birlinterrupted:

Loving this implication that I had a happy and carefree childhood lol. Sorry if this response is a bit long.

I am really at this point p tired of arguments around socialization. As I said before, there are a lot of theoretical issues with trying to talk abt this in an individualized way (not all women or men experience the same childhood and socialization, there are numerous other factors at play, general trends are not determinative of individual behavior or beliefs or even upbringings). After all, if trans women have broken probably the number one rule of male socialization (‘be/become a man’), I find it weird to act like they would exhibit all other forms of it.

But regardless of the actual completely untestable and faith based idea (unless they come up w a good measure of ‘male socialization units’) I just think there’s something misguided abt this sort of approach to determining people’s identities. It’s a strange double standard that you are somehow implicitly alright with women who treat other women (including their daughters) in incredibly misogynistic ways, or at the very least they shouldn’t have to be constantly ready to have their experience of misogyny denied for it.

Like, as opposed to using *former* social situations and identities as some sort of rough (and frequently incorrect) social justice heuristic for what you think is going on, wouldn’t it be more efficient to just like… pay attention to when women are mistreating other women? And to think that the directionality here is necessarily that trans women are going to more frequently be misogynistic towards cis women than the other direction is…. not really my experience. At the end of the day, this sort of approach is always imo framing trans women as an inherent threat to the safety of cis women (and some men!), and trying to act from there, which I dont think is going to actually be a helpful way of understanding what place trans women have in women’s spaces.

Because, let’s look at this from a less abstract, perhaps more pastoral perspective when thinking abt groups of people. You are basically saying that trans women have some sort of metaphysical taint of gendered socialization from our childhoods (which are, in this imaginary, always less traumatic or patriarchically harmed than literally every single cis woman). How long are we supposed to have that stain, that original sin? Indefinitely? Or is there some sort of “Actual Woman, Cis Feminist Approved” licensure process that we should have to go through? This way of treating cis women as the arbiters of our experience is… unsatisfactory to me.

And the danger here is that what gets set up in this scenario is basically an underclass of women who have a readily available way to be shut down, isolated, what have you. If the idea is that I should be tolerated within women’s spaces, provided that no one feels like I am exhibiting the sinful Male Socialization, pragmatically that basically comes down to the situation where I am welcome, as long as I don’t disagree with or anger any given cis woman, esp. one with a lot of social power within a group. The idea that I hold some sort of inner hatred or oppressive impulse towards women can be used at any time to dispose of this underclass of women with completely sanitized feminist conscience. I hope you can see how easily this sort of thing could be abused, how it *has* been abused, many times by people who have abused us.

After all, telling women that they are “acting like a man” has always been a method of social control over women when we have gotten too loud, too angry, too demanding or assertive. But with a “system” (because after all, there’s not really a system) you come to a situation where a specifically marginalized and victimized group of women are expected to live up to all of the contradictory demands placed on women as a whole or risk losing their social support. I think it’s just a bad idea to claim a feminist praxis of making sure there’s an underclass of women who are *really* examined to make sure they are submissive, quiet, deferential, agreeable – all because of a ‘participation’ in systems that we were coerced into (many times sexually and physically by both men and women) *as children*!

And really, this results in (imo) a sort of penalization for gender nonconformity away from manhood (and an encouragement of dissociation from womanhood, but that’s another question for another time). Setting trans women as on a sort of eternal probationary status while losing any sort of social supports they would have had as queer men makes it so *less* people can risk doing so. The irony is that the only people with the sort of social buffer who would be able to not just suffer in the closet are the sort of women that many cis women claim as examples of how trans women are privileged/socialized as men (your Jenny Pritzkers, Caitlyn Jenners, Martine Rothblatts). You end up in a world and feminist approach that encourages people to be men, whether thru giving little support and an avenue of exploitation to people disidentifying with manhood, or through treating certain men as inherently feminist and female-socialized. Considering your idea that men only exist to oppress women, I hope you could see the problems here.

But I mean, I know this is a long response, and mostly not an argument regarding the veracity of socialization-castes; I just hope you can see from my perspective why this approach is just so sorely lacking on a practical level when it comes to treating trans women as more than just something to be tolerated (but with cautious suspicion) within women’s communities. I just don’t think it makes sense to address these sorts of situations through the cipher of identity, especially identities that people are rejecting outright, through mechanisms that clearly didn’t work completely on them!