lee on Nostr: thinking about oppositional sexism today and its impact on the idea of "male ...

thinking about oppositional sexism today and its impact on the idea of "male socialization" regarding transfems

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first, the primer: oppositional sexism.

traditional sexism: men good women bad

oppositional sexism: men and women are each other's *opposites*. this is understood to be both normal and natural, *and* morally good and correct.

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let me lay out two thought patterns that come to weird conclusions if you are, perhaps, a transmasc person who hasn't engaged with and started to mentally dismantle oppositional sexism.

ONE. as a young person, I (a transmasc) experienced female socialization. if I understand transfems to be my "mirror," my opposite, then clearly they have experienced male socialization growing up.

and that's often not true, right? in fact, both transmascs and transfems are growing up and absorbing messages that this femaleness or femininity that's about them is Bad And Wrong. even if *we* don't understand our own gender, children around us often pick up on it and respond accordingly. My wife frames it as being socialized as the little fag who should be hit with rocks.

TWO. as a (theoretical) non-passing (passing bad etc not the point here) transmasc, it can be true to say that I am experiencing misogyny from being seen as a woman. If I understand transfems to be my "mirror," then a non-passing transfem is seen as a man.

and that's often not true, right? in fact, non-passing transfems are still often seen as either visibly transfem or as somehow deviating from maleness in some uncountable, ephemeral way, which removes their access to privilege and ease of moving about.

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tl;dr if you have not unpacked/started working to unpack oppositional sexism, you are susceptible to transmisogynistic stereotypes.