December 4, 2024

Transphobia and transmisogyny

Assorted observations on how sexism means trans men and trans women get distinct types of oppression

This post draws heavily on ideas developed by trans women, in particular Julia Serano and Talia Bhatt.

Transphobia is not symmetrical. The trans masculine experience is not the mirror image of the trans feminine experience, because the sexism that pervades society applies its own force to both of us.

Let's start with a couple of observations that ought not to be controversial. In our society, women have a lower status than men. Also, people who are known to be trans have a lower status than people who are known or assumed to be cis, so that being outed as trans can only lower someone's status.

Thus, a trans man who is outed will be treated as a woman trying to lay an undeserved claim to the status of manhood. But a trans woman who is outed can't be treated as as man - that would represent a gain in status. Instead, she's treated as something less than a woman: a freak, or even an object.

You see the same pattern in how transphobes speak about trans people generally. Trans women are always portrayed as monstrous threats. Described in language that makes them seem physically dangerous. Referred to as "men" - even when they're clearly children - but never granted the privileges that cis men would be offered.

Trans men are typically portrayed as victims. Well into adulthood, they're described as if they were young girls. Through trauma or neurodivergence, they're considered incapable of knowing their own minds, helpless dupes of The Trans Agenda.

When trans men resist this characterisation, transphobes aren't agreed on a response. Some double down on calling us girls, so misguided we can't even recognise our own victimisation. Some ignore us altogether, or misrepresent us as trans women, thus demonising them still further.1

It's frustrating to be ignored in a conversation about our own needs, but this isn't a way trans women are privileged at trans men's expense. Firstly, it's hard to argue that the hyper scrutiny and demonisation that trans women routinely receive is a better deal than being ignored. Secondly, just as regular misogyny sometimes harms cis men too, so transmisogyny can cause splash damage to trans men.

If we're "really" women, and women have a lower status than men, it's understandable that we would want to climb the ladder. We have to be put inq our place, of course, but we're not a threat to the established order like trans women are. We're a non-story, dog bites man. Nothing to see here.

Putting us in our place sometimes looks like severe misgendering misogyny, up to and including corrective rape. Sometimes it looks like the opposite: flattering us and lovebombing us to try to bring us back within the bounds of womanhood. It depends how firmly we assert our manhood, how far we are into medical transition, and who's trying to regender us.

Trans women get a different tactic, which Talia Bhatt calls "degendering". Trans women are referred to as a third gender, not women but also not men, and driven out to the margins of society. Even quite liberal cis people who think they're trans accepting often slip into using gender neutral pronouns for a trans woman who has specifically asked for "she/her", as if they don't want to outright misgender her but can't quite bring themselves to gender her correctly.

I've observed myself that trans people can never be seen as fully men or fully women. Trans women are often called men when the intention is to misgender them, but to treat them as men would be to take them seriously as people, to pay attention when they speak, and to evaluate them by other metrics than how sexually attractive they are. To be a man is to be fully human: trans women have forfeited that humanity by calling themselves women, while trans men were never entitled to it in the first place.

To be a woman, in this framing, is to be a helpless victim deserving of protection. And despite all the insistence that trans men are "lost sisters", we're often denied this equivocal status. Whenever the subject of driving "men" out of women's spaces comes up, someone will insist that trans men, although we should be allowed based on the definitions they've laid down, should voluntarily recuse ourselves in order not to frighten the delicate women with our masculine features. By asserting our manhood, we've forfeited the protection of womanhood and we too are neither one nor the other.

So sexism and transphobia exert their malignant pressures on both of us, albeit in different ways. Some trans men regrettably deal with it by flexing what power we do have over trans women, and treat the resulting angry response as justification. Others try to appropriate the term transmisogyny by saying we too suffer from both transphobia and misogyny. And we do, but that's not what transmisogyny refers to. It was coined by Julia Serano to describe the specific oppression of trans women as trans women2, and it isn't our word. Some men have tried to make "transmisandry" catch on, but I think transphobia already covers most of it.

Arguing with trans women about who has it worse isn't just hurtful to the trans women, although that is in itself a very good reason not to do it. It's also a way of avoiding the real problem, which is the way cis society devalues us both. If we're going to make things better for anyone, we need to put our efforts towards fighting the real enemy.