I’m not here to dunk on this post or anyone in it, BUT I do think it’s a great visual example of how when trans men DO get platformed (which is rare, especially outside of queer spaces, and we suffer from invisibility within queer spaces too to an extent) it’s almost always relatively privileged trans men who are some combination of:
- white, white passing, or otherwise light skinned
- trans men who don’t have any kind of visible/very noticeable disability
- trans men who are relatively thin and more or less “average man build” according to cisnormative fatphobic standards, trans men who are not fat or curvy or petite
- trans men who have had access to testosterone HRT for at least several years
- trans men who have had top surgery or trans men who are able and willing to bind constantly in any kind of public appearances
- binary he/him only trans men who are feasibly cishet male passing and not visibly gender nonconforming or expressive in ways outside of heteronormative masculinity. trans men who do not “dress loud”. trans men who do not style themselves as particularly alternative, and instead mostly wear relatively “normal guy clothes” in general. trans men who have short hair and don’t wear makeup
And probably more that I’m missing?
I just think that a lot of people who don’t know lots of trans men personally tend to assume we’re all like the guys in the picture above and move through life being treated as such, because they haven’t been exposed to other types of trans men (or- consciously or subconsciously- they don’t see trans men outside of a stereotypically hypermasculine mold as “real trans men”). Maybe half at most of the trans guys I’ve met look similar to the guys in the picture above. A lot of us don’t look like that. But the way some people talk about trans men, it’s pretty clear they’re exclusively imagining guys like we see in the picture above and not considering trans guys who fall outside of that.
