Ask i got (idk if there's a way to answer and specifically anonymize it so screenshotting here)
Yeah that post got me rolling my damn eyes 😭 Kalvin Garrah ass behavior.
Me when I'm sooo masc and cool and awesome that I don't feel effected by the systemic oppression my population faces but that's because I'm just mascer than everyone and this makes me better than everyone 😎 this is not out of touch at all
Like get better soon? Acknowledging experiencing misogyny isn't actually misgendering you. Or emasculating you. You're not getting misogyny mogged rn dude. You experiencing less interpersonal misogyny in day to day interactions because you pass won't protect you from the widespread structural misogyny. Have fun flexing in front of lawmakers and medical institutions because the waiter now automatically hands you the check.
It's really just an immature and egotistical attitude. But its both one guy being full of himself and a symptom that speaks to a deeper illness with how trans men are legitimately treated as emasculating themselves and misgendering themselves to recognize and talk about how they experience misogyny. Because misogyny as a system of oppression is treated as so anchored to the terms of (almost entirely cisgender) womanhood that its broader application of systems of gender conformity across the population is lost.
Which just absolutely further shoots us in the foot when it comes to addressing the very widespread systemic oppression we experience and its relationship to misogyny (a relationship which is more nuanced then just the equivalent of what cis women experience or like. Nooo we don't experience misogyny if we're men bleeh 😝). Makes this shit even harder to fight, even harder to get us help.
It's just such a shame so many trans guys feel like expressing we experience misogyny is shameful and delegitimizing to our manhoods. It is a byproduct of toxic masculinity, and how denial of weakness or any relationship to experiences associated with womanhood is so harshly impressed upon us as a population who has to "prove" our manhoods much beyond what cis men must do, and still never will face true acceptance or legitimacy from these ideas. It's reeks of transsexual shame.
Whoever the poster is, if he's being fr, is being an insensitive pick-me douche here. But I also feel bad that trans men get driven to denying their own hardships out of a fear that vulnerability will invalidate their manhood.
It's not just some fragility from the need to live up to masculine social performance to feed a sense of power or ego. We really do have our manhoods treated as completely revokable, get subjected to intense misogyny- and we don't get treated just as cis women when our manhood is revoked, we get treated as like complete freak failures. Completely undermined, laughed at, and in an incredibly dangerous position as targets which an attacker will face no social consequence for abusing. A level of cruelty and rejection and punishment which mirrors much of toxic masculinity that cis men face, but with more severe consequences on our lives and safety. Something that can completely oust us from community or society, without any aid to fall back on.
The masculine overcompensations coming from insecurity that a lot of cis men perform are still consequences of patriarchal constraint and punishment which are harming them, and I don't think it is wise to treat all expressions of toxic masculinity as some manifestation of personal moral failure and nothing more. But an important part of upholding toxic masculinity is not just shame, but reward, and a cis man who performs toxic masculinity like this is going to reap benefits from that. But fundamentally, a trans men just won't and can't be rewarded by toxic masculinity as a cis man will, nor can he be rewarded by expressing misogyny in any way that does not fundamentally harm and undermine his existence.
No matter how much he tries, he will not be assimilated or accepted through these expectations, he genuinely, truly, cannot flex and pass his way out of being a target of institutional misogyny. That's because of patriarchy, not personal failure to meet gendered expectations. Trans people will never meet gender expectations because those expectations are not made for us.
Understanding that combatting misogyny doesn't incidentally but directly involves our personal liberation is essential. While his behavior mirrors chauvinism I honestly believe this is also a consequence of how trans men are made to feel secondary our whole lives. A lot of trans men who do the whole "I don't experience misogyny because I'm a man" thing are doing it in a way to say that the combatting of misogyny is something done for the benefit of trans and cis women, and our roles are as protectors and supporters.
It's maybe gloating in the face of the illegitimized trans men, to distinguish yourself above/better than them, but it's not really gloating in an "i win patriarchy" way. It's so very often a "you need to shut up and accept your privilege and sit down" way. Attempts at allyship which dismiss and decenter our experiences of oppression to emphasize others.
It's this undermining of our experiences, the ways we're so deeply used to our struggles being treated as less legitimate, it's the way we personally know what misogyny feels like- so when the check does get handed to us, we feel a sense of guilt. The lessening of interpersonal misogyny can be muddied with the experience of gender affirmation, and that creates a sort of complex experience. Where we step into a world of manhood that has accosted us, driven us out, stood above us, and are seen in, in certain circumstances, with a neutrality and belonging. Are you allowed to feel good about being treated as a man, when being treated as a man means sometimes being treated as more of a person than as a woman?
But of course, these experiences are very fragile, almost entirely operating under the assumption that we're cis. They also open us up to dangerous situations, where our neutrality in a place is assumed, but in reality, we are not welcome. Most trans men are not stealth, so even if they pass, they're out as trans. When that trans identity is outed, or offered, our experiences can change severely. And like I said before, we're extremely subject to systemic misogyny, in law and medicine, in employment and housing, in restrictions of human rights cisgender women actually experience less of. Because we're seen as needing to be corrected. We're not just outed as 'secretly women,' we're outed as transgender men, something seen and treated differently than cis women can be.
But this isn't an experience of gendered oppression that we're familiar with, it isn't the 'standard' experience of misogyny that cis women face, and most of the explorations of transphobia into specific intersection focuses on trans women and transfems. Even butches and experiences of masculine nonconformity are underrepresented in society, queer spaces, and feminism. Experiences that could help elucidate and shape the conversations of our experiences of oppression as transmasculine are not apparent or centered, so we can only operate off of secondary language, secondary understandings of concepts with more elaboration and focus on others. People treat us as secondary as well.
It's easy to feel severely gaslit that really you must not have it all that bad. Comparative to the more recognizable expressions of misogyny prior to your transition, and for those with relative privilege in other areas of identity, transitioning could feel like this is simply a beneficial interpersonal experience.
The ways we are failed, excluded, and erased institutionally don't always come up in the day to day, depending on your circumstances. They come up in things like why you didn't get diagnosed with cervical cancer, and why you won't be able to go to college, and why you are underpaid at work compared to cis colleges. A lot in the long term.
Misogyny works like this too, misogyny is related to this, but most of the misogyny we may actively recognize used against us is in specific direct interactions and conversations. If you don't hear that directed at you as much since you pass as male, and you may be privileged to live in a safe area, and you never see the big picture systemic oppression you face in regular, direct confrontation, or the many covert and automatic applications of misogyny and anti-transmasculinity in your life. If you were never taught to see and understand it and no one will acknowledge it. Is it even real? The misogynistic treatment went away, right?
Then with the added pressure to deny deny deny any glimpse of vulnerability lest you be invalidated and treated like absolute extra shit, then of course you'll double down. Let your experiences be undermined and hope that means you are strong, if you're in a better place than the women around you, at least that means you might be able to bolster and benefit them.
Appease the guilt, appease the shame drilled into us by doing something noble and masculine, be a man in the right way. Place yourself secondarily and help others, because you know how it feels to need help. Because thats an image of manhood that isn't like that of those who harmed you.
Be a good man, and implicitly, feel guilty for being a man. You never had to be a good woman, not in this kind of way, but you need to be a good man. You are full of the capacity for harm now, and privilege and ease- right? Do something good with that. That means doing something for others.
But if you need help now? Well you don't ask for it. Because there's a consensus you don't need it, and acknowledging you do is threatening.
You aren't actually having an easier time, you are vulnerable, vulnerable to the widespread systemic oppression you lack the words for, and vulnerability to misogyny. But you're not allowed to acknowledge this, if you do, you threaten to be treated as a sniveling whiny failed man, failed trans person, failed woman. A woman but too much of a coward to admit to being a woman, a man but too much of a coward to properly be a man, a thing. With no expectation from others you are someone in need of supporting.
When you do speak out on your struggles, your experiences are consistently undermined to be made to feel secondary, unimportant, irrelevant- and whiny and attention seeking to even bring up. And how do you be a good man who helps others if you are the one in need of helping?
So you don't get help, and things stay hard, and they get harder, and they don't get better, because you don't get help. And you need to grit your teeth and bare through it because you need to be a man, and no one will see you as a man if you show you are weak. God forbid acknowledge you are more vulnerable than even cis women, because that means you're just like. Completely useless as a protector.
Then what do you do with the guilt? How do you feel like an active participant in making things better? How do you square this away with the fact many will never see you as a man because of it? That people will blame you for not being more strong, because men are strong, so you're just not being a man enough.
It drives trans men into this cycle of chronic invalidation. Even performances of masculinity like this, it's to undermine the people saying trans men experience misogyny to support the idea that if you're trans good enough, you'll be able to transcend that. To bolster the arguments that trans men who talk about experiencing misogyny are just doing it to take away resources from those that really need it. But not you. You're strong, you own up to your privilege you recognize your strength, you're owning up to it and being a real man and letting others use you or dismiss you or be cruel to you because you suck it up because it's not that bad. You can take it.
Except it is that bad, things are bad. And a lot of people a lot less lucky than him are struggling to survive, and denying we need help and invalidating our own needs is compounding this. He's actually a lot more vulnerable than he would wish to acknowledge, but with the privileges he does have, being a protector to those who need help should absolutely include his brothers. He can help protect them by advocating not just for them, but for himself.
We all need to protect and support one another. Standing alone and attempting assimilation or acceptance or servitude through a toxic masculine performance and putting other trans guys down when those who judge masculinity by these standards will never accept us or have our masculinity seen as satisfactory anyway is just. totally futile.
