There's someone I vaguely know who I'll call B who is, like, one of the most obvious eggs of all time (and so I will be using she/her, if you don't like that please bear in mind that I used to be in B's position and on the rare occasions someone used she/her for me it was an incredibly positive feeling).
B is quiet, sweet and gentle, has predominantly female friends, loves animals, spends weekends doing butterfly conservation with a group of elderly women, none of that makes her an egg but it's definitely unusual behaviour for a cis man.
No, what makes B such an obvious egg to me is how she is treated by everyone else. A lot of men just avoid her, they think she's weird and effeminate. Women generally like her well enough, but they still tend to keep her at arm's length in a way they don't do with cis men. In a way she is being third-gendered already, like there's no established pattern for men or women to interact with someone like her, so they just avoid doing so if they can help it.
Last year she asked out this girl Alice, and Alice said yes. They dated for a few months, broke up, and continued to be perfectly friendly. Alice started dating someone else, everyone moved on.
Then these whispers started that B was actually really creepy, people started saying they had heard bad things about her (unspecified), that she had abuser vibes, that she had done all this supposed bad stuff but no one was allowed to say what it was, but it was definitely bad. And, really unusually if B was a cis man, all the men and women and non-binary people in her circle all immediately stopped being friends with her. She was uninvited from events, people even cancelled one-on-one meet-ups with her, she was barred from attending the LGBTQ support group she went to (she is pan). And bear in mind that all this is stuff I heard only from the people who cut her off, I am at best a distant acquaintance of B.
I ended up at an organised-at-the-last-minute drinks event that was hosted by a cis woman acquaintance on the same night that B had a month earlier organised a boardgame session, and everyone who had been planning to go to B's boardgame meet cancelled to go to this drinks event, to which B was explicitly not invited (I didn't find this out until later, I'm not really part of this circle at all). Incidentally, the woman who hosted the event made a point of telling me she was concerned for my safety out in public at night, and then proceeded to call me a man 🤷.
Several months later, the details came out: the "creepy" thing she had done was to buy Alice a birthday present. Alice thinks that's weird because it's not normal for friends to buy each other birthday presents and so she understood this as B expressing a level of intimacy beyond friendship. (Again, this is Alice's perspective on what happened). I know for a fact that B buys her friends birthday presents often, because I know some of those friends. If Alice had originally led with, "B bought me a birthday present," rather than, "B is being creepy, and I don't want to tell you how just yet," it probably wouldn't've worked to socially isolate her, so she let everyone's imaginations run wild with ideas about what B might've done. Only when everyone had cut B off did she reveal the details, and I understand B's social life is very slowly recovering but there is still so much suspicion about her.
I've talked to enough trans women in my time to recognise this story well. I personally have been lucky enough never to end up in that situation, but perhaps that is because I tend to avoid friendship groups where possible and prefer to have individual friendships that don't join up. Perhaps that is a subconscious defense mechanism to avoid stuff like this happening to me, idk.
But during this whole saga, a common refrain from B's cis woman and transmasc former friends was to respond to mentions of her unspecified creepy behaviour with "I hate cis men". That is, to position her supposed abusive behaviour within the context of gendered violence, even while not actually knowing what she did. And, having met B a couple of times and got a vibe, it fell to me to point out that some people that they consider "cis men" are actually not, which raised the whole "male socialisation" issue and whether trans women are oppressed before coming out, and then I decided I couldn't deal with that conversation with a bunch of non-transmisogynised people.
But at this point I am sort-of thought to be the "cis guy defender". People will say they hate cis guys randomly, and then apologise to me as if I am personally offended. No, I hate them too. But I feel that with a handful of alleged "cis guys" I can see the woman beneath even if they are unaware of it themselves. And the thing is, I don't trust non-transmisogynised people to be able to see that at all. Or rather, I think they can see it, but I don't think they realise what they are seeing, only that they instinctively hate it and want to kill it, so ingrained is transmisogyny in our society.
And the fact is that most of these "I hate cis guys" people don't hate actual cis guys. They love cis guys. They go out of their way to spend time with them, they admire them, they seek their approval, their favourite writers are all cis guys, their favourite actors too. And that's not to blame them for that, we live in a world where cis guys dominate everything, that's life. But it is a problem when your hatred of cis guys is expressed only against someone who (it seems to me) isn't one.
To deliberately cut off B's social life based on no information, even as you still support Neil Gaiman or Johnny Depp, is not the action of someone who hates cis men's violence against women, but of a transmisogynist who doesn't even know there's a name for the bigotry they are perpetuating. It starts to seem that, coming from certain people, "cis men", much like "AMABs" before it, often functions ironically enough as a slur against transfems. And that's not getting into the issue of those transmascs who say "I hate cis men" not as a fact but as an affirmation, that effectively misgenders themselves in order to label themselves as ontologically non-oppressive, which is a whole other (but related) can of worms.
Privilege dynamics can be observed even if they can't be named by the people involved. If a woman can make a load of people including cis men instantly stop talking to another "cis man" by saying, "he did something really bad, but I can't talk about it," that doesn't mean that those people (and especially those cis men) have suddenly overnight become the world's most passionate feminist advocates and desperately keen to believe women's words. It means that there is another privilege dynamic going on that makes ruining that person's life something they actually want to do.
