Not transmasc invisibility, but erasure / Antitransmasculinity as erasure
intricacies of transmasc invisibility, and the fallacies of strictly gendered transphobia
The point of this work is in no way to argue against the hyper-visibility of transfeminine people within the media, within legislation, within social spaces or anywhere, nor to argue that this hyper-visibility is a privilege in any way — because it is not. Hard stop. One of the most important pillars of my communication is understanding that the insistence upon one truth does not imply the opposite of another. When I say that transmasculine people are erased and made invisible in many ways by society and that this is a cause for immediate concern and something to interrogate — I do not mean that the hyper-visibility of transfeminine people is not a cause for concern and not something that needs to be interrogated. I mean exactly what I said, and only that. The desire to ascribe a meaning to my words that I did not imbue them with is common, as language is imprecise and our emotions are intense.
I have been accused at many points of being a (t)MRA, standing for (trans)men’s rights activist. This is a blatant misunderstanding of what Men’s Rights Activism actually is and what it stands for, as it insists that any Men’s Rights Activism language or goals have been built with transmasculine people in mind, when they have never been. MRA’s are not in any way attempting to redefine masculinity or expand upon its definition, instead they argue for a return to tradition, a repositioning of the patriarchy where transmasculine people would have no place. I am not arguing from the position of the patriarchy not providing me with benefits that I was raised to believe I should have. MRA’s set their sights on combating feminism, whereas everything in my work about gender and transmasculinity vehemently supports intersectional feminism, only pushing back on white supremacist cis centered feminism that fails to be intersectional, and thus, leaves out massive portions of people who do indeed need intersectional feminism.
The reason the things that I or other transmasculine people say might sometimes resemble sentiments made by MRA’s is because we are insisting upon our manhood, and also attempting to draw attention to the things that other people do that harm us, as men, and as trans people and that sometimes the people who do these things — are women. Does this mean that we blame women (trans or cis) for these things? No, not at all. Women are not to blame for fuctions of antitransmasculinity. It is transphobia, antitransmasculinity, exorsexism, white supremacy and all pillars of opression surrounding it that are to blame. The people who perpetuate these things are not only women — it’s everyone. It’s important to note that this does include transmasculine people themselves. When I say that something is a problem that transmasculine people are dealing with, I am never blaming women, trans or cis or otherwise. I am always drawing attention to something that anyone, regardless of gender, can perpetuate. I am calling attention to the systems in place that reward acts of antitransmasculinity. I am calling attention to the ways that these things harm trans people because I care about them and I want the world to be more tolerable for us all to live in. I care about the tragic number of transmasculine people committing suicide when they are such a microscopic portion of the population. I care about the fact that transmasculine people expressing pain are so often read as in opposition to the pain of dealing with transmisogyny, to the pain felt by transfeminine people. All things that MRA’s couldn’t give two shits about if you know who they really are. Calling transmasculine people who express things like this MRA’s is taking the position that because we are men, or masculine people, that we stand in opposition to feminism and women (trans and cis) because we are not among a vulnerable marginalized population of people marginalized by our genders. This is a denial of our transness as an axis of our identity that matters, and an act of antitransmasculinity.
When I speak of transmasculine invisibility and erasure, it is not in specific contrast to transfeminine hyper-visibility, which has been proven for a very long time to be pervasive and harmful. Too often, invisibility, on the other hand, is talked about as an inherent privilege of transmasculine existence, too many sources to cite of people saying things along the line of “transmasculine people just get to blend in without issue”, which could not be farther from the truth. People will then bring up trans men who pass as cis and are stealth in their regular lives. This argument falls apart when you interrogate the specifics of our society, where there is no way to entirely erase your existence of all traces of your transness. There is always a way to be outed, because we live in a world that is hostile to transness, and even people who are successfully stealthing are at risk, especially due to the inherent view of being stealth as maliciously deceptive by cishet society. The relative obscurity that trans men who pass as cis men get to enjoy does not change society, and it does not change the fact that being outed will have consequences. This viewpoint of invisibility as a privilege is a display of the function of antitransmasculinity that rewards people for upholding the concept that most transmasculine people are white, cis passing, hyper masculine, educated and able. There is also a viewpoint expressed by many that people affected by transmasculine invisibility both envy and desire the same level of hypervisibility that transfeminine people have suffered from. This is something I feel stems from these conversations happening over so many years, people being worn down by them and stuck on perceiving those who are begging to be seen as them begging to be seen in all the ways so many wish they could only get a reprieve from. I hope to, in small ways, throughout my life’s work, usher us toward seeing the ways we ask for help and visibility more for what they are — cries for help from a world that is trying to bury us all.
Invisibility as a term for what is happening to transmasculine people is a fallacy in and of itself. What we suffer from is not invisibility, but deliberate erasure. We are erased explicitly so that violence against us can continue to be ignored, so that transmasculine people who rise to any level of power can be highlighted (cough, buck angel, cough) and so that the perception of transmasculine people can remain being largely privileged white cis passing transsexuals who have lived flawlessly as men 6 months into t or impressionable young (white) girls who have been infected by a social contagion. This perception of transmasculinity is explicitly due to deliberate erasure of every other kind of transmasculine person that exists, so that violence can continue to be done against us behind closed doors. It is not transmasculine people that are made invisible, it is anti-transmasc violence, including militant state violence and interpersonal violence, which makes us through a process of essentialization, aggressors without aggression and victims without words. As you read this interrogation of how the erasure of transmascs, trans men and intersex trans people actually functions, it should be clear how this erasure does not function as a shield from violence, if you have any desire for legitimate solidarity between marginalized demographics of people and I implore you to see how this function of erasure and invisibility is not a shield from violence and is instead a cloak that hides the dead bodies of trans people. An intentional burying. This recent phenomena of other trans people agreeing that transmasculine people who do not medically transition or desire outward presenting masculinity are simply cis people doing “neoliberal cosplay” is another layer of this intentional erasure that serves nothing but the status-quo that beckons that transness is nothing but a contagion they have been infected by.
The violence of cis men and women against transmasculine people is rampant, and it is often buried. Cis men by and large get away with abusing and killing us in private, while the state upholds and encourages it by more often than not misgendering us posthumously or choosing to gender us correctly while we are still alive and seeking aid, so that we can be denied protection entirely. The status quo aids those who seek to cover the violence they perpetuate against transmasculine people because we are so often seen and treated as the symptom of a virus, one that must be cured.
There is also a general assumption that discrimination against transmasculine people is entirely reclusive and non-aggressive, especially in conversations where people see a point in comparing it to the discrimination that trans women suffer from. I have to say, I see no point in this whatsoever. Trans people shouldn’t have to suffer from discrimination, hard stop. I see no point in ranking the discrimination suffered as less overt or more, as less aggressive or more, when we live in a world that is very overtly, telling us it wishes none of us existed at all. Often, this idea that the discrimination that transmasculine people suffer from is not overt and aggressive is the justification for excluding us entirely from discussions of discrimination, and this is another form of violent erasure. This reasoning is a reason that so many transmasculine people are stuck doing survival sex work with no way out, or dying entirely closeted. Excluding and erasing transmasculine people entirely from conversations about trans people who are forced into sex work to survive or afford gender affirming procedures is not helpful to the transfeminine people who are also forced into survival sex work. This is especially poignant to me as someone who was given the guidance of older transfeminine sex workers early in my sex work career, as I saw the safety we can create for each other when we work together in these precarious environments. We are stronger together, but we can’t be together if the general implication is that transfeminine people are on their own when it comes to being forced into survival sex work. This myopic view of “we have to focus on THE most vulnerable group, everyone else after that” makes it so that myself and thousands of other transmasculine people are actively dying in sex work, with no recourse and no resource while the general understanding says that people like me are included within groups of people who are drowning in resource. The idea that transmasculine people in sex work exist in relative privilege to transfeminine people in sex work is a fallacy, and it is one that makes it more dangerous for every single one of us to do what we need to survive.
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This brings me to the idea that all transfeminine people inherently exist within more intersections of oppression and thus face more discrimination is an idea that almost ignores intersectionality entirely, as it avoids addressing it in any meaningful way. This line of thinking is something that I feel has directly resulted in the rampant mistreatment of Black transmasculine people I have witnessed by nonblack and particularly white transfeminine people who see themselves as inherently more oppressed, inherently more discriminated against and thus privileged over them and able to treat them like an oppressor class. This is not how intersectionality (a term I must remind everyone was coined by a Black woman specifically to address how race intersects with her other identities) functions. Shallow understanding of intersectionality like this, again, is perpetuated by all groups of people — not just white transfeminine people. Dr. Devon Price, a widely published, educated white transmasculine person once said: “trans men are deferred to, listened to, not treated as predators on the level trans women are, are invited into a variety of gendered spaces and seen as safe to be there, are more favorably and sympathetically depicted in media and experience many many other advantages and we do not need to pass as cis for any of these things to happen.”
The issue with these statements is that none of them are true if you apply even the most basic level of intersectionality. None of these things are true when it comes to Black and Indigenous trans men, particularly if those Black and Indigenous trans men are also disabled and low income. This is an overt attachment to theorizing about and comparison of transmasc and transfem experiences lacking intersectionality and centering on an extremely white ideal of transness and identity. The desire to find transmasculine people to validate this idea that we carry inherent privilege no matter where or how we exist has been validated extensively by primarily, white academics, who are not known to be notoriously plugged into spaces that are offering wide levels of diversity. This sort of hyper representation and acceptance is only present in spaces where you consider white, passing, educated transmasculine people to be the default. There is nobody else overrepresented in social or activist spaces except for that demographic. Black transmasculine people are overwhelmingly either stealth, living as Black men (a position in society notorious for being full of wealths of privilege, especially when you exist within other marginalizations as a Black man! /s) or poor survival sex workers barely scraping by or surviving decently by virtue of suppression of identity to stay within the confines that cishetero white supremacist society has laid out for us to be deemed worthy of life. Black people are treated like the predators of all nonblack people, everywhere, due to global white supremacy. This does not stop when we are trans, it only increases. Indigenous people are called and treated as “savages’’. This does not disappear when the axis of transness is introduced. It all multiplies.
Bobby Noble said in his 2004 paper, “Sons of the movement”: “What this criticism (trans men are hyper represented bc of male privilege / passing privilege) actually reveals when it seeks and thinks it finds privilege occurring to gender is, first, its own inability to think intersectionally and second, its complete erasure of whiteness as a mark of privilege” So — what i’m saying here is that 98% of the time when people are saying that transmascs are inherently privileged and they point to these organizations or academics or even actors on tv — this is actually a criticism that should be aimed at white supremacy as failing to do this continually treats the white transmasculine experience as the default, thus erasing the experiences of Black and Indigenous and other racialized transmasculine people, and treating them as unimportant, trivial and insignificant. This is a huge consequence of upholding antitransmasculinity and pretending it is in service of trans women, positioning it as the theory of white trans men, when in reality, Black and Indigenous transmasculine individuals are having their lives made worse by this insistence.
Often the perception of transmasculine people vs the perception of transfeminine people in media is used as a way to “prove” the inherent safety or privilege of transmasculine people, but this premise is fundamentally flawed because again, it lacks intersectionality or the ability to stop viewing the experiences of white trans people as the default. It is a common statement that “trans women get called predators in the media, while trans men are called confused girls who need to be protected” it is often even said that the protection these “little girls’ ‘ need is from transfems. It is often said that transmasculine people are treated as fragile and innocent, incapable of causing harm — and again, this is something that falls apart entirely if you apply even the most minute level of intersectionality.
Transfems and transmascs get both of these treatments, depending on a variance of factors and intersections that they might or might not exist within. If you pay attention to a wider set of people and conversations, you’ll notice a lot of things. For instance, Black transfems and women are often treated like confused, groomed victims of a sinister plot (this is often tied to antisemetic conspiracy theory about Black Male Annihilation) to destroy Black manhood and masculinity as a whole, mostly to deconstruct the Black nuclear family structure. Black transmascs and men are often treated like violent predators who don a masculinity identity or exterior solely as a means to gain proximity to patriarchal privilege, specifically to harm and sodomize white women, and also to destroy the Black nuclear family structure and to take over the role of Black men. It’s both, and it always has been. You have to pay attention to more than what you are made to see, because these things are deliberately erased and made invisible so that the violence can continue to be done. It is not helpful to say that transfems only get the scary predator version nor that transmacss only get the helpless victim version, as it true, it lacks intersectionality and it buries those of us dealing with transphobia outside of this essentialist way of its functioning.
There is a way that people talk about transmasculine people who speak on antitransmasc violence and erasure, as if they are simply complaining about being left out whereas other people are terrified for their lives due to danger. I think it’s easy to forget, when you are in danger, that none of us can do this alone, and isolation and invisibility does in fact kill all kinds of trans people. There is this odd perception that transmasculine people who express things like this are jealous of the violence being done to transfeminine people, instead of genuinely desperate to have the violence already being committed against them recognized as something happening at all. A consistent sentiment is echoed of “you’re just mad some trans woman was mean to you online” (because of course, it has to be a trans woman, because the lack of sympathy comes from the idea that any expression of transmasc pain is in juxtaposition to transfeminine pain) — and this is a brutal, sad sentiment to see so consistently. An oversimplification of what being ostracized and isolated does to people who are already such a small, targeted minority of marginalized people. There is a reason so many transmasculine people are speaking up about this, and it is not because they are not at risk in other ways, or because someone being mean to them online is the worst thing they have ever dealt with — it is literally because the isolation and invisibility and erasure only compounds that risk and adds even more. This is another place where true solidarity needs to be desired for it to make any sense. If you see transmasculine people as not being a part of the same fight, it is hard to see them asking for a hand as anything but a detractor from the help you need to escape and evade the violence that is after you, and I am sorry. I am sorry for all of us, that there are not enough kind hands to go around, so much so that our hands reaching out to one another look like sabotage. So little places for reprieve that ambivalence to the suffering of others looks like resistance to the things crushing us all.
Another pillar of transmasculine erasure is the pervasive myth that transmasculine people pass better, and that taking testosterone gives people enough markers of masculinity to pass fairly quickly. This belief is blatantly false, and closely rooted in the myth propagated by TERFS that testosterone causes “irreversible damage” to young girls, a concept being used to elevate the myth of “rapid onset gender dysphoria” and to deny transmasculine people gender affirming care. Testosterone is a hormone at the same level of strength as any other. It is not the strong hormone, nor is estrogen the weak one. I was given exogenous estrogen as a child, and it’s the reason I have gynecomastia. The idea that transmasculine people pass better exists in tandem with the idea that transmasculine people don’t try hard enough to pass, and thus, are actually just cis women doing neoliberal transgenderism, and that all trans men pass after a year on t. Many of the people that are called trenders, cis women who want a share in some oppression — are people who have been on t for a long time. Bodies are different, and they react to hormones differently. It’s said it’s easy to pass as a man, but also long hair is too feminine, and so is curly hair and you also have to retrain your hips to walk the right way and also you can’t really groom yourself anymore unless you pass in every other way or else it’s your fault that people don’t read you as a man. It’s all bullshit. T doesn’t make transmasculine pass more easily than any other hormone makes anyone else pass more easily. When you spread the myth that T is a hormone that causes changes so quickly and permanently, you validate the transphobes and TERFs spreading the myth of rapid onset gender dysphoria and irreversible damage. The idea that passing is inherently a privilege for trans men, because cis men are privileged, is also a lie that avoids addressing intersectionality. Take an example in fiction, an example that is the reality for many of us. In Stone Butch Blues, the one Black transmasculine character present, goes on T and it is immediately harder for him to be read as gender ambiguous butch lesbian, and this does not serve them. The more he passes, the harder it gets, and his story ends with him committing suicide, because it didn’t get better. His passing did not bring privilege, it bought hyper visibility as a queer Black man, it brought him violence. You cannot avoid addressing intersections, and the act of denying these intersections when discussing things like transmasculine privilege is an act of harm that falls upon trans people who freeze in the shadows the hardest.
We, as trans people, are all Schrodinger’s gender. We are both seen and not seen as whatever assigned gender at birth is being projected onto us, when it serves the person in front of us. Transmasculine people are seen as women when it’s convenient and men when it serves others. Transfeminine people are seen as women when it’s convenient and men when it serves others. Non-binary people are seen as trans when it’s convenient and “cis-adjacent” when it serves others. Intersex trans people are seen as a strange deviant third sex when convenient and as quirky brainwashed cis people when it serves others. There is no box they won’t put us in to achieve their goals, because it is about their goals. The goal is to be right, regardless of how contradictory the path is that led them there. It doesn’t matter what any of us really are, or think we are, or know ourselves as. They will see and categorize us as whatever they want, that reinforces whatever narrative they’re trying to spin about us at that time. There is no such thing as transphobia, misgendering, degendering, ungendering that only one kind of trans person suffers from. We are all Schrodinger’s transgender to a society that wishes we were not here at all.
Criticism within the marginalized groups we exist within is a double-edged sword, one I am well aware of. I do what I do to increase understanding, to offer perspective so that we can find ways to connect through our similarities and build stronger solidarity through understanding our differences. I fear that the basis of so much intra-marginalized group criticism is for others to feel validated in their worsening attitudes toward other marginalized people — that will never be what I’m about. I do not turn to my keyboard and write these things to be validated in the awful things that I see being something that speaks for us as a group, something that informs my attitudes toward other trans people. I turn to my keyboard to combat misinformation rooted in consistently peddled fallacy. I turn to my keyboard to write these things to let other people know that there’s another way to see things. There’s another way.
I’m going to wrap up with this: I want more trans people to exist. I want more transmasculine people to exist. I want more transfeminine people to exist. That wont happen if we don’t express the pain we feel and the ways we perpetuate one another’s suffering. There is always a way to do this that doesn’t represent this mistreatment that we inflict upon one another as indicative of our entire group, nor should we allow these experiences to inform how we perceive and communicate with and engage with one another. There are not enough of us to justify targeting one another in that way, a true example of people eating their own and gaining no sustenance from it. There is no invisibility without deliberate erasure. There is no invisibility when targeted groups stand together.
I’m sorry that things are like this.
