i would be interested in you debunking the terf "spending the first 20 years of your life as a man" ask. ive read "why are amab trans people denied the closet" by julia serano but i still do not understand how tma people dont grow up with "boy socialization". you can grow out of that socialization because its not a stale thing, and you can still be a woman regardless of your childhood experiences. but (some) trans women outright deny that they had any boy socialization. certainly trans women are more interested in computer science and gaming more than cis women are, both things cis girls are discouraged to be interested in
hi so this is a really old ask, i tried to answer it a while ago but it got eaten by tumblr, i only recently found a version of it buried in my drafts, so im answering now. I have no idea if anon still follows me or even uses tumblr, but i really hope this will be helpful to some
im going to have to approach this carefully because theres a lot of loaded rhetoric here, not necessarily intentionally on your part but its present, and its overflowing from the original ask.
let me try and break it down a bit.
so firstly lets start with "the first 20-whatever years of your life". this is simply factually untrue regardless of if you buy into the rest of it. I started socially transitioning very young all things considered, i wont give a specifics for privacy but my processes of transition started around 14 and i had ran away from home to live as a woman by 18.
this may seem petty or like a small mistake on anons part, but its really not. this number of 20-whatever was almost certainly picked due to my bio saying im in my 20s, the anon assuming i must've lived as a boy until just recently, without much more thought at all. people like anon see trans women as perpetually new to womanhood, early in transition, and this is far from a simple mistake, its policy. they want to keep trans women from transitioning, and if we do, they want to kill us. the view of any trans girl or woman as new to it all is a key piece that makes their ideology tick, they cannot comprehend a child that may be trans, despite many studies pointing towards gender identity forming at a very young age. and again, when they do comprehend this, they become exceedingly violent, you only need look at the rhetoric surrounding children and trans people recently to know what im talking about.
secondly, the portion on being taught that im biologically and intellectually superior:
this part is extremely nuanced to describe accurately so i may need to return to it to do it justice, but the short version is that I was not taught that I, jingerpi, am superior to women, I was taught that Boys, that Men, are, as a class, superior to Girls and Women as a class. while yes, for a time it seemed i was to be put in that class of boys/men, there was never any illusions about this being something specific to me, individually. in fact, most of the things i learned about myself individually were that i am weak, and inferior. i had multiple older siblings who all put me to shame, all of my peers were higher achievers and more physically capable. I was even called slurs and told the typical things about not being a real man or being too effeminate. i distinctly remember arguing against a boy when we were around 10-12 or so, that boys aren't stronger than girls of the same age, that often girls are stronger, in part due to puberty starting younger for girls. the differences in adults to exist sure, but they're also largely specialized, and are not universal traits about womens ontological weakness.
of course, this is personal experience, but that is my point, i was never told i specifically am stronger than women* (more on this later), i was taught implicitly about the patriarchal relationships between genders, as all children are, even cis girls. I call this patriarchal socialization, rather than male/female socialization, because everyone receives it to some extent, even cis women are perfectly capable of being misogynists, the real difference is where you see your role in it all, and how society treats you.
speaking of society, lets move on for now and come back to the socialization aspect later, because there is certainly more to it and i dont want you to think that is the totality of my view, but we need more context to fully understand the issue.
so thirdly, the section about being given automatic access to everything i need to succeed and independently make all the money i need to for the rest of my life, as well as that little note about a career path making more money the more men are involved in it.
this is just another blatant untruth. the wage gap for trans women is far worse for trans women than it even is for cis women. anon is straight up lying
ive posted this graphic before but its actually far more damning than it appears, while even this places trans women well below average and indeed below cis women according to most metrics, its only looking at trans women who had full time jobs
and this isnt a small issue either, because unemployement rates for trans women are (at least) twice that of the general population, somewhere between 15-30% of us go without employment. and of those who do have work, 44% are underemployed, compared to about 30% of women generally being under-or-unemployed, more trans women are under and we're 4 times as likely to have household income under 10k. source for the above information. this isnt cherrypicked either, some sources estimate the umeployment rates for women are 3-5x higher than the general population, going as high as 30% for total unemployment, before even adding on the 30.8% underemployment from before (44% of 70% is 30.8%), which would bring the final number to a whopping 60.8% of trans women under-or-unemployed. I picked this first source because it was clear and concise.
as for that bit about gaming and computer science, i have to say this really bothers me, because it relies on a popular stereotype to pass of transphobia uncritically. while some might challenge the stereotype itself, i think thats missing the point of this assertion. so firstly, about the stereotype, that is what this is, theres no data provided here that trans women are disproportionately working in computer science, but ill address it more and get to the anecdotes in a moment. I think the important thing to keep in mind is that it isn't the presence or absence in a field that makes someone a woman or not, we have to look at how they're treated within that field. if a cis woman went into computer science, you would not say she has male privilege, you would say she's brave and achieving her dreams, you would know she faces discrimination in the workforce. I wont bother with the statistics here because its so obvious and you can google it yourself, but trans women face many many hurdles and discriminations within the workforce, yes even (especially) in computer science. I mean all you really have to do to see this is look at the earlier income statistics and this is extremely clear. Why does being in a male dominated field seem to you to be evidence of secret maleness? is it because its as a demographic of women rather than an individual woman? Well, if thats the case, do you think Asian women are male socialized because they're significantly more likely to go into STEM, an area of 3/5ths men, than their white counterparts? no, of course you dont (and if you do, you're racist). this is ridiculous, this scrutiny is being unequally applied due to transmisogyny, and the concern presented here is false pretense for sharing that bigotry.
so to get to the stereotype itself, something like 48% of gamers are women, the idea that gaming is a male thing is just misinformation which only considers people who play on PCs to be "true gamers" or whatever, even then, the proportion of PC gamers is still about 35/65ish, not nearly as big a gap as many think. the field of computer science, was also started by women. Ada lovelace is widely considered the mother of computing, and the first calculators were literally women doing math themselves. while yes, the field has become more male dominated, the idea that this correlates causally with people engaging in it as being male is ridiculous. you're saying that because a lot of fish in this pond are goldfish, these fish that look just like mosquito fish must secretly be goldfish, because thats whats usually in the pond. its like saying a rectangle is a square because you noticed squares are rectangles. its a total logical error, just because the association goes one way doesn't mean it goes the other.
and again, you've provided no evidence that this disproportionate engagement is even real, anything more than yet another stereotype of a minority. in my experience, most trans women work far more in the service industry. whether that's retail, some general customer service job, sex work, or otherwise, and people who see trans women as all having high income computer science jobs only think so because they're not friends with poor people, and particularly not poor trans women, so their sample is incredibly biased. I myself have studied computer science, but I have never worked in the field. most of my jobs have been in customer service, with some being in education, again, a very feminized field and labor force.
that said, if we look at it anecdotally, yeah, ive seen trans girls be more interested in computer science than other women ive known, not by a ton mind you, ive met plenty of cis women in computer science too, and its a biased sample, because i myself am interested in computers because my siblings were, and i talk more to other trans people, because im trans, but putting that aside, and putting aside the hypervisibility that may lead someone to think representative stats are "over representative" ("theres a suspicious number of women in this movie", etc), lets just throw all that out and assume for the sake of argument that trans women are disproportionately interested in computers. lets think for a moment if we can explain this with anything other than "male socialization" okay? how about the freedom of gender expression and anonymity the internet allows? how about the fact that we're continually harassed when we go outside? how about the fact that we're not allowed into womens spaces? We're barred from child care and adoption, We cant even use the bathrooms for crying out loud, how about the fact that we're banned form participating in sports? did you know these gender segregations also apply to chess? I used to play chess, I'm registered with FIDE, but I'm trans and FIDE requires a formal two year processes to change your gender, for chess (though it doesn't apply to trans men lol). Do you see what I'm getting at, though? Trans women are pushed out of every sport, every hobby, every field, etc. the only place we can find solace is on the internet. I would be dead if i didnt connect with other trans girls through social media and messaging apps. I spent my early years roleplaying in minecraft for gender euphoria (40-45% of minecrafts playerbase are women btw, for another datapoint for you). so in the end, do you think its possible that if this correlation does exist it could be explained by any number of cultural differences just like it is for other demographics of women? Even explained by our own oppression? Or is it just because we're secretly men in some metaphysical way?
again, if this were any other group, you would be celebrating us entering into the field, happy to see us challenging the assumptions, but you're not, you're trying to use it to slander us as a demographic, because you don't think we're really women, we just identify that way.
I also just really dislike the erasure of women from computer science, something these talking points contribute to directly, while claiming to be working in feminism's name (how ironic). women have contributed vast amounts to computer science, and any of us who do so despite sexism should be applauded, not misgendered. you're calling a girl a boy because she wears blue, and claiming to be the progressive one, when you're the one implying that colors have innate gender. (though yes they have socially defined genders, you need to see girls fighting against that as such, instead of saying actually their affinity for blue is telling of their internalized sexism, or some such nonsense, theres nothing sexist about liking computers, or the color blue).
fourth, still about society's treatment, the section about "never having to fear being raped [pregnant] or stalked by dangerous men"
this part is reactionary drivel that knows nothing of my experiences, again, its simply factually wrong. I was raped, as a child, repeatedly. while yes, I cant get pregnant, i didnt even know how pregnancy happened at the time it started i was so young, that didn't make it any less terrifying. its incredibly hubristic to downplay rape like this to pwn a trans woman, especially considering we experience it at such high rates. i also know pretty confidently that they wouldn't make this same argument against a cis woman who is infertile, cis women being unable to bear children is a tragedy, but when its a trans woman, they see it as a burden lifted, regardless of whether or not we personally want children or mourn our inability. there are also still plenty of medical risks associated with rape, and i was not in a situation to get care for any of them.
its also laughably wrong to say that i never feared being stalked by a man. I've been stalked multiple times, two times of particular note, once with a coworker who consistently compared himself to the joker and said he would kill people for me and many many other things which i dont want to get into, and another, who abused his job to gain access to private information about me and the people i was living with, tracking down countless people even tangentially associated to those i lived or worked with, to call or show up at their door unannounced, eventually finding where i lived, once showing up at the house i was staying at waiting for us to arrive home to try and confront me on the spot. i distinctly remember hiding in the garage fearing for my life while the use of guns was being discussed by the property owners to deter him. thank god for the owners who let me stay with them by the way, they saved my life on more than one occasion and mean the world to me. again, i wont give a specific age, but both of these stalking incidents were before i was even 20, with the rapes being well before i even know what being transgender was. this is to say nothing of the countless other ways i was harassed or belittled throughout my adolescence in distinctly feminized ways.
so now that we've addressed most of the big claims here, let's return to the socialization issue. I said earlier that I think we're all socialized to believe in patriarchal ideas, regardless of assigned gender, and that our position within society is far more important. however, I think sometimes it even goes beyond this. while there's no single unified theory, in many ways trans women are women, or girls at least, before we "come out", and before we even have words to describe our experiences. I have a personal anecdote about that.
when my siblings and I were younger, we learned from one of our cousins how to snap in an atypical way from our cousin, where you move your hand and then stop it and let your index finger fall against your middle finger making a noise, you can do this repeatedly to have a little miniature clap, a motion sometimes accompanied in pop culture by the phrase "dammnn". after a while of most of us doing this as a habit when bored or when wanting to make a noise, our parents told our sisters, and only our sisters, to stop snapping like this because it wasn't lady-like. despite being about 8-11, not knowing I was trans, I stopped doing this motion too, because I didn't want to be unladylike.
I could go on for a long time telling many stories, all the classic things you hear about acting like a girl beforehand, putting on skirts, internalizing what I was told women were supposed to be, etc, but that would be something of beating a dead horse. as you've no doubt heard it all before.
that said, I know a lot of this is more than simply me being treated strangely in ways that would be worse if I were ""female socialized"" because I have my sister's as comparison. my path in life is much closer to theirs, and in fact worse in many ways, than it is to my brothers. my sister also worked in education, we were both harassed by the same teacher who later went to jail for sex with minors, even our parents seemed to know there was something off about us, giving us special rules which our brothers didn't have to follow. I also know it's not possible to teach children about patriarchy without using comparison, if you want a boy to know he's superior to women, you have to use comparative language, or at least implications. you teach boys and girls all these ideas about the roles of boys and girls, we all understand the role the others are put into because we're taught it as part of understanding our own role in society. when someone amab starts to see themselves as a woman, they already know what kinds of expectations that comes with, and if not they'll be violently forced to learn extremely quickly. it's disingenuous to say there's this massive split in how we're socialized as if we don't all learn about both sides of the coin.
that said, earlier I put an asterisk on this, and that is because there was one time in particular where I was told my role in absolute terms, not just relative terms. generally, when I was told things about my role in society, it was comparative, and even in this situation it was, but here it was much more explicit, I was explicitly labeled as a boy and told firmly that this was the role I was to play out, and had those ideas intentionally enforced on me. That I specifically was superior to women.
do you know when this was? what situation led to these ideas being put on me? this so called "socialization"?
I was sent to conversion therapy many times across 3 years and two "therapists". they tried to tell me that I should behave in particular ways, that I deserved certain things from women, and that I should be attracted to certain things about women. this was forceful, I never had a choice in the matter, and it was extremely distressing. conversion therapy has a long record of emotional abuse and it's been shown repeatedly to not only be ineffective, but traumatizing. in fact, I'm quivering violently as I type this even thinking back on it.
when you treat girls like boys, there isn't a "psychological benefit". it is trauma. there is a reason trans people face such high suicide rates, and why transition and social support are the two biggest indicators of a more mentally stable life for trans women. being treated as boys or men is not a privilege for us, it's violence. it gets us killed, and it's enforced through violence. like by putting us in conversion therapy, where we're tormented psychologically and sometimes physically, or mens prisons, where we're systemically raped.
I faced this violence in other ways too, but I don't care to get into it. this was by far the strongest way I was ever affirmed as a boy, though, and it was awful. I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. Im not usually one to put too much stock in psychiatry, but I am diagnosed with PTSD, and many aspects of it are due to this experience.
if you want to read more about patriarchal socialization, the details that go on there in more depth, feel free to search my blog for it, Tumblr willing you should see a few posts where I discuss it in more depth, but this ultimately is what we're talking about. we're all taught our roles in society, but when we're forced violently to perform one specific role, it's really not so nice. and it's certainly not a "privilege" like the original anon was trying to argue, it really is so ridiculous to argue this form of oppression which is shown to have dire consequences for us is somehow a privilege.
so, wrapping up here. I hope you can see why we don't take this rhetoric seriously, and how it's clearly a transmisogynistic anon. this isn't a good faith thing they've come in with trying to understand, this topic is never brought up out of genuine concern, it's brought up to dismiss our oppression in public while they abuse us in private. they don't want us to have terms for our struggle or to see ourselves as women, it makes them extremely angry, because it challenges their position in society and their worldview.
again, theres not really a single explanation of transgender-ness that is so dominant as to exclude other perspectives, but this one provided here isn't a genuine recounting of trans women's experience, it is harassment. so excuse us if we're not too fond of the idea of "male socialization", when it's reason for existence is a cudgel against trans women. socialization is not an unchanging mass that taints you invisibly, and in fact it can be a very violent and upsetting process. it's extremely arrogant to suggest that what trans women go through is a privilege. I won't say no trans girl is ever socialized to think boyish or misogynistic things, I myself used to believe I was male socialized, because that's what I was told and I believed them, but really I don't think it's that straightforward. because you know who else often holds misogynistic or boyish beliefs? cis women. there really is no clean line like people propose. and the few places where society is divided strictly into gender, like boarding schools or prisons, trans women are feminized and used as sex toys for the boys there, and being sent there in the first place is typically done so knowing this, as an act of violence against us.
women are allowed to like boyish things, have interests that are generally considered for boys, and this doesn't stop just because the woman in question is trans, it doesn't make her any less of a woman, and it just doesn't make sense to say this is because of her socialization, if anything, many trans girls go very far in the opposite direction into liking far fewer masculine(ized) things than they may "naturally", because its so often used against us and often a source of dysphoria. this too gets us hate, though. when we rightfully understand our role in society as women, and hyper scrutinized women at that, we often perform a very specific type of femininity that we're expected to, to try and please society, just as many cis women do, but we're attacked for this as well, saying that we're following a man's idea of womanhood, or that we're stereotyping femininity. this is also ridiculous, they simply don't want trans women to do anything at all, so if we act feminine or masculine, we're attacked for being fake women. yes, some of us perform a man's idea of femininity, but its not our view of womanhood, its the views of patriarchy we're forced to respond to, and again, cis women do the same thing. what is the oppression of women if not being forced into roles determined for us by men? obviously it's more than gender presentation, but as I've shown above, we get the poor wages, and we get the other stuff too, we get the harassment, we get the medical discrimination, we get the forced sterilization (more so than most cis women), we experience misogyny and operate in the world as women.
so I hope you can see why most of us don't find male socialization an accurate term for our experiences. we're all socialized under patriarchy, and for women it's often a violent process, but that includes trans women, too.
so no, it's not "just honest" to admit that we have these "psychological privileges", it's in fact it's nonsense, its entirely wrong on a fundamental level. the original anon says it doesn't challenge our identity, but the thing is, being a trans woman isn't simply an identity we slap on top of "male" experiences. we are women. I live as women every day, the hormones in my body are that of a woman, my position in society is that of a woman, my relationship to misogyny is that of a woman, my career prospects and salary are that of a woman. We are women. socially, psychologically, biologically, whatever metric you want to use, the abuse I've faced doesn't change that, and I hope one day we can leave this "socialization" gotcha behind, and recognize it for what it was, transmisogyny.
