misandry isn't real
Transandrophobia is. While no one faces oppression purely for being a man and nothing else, masculinity and being male DO play a role in oppression when combined with marginalized statuses; it’s called intersectionality. But admitting that would mean admitting the role white women have played in upholding racism, often by using their whiteness and femininity to oppress Black men (and other men of color, but Black men and boys especially in the US) for their masculinity, i.e. Emmett Till and countless others like him who were murdered because white women claimed to have felt threatened by their Black masculinity. You can’t deny that masculinity played a role there, and still does in some cases. Marginalized men are seen as threats or as failures at masculinity because they aren’t white, allocisheteronormative men. Acknowledging that isn’t anti-feminist; in fact, all forms of feminism, except radical feminism, which seeks to raise the status of white women at the expense of everyone else, acknowledges this.
As for trans men and transandrophobia, which also HEAVILY intersects with race, well, no, it’s not a direct parallel to transmisogyny. But trans men aren’t claiming it is, and we never have; the people who are saying we are are acting in bad faith and twisting our words to silence us by claiming we’ve said things we haven’t said at all.
We’re literally just saying it EXISTS - that trans men and transmascs experience a unique form of transphobia that’s informed by both our masculinity AND by misogyny in unique ways that are different from what trans women experience when they experience transmisogyny. Because, no, when we experience an intersection of transphobia and misogyny, we aren’t experiencing transmisogyny - and it would be transmisogynistic to claim we are, since transmisogyny isn’t merely the intersection of two forms of oppression, it’s specifically the way that intersection targets and harms trans women. By saying what we experience is different, we’re not talking over or taking away from trans women; quite the opposite, in fact. We’re acknowledging that what we experience isn’t the same as what they experience. Two separate phenomena can exist at once.
Statistically, we’re more likely to be victims of sexual and domestic violence, as well as suicide, than any other gender group, including other trans people. We’re nearly as likely as trans women to be victims of hate crimes. The violence we face is erased, because we’re often mislabeled as women. We still get murdered and assaulted, though. And when we seek out resources to deal with that violence, to escape domestic violence situations or to get help after having been raped, our gender is a major factor in our access; most shelters and orgs that deal with those issues are for women only, so we often either have to go without that help or go back in the closet and deal with dysphoria and being misgendered while we get the help we need - which often means leaving our crucial details about the violence we face, because it’s often motivated by the fact that we’re trans men and not cis women. How is that not an issue that impacts us in a unique and specific way, beyond run-of-the-mill transphobia? Shouldn’t we be able to talk about that without being accused of trying to silence or talk over other trans people? Why can’t we support trans women, take transmisogyny seriously, AND also take our own issues seriously?
Especially in the face of Roe v Wade and the attacked on trans healthcare. You know that’s happening primarily because of rhetoric about us, right? The bathroom bills and sports bans are focused mainly on trans women, and I’m not diminishing the seriousness of those, or the impact these new bans on healthcare will have on trans women and girls trying to access healthcare, but the people who have been fighting for years to get bills like this passed have been relying on ideas pushed by TERFs like Abigail Shrier in her Irreversible Damage book (you know, the one about how little girls are being permanently damaged and mutilated by being put on testosterone and getting surgeries? The one Target refused to stop selling, that was an Amazon bestseller for a week, that the Economist endorsed? That one?). It’s this idea of “protecting” little girls from identifying as trans and seeking to transition, because the worst possible thing would be for those girls to grow up to be trans men or transmascs with queer bodies that aren’t sexy according to heteronormative beauty standards - for them to end up like me, basically - and for them to become infertile in the process, which ties into white supremacy; the people pushing these laws want little white girls to grow up and reproduce and have little white babies. Trans men of color are demonized because they’re already viewed as overly masculine women, and now they’re influencing our perfect little white girls to end up like them - we can’t have that, can we?/s That’s a very specific type of transphobia that focuses specifically on trans men. Again, it needs to be named. If you don’t name it and you don’t take it seriously, if you get divisive about it instead of letting trans people show solidarity with each other and put our energy towards fighting the people making these bills and laws instead of towards tearing each other down even more, it hurts all trans people, not just trans men, and it benefits the agenda of transphobes.
And then there’s Roe v Wade and reproductive healthcare. You know that affects us, too, right? And that it affects us in unique ways? While transfeminine people and trans women do, of course, face medical discrimination, too, the reality of our biology often means we experience more common and more complex incidences of this discrimination. Uteri, ovaries, cervixes, and vaginas are already not given adequate healthcare all too often, even in cis women. So throw in things like testosterone, top surgery, and other surgeries we go through, and it gets very difficult very quickly - and intersex people, epsecially intersex trans people, have an even harder time with it all. Trans women not being able to access prostate exams is a serious problem, and I’m in no way trying to minimize the seriousness of that or its effects, but you do realize that trans men face many more barriers to adequate reproductive healthcare, right? Because, again, our fertility becomes a battleground, our breasts become a battleground, and we have complex needs relating to our bodies, especially if we have health issues like endometriosis, which is quite common and often inadequately addressed.
There are trans men who literally cannot access regular healthcare, like pap smears (which we need more often on T, btw). Medical systems and insurance will have us marked as men because we’ve legally changed our genders, so insurance companies refuse coverage because the wording in documents only requires them to cover those things for women, and similarly, doctors’ offices and hospitals can deny us appointments on a similar basis or use the excuse that the “system” won’t let them schedule those procedures for men.
If we get pregnant, we have to stop testosterone because it harms fetuses. In a post-Roe world, you know what that means, right? It’s already hard enough for many trans men to access abortions as it is. Without Roe, trans men can be forcibly detransitioned very easily if we become pregnant. Combined with the incredibly high rates of rape and sexual assault we experience, that paints a pretty ugly picture.
So who does it help to deny that that’s a problem, or that it’s one unique to trans men and transmascs who transition and are viewed as trans men? Who, exactly, benefits from not talking about it? The people who want to eradicate trans people from existence, that’s who. These aren’t things all trans people face. These aren’t run-of-the-mill transphobia. These are extremely complex and specific issues that rise from the intersection of transphobia, misogyny, and, indeed, prejudice that’s based on our masculinity - or, rather, our specific type of masculinity, because it’s not cisheteronormative, white masculinity, and therefore, it’s a threat. And a lot of these issues are much worse for trans men of color; I’ve met several Black trans men who say they actually feel LESS safe as men than they did as women, or just as oppressed but in a different way, because walking down the street as a Black man puts a target on your back.
If we don’t start fucking acknowledging the fact that, just like trans women and nonbinary people, trans men and transmascs face a unique type of oppression, none of this is going to get better. It’s going to get worse.
So we need to have a word for it and start acknowledging that it’s real and it’s a thing.
