone is easy to get (it’s actually harder to get than estrogen because it’s a level three substance that results in a felony if taken without a prescription), that it’s poison (and maybe it was for them, but they say it as a universal statement), that all trans men worry about is misgendering, ignoring the very real violence against us specifically for being TRANS MEN. And you die a little inside and grow very disillusioned and alienated from other trans people. You notice that traits of a testosterone-induced puberty are demonized even when that hurts trans women, and you notice any trans women who try to speak up are silenced, just as you are. And it hurts. Where is the community in this?
But still, you have your own community, slowly raising awareness for these things. You dust off your skills you got from validating yourself from harm from your abusive mother, and put on that same shield you used against abusive cis boys in high school who made period jokes and said cis lesbians just wanted to be men. You use the language to describe your own oppression that you know to be true. You use “transandrophobia” and “anti masculinity” without apology. You’re not going to apologize, flutter your lashes and give a nervous laugh the way you did for cis men when you were in danger, to other trans people about transphobia. Not anymore, not now, and not ever again. You work through your own self-hatred of masculinity that the queer “community” fully endorses and practices daily, and realize that being a man is good, actually. You start defining your own ideal of masculinity, and start being your own role model of what you want to be as a man.
You’re on testosterone and see it demonized daily by other trans people, and see that what gives you happiness is mocked as what makes you unlovable and disgusting. It hurts, but you learn to brush them aside. Solidarity is important, you’ve always known this. Sometimes you can get through to people, who will realize they’re hurting you and stop. But some people won’t, and will victimize themselves eternally. That’s not your fault, and the emotional labor you carried over from being raised as a girl means you especially need to hear this. That’s not your job. Not because women should have that job, but because no one should have to do more work than is equal. You are trans because you are a man, and so your manhood cannot be separated from your transness. Other people practicing transphobia against you is their fault, not yours.
You start to learn that damn, the patriarchy really does effect men from how other queer people treat you. Because people, especially women (both cis and trans) start treating you like a non-human robot, an emotional punching bag. That’s if they don’t demonize you entirely. But still, you have your community, you’re transitioning, and you’re happy. You start growing into your manhood and masculinity, really growing into it. And there are times when you’re really, really happy. You decide to make your own representation. Don’t let anyone take that away from you, fellow trans men. You are handsome, you are strong, you are resilient. Your are courageous and lovely and kind. You are worthy of love not despite being a man, but because you are a man. It’s been hard, it’ll be hard. But it’s worth it to be a man.
(This ended up being a long post, a combination of what started out as a rant and turned into more of a personal journey narrative. I want to make people feel heard. You are valid. It’s not just in your head, they are gaslighting you. You aren’t sensitive, you aren’t dramatic, you aren’t toxic, and you aren’t whiny. You’re a trans man who wants to be known as a man without being demonized for it. Never be afraid to speak up against transphobia, especially when it’s from other trans people. They should know better, it is not your fault. I love you. I’ve also learned more about multigender people and intersex people, but I can’t speak to their experience at all and so didn’t want to misrepresent. But I can only imagine it’s even more complicated and hard for you, so you get even more love and support <333)
(If you’re not a trans man or transmasc reading this, and you support it, thank you. This was specifically about trans men because it’s the man part people really demonize, and transmasc as an identity is still seen as “safe” because it’s “not a man”. For supportive trans women and transfems, I love you. Keep speaking up for us. But for anyone who comes at this in bad faith, re-evaluate why you feel attacked. Are you perpetuating harm against trans men? Are you continuing gender essentialism but justify it because you have a marginalized identity? Are you projecting your trauma against cis men, men in general, and masculinity against people who can’t fight back? Reflect and grow the fuck up. Are you a trans man who’s bought into dehumanizing yourself so you can be seen as “one of the good ones”? Are you a white trans woman weaponizing your newfound sense of white womanhood onto trans men, especially non-white trans men? Reflect on how demonizing men and masculinity as inherently predatory and dangerous effects jewish men, black men, brown men, disabled men, and Asian men. And maybe just white cishet men as well!!! They’re also people!!!! Being a man isn’t inherently a bad thing. You should be mad at systems, not people, and individuals when they perpetuate harm. Being marginalized in one area doesn’t mean you can claim to be the voice of the community while hurting members of the community you supposedly consider yourself apart of.)
