can you (or someone else) maybe explain how trans women did not have male privilege prior to coming out? its an idea that i want to understand and support, but i just find it a little confusing? i've heard from successful trans women that male privilege is what got them to where they were before they came out. if u don't wanna answer i understand, thank u anyways 💖
Hey! So messages like this are almost always, in my experience, in bad faith, but I’m gonna hope that this one was sent in good faith and try to give an adequate answer.
Any answer has to start off with noting that “privilege” is shorthand for the collected body of a whole array of things, both external and internal, that manifest differently in different people in different contexts, and part of the reason that “______ privilege” is such a black hole of discourse is that there is no real detailed common understanding of what “privilege” means across people with different viewpoints.
The statement “trans women had (or have) male privilege” is based on an understanding of privilege that collapses everything into “growing up, people saw that you were a boy, and they gave you all the privileges and opportunities accorded to boys.” And that fails for a couple of reasons. The first is that it makes of boyhood this valorized paradise in which it is inconceivable that traumatizing relations both with authority figures and with other children happen, which is patently untrue. Even amongst the “societally normal” boys, who grow up to be cishet, neurotypical, white, middle-class men, hierarchies form and those on the bottom have a pretty rough time of it. Add in kids who differ along the lines of sexuality, race, class, and neurotypicality and that rough time increases exponentially. Closeted trans girls, or trans girls who have yet to understand themselves in those terms but who just know that they are somehow different, are overwhelmingly in the latter category. Most of them don’t merely sail through as a “normal” boy might; childhood is a deeply terrifying and traumatizing time, and frankly it’s ridiculous to believe that a “societally normal” girl in 2020 has fewer opportunities than any given boy. That’s an immaterially reductive view, a wholly idealist one.
The second reason is related to the first. In addition to flattening “boyhood” or even “manhood” into a single experience, the view that trans women had/have male privilege wholly disregards the relation that one’s mind and sense of self has with their external life, effectively making the state of being closeted a privilege in a way that many of those people would reject as ridiculous if one applied it to sexuality. A closeted gay man is not a straight man, and any playing into that heterosexual role that he might do is widely understood to be under the threat of violence should he fail to perform heterosexuality as he is compelled. A person who desperately tries to live up to manhood under the constant fear that their failure to truly be a man might be revealed at any moment and open them up to punishment is not identically situated to a man, either in their psychical life or in their relation to their social surroundings.
This isn’t even close to being exhaustive, but it’s a couple reasons that I would give why I reject “trans women have male privilege.” As far as various successful trans women saying that, I think in many cases claiming that male privilege was what got them to where they were is a way to look like they are self-reflective while actually dodging reflection. For a few of them I know in particular, attributing their earlier success to their “maleness” allows them to disregard the prominent role that their whiteness and class background had in that success. In other cases I imagine it is an effort to compromise with transmisogynists in hopes that “maybe if I agree with a few of their points they’ll see that I’m not unreasonable.”
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