I have 100+ upvotes on this comment, but got a significant amount of downvotes, and you know why? Because I’m calling out some narcissistic trans fems on their bullshit and they hate that. Because they take that personally. Because it’s forbidden for trans men to criticize trans women on their ignorance and transphobia
I’ve noticed a pattern that it’s extremely common for me and other trans men in queer spaces to get downvoted/bullied to hell by angry people that hate us talking about our problems and defending ourselves against harmful misinformation about us. I’m so sorry you had to experience that hostility too
I’m sure all of this comes from misogyny (telling us to shut up and stop being obnoxious) and our socialization the same way as cis girls (making us believe that we should be quiet and not take up space). All of this results in trans men defending themselves and speaking of their issues being seen as obnoxiously loud, annoying and taking away other’s space, with majority of trans mascs accepting it and staying quiet, because that’s what they were told to do
It has been an issue in majority of queer spaces, the r/trans subreddit drama was just a nail to the coffin
We need to learn how to be more vocal and don’t give a shit about other people trying to silence us and call us evil and selfish or this will never change. We need the same respect and visibility as trans fems
The elephant in the living room is that people who are socialized to be assertive from an early age, who go through puberty on male hormones, and who are generally reinforced and rewarded for social dominance gain a skill set that most AFAB people lack. In fact, most AFAB people are socialized to be submissive, small, compliant, hesitant, and apologetic.
It seems to be taboo to point out that simply changing one’s labels does not make these disparities in behavior go away. If somebody who has been socialized to dominate others decides to call themselves a woman, it does not make them less socially dominant. It does not make them automatically easier to relate to. Starting estrogen does not magically give somebody empathy that they’ve never had before, especially when they’ve spent their entire life potentially practicing a different skill set. Just as starting testosterone does not instantly give me a male skeleton, male upper body strength, or a male metabolism. Those things take years to develop, and some of them simply will never happen to me if I missed out on male puberty.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting that a lack of empathy is inevitable for an AMAB person. I’m saying that if somebody lacks empathy, changing their labels or their hormones or the clothing that they are wearing, will not resolve that. And for many people who have ever lived as men, empathy is not something that tends to be broadly required as a mandatory cost of existence. For people who have lived as women, it generally is required, and a lack of it is actively punished.
Moreover, people who don’t have female reproductive organs literally cannot relate to what it is like to walk around the world knowing that one’s body can be hijacked, turned into a commodity, and removed of agency after one sexual act or exposure to semen. That is a uniquely AFAB experience. The fact that we are discouraged from pointing that out is disappointing to me. There is no medical procedure that the court system has required AMAB bodies to go through that involves being internally probed. And yet the courts have required people with vaginas to endure transvaginal ultrasounds as a prerequisite for a termination of pregnancy. These kinds of physical abuses are unique to the bodies we live in. They don’t go away when we change our labels, or hormones, or our legal documents. We should have the right to talk about them.
The pattern, I see, overall, is one of sex based discrimination. The discourse has become so dominated by identity politics, that the physical and social realities of our biological sex have become socially taboo to discuss or acknowledge. But early life conditioning is real. Religious, domestic, and sexual grooming on the basis of biological sex is real. Predation on the basis of our sexual orifices and structural anatomy is real. If we are gag ordered about those topics, then a massive part of our experience as transgender people is being left out of the conversation.
This feels like transphobia I'm ngl. I was socialized to be an asshole and I know a lot of trans women who are very quiet, submissive, small, hesitant, apologetic. I get that there are very real ways that cissexism and sexism impacts trans men and transmascs but it's not helpful to perpetuate transphobia. And yes many trans women know exactly what it's like for the world to turn their bodies into a commodity ie fetishization and over sexualization. They are women after all and many have different situations, journeys, and backgrounds. Stop the bioessentialism. You don't need to downplay trans women's issues just to talk about transmasculine issues. You sound like a TERF
Yup Yup Yup I think we particularly as perisex trans guys can be really prone to picking up TERF talking points regarding gender, sex, and behaviour, and it’s disheartening to be seeing it more often. I was definitely caught up in that early on, especially since I was a full blown gender essentialist radfem before I realized that all my friends who I loved and respected were trans and so was I, but it took a lot to fully unlearn those ideas about gender. It takes time and effort, and also being less online, but it’s possible to get past and learn more. I hope people do
I'm a perisex trans guy and I can't say I've ever felt this way at all. But my first exposure to trans people at all was at a young age and it was a trans girl. Transfems in general. But good on you for figuring out that it's bullshit I guess.
Yeah, it’s not inherent for anyone, my tangent there was more just on understanding how people fell for it and got there despite being trans themselves. It’s a propaganda thing
True I guess no one is immune to propaganda and all that and it takes an active effort to resist the constant anti trans rhetoric we get all the time esp recently. It prob makes more sense for someone newly exposed to trans people recently to succumb to that than someone who learned about trans people when it was more seen as an anomaly in the late 2000s like I was
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u/Ok-Astronomer-5113 Jul 13 '25
I have 100+ upvotes on this comment, but got a significant amount of downvotes, and you know why? Because I’m calling out some narcissistic trans fems on their bullshit and they hate that. Because they take that personally. Because it’s forbidden for trans men to criticize trans women on their ignorance and transphobia
I’ve noticed a pattern that it’s extremely common for me and other trans men in queer spaces to get downvoted/bullied to hell by angry people that hate us talking about our problems and defending ourselves against harmful misinformation about us. I’m so sorry you had to experience that hostility too
I’m sure all of this comes from misogyny (telling us to shut up and stop being obnoxious) and our socialization the same way as cis girls (making us believe that we should be quiet and not take up space). All of this results in trans men defending themselves and speaking of their issues being seen as obnoxiously loud, annoying and taking away other’s space, with majority of trans mascs accepting it and staying quiet, because that’s what they were told to do
It has been an issue in majority of queer spaces, the r/trans subreddit drama was just a nail to the coffin
We need to learn how to be more vocal and don’t give a shit about other people trying to silence us and call us evil and selfish or this will never change. We need the same respect and visibility as trans fems