the thing that made trfs whole deal with treating trans men as though they're cis men make sense to me? (in terms of how they can believe it, not in terms of me buying into it, to be clear)
was realising how that fit together with their weird-ass gender-essentialist takes, in particular their insistence that trans women cannot under any circumstance actually have anything even resembling male privilege, whether they're pre-realization, closeted, or anything else. (never mind that whole thing about "literally just using a man's name at work provides material advantages, this proves that trans men have male privilege" thing that goes around, that doesn't count in this context because, uh, hypocrisy i guess)
they seem to think that there are only two ways that trans people's relation to "male privilege" can be conceptualized;"trans women are really men, and therefore have male privilege", which is terfy, transmisogynistic, and false, of course. the only alternative being "trans women are really women, so trans men are really men, and therefore have male privilege", which is clearly the self-evident truth. fittingly, this binary perspective completely ignores non-binary people. it's almost like trfs have issues with accounting for us, isn't it?
anyway, the point is that if you try to argue "trans men don't have access to trans privilege", that view leads to the insistence that that claim misgenders trans men and buys into terf rhetoric. because if you believe that "trans men don't have male privilege", to them, the only possible reason for it is because you think that "the real men with male privilege are trans women".
it seems like any discussion about the nuance and complexity of actual trans people in relation to "male privilege" and "material advantages" and the like, and the ways in which different trans people, even of the same identity, can have wildly varying experiences with relation to these things based on individual circumstances (like remote vs in-person working spaces, taken names, presentation, being out or not, pronoun usage, etc) is taken as attempts to obfuscate the "simple reality" that "trans men have male privilege and trans women don't".
which is all fucking clown nonsense so far as i'm concerned, but if you're retrofitting terf rhetoric into trying to empower trans women it's not like that's going to get you anywhere that makes sense anyway.
They're literally too unimaginative, they're simply not intellectually creative enough, to comprehend anything that isn't the same dynamic as cis men and cis women. And part of this has to do with the disingenuous assertion that feminism was ever originally anything but centered pretty squarely around a false and antiquated notion of sex-based oppression. It's actually fine to not have some mystical tradition of continuity with cis feminist politics. That doesn't make one not a woman, but all the notions they've founded their "transfeminism" on says otherwise, they just go "but this time also trans women" or "but trans women even more" no matter how incongruent that is with the original principle.
