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| Milwaukee Pridefest, 2008 |
It's taken me years to be comfortable with saying this. Because, due to the crowd I was allying with during my first run through college, I was internalizing the belief that because I was entering manhood, I was an oppressor whose role in that environment was to unquestionably accept critiques regarding my identity as a man.
So if transmen were forming their own groups because we felt unwelcome or unheard at mixed trans groups, it was because transmen were transmisogynists. If we were uncomfortable with Dr. Alan Hart or Brandon Teena being portrayed as lesbians, it was because we were homophobic. If there were fewer butch women in the world, it was because we were luring them into transgenderism. If we got excited about our surgeries or the effects our hormones were having on us, we were devaluing women's bodies. If we considered ourselves fully a member of our lived gender, we were being binary-enforcers and demeaning genderqueer people.
Being surrounded by the vocal minority that says things like this, it hard for me to remember that I had important problems, too.
When people critique the identities of transmen as transmen, the focus is placed on two things about us. First, we are men. And second, we were born with female bodies. Because of this, our behavior is scrutinized both as though we were cis men and as though we were cis women, with the emphasis on "men" in the former and on "cis" in the latter. So if we make our own space, space for transmen, it is criticized as though it were the same as cis men excluding women for sexist purposes and/or as cis people excluding trans people for transphobic purposes.
This leads to such fringe beliefs as that transmen create transmen's space to oppress trans women, or that our transitions are a symbolic attempt to demean cis women, or any number of other critiques of our identities or ways of coping with them. More importantly, it leads to outside perceptions that transmen are accepted by other queer communities, accepted by women's communities, and treated fairly in the media.
After many years of hating myself and assuming that I was in a position of privilege, I feel like I can finally admit that I have no idea where the hell people are getting any of these ideas.
To believe that we are accepted in women's communities is both to ignore that many women's communities consider us failed women, and to ignore that those that do allow us into their ranks are doing so because they are at least on some level denying our identities as men. Those that focus on our current identities as men forget that we were usually raised to be women and subject to the same misogynist typecasting as women as we grew up. Those that feel the media treats us well are ignoring not only the way our modern figures--Chaz Bono and Thomas Beatie, for example--are criticized and ridiculed, but also the fact that for a very long time we lacked any mainstream visibility. That meant we were generally ignored by the media, but it also meant we had fewer visible role models.
These things don't negate the importance of our own issues, nor do they make us "oppressors." Our problems are not nonexistent or less worthy, they are just different.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't have to check ourselves. Despite inordinate focus on that fact, we are men and have the capability to be sexist. We have the capability to say stupid things and do stupid things, to throw our weight around, and to oppress. My problem is not that we are asked to check ourselves, but that in some communities we are singled out for it due to the erroneous belief that transmen are a privileged class.
We're not.
