Say, can we talk about how trans men and transmascs are often… just plain not trusted?
No matter what we say, what we do, how we say it, what’s done to us, any of that, it’s somehow painted as malicious on our part. Just as a few examples…
For a time there was not really any well known transmasc theory floating around, and this was seen by some as an indication that trans men and transmascs just wanted trans women and transfems to do all the work for them. No one thought maybe we were just being actively erased or that they simply hadn’t been looking for it. There was a jump to the conclusion that we were simply lazy and entitled.
There are cis lesbians who would not date or have sex with trans women but would date or have sex with trans men. I have seen on multiple occasions, even in comic form, a narrative that the trans man is an active participant in this, that he is willingly misgendering himself to get into transphobic lesbians’ pants. When I talk to trans men and transmascs about this, I don’t hear that narrative at all. What I do hear is stories of transphobic cisbians sexually harassing trans men who don’t want to date them, or outright TERFs pretending to be accepting in the hopes of forcing a trans man to detransition during the relationship, or transmascs having a complicated relationship with their gender and sexuality in such a way where not only is dating a lesbian not a form of misgendering for them but they actively consider themselves a lesbian for one reason or another.
I once made a post about how it’s weird to go around announcing you’d never date a trans person when nobody asked and all that happened was a trans person existed in your presence. I was very clearly trying to convey that announcing you don’t find trans people dateable or fuckable unprompted purely because a trans person exists near you is weird and transphobic and completely unnecessary. A cis woman responded by angrily telling me I shouldn’t be trying to trick women into thinking I’m a real man, as if the reason why I transitioned was to dupe cis straight women into having sex with me.
There’s a book titled Female Masculinity that was published in 1998 by Jack Halberstam. I don’t think Jack himself uses the term transmasc to describe his gender, but his book touches on not only Butch lesbianism but basically anyone who was assigned female at birth and is masculine, which means a lot of transmascs and trans men are exactly who he’s talking about. I recently got word that someone has attempted to debunk his book because they don’t think he can be trusted to speak honestly about his own experiences and community.
Multiple notable trans men on YouTube have been listed as vectors of a social contagion by the book Irreversible Damage. Here’s Ty Turner talking about it.
Speaking of the social contagion idea, the more I look at it, the more it becomes apparent that one of the things it relies on is the idea that trans men simply existing near your cis daughters will turn them trans. For many a conservative, this would mean trans men in public are dangerous and cannot be trusted. When we say transitioning improved our lives and that we’re happy this way, they don’t believe that. They look for secret signs that we’re actually miserable, as this one transphobe did to Elliot Page, which was reacted to by Jammidodger.
The words that come out of our mouths are always less believable than what somebody else imagines us to be like. We cannot be trusted, so when we speak, somebody else has to step in and correct what they see as falsehoods. We’re secretly miserable and in need of help we won’t admit to when we’re not too far gone in our transitions and secretly predatory and a danger to women and girls when we have. From the right, we’re misguided women who need help until we’re spreaders of a dangerous disease that will cause the girls you love and care about to poison and mutilate themselves. From the left, we’re misogynistic gender traitors who have no real problems and are even more dangerous than cis men due to our ability to fall back on our agab when needed and therefore we need to be kept in check more than any cis man does. Both sides consider us sneaky and suspicious and deceitful. Neither is willing to think we are just existing and living our lives in a world that actively wants us gone, and when we dare to complicate things by suggesting that our lived experiences don’t align with the theory that’s been put forth and we’d like to contribute, not a single word of it can be trusted.
(This does, by the way, mean that if you’re not a trans man or transmasc and you choose to listen to us and trust us enough to believe us about our own lives, you’re helping us by pushing against a very prevalent narrative about us and I just want you to know that we see this and we appreciate it so much).
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