When discourse comes around about the apparent “lack” of transmasculine voices and contributions in history as compared to transfeminine ones, I always think of this diagram:
Survivorship bias is such a huge factor when it comes to which queer narratives and stories survive the march of time. For transmasculine people, the challenge has always been not only overcoming anti-queer sentiments of the day, but also contending with a lack of legal and societal personhood that put them in a position where telling their story- or even discovering themselves- was literally impossible. The level of risk involved in even just exploring your identity in secret, let alone finding community and recording your experience, was astronomically high when you were considered another person’s property, largely uneducated and expected to not communicate with anyone other than your husband, relatives and children. I’ve seen mentioned how many societies outlawed and punished gay (mlm) relationships but not lesbian ones, but the rather obvious conclusion to that is because it was seen as such a non issue that it was beneath notice, due to the lack of cis women’s ability to exist outside of the constant control and supervision of her male relatives. To say they were “privileged” for not being legally barred from sapphic relationships would be silly, because legally speaking they would’ve been at the total mercy of their owners (male relatives) if discovered, which served as punishment in itself.
All of this maps pretty cleanly onto trans dynamics of the time, especially since the distinction between sexuality and gender was often considered nebulous or nonexistent. Like gay cisgender men, transfeminine people came back riddled with bullet holes- but they came back (aka, built community and survived through the historical record). For transmasculine people, however, very few ever did, and of those we can point to their identities are the subject of fierce debate even to this day. It’s always “brave WOMAN dresses as man to escape oppression”, never “trans man gets the right blend of luck and ingenuity to tell his story”. Because those who didn’t never came back, never even got out the door in the first place. All of that in mind, it’s insanely cruel- and ahistorical- to say that we “never contributed anything” to queer history, when history was barred from our contribution from the moment we were born.
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