I actually don’t really think they’re joking. I think that a lot of people in the queer community don’t realize how much the political lesbian/radfem simplistic view of “men bad” has infected the community as a whole.
You see it in the “my sexuality is every girl and precisely one man” which is hugely widespread in the way m-spec women discuss their sexualities. (Which is not to say that a lot of women don’t feel that way, just that when I’ve pointed this out to my friends, and how shitty it made me and other transmascs/men feel, a bunch of them went ‘oh shit, you’re right.’) You see it in how m-spec women are made to feel like they should apologize for being attracted to or involved with men/mascs, and how lesbian/sapphic/queer spaces eject – sometimes violently – m-spec women in “straight-passing” relationships. (This also happens to m-spec mascs/men, but not so loudly, and in a different way.)
You see it in the long and storied way that transmascs and trans men have been treated in our community. This isn’t the first time that trans men have been told they are ‘giving up womanhood’ and how dare they. There’s a scene in The L Word, a show that ended 12 years ago, which has a character literally saying that to a trans man, that he’s ‘giving up the most beautiful thing’ by transitioning, and that thing is ‘being a woman.’
This isn’t a new message, that men are the enemy, and that anyone who voluntarily chooses masculinity or manhood (whatever form of masculinity or manhood they choose) is a gender traitor, “joining the enemy,” deluded, attempting to “opt out” of misogyny, or any number of other loathsome ideas. This spills over into the idea that transmascs/men have “aligned interests” with TERFs, that we don’t actually face societal transphobia, that we aren’t targeted by institutional transphobia in any way, that we’re ‘collateral damage’ of the “real” transphobia that transfems face, that we magically just gain male privilege the moment we start transitioning, that we’re never targeted by misogyny, that we don’t face physical violence, that we’ve “joined the oppressors” and are somehow capable as a class of being the oppressors of transfems rather than simply another oppressed class (which is its own topic that deserves like, a whole-ass essay, but whatever) that transmisandry isn’t a “real” thing and transmascs don’t face any sort of specific-to-us discrimination or issues… and all of those ideas damage our ability as a community to discuss and ameliorate these sometimes-fatal and always-damaging ideas.
Hell, to listen to people within the community talk, you wouldn’t think that JK Rowling’s horrible essay didn’t spend a huge chunk of time misgendering and gaslighting transmascs, or that one of the big “bibles” of TERFery (Ab*gail Shrier’s ‘Irreversible Damage’) wasn’t targeted very specifically, fucking laser-focused, on transmascs, including non-binary transmascs. And this all spills out from the idea that we don’t face any ‘real’ oppression because we’ve ‘joined the majority/oppressors,’ and “men are bad,” which is such base-level 1970s retro radfem nonsense.
And honestly, at the end of the day? It doesn’t matter if it’s a joke, and I’m pretty displeased with “oh they don’t understand that it’s serious and they think it’s just a joke.” These sorts of “jokes”, levied at transmasc people, aren’t okay. Maybe if it’s just you and your buds who have given each other permission to shit-talk each other, and you know each other and have personal context with one another, sure. But in this sort of open, parasocial context where you have people who don’t know these two transhets, it is always damaging, and saying “gosh I think they just think it’s a joke” does the opposite of excusing it.
This lateral aggression shit is terrible and damaging to lots of people – I honestly think there’s no segment of the queer community that this doesn’t directly damage, and we should challenge it whenever we see it, not make excuses or permission for it in the slightest way.
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