On transmasculinity as pure hypothesis
I know this screenshot is from a post from a couple of months ago but I want to put it in its own post because it’s so demonstrative of the kind of backwards reasoning these people use when it comes to trans issues.
When I say that both transmasculinity itself and transmasculine oppression are epistemologically neutered, this is exactly what I mean. Inequivocable proof of transmascs being unambiguously targeted for their transmasculinity (in this case, trans men of color being essentially tortured in ICE camps) is still inadmissible, because all this news proves is that a transfeminine person would have it worse. There is a rhetorical sleight of hand at play that substitutes the real, named transmascs in the story - specific and individual human people who relayed their own experiences in details firsthand - with entirely hypothetical transfeminine people not in the story at all. The transfem that the tagger imagined in their head for the sole purpose of dismissing anti-transmasculine violence becomes the real person, while the real and named transmascs melt into a mist and become purely hypothetical.
The nature of inhabiting transmasculinity in a world of history-long transmasculine epistemicide is that you are never taken as yourself, in your full living human body, with its discrete characteristics (whatever they may be), its history, its traumas, its unique positionality: you are never read as yourself because your ‘self’ is inherently illegible. Instead you’re like a text in an unknown language that others try to interpret comparing you to know quantities (even aberrant ones) and always finding you lacking in some way - less beautiful, less strong, less virtuous, less meaningful, less interesting, less valuable - because you are being graded on a system that is not just built without you, but rather built around your absence.
To make an example: Often I speak of the ways that growing up as a member of the female social sexgender class has shaped me in the person I am, and specifically the behaviors I have been trained and coerced into in order to escape additional punitive violence (on top of the regular violence being seen as a girl/woman gets you just to keep you subdued into the underclass). I have been taught to walk a certain way, stand and sit a certain way, to make way for people that register as men, to shrink myself around them, to fawn, to smile, to modulate my voice to sound submissive and placating, to defer to them, to apologize for speaking in the first place, to wrap my speech in conditionals and justifications, to make a show of doubting myself even when I’m sure of what I’m saying. This behavior is impossible to completely unlearn while living in a body perceived by others as female, because every step out of line is answered by a retaliation equal in proportion. You people would know about this if any of you listened to cis women. transitioning does not remove this behavior, certainly not instantaneously, and on top of that, having this heavily feminine-coded behavior and speech patterns while appearing even ‘imperfectly’ or ‘somewhat’ male is also grounds for punishment, more or less severe. You would think the people who talk all day of transmisogyny would be able to see this.
Now if I speak of this, I sometimes receive this response: but what about when you pass? When you look and sound and move exactly as a normative cis man does, won’t you have the space and opportunity to unlearn this behavior completely? will you still be claiming that your upbringing has shaped you so, ‘clinging’ to your AGAB? And that certainly sounds like a good argument, if you don’t notice the sleight of hand. If you ignore the fact that it is being told to me, a specific individual trans man with a specific history and body. I am 30 years old. I have been medically transitioning from a while. I do not look like a cis man or a cis woman or a transfeminine person - I look transmasculine. As of now, this much-discussed ‘male passing privilege’ has not reached me even remotely.
Now, because there is no cultural notion of what transmasculinity is or looks like, I am usually read as a medically aberrant and gender non conforming cis woman. At times I’m also read as a gender non conforming, queer, very young cis man, while some other times I’m read as transfeminine. In a few extreme cases where I do my best to ‘girlmode’ out of necessity I can even read as a quasi-normative cis woman, albeit an extremely quirky one. But I am never, ever read as a normative cis man. That has genuinely never happened to me. It is very possible that, due to a mix of my individual medical circumstances, my desires for my own body, and my sexuality and aesthetics, I may never happen. I may never move through the world as a normative (and straight) cis man on a regular basis. I cannot know that for sure because I have a hopefully long life ahead of me, but I certainly wouldn’t discount it as a possibility.
And still, to the person posing the argument of “what about when you pass”, my lived reality for my entire 30 years of life, which will continue to be my lived reality for the short and medium term future, is superseded by the specter of the entirely hypothetical, very possibly forever-inexistent, normative cis-passing straight-passing stealth masculine man they have summoned in their own mind to dismiss the real, present, firsthand testimony of my own lived experience. Their ‘headcanon’ of what I could one day turn into becomes more real than the living, breathing person I am.
If you’re wondering how can we get to the current year knowing so little of transmascs and having so little transmasc presence in history, art and culture, this is how.
I’m glad that this is resonating, I’d like to add two small points.
- I was going to link the article with transmascs’ and other masculine AFAB people’s experiences in ICE camps, but I somehow forgot before hitting post. This post is lacking without that context, and the reader’s ability to go and read the experiences of the transmasculine people I refer to in it. This post has excerpts for accessibility and a link to the full article itself.
- I am glad that people are adding their own experiences with their relationship to passing and what I in the post call ‘readability’. Adding more transmasculine voices to the pool of available knowledge always helps to fill out the void a little. I will not censor let alone criticize people who use this post to do so. However, I would like to clarify that this post is about the ontological and epistemological situation of transmasculinity itself, specifically how transmasculinity has always been so consistently and reliably erased from the human record because it has the particular quality of not being considered admissible as its own evidence. When I talk about some of the effects of quote-unquote ‘female socialization’ on my psyche and behavior, and the way my reporting this experience is automatically and as a matter of course dismissed by bringing up how my eventual potential ‘passing’ may negate these effects, I am doing so to provide an example about a larger phenomenon. The phenomenon, and not the example, is what’s important. For instance, someone in the notes (correctly) points out that even for trans men who perfectly pass, passing doesn’t negate their need for specific healthcare that cis men don’t need. That is unquestionably true. But the textbook response to this, according to the phenomenon I observe, would be to say: “well what about trans men who get phalloplasties and hysterectomies? Aren’t they trans men too? That means that you can’t claim that ‘needing access to gynecology/abortion/etc’ is a transmasculine experience!” Or if you say that transmasculine people experience medical misogyny as a result of needing gynecological care, they will respond: “what about cis women who are infertile? Or who are born without uteri? You can’t claim that needing gynecological care or abortions or experiencing periods means that transmascs will be treated misogynistically based on some functions of their bodies, because there’s even cis women who don’t experience that!” And so on forever. The point is that anything transmasculine people report about our own experiences can be dismissed by bringing up a hypothetical other person (a different transmasc, a cis woman, a trans woman, a NB person who isn’t transmasculine, the transmasc in the conversation’s hypothetical future self, his hypothetical cis woman version, his hypothetical cis man version, etc. etc. etc.) because our real material existence is seen as a hypothesis that is never fulfilled in reality, so flimsy and removed from the material texture of the world that the mere concept of any other person feels more solid than our living bodies.
I’d appreciate if everyone reblogged this version.
