“I need feminism because… All feminism means is equal rights for women… shouldn’t be controversial”
It shouldn’t be controversial, but it is.
Because feminism only cares about equality when it benefits women. Feminism doesn’t care about equality when men are the ones suffering and when men are the ones with the short end of the stick. They only cherry pick the issues where females can benefit from change. It is a disgusting bias that is perfectly acceptable in feminist theory.
For example: Feminists don’t care that men have such low custody rates for their own children, because women benefit from that discrepancy so it doesn’t need to be addressed. Feminists don’t care that men make up the majority of homeless people, because women in that particular issue aren’t suffering more than men so it also doesn’t need to be addressed. Feminists don’t care that men have such a high rate of suicidal deaths, because women unsuccessfully commit it more often and clearly the ones who are dying just aren’t as important.
The men suffering from these issues may get a footnote in a speech, but not one single piece of legislation that has been put forward by feminists actually directly benefits men when they are the ones suffering. In fact, when men do try to get help for these issues through the MRM they are often shut down or ignored. I’ve also added a post from aaasources that highlights all the “equal rights” feminists claim to stand by.
Feminism doesn’t want equal rights for women, it wants privileges. They want the privilege of having an equal representation in all the fancy, smart, respectable, clean, high-paying jobs. Yet when it comes to the dirty, physically demanding, time consuming, dangerous jobs they don’t give a damn that men are the majority who are slugging it out just for a decent income.
Image description: A still image from the 90’s TV sitcom Saved By The Bell. Zack is in the locker room holding a microphone to his mouth. He is carrying recording equipment, and he is addressing a girl with a hand on her hip, a look of disbelief on her face (interpretation of scene my own). The caption reads, “White people benefit from the privileges accrued from racist exploitation, past and present, and are therefore accountable for changing and transforming white supremacy and racism.”
You want to know what white privilege is? Being allowed to wear a damn colander on your head in a driver’s license as an expression of your religious freedom, while brown people have to deal with protests calling for the closing of their mosques.
Dominance is well exercised by the denial of privileges. Privileges the submissive might not have previously seen as such, even. Privacy in the bathroom was something Pigletmade the mistake of assuming was her right; I quickly disabused her of that mistaken notion. She was mine, and there was no privacy from me. No matter how humiliating.
I do not truly believe that sexism or racism is present in media. I think that both sexes and most races are portrayed fairly in media. I have sat here for a good amount of time now trying to think of anything and I am truly drawing a blank.
It’s such a Western idea that meat is the best source of protein, disregarding the fact that the majority of people get their proteins from cereal grains and not meat. I think it says a lot about the priviledge that members of developed countries have
I’ve always found it deeply ironic how people dismiss veganism as “privileged” while failing to appreciate what most people in the world actually eat. Worldwide, an estimated 2 billion people live primarily on a meat-based diet, while an estimated 4 billion live primarily on a plant-based diet. In the Chinese-Japanese, Australian, Hindustani, Central Asian, Near Eastern, Mediterranean, European-Siberian, South American, North American, Central American and Mexican regions, every single staple food is vegan; staple being defined as a food that is eaten regularly and in such quantities as to constitute the dominant part of a person’s diet and supply a major proportion of their energy and nutrient needs. In fact, just 13.5% of food eaten globally is composed of meat, milk, fish or eggs.
Meat consumption used to be largely a class issue in Western countries until relatively recently, even though European meat consumption in general has always historically been higher than the rest of the world. All of the cookbooks in early modern Europe described the meals of the rich. Rich people were usually the ones eating meat at every meal, and everyone else ate mostly bread.
It was the overall wealth gained by imperialism,colonialism, and general exploitation of the rest of the world that raised the standards for whole populations of Western countries, like the US, making us globally “rich” by comparison, and giving poorer people in these countries more access to meat and dairy. Therefore, simply eating meat became less of a status symbol, so the elites started to focus on more difficult to obtain foods from colonized countries, like vanilla (which is now ubiquitous, but was quite the delicacy back in the day), and uphold certain kinds of meat, like lobster, caviar, etc., as the new status symbols which artificially inflated their prices.
When Italians first started immigrating to America during the Industrial Era, they were shocked that even poor Americans were eating much more meat and dairy on a regular basis than people back in Italy. So they started creating new, decadent recipes to incorporate as much of these “elite” foods as they could as a sort of status symbol in their own right. Now, what we consider to be Italian food - rich, meat laden pasta dishes drowned in cheese and sauce - looks nothing like traditional Italian food.
Not to mention the fact that most of the world is lactose intolerant: it’s estimated that only about a quarter of the world’s population can digest dairy after childhood (comprised of almost entirely white European/white North American people).
Dear Carolyn: What do I owe my siblings, if anything? My husband has been fortunate enough to make a lot of money, and we agreed long ago that it was for us and our adult sons, not our (many) deadbeat relatives.
My older brother pretty much raised me and helped my husband when starting out. Brother had a severe stroke three years ago, and Second Wife claims they have gone through all their savings and are now $140,000 in debt with all the costs. She is trying to guilt me into helping them. I do not feel this is appropriate.
She did quit her job to take care of him, but they were improvident and did not buy long-term care insurance. I ask her why she does not put him in a home or hire a full-time aide and she says they can’t afford it.
Brother’s adult children tell me Second Wife is horrible, which is why they choose not to help, either. Second Wife had the nerve to ask me to help buy Brother an oxygen concentrator. It is expensive: $2,500. I think this is pushing it. She comes off as bitter, so we said no.
Now she tells me she will have to launch a GoFundMe, because otherwise they will lose their house. This will be extremely embarrassing to my husband and me, because we are prominent in the community. What do you advise? — Family
Dear Family,
While your problem has, on the surface, a very obvious solution — let the brother who raised you and gave your now-wealthy family its start in the world die a slow, desperate death in poverty because you don’t like his wife’s attitude — families are complicated. Sometimes it’s not as easy as getting what you want from someone financially and emotionally and then abandoning them forever because you don’t care whether they live or die — because then the neighbors might talk! What a pickle.
Of course your brother should be forced to forego the medical care he needs because you don’t like his wife. That much is clear. It’s not about the money — you’d never miss a dime — but you think your brother’s wife sucks, so it’s just really not worth ensuring he has the medical care and housing he needs. Anyone in your shoes would make the same calculation without a second thought.
However, things get sticky when we start thinking about what really matters: how embarrassing it will look to people you aren’t related to, who you’ve never met and have no responsibility toward, if it comes out that your brother is an irresponsible poor who didn’t even get long-term health insurance before deciding to have a stroke in a country with an exploitative, unjust, discriminatory, and deliberately impenetrable medical system that drives millions of people into unimaginable debt every year.
It would be a kindness if the man who raised you and seeded your family’s vast financial success could just suffer in silence and die in the streets with his bad wife and leave you out of it. That’s an outcome you could be proud of — the kind of comfortable, happy little family story you’d be fine sharing with a few intimate friends at the club. But for your sister-in-law to publicly humiliate you by trying to stay alive and housed in order to fund your brother’s medical care, when she knows you simply can’t help him because you hate her! That is impudence of the highest order, and your brother’s wife is only creating for everyone a self-perpetuating cycle wherein she quits her job to care for her husband and has to beg other people for money to stay alive, and you have to keep not giving her money because you hate her because she’s so poor and embarrassing! The one and only solution in this situation is so simple — she shuts up, he dies! — and yet, this self-absorbed couple just can’t bring themselves to take the necessary steps.
There’s nothing you can do here, since funding your brother’s medical care as the most minimum thanks for his support at the most crucial times in your own life will only help him live a longer and more comfortable life without his wife having to make a big public show of their poverty at you. Some people really can’t see past their own self-interest! An upside: if your in-laws go forth with their crowdfunding plan, you will see your own visibility in the community grow in some interesting new ways.
You’re lucky if you can imagine such a moment with your mother in your childhood. You’re not lucky if your mother only sought an opportunity to put you down and could use anything you trusted her with against you.
it fucking destroys me how many people casually support eugenics and like, don’t even seem to REALIZE it’s eugenics
RIGHT??? like – it’s like they’ve internalized the idea that eugenics is a thing Bad People like, but literally sterilizing people they don’t like against their will unless they have special dispensation from the government – that’s some other word that isn’t a bad mean word like eugenics :D!!!!
nope sorry still morally indefensible, even if it’s against people you personally dislike h t h
I feel similarly about complaints about “stupid people.” It’s one thing to criticize bad judgment, but when I hear someone indict anyone who wasn’t as lucky as they were in the genetic lottery, or who didn’t get the education they got, their privilege shows. Complaints that stupid people shouldn’t be allowed to breed tend to come right after.
“There’s some truth” to claims that people of color are suspicious of clinical studies, this epidemiologist, who is Latino, said, “because there’s discordance in who gets studied and who’s doing the studying.”
This has enormous implications for the applicability of health research.
I’m sick of people asking me how privileged they are and asking who is more oppressed, a black man or a white woman? A gay man or a trans man?
It’s not my job to tell you the answer to your oppression olympics other than the fact that I will win that game literally every time and that my oppression isn’t something for you to even try and match.
Being able to acknowledge and think critically about discomfort is a skill that the world doesn’t want you to learn.
No, this is not a conspiracy theory.
Discomfort is your body and mind’s way of telling you, “Hey! Something’s different! Something’s off! Something’s changing!” It’s a useful tool, evolutionarily. The primordial ape that responded to being cold by bundling up in a pile of leaves was more likely to survive than the one that did nothing. As a result, humans are generally quick to feel uncomfortable.
Sometimes, discomfort is a sign that something is truly wrong, and you need to get away from the source of the discomfort right away. Other times, discomfort is a sign that this is an opportunity for growth, for improvement, for making the world a better place.
However, we are not encouraged to think critically about discomfort and figure out which of these two circumstances it is. In fact, we are actively discouraged from doing this.
If you’re in a position of power, you are encouraged to think about any discomfort at all as the most terrible thing ever. This is why white people often behave as though being called racist is worse than actually being racist.
If you’re not in a position of power, then you’re not supposed to think about your discomfort as important at all. This is why people with chronic illness are so often told that they’re faking it or making a big deal out of nothing.
Being willing and able to think about our discomfort – to consider it instead of simply avoiding it – is not an easy thing to do, but it is a revolutionary act. Thinking critically about discomfort opens doors and is a vital skill for changing the world.
(I talked about this first on TikTok – watch it here!)
[IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A BABY BIRD STANDS ON GRASS, SQUAWKING. TEXT READS, “DON’T EXPECT THOSE WITHOUT A SAFE PLACE TO SLEEP TO DISCUSS WHAT YOU THINK ARE MORE IMPORTANT ISSUES.”]
One more time for the people in the back, white privilege does not mean that because you’re white, you’ve never struggled. It means your struggles are not BECAUSE you’re white.
If you’re straight and you struggle, it’s not because you’re straight. Queer people have the same struggles you do, but they also struggle because they’re queer in a world that favors people who are straight.
If you’re a man and you struggle, it’s not because because you’re a man. Others have the same struggles you do, but they also struggle because they’re not men in a world that favors people who are men.
And if you’re white and you struggle, it’s not because because you’re white. People of color have the same struggles you do, but they also struggle because they’re people of color in a world that favors people who are white.
It really is that simple. Are there exceptions? Sure. But straight people, white people, and/or male people have power that those who are NOT straight, white, and/or male do NOT have.
Privilege is not worrying that your “ethnic” sounding name will get your job application tossed or that your “ethnic” hair will get you fired.
Privilege is not having to sweat every election because the next crop of lawmakers might get enough power to strip away your bodily autonomy, the validity of your marriage, or your right to not get fired because your boss doesn’t approve of your “lifestyle,”
Privilege is not fearing for your life every time you get pulled over and not needing to have serious discussions with your children about how to keep the police from killing them.
Privilege does not mean your life is easy and that you never struggle. It doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. It doesn’t mean you should be ashamed, or that you have no right to complain about the injustices or disadvantages you DO experience.
It just means that you are exempt from experiencing certain systemic disadvantages that other people are not. Some of those disadvantages are frustrating (microaggressions). Some can literally mean the difference between life and death.
When someone tells you to check your privilege, they’re telling you to remember everything I just wrote here. It means there are things in this world that you don’t have to worry about.
It means there are very real problems in this world and in this country that are not about you.
Lori Gallagher Witt (As always, okay to share, but please don’t remove my name.)
What is the scientific, or at least verifiable, qualifier for the ‘recognition’ of ________ privilege’? How are privilege politics simply not reducible to a reliance on the self-appointed ‘arbiter’ of the Truth? This takes the form of: a relationship of 'faith’ between the arbiter and the condemned (e.g. “I believe that you recognize your privilege, now”) b) an admittance of epistemological incompetence (e.g. “I can never know your oppression, so I need you to verify my own admission of eternal ignorance”) c) self-castigation (e.g. “please forgive me for my privileges.”) Again, all of this is a reliance on a presupposed clear-sightedness of the self-appointed ‘arbiter’. It is an assumption that a judgement is even possible in the first place, and in the second place, only by the those in judgement (I’m the REAL person from ________ group). I’m not saying that ‘privilege’ isn’t real, but that the concept, and how its used, often is expressed in an idealist manner. Then people are too scared to critique the ritual, at the risk of being accused of having X privilege, and that X is supposed to be the reason the person simply can’t understand the privilege (sin) in the first place.
The romantic notion of home paints it as a nurturing, safe place; a haven or refuge from tensions that disturb the outside world. It is a space of comfort and belonging, of warmth and affection. It is where one feels at ease the most, and as the old cliché goes, a place like no other.
In this exhibition, Yeo Kaa unsettles the sense of security and content felt at home through an outward gaze that exposes the perils and menaces hidden or distant from one’s comfortable abode. The phrase “from the comfort of my own home” draws irony from the stark contrast between inside and outside conditions, with the outside as the site of danger and harsh realities of life. Central to this opposition is the attempt to confront the vantage point of a privileged existence—being sheltered or immune from the difficulties and suffering of others by virtue of one’s social position. The home here refers not only to the immediate household, but extends to larger communities—from posh apartment buildings to gated, self-contained residential zones—which similarly detach society’s privileged few from the experiences of the common people. Recent events, such as the ongoing pandemic and the string of calamities that besieged the artist’s native Philippines, have rendered the disparity between the lives of the rich and the poor more pronounced. The works interrogate this gap and the former’s filtered encounter of the latter’s struggles.
The disjuncture among lived realities shaped by social inequality is conveyed in the glass enclosures that blur the depicted imagery in each work. On a remote control’s cue, clear images of natural calamities like floods and forest fires, pollution and environmental decay, are revealed, shifting the audience back and forth between the shielded view of privilege and the more vivid and gripping accounts of difficult life out there. Like the white overlay that covers the scenes of tragedies and devastations behind it, privilege may sanitize one’s picture of reality and disengage us from the plight of society’s margins. These pieces remind us to constantly assess the lenses through which we access the wider world, and to look beyond our positionalities that may conceal truths outside the convenience of our social spheres.
i see a lot of trans men and female nonbinaries often say things like “i face misogyny because people still see me as a woman! i don’t deny that!” but male nonbinaries and trans women would rather be caught dead than accept that they have male privilege … why is that
^ Adding the above answer to my request for clarification on what “male privilege” for trans women means here, as it would be too cumbersome to respond via replies.
So the simple answer to this is we don’t experience male privilege because we’re not men. We may have physiological similarities to cis men, and we may be socialized (often against our will) in similar ways, but as trans women we experience all of these things through a transfeminine lens. Nearly every single aspect of what is thought of as being a boy/man is intrinsically inseparable from this lived experience, and most advantages in this regard come with associated costs that outweigh them on the whole.
Biological advantages like not having to worry about getting pregnant, come not only with dysphoria and its associated mental health issues, but are also used as a bludgeon by society to “prove” we’re not “real” women. We are inundated with messaging, both through personal attacks and through society at large, that the ability to produce eggs and carry children is an intrinsic feature of womanhood (which is a damaging narrative to all women, obviously, but is harmful to trans women in much the same way as it is to cis women who do not have the ability to get pregnant.) Trans girls forced to go through “male” puberty experience increasingly severe dysphoria, suicidal ideation, and find it ever more difficult to pass which furthers ostracism.
Social advantages for being raised as male are more ephemeral, and are better described as “passing privilege” than male privilege. We are treated as boys/men not because we *are* boys/men, but because we *pass* as boys/men, and that preferential treatment largely vanishes the moment we come out as trans women. In fact, out trans women by and large face gendered oppression in similar ways to cis women, with things like violent victimization, sexual abuse, poverty, employment discrimination, wage gaps, etc. experienced at rates commensurate to or in some cases even higher than cis women. Further, passing for cis men is deeply traumatizing for most trans women, and is often done to avoid abuse, ostracism from family, or worse.
In the same way that I’m sure you wouldn’t consider a cis girl who passes for a boy to have male privilege, or a gay person who passes as straight while closeted to have heterosexual privilege, closeted trans women do not have male privilege. Privilege granted at the point of a gun and at the cost of denying who we are is no privilege at all. While I do not deny that trans women have some advantages, with all factors considered it clearly does not meet the bar to qualify for privilege in human society any more than the advantages associated with being a woman equate to female privilege.
Lastly I’ll say to your original point, I don’t really see trans women not having male privilege and trans men suffering from being perceived as women as being in fundamental opposition, it’s all a function of cisnormative patriarchal forces that value manhood and devalue anyone perceived as not being a part of that. However, as I am not a trans man (similar with non-binary people) I can’t fully speak to their experience, so I will leave it there for others to weigh in.
what is a man? what is a woman?
i am aware that dysphoria is a real and debilitating condition, but why does incongruence between the mind and the body warrant the denial of social conditioning based on biology? trans women didn’t grow up being taught how to “become women” which is NOT something to envy. little girls are forced into femininity, face discrimination and bias in school (and, depending on geographical location, are denied the right to an education because of their sex), are face cat calling and street harassment from pre-puberty ages, etc. the descent from girlhood into womanhood is something that the vast, vast majority of trans women do not experience because of the ages of their transitions. childhood socialization is incredibly difficult to unlearn and becomes a core part of ourselves. while girls are going through this, boys (referring to male children including trans women) are taught to be strong and smart and powerful. they are masculinized, which gnc boys find undoubtedly uncomfortable, but it is true that they grow up learning that they are worth more than girls and they do not face systemic and interpersonal misogyny.
male privilege is an axis of oppression that exists outside of our minds. i am white, and i am also an immigrant. i face discrimination due to my immigrant status and i do not have the same internal thoughts and beliefs as a huge majority of white americans, but that does not erase my white privilege. when my whiteness grants me privilege i am uncomfortable because i know i am not the intended benefactor of this privilege—many of my family are refugees and we escaped our home country because of extreme poverty. this does not erase the privilege i have when people are unaware of my immigrant status. i am still white. trans women are still male.
trans girls are not forced to go through male puberty, they simply do—it is a sign that their bodies are working properly.
and honestly? masculine girls who can pass as men and gay people who can pass as straight do not have privilege in the same way that male humans have male privilege. a masculine woman (such as myself) has still undergone female socialization. everyone in our lives knows we are women. we are treated as such. i also choose to dress myself up and lie about being a lesbian when i’m around extended family members and in my work environment, because it’s easier. this does not change the fact that i grew up being told that i, as a woman, must like men. heteronormativity has been a part of my daily life since the moment i was born. male children aren’t taught that they can’t be women—they are taught that they are better than women. there is a difference.
i do think that trans women who pass as women face misogyny. i do think that violence against trans people is abhorrent and trans people have a right to safety. what i do not think is that feelings are more important than biological and social truths. i also do not think gender should be a part of our society; whoever seeks to uphold it is a misogynist.
A woman is a person of female gender, vice versa for a man. And respectfully, it’s clear that there is a fundamental ideological difference between us on how that is defined, so I’m not particularly interested in arguing the point.
I agree that the way cis girls are forced into womanhood is not something to envy. It is oppression, I never stated otherwise. Further, I agree that boys are taught to be strong and smart and powerful. That they are better. The difference here is, once again, that trans women are not boys. We were never boys. We were trans girls perceived as boys, who are taught that this idealized male version of ourselves is strong and powerful. But that person is not *us*. We are “lesser”, lesser in some cases even than cis women but most certainly lesser than cis men. We are an imposter. We speak the truth at our own peril, a peril which often includes abuse. Homelessness. Conversion therapy. Murder.
How does our internalized power, our inherent privilege, actually manifest in society? Not by preferential treatment in employment. Not by being favored for governmental positions. Not by an increased likelihood to avoid poverty, to avoid being sexually abused or fetishized or forced into the sex trade to survive. Not by better opportunities for education. Not by preferential treatment in the eyes of the law.
We only have access to those things if we stay in the closet. And being forced to deny who we are to get benefits does not equate to privilege any more than a cis lesbian “just marrying a man” to pass as straight equates to heterosexual privilege. We are not boys who just decide one day to become women, we are women, and our journey to recognizing this within ourselves is as unique and varied as a gay person’s journey to recognizing their sexuality. Neither is diminished by not understanding ourselves until a later age, especially when the ways society, family and peers seek to deny our identities are completely outside of our control.
You claim that denying this is adhering to biological and social reality, but to do so you have to completely ignore our social reality and lived experiences, otherwise it falls flat. I’m not saying these things to minimize the oppression of cis women, but to show that we are both being oppressed along the same axis but in different ways. Our oppressors are the same, and always have been.
I don’t expect you to agree, again because of the fundamental ideological differences between us. My goal was to explain why trans women do not feel that we experience male privilege with good faith arguments, which I hope you can agree that I have done.
Some followup points since this is winding long:
* Cis girls being raised and socialized as boys, with their true identities kept secret from friends and close family absolutely is something that happens! It doesn’t mean they have male privilege, any more than trans women do.
* Likewise, trans girls *are* sometimes forced to go through male puberty, as gender affirming care is restricted in many areas of the world. Several states in the US are taking great efforts to do so by passing laws to forcibly detransition all trans kids in their jurisdiction. Our bodies are doing what our hormones tell them to do, but it doesn’t mean those things are right in all cases, and it is standard medical practice to make adjustments were necessary.
* Biological reality is far more complex than we once thought, as decades of medical research into gender affirming care has shown. There is a reason why every major international medical organization endorses gender affirming care for trans people: because it works the vast majority of the time.
i am interested in arguing that point though—what is the female gender? why do you think gender should exist?
how can trans women not go through male socialization if so many of them don’t come out for years, often decades? socialization is how we are treated by society, not how we feel about the way we are treated by society
bio women are also at an increased risk for homelessness and murder—in fact, one thing that led me to gender abolition was how many trans women are being prostituted/trafficked. i know that gender identity does play a role in how society treats people and i don’t think anyone should have to be a victim of violence or trafficking for any reason—the concept of gender/gender roles is the oldest and most deeply ingrained system of violence that exists in the world. why anyone would want to contribute to it is beyond me
you still say that trans women are women without giving me a concrete definition for what a woman is. someone of the female gender makes no sense because female is a biological category, not a gender. would trans women still be women in a hypothetical alternate universe where gender and gender roles do not exist?
i do agree that that trans women may feel that they don’t have male privilege—that is exactly why i made the original post. of course life is hard for you—i never said it isn’t. but the way we perceive things is not usually the way things really are. trans women who do not pass or who are in the closet are treated better by society and that is a fact. when i choose to pass as straight i am treated better but it would be illogical to say that i have privilege because i am still denied the rights to life in multiple countries, would be shunned by some family members, only recently got the right to vote, etc. these are concrete, material reality. gender as something separate from sex is a fickle and fluid thing that no one can ever give a good definition for and everyone “experiences differently.” we can talk about rates of violence and abuse towards trans women while acknowledging that they also live in a society that values males
and every major medical organization endorses transitioning because it is a huge source of money. trust scientists but also have critical thinking skills about the economic state of the world
It’s not a matter of whether I think gender should exist. It’s that the cultural notion that sex and gender identity are both a.) binary and b.) easily divisible into entirely biological and entirely social does not match our current understanding of human development. This is reflected not only by studies of very young trans children whose behaviors are almost entirely indistinct from their cisgender counterparts, but also by the dissonance experienced by both transgender people AND cisgender people who had their sex non-consensually reassigned in infancy, which in both cases can express itself both as positive knowledge or through discomfort (of varying degrees) with one’s apparent sex. The purely ideological belief that there is no innate sense of gender rooted in biology means that this is a topic that, in my experience, we would typically go round and round with no hope of reaching an agreement… which is why I said that I’m not interested in rehashing that experience.
Note that this is different from gender roles and gender-based discrimination, both of which we all agree should be abolished! But trans women are not gender roles, there are many butch trans women, androgynous trans women, etc. Many do follow cultural feminine norms, but this is because we exist in society and are subject to the same pressures as everyone else (along with additional pressure to “pass” to avoid transphobic harassment.) In a future world where gender roles no longer exist, trans women would still be women, and would ideally have easier access to more advanced treatments that will resolve the mind/body incongruence in a way that makes their outward sex indistinguishable from both their sense of self and cisgender members of said sex. But their social lives and their roles in society would be whatever they wanted them to be, just the same as cis women.
Your replies thus far have constantly skirted around the points that the purported privilege received while closeted is functionally indistinguishable from the way straight privilege is temporarily “granted” to closeted gay people (after all, are gay kids not socialized as straight, taught that being straight was superior, morally righteous and the de facto norm?), and that this purported “male” privilege does not offer a meaningful systemic advantage to trans women in modern societies in which trans people are consistently amongst the most marginalized minorities, with no institutional power to speak of. Without that, how can you make the claim that we experience gender-based privilege, much less male privilege?
I readily acknowledge that society favors males. What society does not do, however, is favor out trans women, or treat them as males in a way that can meaningfully be described as privilege outside of certain edge cases. Because, again, trans women also experience the concrete, material realities of being shunned, being killed, and of having rights restricted in many areas of the world. Hell, in the US many trans women alsodidn’t have the right to vote until half a century *after* white women!
Lastly to address your final paragraph:
“and every major medical organization endorses transitioning because it is a huge source of money. trust scientists but also have critical thinking skills about the economic state of the world”
This is a thought-terminating cliche, because it doesn’t meaningfully address the argument that gender affirming care is the only treatment that actually works for trans people. All it does is give you ideological cover to ignore scientific consensus and the efficacy of these treatments, in much the same way as anti-vaccine or climate science denial does.
i see a lot of trans men and female nonbinaries often say things like “i face misogyny because people still see me as a woman! i don’t deny that!” but male nonbinaries and trans women would rather be caught dead than accept that they have male privilege … why is that
^ Adding the above answer to my request for clarification on what “male privilege” for trans women means here, as it would be too cumbersome to respond via replies.
So the simple answer to this is we don’t experience male privilege because we’re not men. We may have physiological similarities to cis men, and we may be socialized (often against our will) in similar ways, but as trans women we experience all of these things through a transfeminine lens. Nearly every single aspect of what is thought of as being a boy/man is intrinsically inseparable from this lived experience, and most advantages in this regard come with associated costs that outweigh them on the whole.
Biological advantages like not having to worry about getting pregnant, come not only with dysphoria and its associated mental health issues, but are also used as a bludgeon by society to “prove” we’re not “real” women. We are inundated with messaging, both through personal attacks and through society at large, that the ability to produce eggs and carry children is an intrinsic feature of womanhood (which is a damaging narrative to all women, obviously, but is harmful to trans women in much the same way as it is to cis women who do not have the ability to get pregnant.) Trans girls forced to go through “male” puberty experience increasingly severe dysphoria, suicidal ideation, and find it ever more difficult to pass which furthers ostracism.
Social advantages for being raised as male are more ephemeral, and are better described as “passing privilege” than male privilege. We are treated as boys/men not because we *are* boys/men, but because we *pass* as boys/men, and that preferential treatment largely vanishes the moment we come out as trans women. In fact, out trans women by and large face gendered oppression in similar ways to cis women, with things like violent victimization, sexual abuse, poverty, employment discrimination, wage gaps, etc. experienced at rates commensurate to or in some cases even higher than cis women. Further, passing for cis men is deeply traumatizing for most trans women, and is often done to avoid abuse, ostracism from family, or worse.
In the same way that I’m sure you wouldn’t consider a cis girl who passes for a boy to have male privilege, or a gay person who passes as straight while closeted to have heterosexual privilege, closeted trans women do not have male privilege. Privilege granted at the point of a gun and at the cost of denying who we are is no privilege at all. While I do not deny that trans women have some advantages, with all factors considered it clearly does not meet the bar to qualify for privilege in human society any more than the advantages associated with being a woman equate to female privilege.
Lastly I’ll say to your original point, I don’t really see trans women not having male privilege and trans men suffering from being perceived as women as being in fundamental opposition, it’s all a function of cisnormative patriarchal forces that value manhood and devalue anyone perceived as not being a part of that. However, as I am not a trans man (similar with non-binary people) I can’t fully speak to their experience, so I will leave it there for others to weigh in.
When we say you are racist. We do not refer to a certain person. This is not a personal attack but rather an attack on the society we live in. Trust that when we, as “nonwhite people”, say racist we are indeed addressing society along with all its social and institutional frameworks that allow a person of white culture to believe that they rank from a place of higher order albeit being a person of colour has been dictated as being a person of endless limitations. Racism is more than just a snarky comment, it is the laws and cognitive condition that suppress a person of colour. It extends far past racial prejudice and because of this Society… YOU ARE RACIST.
