Something that I’ve seen pointed out by several people about the transmisogyny prevalent during various recent discourses, that I myself have observed, is that it’s primarily being done by younger trans men and mascs, often pre-transition or early-transition, whereas trans men / mascs who have been transitioning for some time (and are often more offline) frankly tend to be more chill, and I believe there are oppressions underpinning this that are worth talking about.
The primary oppressive modality that trans men / mascs face early in transition is something called regendering, this can simply be described as a pressure to reassert themselves as women instead of seeking to “rise above their station” via an assertion of masculinity or manhood, something that is seen as delusional by patriarchy due to manhood being a biologically nepotistic category. This is also the primary oppressive modality faced by trans children, which for both trans children and trans men / mascs stems from the status of both children and assigned-women as propertised, objectified classes that exist as forms of familial, patriarchal and national capital and signifiers of reproductive futurity.
The biological nepotism that underpins patriarchal manhood can best be described as a one way door, it’s a future designation placed upon people assigned-male, you can never enter it from outside that designation but you can most certainly leave it (or be pushed out of it via emasculation: see how men constantly try and call each other's masculinity into question as a policing mechanism). Leaving manhood leads to the counter-modality of regendering which is called degendering, we’ll be talking more about this later.
While trans men / mascs are never actually allowed to enter through the manhood door (a form of oppressive resistance called transemasculation), encountering that door whilst simultaneously being pressured to reassert themselves as women puts immense pressure on trans men / mascs to adopt normative signifiers of masculinity in order to be taken seriously, some of the more harmful signifiers being misogyny and transmisogyny.
This coupled with the often-inevitable internalisation of regendering pressure can lead to what I can best describe as the expression of a schizophrenic phenomena, where trans men / mascs are engaging in masculine self-assertion via harmful signifiers (misogyny and transmisogyny) and simultaneously regendering themselves as a form of woman or AFAB due to the aforementioned internalisation of regendering pressure. This is a phenomena that I not only believe remains unelucidated within a lot of trans male / masc communities online but is often actively reinforced.
So why is this phenomena so much more common amongst younger, early-transition and pre-transition trans men / mascs? The answer to this is surprisingly simple.
Regendering functions like an elastic band, the further away from assigned-womanhood trans men / mascs get, the more pressure there is on them to return to the fold, but there comes a point in transition where recapture is no longer seen as possible, the trans man / masc is considered “too far gone” to be reigned back in and the elastic band snaps, but instead of finally being seen as men or sufficiently masculine they are instead cast into the limbo between sexes (a phenomenon known as third-sexing). They are abjectified, they are monstered, they are degendered.
The simplest way to understand degendering is as a Schrödinger’s box in which the degendered individual is seen and treated as male, female, neither or both depending on which designation(s) can enable the most harm in any given moment, a great unfortunately not-so-theoretical example of this would be a trans woman arrested for indecent exposure for being topless in public (treated as a woman for the purpose of arrest) and then thrown into a men’s jail for it (treated as a man for the purpose of punishment). This is the primary oppressive modality faced by trans women.
The fact that further-transitioned trans men / mascs face similar expressions of these oppressive modalities to trans women (despite there still being marked differences in how it can manifest) makes solidarity and understanding come more naturally, on top of those trans men / mascs no longer facing anywhere near as much pressure to constantly reassert their own masculinity or regender themselves as women, with all of the resulting problematic behaviour that that pressure can manifest.
So what do we do about it?
We talk, we elucidate the realities of how oppressions can manifest differently instead of trying to flatten everything and accuse people who dare to highlight those differences or express exasperation at trans men’s / masc’s problematic behaviour as being infighters or “transmisandrists” or what have you.
The root of this problem is that we’re shut out of knowledge-seeking and knowledge-creation about ourselves, we need to stop being part of this problem, we have to fight against this epistemic injustice.
