“Trans men truly are the men of trans people” — how about you unpack that for me. Don’t pretty it up, tell me what you mean. Do you think they’re more violent? More misogynistic? Tell me why you think that. Are you negatively generalizing the whole community (the literal definition of bigotry) based on bad experiences you’ve had, or are you just sharing straight up transphobic rhetoric.
A lot of people seem to be missing the point.
The quote at the beginning of this post isn’t the neutral, “trans men are men.”
It sounds an awful lot like it, because, well, yes. Trans men are men. And are part of the trans community. And so are the men of the trans community.
But, as there is a fair few trans men/mascs who were (or still also are) butches, and have heard this exact same line directed at butches within queer and more specifically lesbian/sapphic spaces. “Butches are the men of the lesbian community.”
And the phrase, then, can be seen more easily for what it is. It’s meant to imply that the group in question has positional power over other people within the group because of proximity to cis-maleness, and as such male privilege. It’s meant to say that butches are to be protectors of the community and not part of the protected, because they don’t need protection.
There are also implications there of whatever else the person doing that comparison thinks of men on a gender-essentialist level. Men not needing protection, or at least not having any vulnerability is already an example of that. But it could also include the implication that men are more violent, so by saying “are the men of,” they’re saying “are the violent part of.” Or anything else someone may have absorbed from essentialism.
Directing that onto trans men doesn’t lose all of that meaning. And it doesn’t make it more correct to attribute male privilege to a group of trans people who, as trans people of any kind, can only have access to true male privilege very conditionally, if at all.
I understand missing that if you’ve not seen the phrase used in other contexts.
