Why "Male Socialization" is Transmisogyny
When we grow up we are taught how to live. One of the aspects of this is socialization into gender roles. Societies tend to teach their various genders how they are supposed to behave and fit in with the rest of the society. In many societies, including the one from which I am writing, this involves constructing and teaching two binary genders: boy and girl, man and woman, male and female. These are often called "male socialization" and "female socialization."
This concept works well enough for cisgender people. There is some varation, but for the most part in Western society this works well enough to describe the way cis boys and girls are raised to adulthood. It does come with the trauma of being coerced into specific gender roles and a suppression of divergence from it, but their socialization more or less matches the gender are. The wave moves with them, more or less.
For the most part, you could say that trans people are socialized according to their gender assigned at birth. In Western society, most transfeminine people are taught to be boys and transmasculine people are taught to be girls growing up. In this way, you could say—and many do—that transfeminine experience male socialization and transmasculine people experience female socialization.
However, that framing suggests that trans people undergo the same socialization as cisgender people with the same gender assigned at birth. That doesn't match with the experiences of many trans people. The experience of someone going with a wave is going to be very different from someone going against it. Being told you are something you are not and being forced to perform that gender is traumatizing. This applies even for trans people who don't know they are transgender until later in life. This is because being transgender is fundamental to us. We don't become transgender—we are always transgender, and that manifests throughout our lives.
This does not mean that the trauma trans people experience does not affect our behavior. Quite contrary. Trauma often changes how we behave. But this trauma is very different from the experience of being forced to go along with your gender, it's not fair nor accurate to use the same label to describe them both. The effects of the "male socialization" of trans women is really the trauma of conversion therapy.
The experiences of trans women are not commensurate with the experiences of cis men. To say otherwise reinforces the notion that we are just men who chose to be women rather than our femininity being something more innate. Cisheteronormativity must suppress us for a reason.
I have focused on male socialization and trans women specifically here because that's what I relate to best and I don't often hear people accusing transmasculine people of having female socialization by other trans people as a way to invalidate their experiences. That said, what I have said applies equally to all forms of transition. We are not what we were forced to be—we shouldn't invalidate that.
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