This post was sponsored by: That anon in my inbox who got really mad when I said trans men are oppressed!
If you were upset by my extremely bland unseasoned take of “trans men experience oppression,” you are going to love this one.
The idea that “men” as a category universally benefit from patriarchy in a clean, consistent, across-the-board way is oversimplified, it actively erases the reality a lot of people live in.
Patriarchy is real. True.
Male privilege is real. Also True.
But neither of those things function like a flat video game style buff applied equally to every single person who can possibly be labeled “man.”
They are conditional, contextual, & constantly intersecting with other systems of power.
There are many men who do not meaningfully benefit from patriarchy in the way people online like to pretend they do.
There are many men who are, in very real and material ways, actively oppressed.
And if that statement makes you angry or upset or uncomfortable you're going to have to get used to it.
Because as an indigenous person with a cultural gender that many people assume the gender of depending on what shirt I wear that day, I can tell you that BIPOC men have been telling you this for a long time.
Black men are not treated as “safe, protected beneficiaries of patriarchy.”
They are disproportionately surveilled, criminalized, incarcerated, and killed. They are denied softness, denied vulnerability, denied the presumption of innocence.
The same system that upholds white male dominance does not extend that protection to them. It weaponizes masculinity against them.
Indigenous men, Latino men, and other men of color are similarly targeted by systems that see them not as the 'in group', but as threats to be controlled, removed, or erased.
Their “maleness” does not grant them safety. In fact often intensifies the violence directed at them (sometimes/often by, yeah, White Women!)
Intersex men are another group people love to forget entirely in these conversations.
Many have experienced non-consensual medical intervention, forced “normalization,” and lifelong violations of bodily autonomy. Their existence alone disrupts the rigid binary that patriarchy depends on, and for that, they are punished.
Disabled men are not sitting at the top of anything either. They are often stripped of autonomy, infantilized, denied agency over their own lives, and excluded from both independence and respect.
Their “manhood” is frequently questioned or outright denied because they don’t fit a narrow, able-bodied standard.
Queer men, especially those who are visibly gender nonconforming, are punished specifically because they do not perform masculinity in the way patriarchy demands.
They are harassed, excluded, and targeted. Again, their “man” label does not shield them. It just becomes another axis through which they are policed.
And yes, trans men exist within all of this.
Trans men do not magically gain full access to male privilege the second they are perceived as male, if they are perceived that way at all.
They face transphobia, medical discrimination, social exclusion, and violence. In many cases, they are punished both for being trans and for failing to meet expectations of masculinity in a way that is considered “acceptable.”
None of this negates the existence of patriarchy of course, it is a very real systemic force.
What it does is challenge the incredibly lazy framework that treats “men” as a monolith of power and “not men” as a monolith of 'the oppressed'.
Power is not distributed with a tidy neatness.
Oppression does not care about your simplified categories.
And when you insist on flattening everything into “men = icky evil oppressors,” what you are actually doing is erasing the people who do not fit that mold and, in many cases, actively throwing them under the bus.
You are ignoring the way race, disability, intersex status, queerness, and transness interact with gender.
You are ignoring the way systems of power overlap and compound.
You are choosing simplicity over accuracy.
that choice has real life god damned consequences.
If your understanding of oppression and intersectionality cannot account for the fact that some men are heavily marginalized and targeted, then your understanding is incomplete.
If it cannot hold the idea that someone can be a man and still be oppressed in significant, structural ways, then it is not a useful framework.
It is just a convenient one for you, and you value simplicity and convenience over complex reality. Also you never talk to BIPOC men because you're racist but like, that's mundane at this point, tumblr is one of The most racist sites I have ever been on frankly, white dream BIPOC nightmare here.
Anyway.
trans men are oppressed. I'm gonna keep saying it.
And I will go further and say that there are many non trans men who are not meaningfully protected by patriarchy at all, and are instead harmed by the very systems people keep insisting automatically benefit them.
If that upsets you, I would strongly recommend interrogating why you are more committed to a simplified narrative than to the actual lived realities of marginalized people.
Because at that point, the issue is not what I said.
It is your own assumptions and racism or ableism or general shitty unwiped assholery.
