On transmasculinity as pure hypothesis
I know this screenshot is from a post from a couple of months ago but I want to put it in its own post because it’s so demonstrative of the kind of backwards reasoning these people use when it comes to trans issues.
When I say that both transmasculinity itself and transmasculine oppression are epistemologically neutered, this is exactly what I mean. Inequivocable proof of transmascs being unambiguously targeted for their transmasculinity (in this case, trans men of color being essentially tortured in ICE camps) is still inadmissible, because all this news proves is that a transfeminine person would have it worse. There is a rhetorical sleight of hand at play that substitutes the real, named transmascs in the story - specific and individual human people who relayed their own experiences in details firsthand - with entirely hypothetical transfeminine people not in the story at all. The transfem that the tagger imagined in their head for the sole purpose of dismissing anti-transmasculine violence becomes the real person, while the real and named transmascs melt into a mist and become purely hypothetical.
The nature of inhabiting transmasculinity in a world of history-long transmasculine epistemicide is that you are never taken as yourself, in your full living human body, with its discrete characteristics (whatever they may be), its history, its traumas, its unique positionality: you are never read as yourself because your ‘self’ is inherently illegible. Instead you’re like a text in an unknown language that others try to interpret comparing you to know quantities (even aberrant ones) and always finding you lacking in some way - less beautiful, less strong, less virtuous, less meaningful, less interesting, less valuable - because you are being graded on a system that is not just built without you, but rather built around your absence.
To make an example: Often I speak of the ways that growing up as a member of the female social sexgender class has shaped me in the person I am, and specifically the behaviors I have been trained and coerced into in order to escape additional punitive violence (on top of the regular violence being seen as a girl/woman gets you just to keep you subdued into the underclass). I have been taught to walk a certain way, stand and sit a certain way, to make way for people that register as men, to shrink myself around them, to fawn, to smile, to modulate my voice to sound submissive and placating, to defer to them, to apologize for speaking in the first place, to wrap my speech in conditionals and justifications, to make a show of doubting myself even when I’m sure of what I’m saying. This behavior is impossible to completely unlearn while living in a body perceived by others as female, because every step out of line is answered by a retaliation equal in proportion. You people would know about this if any of you listened to cis women. transitioning does not remove this behavior, certainly not instantaneously, and on top of that, having this heavily feminine-coded behavior and speech patterns while appearing even ‘imperfectly’ or ‘somewhat’ male is also grounds for punishment, more or less severe. You would think the people who talk all day of transmisogyny would be able to see this.
Now if I speak of this, I sometimes receive this response: but what about when you pass? When you look and sound and move exactly as a normative cis man does, won’t you have the space and opportunity to unlearn this behavior completely? will you still be claiming that your upbringing has shaped you so, ‘clinging’ to your AGAB? And that certainly sounds like a good argument, if you don’t notice the sleight of hand. If you ignore the fact that it is being told to me, a specific individual trans man with a specific history and body. I am 30 years old. I have been medically transitioning from a while. I do not look like a cis man or a cis woman or a transfeminine person - I look transmasculine. As of now, this much-discussed ‘male passing privilege’ has not reached me even remotely.
Now, because there is no cultural notion of what transmasculinity is or looks like, I am usually read as a medically aberrant and gender non conforming cis woman. At times I’m also read as a gender non conforming, queer, very young cis man, while some other times I’m read as transfeminine. In a few extreme cases where I do my best to ‘girlmode’ out of necessity I can even read as a quasi-normative cis woman, albeit an extremely quirky one. But I am never, ever read as a normative cis man. That has genuinely never happened to me. It is very possible that, due to a mix of my individual medical circumstances, my desires for my own body, and my sexuality and aesthetics, I may never happen. I may never move through the world as a normative (and straight) cis man on a regular basis. I cannot know that for sure because I have a hopefully long life ahead of me, but I certainly wouldn’t discount it as a possibility.
And still, to the person posing the argument of “what about when you pass”, my lived reality for my entire 30 years of life, which will continue to be my lived reality for the short and medium term future, is superseded by the specter of the entirely hypothetical, very possibly forever-inexistent, normative cis-passing straight-passing stealth masculine man they have summoned in their own mind to dismiss the real, present, firsthand testimony of my own lived experience. Their ‘headcanon’ of what I could one day turn into becomes more real than the living, breathing person I am.
If you’re wondering how can we get to the current year knowing so little of transmascs and having so little transmasc presence in history, art and culture, this is how.
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