This is a difficult read for me. Much of it reminds me strongly of how trans men and transmasc nonbinary people have, in the past, engaged in transmisgyny against my sisters and me. Some passages read directly like the emotional, psychological and gendertheoretical foundation for how they have practiced silencing and ostracism against us out of a sense of “not all men” fragile masculinity. That “not all men” is disavowed halfheartedly at one point does not change that.

I will go over each of these problematic parts individually to highlight how pervasive that ice-cold undercurrent is in the text. Note that i am not doing this to attack the author, but to engage in good faith with somebody who has a drastically different relation to doing gender than myself.

I found the argument that my dysphoria was rooted in internalized misogyny—and contrary to my interests as a feminist and “woman”—to be particularly compelling.

For those not in the know, “your dysphoria as a transmasculine person is internalized misogyny” is dyed in the wool TERF reasoning. Telling trans people that our dysphoria is actually something else that is entirely not trans related is textbook transphobia and a red flag for when gatekeeping begins to border conversion therapy or sending somebody on the “AFAB only” to detransitioner pipeline. This person has, knowingly or not, spent a significant amount of time in T(W)ERF-influenced tumblr millieus and has soaked something up there.

So while I had said very little to my therapist about my transness to begin with, I soon decided to explain to her how, ultimately, who you are has to do with how you’re classed socially, not how you identify.

And here we immediately have the next point of TERFism, questioning the concept of gender identity as a seperate dimension of gender unrelated to gender as a dimension of class, biological labeling or performative acts.

In response to radical feminism’s legacy of abuse toward trans women, some feminist women (cis and trans) have developed a “trans-inclusive” politics oriented toward encompassing trans women in a fundamentally binary “sex class” framework. In the new radical feminism, much like the old, women (including trans women) constitute a class exploited by men (including trans men).

Now it is already seguing into a stance against transfeminism, including the completely false claim that transfeminism is, somehow, fundamentally a binary framework. The red flags keep piling up and we still haven’t arrived at the meat of the article.

But this framework puts transmasculine people at a really painful crossroads: Do we transition and self-actualize, with the knowledge that doing so will render us complicit in the oppression of our sisters, the same oppression we’ve experienced all our lives? Or do we force ourselves to live as women (or else non-men of a different sort, though this ideology leaves little space to conceptualize nonbinariness), repressing the parts of us that call toward a transition away from womanhood and/or into maleness?

False dichotomy. No transfeminist has ever claimed that transmasculine people should not transition, but that their transition will open up (often highly conditional) male privilege that they have to reckon with if they want to be allies to their sisters. Deeply dishonest framing. Yuck. Ew.

To “trans-inclusive” radical feminists, however, trans men have actually crossed class lines—or else have always been men (and therefore class enemies), a fact that is retroactively revealed upon transition.

In spite of how this person frames it, it is an extremely common stance among trans people of all genders that we have, since birth, always been our gender and have simply not understood this before our cracking. I understand that they perceive their biography in different ways, and that’s perfectly valid, but what is really fucking problematic is this constant devaluation of the lived experiences of trans people like me who know that we have never been our AGAB.

This is especially alarming because the deep-seated belief that we all have once been our AGAB is common in transmedicalist environments. It is extremely sus to generalize such claims to all trans people.

In reality, the experiences typically called “male” or “female” socialization are both individually and culturally variant, and do not serve as direct opposites of each other.

“Male and female socialization” is a TERFy reskinning of gender essentialism. Not beating the “i have supermassive brainworms from hanging out with tumblr transmisogynists” allegations again.

It feels risky to reference Tumblr as an influential source of trans thought, as though doing so lends credence to the reactionary stereotyping of trans people as inherently childish and politically unserious. And yet the theory developed on that platform—through collaboration, argument, and reflection on personal experience—continues to inform my work and how I conceive of myself years after finally logging off. The collective knowledge we created there, for better or for worse, still remains

Who would have guessed.

The assumption that masculinity necessarily means freedom from gender oppression ignores how race/ism is always gendered, and in particular how Black masculine people are gendered as inherently dangerous (and targeted for anti-Black violence on the basis of that “danger”).

Immediately after a paragraph about the literal textbook case of misogynoir, they implicitly deny that misoginoir exists and imply that black men are opressed more than black women, another classic of tumblr transmisogyny. Seriously, wtf have you dragged in, OP?

While liberal feminisms prefer to draw a distinction between “healthy” and “toxic” masculinities, a sex-class-oriented approach necessitates treating all maleness as at least suspect, purely by nature of the class relation

This is how you disavow responsibility for perpetuating patriarchy. Yey, you fucking idiot, when you transition into manhood or at least something inherently enmeshed with it, you have to reflect critically on your masculinity, just as white people have to reflect critically on our position in a white supremacist society and citizens of the imperial core have to reflect on our relation to imperial hyperexploitation. You cannot handwave that away because it inconveniences you.

I did not find the call to be a “good man” particularly compelling, at least as a solution to patriarchy. And yet, the call to be a man—of any sort—remained.

Really telling on yourself there, you know that?

Edit: Here’s the rest of this shitshow. What a load of tripe.

The article’s conclusion—the part I found so transformative—was an endorsement of unitary theory: the belief that patriarchy and capitalism (along with race, disability, and other forms of social domination) constitute one complex social order, rather than separate systems that at points overlap.

Hard disagree. Patriarchy has existed continuously for thousands of years before capitalism. Capitalism has not invented patriarchy, it has inherited and transformed it.

Secondly, unitary theory redefined the terms of gender oppression in a way that places the ultimate blame on the bourgeoisie (a group that I, in my entry-level research job, definitely do not belong to, with none of the grey area associated with my maleness).

How super fucking convenient. It’s not my fault i’m a smol bean uWu, it’s just the bourgeoisie that does the bad patriarchy thing. Fuck this dude.

I now understand the ways in which working-class men benefit from oppressing women as analogous to the ways in which scabs benefit from strikebreaking. The gains are undoubtedly real on an individual level but are not representative of workers’ ultimate class interest in either scenario. This allows for meaningful solidarity across gender lines.

I doubt this person has solidarity across gender lines if i’m the one across these gender lines.

Obviously, holding this belief has been deeply unsettling to my conception of feminism—and there’s still a part of me that worries it’s wrong of me to displace total responsibility for patriarchy onto a class I’m conveniently not a part of.

Wow, once more almost getting it. Sorry, this ain’t it, chief.