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The Beautiful Failure of Being a Man
Trans men and cis men have a lot more in common than you might think.
There’s a notion I run into quite frequently in trans inclusive spaces, which holds that trans men are just different from cis men in a fundamental way.
Cis men cannot possibly relate to the vulnerabilities and insecurities that trans men face, according to this argument, because they’ve never experienced gender minority status. And because trans men have been impacted by both transphobia and misogyny throughout their lives, they understand the gender-marginalized experience in ways than no cis man ever could. It is this understanding of oppression, and the intimacy with it, that supposedly makes trans men safer to be around and more trustworthy than cisgender men.
Cis men are the oppressor class, as most good feminist-thinking people understand it, and their cisness and manhood appear to work together to keep them exalted.
There is no separating those dual sources of power in how many people arrange their politics. Cis men’s identities are seen as almost anti-intersectional: all the violence and entitlement they wield falls under the single banner of man. And in effect, this point of view parcels trans men out of manhood — we’re argued to not be an oppressor class in any situation, to not belong alongside men in men’s spaces, to never be secure, to never be powerful, and to not be beholden to the standards that other gender minorities might apply to cis men.
The argument that cis men are fundamentally different and other than trans men is also used to justify the creation of things like “women & trans” spaces, and event policies that permit anyone but cis men to attend. It creates a fundamental asymmetry, this way viewing the world, because it holds that any person who was assigned female at birth is inherently more trustworthy by default, and belongs in all gender minority spaces, whereas any person who was assigned male at birth must disavow that identity repeatedly, and convincingly enough, if they are to be accepted as anything but a privileged oppressor.
The fundamental logic driving the idea is transmisogyny, in other words — and it endangers trans women immensely. It also has the side effect of completely…
