[controversial] on transmisogyny and male privilege

[aaskew]

(apologies in advance because this possibly comes across as a 'what about the menz? :(' post. I've tried my best not to make it so, but this is a topic I'd like to discuss further

Comments

[dogboi]

I can relate to varanus and gender_euphoric. Just to flesh out how this worked for me...

When i look back through my presumed-female life, i can now identify the occasional rare moment of direct sexism. But it certainly was NOTHING compared to the sexism most of me my actual-female (including trans female) peers got targeted with. No one ever told me i should be in a kitchen. I received a great deal of encouragement into hard science and math which laid the path for my eventual career. I also met no resistance in my passion for playing hard rock music unlike many of woman and/or feminine peers. I can only guess as to why i was excepted from so much sexism, but i suspect my being a gender-normative man (despite being presumed female) did strongly influence this.

Most of the indirect sexism (cultural messages re: women) rolled off my back because i simply didn't pay attention to it as a young boy. Rather i absorbed, for better or worse :-( , cultural images re: men. The direct sexism rolled off my back because it was so rare i just didn't piece it together.

I didn't really understand what women/girls were going through until my teens when woman friends and i started having frank, articulate conversations about their experiences.

And at THAT point, absolutely, i felt rage!!! And quickly signed up to be a life-long feminist! But it wasn't because of what i experienced for myself. It was my compassion for my woman & feminine friends and the cruelty and injustice they faced that got me on board.

For what its worth, i have talked with trans women who experienced direct sexism well before living as women, as well as indirect sexism. In their case, it often made them more keenly aware of sexism from a fairly young age.

[the_physicist]

I do think that it is true that a lot of people, girls too, might only become aware of sexism when they are teenagers. Not that it doesn't affect them earlier, but maybe it is because it affects teenagers more and they are more grown up to start to recognise sexism for what it is. I know many girls and my school didn't and still don't understand that a lot of things that are sexist are just that (though a lot more have had their eyes opened once they left school and even before then when they realised from talking to older/other female friends what challenges they would face). There's a lot of internalised misogyny around.

So I don't think your reaction would be that atypical to that a girl who hadn't personally experienced sexism, but thank you for explaining further as I can now see why you experienced it as an outsider whereas my experiences are not those of an outsider. Just a quick question though: did you worry that you would have to face the same sexist experiences as your peers or did you think what happened to them could never happen to you as society would always treat you as a man? I'm curious, sorry XD.

As I've said to the other posters above, thank you for sharing your experiences with me. they are very different from my own and so far i'd not really known that experiences like your own were common.

I was aware that there were people who strove to be accepted as male so much that they overcompensated by acting rejecting their birth assigned gender to such a degree that they were very sexist.

I am more surprised to hear about the occasions where it is simply that society let you be boys, I guess, since that didn't happen to me. My parents were great on the whole, but they were about the only ones, lol.

I suspect what it boils down to is that many of us have a sense of our gender from a young age. As such, it was always there lurking just beneath the surface of all of our social interactions. And other humans pick up on them, consciously or subconsciously.

I do think that in my case everyone picks up on that too (like you say, all those exceptions, like my partner making an exception, or that i was allowed to captain the men's football team at university eventhough i was a 'girl' and stuff like that), but the question is whether society then runs with that feeling it has or tries to change you and how you as an individual deal with it if society isn't happy with you. in my case, the bullies and bigots won. It's only been recently that I've felt like I can start to try and be who i really am again.

i've often jokingly said that i grew up in the middle ages. Things really weren't that bad, but sometimes, like now, I can't help but feel that even though everything seemed fine when i grew up and all the people thought they were oh so enlightened... how really all the bigotry was there, just under the surface, and simply not being talked about in the open so much because 'that wouldn't be pc' (as those people would have said).

[aaskew]

I was actually aware of sexism as early as kindergarten (~4 years old), although I don't know how much of that was just gender dysphoria. I remember thinking it wholly unfair that the boys got all the cool stuff (better toys, more practical clothes, conversations I was actually interested in, the ability to stand up and pee, etc) and the girls got the boring lousy stuff that didn't make any sense. I clearly remember thinking that it was unfair that you couldn't choose your own gender, and that if you could, I would have totally chosen to be a boy. Shortly after I learnt about the existence of sexism (I was a perceptive kid) and thought ohhhh, that explains everything.

...which then led to my years of aggressive feminism, and being acutely aware of all the little bits of misogyny that pervaded society and which often personally affected me. It's actually possible that I overestimated how bad things were, because I had a tendency to lump non-sexist things into the mix, like "men can grow awesome beards while women have to get these weird chest lumps that look like tumours and get in the way, THAT'S SEXIST".

so I probably ended up conflating a lot of trans-related dysphoria along with genuine misogyny into my overall impression of social sexism.

and I heard bigots criticising feminists as "women who wanted to be men", and I thought "well, duh".
and then I found out that, no, women feminists didn't want to be men, and my entire worldview was shaken and nothing made sense any longer. :\

[the_physicist]

i guess this proves that i should have just stuck to 'it depends on the individual' and left my response at that, hahahah.

I took the awesome cars away from the boys at kindergarten. I remember getting in trouble for that too and being banned from ever playing with the cars again. That telling off i got really stuck with me too, eventhough i can't remember what i did, as i never played with cars again for years really. i definitely lost my 'taste' for them at that point, lmao. i don't think it was until i really got into F1 that i found it again but by then i was too old :P.

i also remember standing up to pee a fair bit why i was young and trying to pursuade my mum i had a penis. she was worried and checked to make sure, lol.

I had good friends at junior school both girls and boys (mostly girls though) who shared my idea of fun: playing football in the street, building tree houses, climbing trees, falling into the streams beneath them, running around the woods poking dead animals, collecting skulls, and generally doing everything possible to make sure i came home muddy, lol.

highschool was... not the same experience to say the least.

i think in general my experience was different from what you describe though. i don't think my experience of sexism was necessarily any different than someone else growing up as a girl, except of course that I was possibly subject to a bit more of it at highschool for being different. not even in terms of not doing stereotypical things, but because i didn't walk like a girl and stuff like that (well, and for short hair and being increadibly hairy and wearing the wrong kind of clothes) kids are very perceptive at times, lol.

of course others who happened to fit certain feminine stereotypes too much also received a lot of shit i think by being treated as if they were nothing more than an assortment of stereotypes.

I do remember being very annoyed at not being able to be as physically strong as i wanted to be and finding that unfair, but I don't think I ever conflated that feeling with sexism, no. and i don't think i misunderstood feminism either. I do understand how especially teenage feelings of how unfair life is as not giving you the right body might get mixed in with rage against sexism though XD.

[aaskew]

Basically generalisations don't work. XD Though it might be interesting to know what kinds of trans male pre-transition experiences were more common in terms of self-conception and how this affected perceptions of sexism.

oh man the cars. My brother had a lot of them and I was always going over to his room to play with the things. Meanwhile I apparently went sleepwalking one night when I was really young, and ended up in the bathroom trying to pee standing up. which did not end well.

I had a pretty mixed childhood experience in terms of gender. My female peers actually frequently accused me of being too feminine and mocked me for being "a sissy", because as I got older (pre-teens) I developed a fear that people would find out that I wanted to be a boy, because I thought that made me a lesbian and people did not like lesbians; and so ended up overcompensating by being generally compliant to all the gender stuff that was forced on me. If my mother bought me a dress, I wore it, even though I might have preferred something else. At one point I was the only one in my peer group wearing dresses (my mother liked them) when most of the girls were going around in T-shirts and jeans and making fun of me, and that made me pretty miserable. I was also bullied for being 'different', though this could have been more due to me being on the autistic spectrum.

I had the same thing with physical strength. It took me until my mid/late teenage years to realise that male and female bodies were different in ways other than reproductive systems and breasts, and found it really depressing to know that no matter how much I worked out, I'd never be on par with a cis man who put in the same effort. Aaand it turned out that I was physically the weakest in my 'all-girls' class, even despite my secret weight-lifting on the side, which was a total bummer. Worried doctors tested me for muscle dystrophy once because they said I was unnaturally thin and weak. Tests came back all negative and they said it looked like I was just really thin after all. Going on T finally changed that and has made me look like a slightly-underweight person rather than a skeleton, and made me physically strong enough to do lots of basic stuff that had previously been beyond me, so that was nice.

[the_physicist]

I developed a fear that people would find out that I wanted to be a boy...and so ended up overcompensating by being generally compliant to all the gender stuff that was forced on me.

are you me? ;) i understand you so much.

I do a hell of a lot of exercise and always have and yeah, it's a bummer that I just can't get those muscles. I'm starting more weight training now (well, not this week as I'm currently recovering from a slipped disk), but then I'm back to my exercise routine of excessive training in the hope that i can be slightly less puny (i'm still a US size 0-2, so yeah... oh well, i hope the extra weight training might work).

[dogboi]

did you worry that you would have to face the same sexist experiences as your peers or did you think what happened to them could never happen to you as society would always treat you as a man?

I was aware that i was treated differently than girls and assumed i would continue to be, but i wasn't totally sure why i was treated differently. Being trans wasn't the only "wierdness" i exhibited as a child, and i wasn't sure which oddity was setting me apart (from my geeky, neuro-atypical, agnostic, vegetarian, jewish family traditions). Back then i just sort of experienced them all as one big ball of cultural different'ness the world was responding to and didn't really start teasing them apart into separate social issues until my late teens.