The Accidental Erasure of Trans Men

How trans-feminist spaces end up recreating cisgender methods of understanding our own experiences.

Last month, video essayist Jessie Gender put out a video titled "The White Feminism of Barbie" or, How Barbie Cis-ified the Matrix. When it first came out I was excited, because while I enjoyed the Barbie movie, I had found its feminism a little bit one-dimensional and lacking, especially someone who operates heavily on an intersectional framework. I really liked Verilybichie's video on Barbie's plastic feminism, I think I watched it before I even saw the film, and being autistic all I was thinking about was Barbie's feminist messaging and themes.

And I did like the video as I was watching it. It spoke to a lot of thoughts I had while watching the movie itself, bringing up things I didn't think about the first time, and I left with a lot of takeaways for my own feminist framework. It made me sit down and start working on my own articles on Barbie- one on the idea of universal womanhood and another on Barbie and butch identity within the film.

However, there was one part of the video where I had to grit my teeth and be a little frustrated because, even if this was a video on feminism by a trans person, I've come to expect being regarded as a trans man in a certain way.

This video's part was an hour and 39 minutes in, where she says, "Trans people generally, and trans women and nonbinary folks especially, have a long history of being attacked because we directly point out how the binary dichotomy that we exist in is not only bullshit, but (because) the desire to exist within a power hierarchy based on that dichotomy is not the end goal for any one of us."

I did agree with what she was saying- it was just that one thing that bothered me.

“Trans women and nonbinary folks especially.”

I do agree on the rest- trans people are often targeted because we contradict existing standards set by a binary expectation because, how I would phrase it, we reject the gender we're supposed to be and even if we are 'conforming' for our gender identity being transgender will inherently break from those standards. Trans people tend to have a hatred for those standards and it isn't just our existence that disrupts that but our words and methods of critique.

But as with most works that explore trans people in society, the perspectives that ended up incorporated were limited.

It's not that I think they were wrong. In my opinion, the problem is the implication that it is true that trans women and nonbinary people subvert binaries and expectations more so than trans men do. Or, trans men are the 'base' trans experience and anything else is adding on a 'double oppression’. Since trans women are both transgender and women, they are seen(by trans inclusive feminists) as occupying two oppressed categories at once that overlap, creating an experience of trans-misogyny as its own form of oppression. Nonbinary people, by being trans and existing outside the gender binary, aren't seen as two oppressed categories but since they break away from the binary to reject it entirely they also get analyzed as a marginalized gender identity.

Trans men often don't get this same treatment. We're seen as trans(oppressed) + man(privileged), so we are considered to only suffer transphobia and maybe misogyny due to our bodies and being raised female. Our experiences as men and our experiences as trans are considered separate, so there’s little understanding of how those two things work together.

I have a whole thing to say about that, but I really don't think Jessie was doing that intentionally. In fact, when tumblr user faggy--butch posted about what bothered her about that line, Jessie uploaded a video to her after dark channel adressing it and I think responded to it really well. They addressed that it was a blind spot that they had, used the word transandrophobia like it had legitimacy, and talked about why she said what she said while also admitting that it was a mistake and not their intention. They also included a bit about the invisibility of trans men and perpetual infantilization of us when revoking our autonomy, something I've written about in the past but don't see addressed often. Genuinely, it was a mistake but a sign of something larger going on with, as she says, “how we talk about trans men”.

You know that part of HBomberguy's videos where he pulls back the greenscreen(or wallpaper) and says "THIS WASN'T WHAT THIS VIDEO WAS ABOUT AT ALL THIS WAS A SETUP! HERE'S THE REAL TOPIC!!"

Yeah, I'm doing that.

I'm not mad at Jessie. I admire them as a creator a lot, especially her ability to admit she was wrong and do better afterwards. I think she's done a lot for talking about transmisogyny and feminism and trans rights with a large platform, which is so valuable right now with so much disinformation about. What I think it was is, not to use a liberal buzzword, unconscious bias. The accidental erasure of trans men. And I’m using what happened as a vehicle to talk about something larger than just what one YouTuber said.

My personal theory is that even though we're talking about trans people from a trans perspective, we're still using cisgender modes of analysis. If cisgender conflicts are women as an oppressed category and men as a privileged/nonoppressed category(or that's the simplified version at least), then we are trying to transfer those same understandings of dynamics over to trans gender dynamics.

We are all oppressed for being trans, but nonbinary people have the status of being neither men or women and trans women have their womanhood as second groups to analyze them by. When looking at those overlapping categories, those are the ones we think to talk about intersectionality with because that's what you'd do in a cisfeminist framework of analysis. We don't consider the unique interactions between transmasculinity and manhood.

We don't consider that not all trans men pass and therefore experience male privilege, we don't consider that trans men who do pass are suddenly treated differently and maybe not better, we don't consider that passing trans men that have that ability to go stealth in cisgender society can ultimately have that revoked, we don’t consider trans men who pass as women but live vocally as trans men, we don’t consider closeted trans men. We don't consider this because even though we are talking about trans experiences, we're trying to recreate cisgender dynamics and use that to understand our lives from a sociological perspective.

It's hard, because due to this fact, we have little reference texts specifically on trans men. But because we have no books or popular video essayists(except Alexander Avila), no one thinks about things like this and the way we talk about trans gendered oppression doesn't change.

That's my theory, at least. I've been reading books on these subjects, or the ones that exist- specifically Men In Place by Miriam Abelson and Female Masculinity by Jack Halberstam- and I want to talk about these subjects more and hopefully get an audience that actually receives them.

While there are people talking about transmasc oppression now, I've found that it's not many people coming at it from an academic and societal standpoint and there is significant backlash to basic things like having the word transandrophobia. As a trans man who is interested in doing those things I hope my voice contributes to the conversation and maybe changes how you think or adds perspectives you didn't know about.