PT ID: Through this lens of imposed womanhood—imposed female embodiment in conjunction with the threat of /fadh/ directed at raced/classed (trans)masculine bodies—it becomes starkly clear how complicity with hegemonic masculinity (or lack thereof) as conceptualized in scholarly works on transmasculinity (Rubin 2003; Aboim 2016; Saeidzadeh 2020; monakali and Francis 2022) is not the sole nor primary actor which reinscribes sex and gender onto the transmasculine body. Moving beyond the frameworks of complicity with hegemonic masculinity in this way allows us to disrupt the logics that have defined the contours of transmasculinity in recent scholarship as well as within popular debates in queer and feminist activist spaces, some of which have attacked trans men by accusing them of benefiting from the patriarchal dividend and consolidating/deploying their newly acquired male privilege. Such accusations are dangerous as they generally disavow the complicity of the state and the family apparatus in regulating the lives of trans men through gendered violence, they pit trans men and trans women against each other in a hierarchy of oppression, and they function to reproduce a liberal second wave feminist tendency that fails to attend adequately to the material conditions under which transmasculine (and all other) subjects live.
From: Fadh, Sharaf and Respectable Passing as New Frameworks for Understanding Transmasculinity in the MENA Region: Case Studies of Transmasculine Refugees in Lebanon (PDF)
