That may cover FtM transphobia but not MtF, which has its own whole set of social roots.
so first off, transmisogyny is one of the central examples of the contamination anxiety i’m talking about. because the contamination-fearing worldview doesn’t allow that trans women are women, and sees male homosexuality as much more threatening than female homosexuality, the only vector by which masculinity can be truly contaminated by femininity is if men debase themselves by taking on elements of what “should” be the feminine role (effeminacy)
in this worldview, ftm transition is simply women pretending at masculinity, which is bad, but not really a threat to the gendered power structure that is being defended. because of course the inferior class wants to pretend at membership in the superior class! all cultural tropes aimed at the policing and maintenance of hierarchy understand that, and guard against it, but it’s still flattering to the empowered class, because (again, so the defenders of hierarchy imagine) the only legitimate exercise of authority is as a member of this superior class.
women, or peasants, or colonial subjects getting ideas above their station is bad (and frequently still results in violent oppression), but it doesn’t threaten the fundamental existence of the hierarchy. social mobility might weaken the hierarchy, but it won’t necessarily destroy it. on the other hand, any kind of unity or solidarity or expression of sympathy in the other direction is a huge problem, because if members of the empowered class desert their posts, then the hierarchy may collapse entirely, like the liberal nobles who threw their lot in with the revolutionaries to bring down the Kingdom of France.
and i think you see this reflected in the uneven application of anxieties about the threat of trans people: the classic sexist formulation that has men as sexual agents and women as sexual subjects rhetorically dwells on the threat of deviant men (i.e., trans women) toward women; women infiltrating men’s spaces doesn’t even register on anyone’s radar as a thing to even try to get people to care about. the idea that boys might want to wear skirts is infinitely more threatening than the idea girls might want to wear pants--indeed, to the point where women wearing pants has become basically totally uncontroversial since the 19th century. i think that points to a real underlying feature of the hierarchy, and of hierarchy maintenance in general.
but, i read this comment at first in the opposite sense, that the contamination anxiety explains transmisogyny, but not transmisandry (is that a word people use?)--that, in essence, the bigotry against trans men has a different source than the bigotry against trans women.
i want to talk about that idea, too, because i think it’s incorrect, but in a way that’s not trivial.
in general, western cultural anxiety about gender roles has tended to assign less threat to either women taking on male roles, or to female homosexuality. less, but not none, and again, that doesn’t mean that that bigotry hasn’t frequently had violent expression, as innumerable examples will attest. for the hierarchy and its exploitative features to operate correctly--to get women to stay at home and do all the housework and keep out of the political sphere and be sexually available to men--the defenders of the hierarchy are still willing to resort to violence to enforce it.
but at least in the particular traditional (within the last ~2-300 years) western formulation, 1) women are, as i mentioned above, sexual objects and not sexual agents, and denying female agency or even desire in sexuality essentially negates even the possibility of female homosexuality (hence moralists over the centuries denying it exists or denying it exists unless perverts go around giving good girls bad ideas), and 2) the way trans men’s experiences are invalidated and their internal reports of their own identity and desires and agency are ignored are emblematic of an attempt to force them back into the category of “woman.” books like Irreversible Damage by Abigail Shrier infantilize trans men and favor the dubious reports of parents over trans men describing their own experience, and promote a theory that they’re basically just poor little women who got confused by the big bad internet.
transmisandry is, in other words, builds on classic misogyny by those who refuse to acknowledge trans men are men. because the charge of effeminacy is part of the boundary maintenance of masculine gender roles, the way those boundaries are enforced on nonconforming amab people can be kind of a catch-22: you’re Not a Real Man, unless you agree, in which case you’re also not a Real Woman, just a man in a dress. transmisandry, though, is much more straightforward: it’s just “shut the fuck up you stupid woman.”
i think it’s worth thinking about the way the same underlying attempt at the enforcement of hierarchy polices gender roles differently, because they are definitely related but lead to distinctly different experiences on the part of the people they are inflicted on. but, to be clear, neither bigotry is “softer” or “gentler” than the other--they’re both cruel and stupid, and frequently result in violence, even lethal violence.
