Likely a hot take. I've been sick as fuck and my brain is mush, so if this is messy I'll probably redo it later.
I saw a post earlier that took a study on self-identified sexual aggressors and turned it into a "cis men suck/cis men dni" generalization. Then another about a cis intersex man who was castrated at birth by a female surgeon who just hated men/boys that much. It got me thinking.
I've met and dated shitty cis men. I've also met wonderful ones. Same with cis women and queer people; some have been just as harmful (or more). Generalizing entire groups like this is harmful. In my experience, it doesn't reduce harm; it makes those groups more defensive and escalates everything into a vicious cycle that hurts people who don't deserve it.
Most boys/men grow up with rigid, damaging messaging: "man up," don't cry, don't show weakness, your worth is in what you provide or achieve, suppress needs for help, take risks, etc. Those scripts absolutely damage men's mental health, relationships, perception of women and other men, and even lifespans. The stats are clear: men die by suicide at much higher rates, die younger on average, make up the vast majority of workplace deaths and homelessness, and often face real barriers around emotional expression, custody, or asking for help without seeming "less masculine."
Rigid sex-role expectations and cultural norms hurt everyone; they just distribute the costs and benefits differently. Men get certain social permissions and advantages at the high end (leadership, risk tolerance paying off for some), but they pay with higher variance: more men at both the extreme top and the extreme bottom. The "privilege" narrative often ignores the parts where the system chews men up and discards them; especially working-class, POC, neurodivergent, or non-conforming men.
It's the same with women internalizing harmful stuff under the same pressures. We can acknowledge real patterns and average differences without sliding into "therefore all members of group X are bad/oppressors."
The "cis men suck" rhetoric slides very easily into "all men suck" because the underlying logic is often essentialist: treating maleness or masculinity itself as tainted or inherently dangerous, rather than specific behaviors or cultural patterns. Once that frame is normalized, transmasc and trans men get pulled under the umbrella whether they like it or not ("you're socialized as male," "male energy," etc.). Trans women catch it from the other side: suddenly their birth sex is the only thing that matters and they're framed as infiltrators or predators.
I've already experienced this flip-flopping with intersex stuff: people weaponizing whichever gender lens hurts most in the moment. It's especially frustrating when people in transmasc/trans male spaces echo "all men are trash" rhetoric for clout or solidarity, then act shocked when it gets reflected back at them. You can't spend years calling masculinity suspect and then expect everyone to magically exempt your masculinity when it's convenient. That inconsistency erodes trust inside communities and hands outsiders easy ammo.
I've seen firsthand how bodies and histories don't fit the neat oppressor/oppressed scripts a lot of online discourse demands. Generalizing "men" (cis, trans, or otherwise) as a monolith doesn't protect anyone; it just trains people to sort each other into threat categories instead of dealing with individuals.
It's okay to want better socialization for boys and men without hating men as a category. And it's okay to push back when your own community imports rhetoric that eventually bites them (and you) in the ass.
Individual people still get to be judged on how they actually treat others. Some of my friends being decent cis men doesn't erase the shitty ones I've met, and the shitty ones don't erase them either.
