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Gender Socialization is Real (Complex)
No one is simply “socialized male” or “socialized female”.
One of the common tools used to bludgeon trans people, particularly trans women, is the concept of gender socialization. This concept holds, in most cases, that babies who are assigned male at birth are taught to be boys in all ways, and internalize the entitlement, confidence, aggressiveness, and even predatory nature that many men are culturally poisoned with. Conversely, if someone is assigned female at birth, this viewpoint holds they have been socialized to be self-effacing, considerate, giving, and gentle.
From alt-right transphobes like Ben Shapiro to faux-scientific transphobes like Jesse Singal to casually transmisogynistic feminists like Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche , the sentiment that trans people are “raised as” the gender they were assigned at birth is both prevalent and toxic. Here’s an example of how it can be articulated:
What’s most maddening to me, as a researcher, is that this theory of simple, binary gender socialization is so often seen as common sense. If society thinks you’re a boy, you’re raised to behave, think and feel like a boy, the logic goes. In a sense, you are tainted by how you were raised, and never truly capable of fully embodying any other gender after that. Even if you do learn to perform the behaviors of another gender, according to this theory, you will never escape your initial years of being seen and treated as a “boy” or a “girl”.
Upon closer inspection, this (nonscientific) theory is obviously too simple. It falls apart under even mild scrutiny and questioning. What does it mean to be “socialized female”? What experiences must you have to count as being “socialized male”? If a child was constantly punished for not fulfilling their assigned gender role well, were they really socialized into that role? What if a child knows from a very young age that they aren’t male or female, and don’t buy into the norms associated with those genders? If a 33-year-old trans woman was seen as a “boy” for the first 13 years of her life, but then lived as a woman for the following 20 years, was she…
