to anyone who’s interested
i think the reason trans women work so hard to change the language that’s applied to our bodies is because there is just so much of it. psychiatry, medicine, law, law enforcement, religions, and every type of media have just so much to say about us, our bodies, and what they mean. when we struggle to redefine words and shift language, its an attempt at self authorship that tries to change the schemas and models that always override our own selves, even in our own minds. there is no similar cultural discourse around trans men, and i wonder if that’s why these dudes just don’t get it. they get to project their identities into a relative void of cultural narratives. i wonder if this is why some trans dudes just cannot empathize with what we’re talking about here.
I know I’m talking about something slightly different than you are, but I feel like it’s not necessarily a void of cultural narratives?
The vast majority of the flak that trans folk receive comes from a (clearly fucked) place of perceiving MAAB trans folk as actually being men who pretend to be women, and FAAB trans folk as actually being women who pretend to be men. N.B.: I’m not claiming that trans women are men or that trans men are women. Duh. Just pointing out that this is how dumb cis people think of us.
I keep on hearing this idea repeated: MAAB trans people get negative representation in media/culture, whereas, FAAB trans people get no representation in media/culture. But! There’s actually this whole lauded motif and history of ‘women taking men’s roles’. Mostly, good things happened to them.
For instance.
Charley Parkhurst was a famous California settler. They voted in the mid-1800s. Nobody knew they were FAAB until their death. The reception was fairly positive.
There were hundreds of civil war soldiers who were described to me as ‘women posing as men’. I remember learning about them in middle school and high school. They were described as heroic patriots.
History is full of these stories: FAAB folk who ‘posed’ or ‘lived’ as men (depending on circumstance), and if they were caught out, got mostly praised / rewarded for it.
SPOILER ALERT: this is not what happened to MAAB folks who did the opposite.
The formula isn’t “transfeminine experiences are treated with disgust, transmasculine experiences are ignored entirely", it’s more like “transfeminine experiences are treated with disgust, transmasculine experiences are praised".
This shouldn’t really come to a surprise to anyone. It’s just misogyny.
