The double bind of transmasculinity.

If the patriarchy primarily views women as an “asset” to be protected (by some definitions)… transmasculinity can’t be allowed to exist.

So why is the invisibility of transmasculinity usually characterized as accidental, harmless, or even protective?

It starts with one of the most commonly-repeated sentiments about trans men.

The patriarchy’s primary model for trans men is that of gender traitor/penis envy:

“People understand why women would want to be men—men have all the power.”

In one sentence, misogyny sets and disguises its own trap. It’s a clever little gaslighting exercise—not simply lying to us and others about who we are, but deliberately eroding our own trust in ourselves and our experiences.

This phrase treats trans men as playacting (misogyny) to strive for power (given to men by misogyny) due to some inherent superiority (misogyny), thus acting like “all women” (misogyny), yet betraying those other women (misogyny).

“Oh, so you want to be a man?”

I still get this remark from time to time, albeit more frequently in the past tense—as if they’re granting me the favour of treating me like a man.

This phrase is also a sleight-of-hand by the patriarchy. Often, the answer—so far as they understand “manhood”—is actually no. But there’s no space for that, just as there’s no space for the idea that trans men might not have much in common with “women who want to be [treated like] men”.

In both cases, transmasculinity itself is not being taken on its own terms. The system must keep us in a box of object and not subject, by any means necessary.

Many people have found a way to make sense of us and “understand” what we “want”. But are they shaping this story to fit our experiences, or are we mere props, our experiences reshaped to prove an existing worldview?

Regardless of the truth, it’s always implied that we should be grateful for their understanding. That, even if it’s incorrect, this is beneficial sexism—an accidentally good thing that keeps us safe.

But it isn’t—and it doesn’t.

As a nonbinary trans man coming into my identity over a decade ago, the myth of understanding = safety was repeated often, and always uncritically. This caused me tremendous damage as a young, nonbinary trans man.

I could feel the truth around me, even if I was being told otherwise. But it’s terrifying and disorienting to lose so much while being insistently told that’s impossible, because in fact you’re gaining so much. (Subtext: you’re a traitor AND can’t be trusted to know your experience.)

As I transitioned, I lost the protections that misogyny pretends to offer women within the patriarchy (“safety” from its own threat). I found myself newly targeted by transphobia… but the misogyny didn’t stop. It was just supposed to.

There was this idea that knowing I’m a man (or “basically a man”) would magically protect me from the consequences of misogyny. Even if I faced deliberately malicious treatment, I was told that I wasn’t the primary target of the violence (social, sexual, medical, etc) that I now know to be common among trans men.

It was clearly intended precisely to scare me—and all of us—back to our rightful place. But misogyny is very, very good at disguising its own existence.

“Misdirected misogyny” was the most I was allowed to claim, as if the only time I experienced harm was when people innocently mistook me for a woman. Minimising misogynistic violence can only play into the hand of the patriarchy. Furthermore, this sentiment just reinforces the idea that the greatest harm one can do to men is to treat them as women; including trans men in the sentiment doesn’t make it any more radical.

“Transphobia” was the only word left for me to use—which fails to acknowledge the role misogyny played in determining the scope of my social crime, and the punishment.

At its core, this framework says that all trans people face transphobia, and trans men might face misogyny (though it’s often still cast as “misdirected” misogyny that we will eventually escape), and only trans women face transmisogyny.

This would mean that there is no intersection of experiences that is specific to being a trans man—nothing that is not experienced (and explainable) by someone else. And if we’re cast as unreliable narrators of our own lives, the implication is that they’ll do a better job of it, too.

Needless to say… I strongly disagree.

The only way I began to make sense of my experiences and fit them into the overall pattern of trans life was to take a stance that remains highly controversial:

Trans men experience a specific and unique intersection of transphobia and misogyny.

For as long as I’ve been participating in and witnessing conversations within the trans community, this idea has been… disavowed, to put it mildly.

When I’m having this conversation with other trans men, this is the moment where we feel compelled to look over our shoulders and lower our voices.

But it’s true. This vitriol is real, with direct material consequences upon our lives.

Seemingly disparate groups can unite awfully quickly in their anxieties about transmasculinity. As I began transition, I was surprised at how quickly I began to experience new harm—and how vicious the danger actually was.

It came from all fronts. For example:

1) feminists who see us as traitors and believe that hurting us now counts as punching up (by any means, including wielding the significant weight of cis privilege)

2) cis queer women, angry about losing perceived sexual availability, and that we’re “destroying assets” (which could be withheld from the patriarchy)

3) cis straight men, angry about losing perceived sexual availability, and that we’re “destroying assets” (which could be given to the patriarchy)

4) cis queer men, angry that they’re being forced to confront comfortable-if-harmful status quos re: gender presentation, sexual preferences, body type, etc

5) conservatives angry about the challenge we pose to a social or religious belief system

6) trans people who are in trauma cycles, and rarely given the space and grace to process and heal from trauma before entering into community with each other

There is no way of avoiding or escaping these harms. They can come from friends and strangers and partners, from work colleagues and medical professionals. And they come from cis men and women alike.

If women traumatized by patriarchy choose to perceive us as men, we’re supposed to be grateful for being distrusted, abused, and left without community… regardless of whether our inclusion in the category of “all men” reflects statistics, or our lived experience, or even theirs.

Of course, they may not see us as men, either. The gender traitor model gives women permission to cast us as the enemy—women who can’t escape who we “really” are but should be viewed as suspicious (and punished) for trying so hard to do so.

Meanwhile, of course, the patriarchy entitles men to do violence to trans men under any circumstances.

This fits with most statistics about the majority of violence being perpetrated by cis men. If we “want to be men”, then we’re pressured to accept the terms: losing our so-called protection from male violence, and becoming peers… AKA, fair game. (It’s worth mentioning the extra vindictive glee, as if in getting to initiate us to the socialized brutality of manhood.)

Of course, this protection from male violence is a lie: men are frequently allowed to be violent toward women. As long as it’s in silence and behind closed doors, people can look the other way and tell themselves it isn’t happening.

It’s not a coincidence that this also describes the way violence is most often done to trans men, and transmasculinity as a whole: in (and through) silence.

At the end of the day, framing us as women who want to be men justifies all manner of harm from everyone, because… hey, we said we wanted it!

Vulnerable, isolated, socially unprotected, not accepted as a possibility that even could exist… that can mean an easy target for predators, as it did for me. At the same time, social transphobia was grooming me to seek cis approval. So was the gatekeeping model of medical transition.

The next trap, of course, has already been set up:

“If you (claim you) are a man, you can’t experience misogyny. If you do, you’re admitting you’re really a woman! Gotcha!”

Therein lies the double-bind of transmasculinity: if we claim to be men, we cannot experience oppression based on our unique position within patriarchy; if we insist on accurately naming our experiences, then we must erase our identities as men.

And so, we are silenced… for our own good. Or is it?

The motivations for keeping us silenced are often disguised as beneficial, protective. They can come wrapped in helpful warnings:

“You should be protected from damaging the things I find valuable about you.”

“If you’re undesirable, you’ll be unprotected and alone.”

“Fine, abandon us, but on your own head be it.”

The words aren’t always that stark. But sometimes they are.

Even if most of the “protection” misogyny once offered was an illusion, it was a shock to lose so much so quickly. In reality—in the context of a global majority—many people never start out with the same privileges I lost. But I was young, white, and presumed fertile, which made me an asset to be protected (including from myself, and against my will).

Transphobia cannot be separated from its invention by colonialism, capitalism, and Christianity… or from the the fascist and white supremacist anxieties that still drive reproductive anxieties about who’s having children, when, and how. And on the rare occasions trans men are discussed, it’s often in the context of reproduction.

For example, the title of “the UK’s first pregnant trans man” has been given to at least three trans men that I know of. When discussing the rising number of young trans men referred for healthcare, people (claim to) worry that we’ll change our minds after we’re sterilized. Yet there are also countries where trans men struggle to get legal gender recognition if we haven’t been sterilized, or where our desire to have our own children is used as a reason to deny us legal gender recognition. (By multiple accounts, this latter example includes the UK’s gender identity certificate panel.)

These anxieties may be at odds with each other—should we have kids, or shouldn’t we?—but they both have the same goal:

We must all be protected from the possibility of a truly liberated transmasculinity.

Self-actualised, self-determined trans men? Trans men being listened to, understood, and taken on our own terms? Trans men being granted the same degree of bodily autonomy as cis men?

That would really, really break the system.

No.

Famously, silence is not safety. Going unseen, unheard, or unconsidered as a possibility doesn’t protect trans men from the consequences of defying a social order that transphobia, misogyny, racism, and other power dynamics are built to protect.

That said, I’m not going to summarize all trans men’s experiences by one position—either “we have male privilege” or “we don’t have male privilege”.

There are specific harms that I don’t face anymore, or I’m less likely to experience. Some of these are dependent on my conformity to a binary gender model—which, as a femme, queer, nonbinary trans man, I can tell you is a hell of a lot more complicated than people make it out to be. And there are experiences of misogyny that are new—particularly where they intersect with transphobia, multiplying to form far more significant harms.

Can we wield misogyny against cis women, even hold power over them as we do so? Sometimes, yes. And trans men are no more exempt from examining our internalised misogyny than cis women (or cis men).

But our experiences are conditional and complex—which doesn’t actually reflect the definition of privilege made widely known by Peggy McIntosh’s work on white privilege in her essay “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”.

Why repeat the refrain that “trans men have male privilege… or at least the accidental privilege of invisibility”, then?

Our supposed privilege is almost invariably used as a reason that trans men should go unheard. And if we are speaking to define our own experiences, it means we can be ignored—“just like cis men!”—because we must not be seeing our own privilege, or we’re in denial, or deliberately lying for manipulative purposes.

In other words, it’s implied that trans men can’t be trusted to understand or describe our own experiences… that we’re understood by others better than we understand ourselves… which sounds an awful lot like misogyny.

This is another example of fitting us into an existing worldview. In this case, it’s their fantasy that there’s a magical door for someone to escape the oppressed and join the oppressor, and it must be transition.

Transition means walking through a lot of doorways, but that’s not one of them.

And implying that we can’t be trusted to define our own experiences? Very conveniently, this ensures that there is silence about the silencing.

When we refuse to stay within our limits—to let others tell our stories, or abandon some part of ourselves—is when trans men tend to face violence. And because we’re not supposed to talk about it (or be believed if we do), we often feel like we’re the only one walking this path.

If I’ve ever had doubts, it was in that silent place, before I had words for it. I was caught off-guard by the unfamiliar depth and breadth of vindictive spite, and how gleeful it was, how eager to teach me a lesson for straying in/out/toward/away. And all the while, I was being told that it wasn’t happening.

It’s even more disorienting because, if you drop the illusions of the Disneyland of gender (we all live there, and it’s carefully constructed to be “realer than real”), we’re standing in the same harsh desert. Transphobia burns us all alike—indeed, kneejerk fears are often born out of cis people’s own unprocessed gender-related trauma.

Yet naming our experiences is framed as treading upon others who supposedly have more right to our pain, or are more trustworthy or able to interpret our lives. We’re warned that speaking up too loudly comes at the expense of other trans people—told that our experiences will be twisted, used to harm others and divide us all.

And when we speak about these experiences, the very same mechanism comes to bear on us—preserving, at any cost, the silence about our silencing.

All told, the patriarchy treats trans men to a gaslighting mindfuck. It portrays itself as necessary protection from those to whom it lies about us and encourages to punish us, while undermining our own understanding of our experiences.

All because they can’t let any of us believe we have a choice.

But we do.