i came across a video of a trans woman talking about how hypervisibility is not a privilege and how it has impacted her life, and i completely agreed with the video as i think there is a very incorrect assumption that attention is always positive, that is until she said she would prefer the invisibility that trans men deal with.
i left a longer comment but the gist of it was what i put at the end which was: “please keep talking about this, but while you do please do not make the grass on the other side seem greener, because it’s not, it’s just as dead and unwatered.”
from there i looked around the comment section to get an idea of the general consensus from people who viewed the video, and come across someone who tentatively identified as a cis man empathizing with this trans woman, which is a lovely thing to do except for the fact that what they were empathizing with was, incorrect. something they said stuck out to me particularly, they said “i would rather live in obscurity than actively being the target of every other form of violence. being in a history book does not sound like a good trade off to being...well, history.” now i believe this person was incredibly well intentioned, but sorely misinformed, and i’d like to share what i replied to them here, if only to help other trans men and mascs find the words when they come across this rhetoric.
i said: “you misunderstand what trans men face, perhaps because the better word for this is erasure, not invisibility. trans men's erasure looks like trans men being detransitioned through forced pregnancy and it never being spoken about in conversations about reproductive justice, it looks like one in two trans men experiencing sexual assault and yet again completely absent and when we do speak up about it i've watched people over and over again rush to silence us, it looks like being denied gynecological care and left to die, it looks like us having abnormally high rates of medical discrimination, it looks like us having very high rates of suicide attempts and low life satisfaction, it looks like us falling through the cracks and no one noticing. did you know there have been multiple trans men and mascs that have gone missing or been murdered in the last month? it looks like stonewall being kicked off by a police officer assaulting stormé delarverie a black transmasculine person and his name being noticeably absent from discussions of that historical event. it looks like trans men and mascs being quietly tortured in an ice facility and the news barely making waves in community discussions. it looks like an elder trans woman when asked why we don't see older trans men saying with grief that they didn't make it, most of them died. it looks like trans men who have existed in history getting misgendered in death and remembered as women. it looks like us not being able to speak, travel or even leave our homes in more restrictive countries. it looks like us dying in mental institutions throughout history or forcefully married off to cis men to a lifetime of sexual assault. it looks like us being absent from discussions of abortion rights, fgm, child marriage, and so many other things that often hit us particularly hard. that is what trans men's erasure looks like. i don't say this to berate you, just to educate and inform. please be more mindful of speaking confidently on things you have information gaps on. wishing you well!”
now they liked my comment and i reiterate i believe they were well intentioned so let’s not go too hard on them in response to all of this. but i do think it’s important to push back on this rhetoric, kindly and in a measured sort of way, but push back nonetheless.
hypervisibility kills. erasure kills. there is no privilege in death. to make room for trans women to talk about their bodies being used as props while their internal landscape is disregarded entirely, the dehumanized result of hypervisibility, does not require a dismissal of the erasure that causes trans men to suffer as we fall, or perhaps more accurately put, are pushed, through the cracks.
