Member-only story
Trans Masc Misogyny and the Red Six of Spades
Being an attempt to grapple with trans community dynamics and trans guys who yell at women. A very long attempt. You were warned.
When I was first coming out, I wanted, more than anything, to know other transmasculine people. This was a matter of survival — I was facing a new set of obstacles, and I needed guidance from other people who had faced them. It was also just a human need for rest and companionship. I had spent my entire life feeling different. For once, I wanted to be near people who were different in the same way.
Like any intense desire, this one had the power to overcome my common sense. I did make some new friends, and I got closer to the ones I already had, and this was great for me. But some of the trans guys I first wound up knowing were not so great, and it is them I want to talk to you about now.
I don’t entirely know how I found these guys, except that they made themselves easy to find. They wrote and posted a lot about the Challenges of Being Trans Masc, and those were the challenges I was facing. Several made a big deal about being feminists; I, too, make a big deal about being a feminist, so that was attractive. Not every trans person made me feel welcome, when I came out. Some went out of their way to make me feel unwelcome. These guys were usually pretty nice.
Correction: They were nice to me. Because what I noticed — slowly, then all at once — was that every single one of them had a pattern of going absolutely nuclear on trans women. At least once a month, there would be shouting, screaming, days-long social media dogpiles, over offenses that were increasingly minor and hard to figure out. Sometimes the woman in question actually had said something insensitive. More often, she’d just written “trans” without specifying “transfeminine,” or made some eye-rolling comment about men (or, God forbid, specifically trans men), or she was better at describing trans women’s experiences than other trans people’s, which made sense, given that the experiences she was better at describing were her own.
Woman after woman that I knew got hit by these guys, and spent days locking her account and frantically trying to justify herself, often over nothing…
