At a certain point accusations of being “male socialised” or having a “male ego” that are regularly thrown at transfems start to feel less like misguided transmisogyny and more like coordinated attempts to shut us up.
Don’t express discomfort with anything
If you or any transfem does any of these things in any context, it’s only because of your male upbringing that you feel so confident to be angry or loud.
A few months after I started transitioning I had a complete breakdown about this. I was so worried about how the ways in which I was raised would affect how I interact with others. Do I have some innate male confidence I need to destroy? This came after reading a lot of the borderline-terf rhetoric that spreads in the trans community about trans women.
After I while I discovered transfeminist writing that helped me understand my place in the world for really the first time. And then I thought, wait my childhood didn’t instil within me any kind of confidence. When I was a kid I was scared of everything, bullied, abused, terrified to speak up and completely unable to relate to any of the boys surrounding me.
It occurs to me that accusations of being male socialised are a particularly useful tool to stop transfems from discussing any of the discrimination or violence we face from non-transfem people. Any kind of advocating for yourself as a transfem can be shut down using this rhetoric.
It’s the complete flattening down of any of the complexity or interiority of transfeminine life for the benefit of shutting down conversations about transmisogyny. It’s a subtle way to say that transfems basically had the same exact upbringing as cis boys. It’s a way of portraying a confident trans woman who stands up for herself as secretly harbouring the same potential for violence that a cis man has.
And once again, like a lot of transmisogynistic sentiment, I don’t see people outright saying these things but rather implying it for plausible deniability.
Quite infuriating if I’m honest.
