Doyle’s gleeful misogyny towards an “acceptable” target — either a specific cis woman he’s decided wants to force all trans men to desist, while also implicitly accusing her of transmisogyny, both on less than zero evidence, or a notional cis strawwoman he’s created just to yell at— is kind of hard to stomach.
I’m particularly struck by how vicious he is towards this hypothetical (or “hypothetical”) transmasc-exclusive pro-transfem cis feminist, because she is, notionally and theoretically, of course, not flattering his ego and not interested in what he, as a man, has to say about feminism and women’s liberation.
Like, it’s almost to the point of caricature, right?
I really appreciate this essay overall! Just, Doyle’s behaviour is egregious enough to briefly make me forget what else I wanted to comment on.
I definitely could have gone further into the blatant misogyny at play as you've pointed out. I blame not doing so on how much I had to cover because of Doyle's disjointed essay. The length of this probably reveals that, haha. Perhaps I can go more into depth about this at some point because I think what it boils down to is related to that piece where trans mascs will sometimes misgender themselves to gain the high ground over women. This is particularly nasty and relevant with trans women. :(
Oh this is great. I got pretty bent out of shape about that Doyle essay, too, as an example of this weird kind of radlib framing that seems to be so popular among trans people. You touched on a lot of stuff that I've been dying to see explained in actual detail. Gender essentialism is an ineffective sort of trans-defensive propaganda, men's problems are both serious and not proof that patriarchy doesn't exist, the relational nature of gender etc-- all stuff I've been trying to puzzle out in my own writing.
I want to push back a bit against two things: First, I don't think that Doyle's problem is a trivial hypothetical. I don't think I have ever personally been in a trans scene where shit-talk about men (and a lot of casual cruelty and rejection levied at trans men) wasn't par for the course. The result for me personally was that I spent most of my twenties thinking of communities of cis men as places that would only reject or harm me, while the "safe haven" of trans culture was overall extremely critical and demeaning to me in a way that no one would tolerate if it was levied at anyone else. And, y'know, that just wasn't true-- the kinds of nerdy cis guys I tend to hang out with treat me fine, and also don't subject me to "lol ugh cis men am i right?" social litmus-testing or frame all of my problems and social friction as an expression of patriarchal power-struggling.
Second, relatedly, I don't think that framing trans men as "failed women" rather than women really makes much of a difference-- it still obligates us to do a kind of third-gendering of ourselves as a different kind of beast from cis men. When I wrote about this, I ended up focusing on the way that trans men habitually frame our problems as Trans Problems but explicitly not Man Problems, rather than understanding ourselves via a lens that proposes our transness and maleness are the same thing. (Personally, I don't ID as nonbinary, but I tend to think along the lines that trans people in general are non-binary hyphenated in that the binary does not make room for complications like transness or queerness, just as you described.)
The way that men are constructed as empowered, ego-driven, and even dangerous winds up being weaponized against trans people of all sorts, but trans men cannot even reject this characterization or press back against our own ostracization because, well, that's just what everyone thinks it means to be a man. I think Noah Zazanis did a better job than Doyle reckoning with this in his piece (linked below) but he still ultimately concludes that trans men "want from feminism something it can never give us: to be acknowledged as men within a m/f paradigm, without reproducing m>f" and that the tension cannot be resolved. And, sure, maybe! But that really sounds like trans men have no option for both understanding ourselves as men and improving our sociopolitical situation unless we build something anew and apart from feminism, which would require a lot of reinventing-the-wheel and is generally frowned upon as oppositional by the feminists we have always looked to as teachers and comrades, to put it mildly.
Hi! Thank you for your comment; I really appreciate seeing people engage with my thoughts to this degree.
A couple things from my end:
1) I actually agree with your first point about shit-talking men. It didn't communicate through this essay/article/whatever you want to call it because I wanted to keep it focused on responding to Doyle's article specifically and didn't want to accidentally get caught up in a tangent, but I painfully relate to what you're saying. I had to giggle a bit when you posted Noah's article because that was the one that helped me get over that mindset! It's a great one. It's also why I wanted to provide a more materialist analysis on why men are technically oppressed by patriarchy, but not in the way MRAs or libfems seem to understand what "oppression" means. Any starting point to help people move away from a reductionist sort of understanding of it is great.
2) Your second point is also really great and something I think about a lot too. I want to expand more on what I've written here and what you're getting at are some things that are bouncing around in my head but I haven't quite yet found the words (nor the time, since I've been fighting with transphobic politicians recently, lol). I hope that whatever I provide in the future can help expand on this conversation. I'm definitely going to check out your writing here, just bear with me since I'm super involved with my state's legislative season at the moment. 😵💫
Okay, so, before I comment, I should probably be honest about where I'm coming from: I'm a bigender TME person who spent their entire adolescence bouncing around various anti-sjw sections of tumblr (and let me tell you, there was infighting between different ones!). Then in my early 20s I kind of just abruptly stopped interacting with them - partially due to the rampant & extreme racism, partially because I became too embarrassed of some of my own bad behaviour - without ever properly interrogating any of my beliefs, and instead just shrugged my shoulders and went "yea, demonizing a whole political movement because of tumblr is probably bad". I'm actually reading theory NOW, but it's an ongoing process, obv. This is all to say, I have a very different political background than you (I assume) and Doyle, which informs my entire view on the situation.
Now, onto the actual topic lol. Apologies in advance for any typos or other errors, I'm writing this on my phone.
I think Doyle is struggling with something a lot of transmascs who were part of the late 2000s/early-to-mid 2010s feminist blogospehre and adjacent communities (I count tumblr in this category) I've seen struggle with: namely, that spending like a decade talking about how much you hate men and how much men suck, ends up hitting you in the face like a badly thrown boomerang if you end up realizing you yourself are actually a man. For obvious reasons, I cannot relate to that exact experience*, but I can imagine it induces a lot of distressing cognitive dissonance that's difficult to reconcile. I mean, who is there to talk to about it? The dreaded cis men they have spent so much time slagging off? Other trans men who are going through the same shit, likely just as blindly as them? r/MensLib (derogatory)? Genuinely, I have no idea! And I doubt they did either! So they ended up just kind of winging it and often failing to stick the landing.
Doyle's own floundering has been easy to track on account of his work. One essay/review he wrote - on the film Promising Young Woman - had the brilliant take of "I tend to think masculine people should avoid expressing anger when possible, so as not to bully people, and that feminine people should express it more", which sounds so much like a cis person failing at being inclusive, it's mind-boggling a fellow trans person wrote it AFTER they figured out they're trans. Like, what the hell does "masculine people" even mean? Men, obviously, but "masculine people" also describes butch women and certain nonbinary people (both TME and TMA!) and it would be silly to act like all of these groups have the same positionality within patriarchy just because they're "masculine". There's probably other examples, but that one sticks in my mind as something obviously ridiculous. And listen, we're all allowed to make mistakes, but the fact that he himself engaged in such crude cis-normative gender analysis makes me believe his beef isn't so much with Donegan as it is with his old self and Donegan is just someone who chose to project this onto. He may not even realize the people he's criticizing have moved on from this type of analysis or never agreed with it to begin with!
But ok, as much as I don't like the way he handled the situation (and various other situations I won't get into) I don't think this is entirely due to his own personal failings or to the failings of this type of transmasc in general. The aforementioned feminist blogsophere had various toxic elements arise for various reasons, some sympathetic (frequent harassment makes people have a shorter fuse! who knew!), some less so (the cisness of it all...), and ended up producing some truly unique neuroses, especially in the minds of those who spent a lot of time on tumblr and/or twitter. While yes, Doyle may have contributed to this in some capacity, it was an intracommunity issue no singular person can be blamed for.** It would be worthwhile to discuss the various ways that sort of environment lead to the current wave of transmascs trying to prove they're nothing like cis men at all.
That said, it behooves him to interrogate his leftover hangups from that era... in private. With close friends, not twitter buddies. And without posting about it the whole damn time. Maybe that's a lot to ask for from someone who's entire livelihood relies on posting, but it would be a net benefit for everyone if he did that.
TL;DR: Doyle is stuck on a version of online feminism that hasn't been relevant since, like, 2018 and it's hard for him to get past it on account of said online feminism being his bread & butter for so long. But he should try anyway.
*Though, constantly inundating myself with the most ill-thought-out and cruel takes about men in a quest to dunk on them didn't exactly help with my gender journey either lol. So I do get it a LITTLE bit.
**Hell, you can probably blame bad faith readings from anti-sjws for it too. I definitely feel like I contributed to a toxic online environment for discussing social issues, which I sincerely regret now.
P. S. if I may be nitpicky for a second, I find the whole "Two Steves" metaphor grating and overdrawn. It feels like such a twee way to discuss this issue. Write like an adult, Jude!
No need to apologize, I think this is a great comment. That environment you're talking about is super real and something I've also grappled with. But as you said... sometimes that should just be done in private and not projected onto others, lol.
this is such a fantastic piece of material analysis that helped me coalesce a lot of thoughts abt transmasculinity and its specific place in these discourses! ty so much for writing :]
I'm still reading this, but I wanted to point out that this essay and the The Trans Dandy blog itself don't seem to link back to your account (the one you've been posting notes from). I don't have experience writing essays on Substack so I don't know the details of how to do it, but I think there's a way to explicitly list your account as the author.
Anyway I'm only a quarter of the way through the essay so far but your arguments are good, and I'm looking forward to finishing it. Materialism for the win.
"I am a trans man not because I have some inner, timeless essence that is innately male, but because I have modified my body in such a way that people interpret me as male upon meeting me."
In implying transness is solely physically based, you're denying it to trans people in countries who cannot transition. Should I tell my trans friends in Afghanistan that they aren't really men or women yet, since they can't transition and diy is nearly impossible? Tell my trans woman friend she's still a man until she can transition, since she's socially treated as one? Tell my trans male friends forced to into marriages and becoming pregnant that they're still women, that they aren't men since they can't be?
The only comfort to so many trans people around the world is believing in an inherent gender when they are denied it by their country and can't escape.
Would you tell that to the woman in a Florida prison saying "no matter what they do to me, I'm still a woman"? Is she wrong for believing she's inherently female?
I am not implying that transness is physically based -- I stated explicitly that transness is socially constructed. Trans people who haven't transitioned are still trans because of our social constructions of gender. So, for instance, we have a number of ideas about behaviors, dress, and so on that are associated with different genders. For the sake of clarity, let me be reductive in this example: in the United States, we generally have the idea that a person who has long hair and is wearing a dress, makeup, heels, and earrings is a woman. A person who was AFAB and desires to dress like that will be permitted to do so. On the other hand, a person who was AMAB and desires to dress like that is going to face serious backlash. This backlash is worse if that person also understands herself to be a woman as opposed to a gender non-conforming man. She is only a woman because society has provided the term Woman to identify with in the first place. It's not that her spirit is ontologically female. But because her definition of woman and how she relates to it differs from what social expectations of Woman are, there is immense opposition that drives her into the closet and prevents her from transitioning.
I've been reading David Valentine's Imagining Transgender recently and I think he's done a very good job so far demonstrating what I mean when I say these terms are socially constructed. They don't actually mean anything past what we have constructed as a culture. Just earlier, I specified the United States in my example because the little I know about Afghan culture is still enough for me to understand that my simplified characterization of what a woman is doesn't necessarily translate 1:1. So no, your Afghan friends who are incapable of transition are not the same as cis people: they understand themselves as something different (as do I, and in this conversation we use the term "trans" to describe them). Because of this difference, they are denied bodily autonomy and are at risk of very serious consequences, such as physical and sexual violence, police brutality, imprisonment, homelessness, unemployment, homicide, and more.
I’m reading this as someone who wants to educate herself further about some of the nuances of the gender debates that are happening right now. I really like the freedom of the movement to define ourselves away from the oppression of cultured gender norms. I was proud to call myself a feminist in the late 1980s and early 1990s when the word was a term of abuse in popular discourse. Now, I still use it, as oppression is still very real, but I’m starting to prefer “humanist”, because it makes the point that I don’t just care about one group of people to the exclusion of others. I haven’t come across the term trans masc before, for example, so I’m reading and learning. Things can often get heated when people are debating important territory, so it was interesting reading your thoughtful take on gender boundaries and identities and how we define them and how we can debate these matters better without losing our tempers all the time 👍
Doyle’s gleeful misogyny towards an “acceptable” target — either a specific cis woman he’s decided wants to force all trans men to desist, while also implicitly accusing her of transmisogyny, both on less than zero evidence, or a notional cis strawwoman he’s created just to yell at— is kind of hard to stomach.
I’m particularly struck by how vicious he is towards this hypothetical (or “hypothetical”) transmasc-exclusive pro-transfem cis feminist, because she is, notionally and theoretically, of course, not flattering his ego and not interested in what he, as a man, has to say about feminism and women’s liberation.
Like, it’s almost to the point of caricature, right?
I really appreciate this essay overall! Just, Doyle’s behaviour is egregious enough to briefly make me forget what else I wanted to comment on.
I definitely could have gone further into the blatant misogyny at play as you've pointed out. I blame not doing so on how much I had to cover because of Doyle's disjointed essay. The length of this probably reveals that, haha. Perhaps I can go more into depth about this at some point because I think what it boils down to is related to that piece where trans mascs will sometimes misgender themselves to gain the high ground over women. This is particularly nasty and relevant with trans women. :(
Oh this is great. I got pretty bent out of shape about that Doyle essay, too, as an example of this weird kind of radlib framing that seems to be so popular among trans people. You touched on a lot of stuff that I've been dying to see explained in actual detail. Gender essentialism is an ineffective sort of trans-defensive propaganda, men's problems are both serious and not proof that patriarchy doesn't exist, the relational nature of gender etc-- all stuff I've been trying to puzzle out in my own writing.
I want to push back a bit against two things: First, I don't think that Doyle's problem is a trivial hypothetical. I don't think I have ever personally been in a trans scene where shit-talk about men (and a lot of casual cruelty and rejection levied at trans men) wasn't par for the course. The result for me personally was that I spent most of my twenties thinking of communities of cis men as places that would only reject or harm me, while the "safe haven" of trans culture was overall extremely critical and demeaning to me in a way that no one would tolerate if it was levied at anyone else. And, y'know, that just wasn't true-- the kinds of nerdy cis guys I tend to hang out with treat me fine, and also don't subject me to "lol ugh cis men am i right?" social litmus-testing or frame all of my problems and social friction as an expression of patriarchal power-struggling.
Second, relatedly, I don't think that framing trans men as "failed women" rather than women really makes much of a difference-- it still obligates us to do a kind of third-gendering of ourselves as a different kind of beast from cis men. When I wrote about this, I ended up focusing on the way that trans men habitually frame our problems as Trans Problems but explicitly not Man Problems, rather than understanding ourselves via a lens that proposes our transness and maleness are the same thing. (Personally, I don't ID as nonbinary, but I tend to think along the lines that trans people in general are non-binary hyphenated in that the binary does not make room for complications like transness or queerness, just as you described.)
The way that men are constructed as empowered, ego-driven, and even dangerous winds up being weaponized against trans people of all sorts, but trans men cannot even reject this characterization or press back against our own ostracization because, well, that's just what everyone thinks it means to be a man. I think Noah Zazanis did a better job than Doyle reckoning with this in his piece (linked below) but he still ultimately concludes that trans men "want from feminism something it can never give us: to be acknowledged as men within a m/f paradigm, without reproducing m>f" and that the tension cannot be resolved. And, sure, maybe! But that really sounds like trans men have no option for both understanding ourselves as men and improving our sociopolitical situation unless we build something anew and apart from feminism, which would require a lot of reinventing-the-wheel and is generally frowned upon as oppositional by the feminists we have always looked to as teachers and comrades, to put it mildly.
https://thenewinquiry.com/on-hating-men-and-becoming-one-anyway/
Hi! Thank you for your comment; I really appreciate seeing people engage with my thoughts to this degree.
A couple things from my end:
1) I actually agree with your first point about shit-talking men. It didn't communicate through this essay/article/whatever you want to call it because I wanted to keep it focused on responding to Doyle's article specifically and didn't want to accidentally get caught up in a tangent, but I painfully relate to what you're saying. I had to giggle a bit when you posted Noah's article because that was the one that helped me get over that mindset! It's a great one. It's also why I wanted to provide a more materialist analysis on why men are technically oppressed by patriarchy, but not in the way MRAs or libfems seem to understand what "oppression" means. Any starting point to help people move away from a reductionist sort of understanding of it is great.
2) Your second point is also really great and something I think about a lot too. I want to expand more on what I've written here and what you're getting at are some things that are bouncing around in my head but I haven't quite yet found the words (nor the time, since I've been fighting with transphobic politicians recently, lol). I hope that whatever I provide in the future can help expand on this conversation. I'm definitely going to check out your writing here, just bear with me since I'm super involved with my state's legislative season at the moment. 😵💫
Thank you for commenting!! 💖
Okay, so, before I comment, I should probably be honest about where I'm coming from: I'm a bigender TME person who spent their entire adolescence bouncing around various anti-sjw sections of tumblr (and let me tell you, there was infighting between different ones!). Then in my early 20s I kind of just abruptly stopped interacting with them - partially due to the rampant & extreme racism, partially because I became too embarrassed of some of my own bad behaviour - without ever properly interrogating any of my beliefs, and instead just shrugged my shoulders and went "yea, demonizing a whole political movement because of tumblr is probably bad". I'm actually reading theory NOW, but it's an ongoing process, obv. This is all to say, I have a very different political background than you (I assume) and Doyle, which informs my entire view on the situation.
Now, onto the actual topic lol. Apologies in advance for any typos or other errors, I'm writing this on my phone.
I think Doyle is struggling with something a lot of transmascs who were part of the late 2000s/early-to-mid 2010s feminist blogospehre and adjacent communities (I count tumblr in this category) I've seen struggle with: namely, that spending like a decade talking about how much you hate men and how much men suck, ends up hitting you in the face like a badly thrown boomerang if you end up realizing you yourself are actually a man. For obvious reasons, I cannot relate to that exact experience*, but I can imagine it induces a lot of distressing cognitive dissonance that's difficult to reconcile. I mean, who is there to talk to about it? The dreaded cis men they have spent so much time slagging off? Other trans men who are going through the same shit, likely just as blindly as them? r/MensLib (derogatory)? Genuinely, I have no idea! And I doubt they did either! So they ended up just kind of winging it and often failing to stick the landing.
Doyle's own floundering has been easy to track on account of his work. One essay/review he wrote - on the film Promising Young Woman - had the brilliant take of "I tend to think masculine people should avoid expressing anger when possible, so as not to bully people, and that feminine people should express it more", which sounds so much like a cis person failing at being inclusive, it's mind-boggling a fellow trans person wrote it AFTER they figured out they're trans. Like, what the hell does "masculine people" even mean? Men, obviously, but "masculine people" also describes butch women and certain nonbinary people (both TME and TMA!) and it would be silly to act like all of these groups have the same positionality within patriarchy just because they're "masculine". There's probably other examples, but that one sticks in my mind as something obviously ridiculous. And listen, we're all allowed to make mistakes, but the fact that he himself engaged in such crude cis-normative gender analysis makes me believe his beef isn't so much with Donegan as it is with his old self and Donegan is just someone who chose to project this onto. He may not even realize the people he's criticizing have moved on from this type of analysis or never agreed with it to begin with!
But ok, as much as I don't like the way he handled the situation (and various other situations I won't get into) I don't think this is entirely due to his own personal failings or to the failings of this type of transmasc in general. The aforementioned feminist blogsophere had various toxic elements arise for various reasons, some sympathetic (frequent harassment makes people have a shorter fuse! who knew!), some less so (the cisness of it all...), and ended up producing some truly unique neuroses, especially in the minds of those who spent a lot of time on tumblr and/or twitter. While yes, Doyle may have contributed to this in some capacity, it was an intracommunity issue no singular person can be blamed for.** It would be worthwhile to discuss the various ways that sort of environment lead to the current wave of transmascs trying to prove they're nothing like cis men at all.
That said, it behooves him to interrogate his leftover hangups from that era... in private. With close friends, not twitter buddies. And without posting about it the whole damn time. Maybe that's a lot to ask for from someone who's entire livelihood relies on posting, but it would be a net benefit for everyone if he did that.
TL;DR: Doyle is stuck on a version of online feminism that hasn't been relevant since, like, 2018 and it's hard for him to get past it on account of said online feminism being his bread & butter for so long. But he should try anyway.
*Though, constantly inundating myself with the most ill-thought-out and cruel takes about men in a quest to dunk on them didn't exactly help with my gender journey either lol. So I do get it a LITTLE bit.
**Hell, you can probably blame bad faith readings from anti-sjws for it too. I definitely feel like I contributed to a toxic online environment for discussing social issues, which I sincerely regret now.
P. S. if I may be nitpicky for a second, I find the whole "Two Steves" metaphor grating and overdrawn. It feels like such a twee way to discuss this issue. Write like an adult, Jude!
No need to apologize, I think this is a great comment. That environment you're talking about is super real and something I've also grappled with. But as you said... sometimes that should just be done in private and not projected onto others, lol.
this is such a fantastic piece of material analysis that helped me coalesce a lot of thoughts abt transmasculinity and its specific place in these discourses! ty so much for writing :]
I'm still reading this, but I wanted to point out that this essay and the The Trans Dandy blog itself don't seem to link back to your account (the one you've been posting notes from). I don't have experience writing essays on Substack so I don't know the details of how to do it, but I think there's a way to explicitly list your account as the author.
Anyway I'm only a quarter of the way through the essay so far but your arguments are good, and I'm looking forward to finishing it. Materialism for the win.
Thanks for bringing that to my attention! I'll go see if I can figure that out, lol. Hope the rest of it lives up to expectations :)
"I am a trans man not because I have some inner, timeless essence that is innately male, but because I have modified my body in such a way that people interpret me as male upon meeting me."
In implying transness is solely physically based, you're denying it to trans people in countries who cannot transition. Should I tell my trans friends in Afghanistan that they aren't really men or women yet, since they can't transition and diy is nearly impossible? Tell my trans woman friend she's still a man until she can transition, since she's socially treated as one? Tell my trans male friends forced to into marriages and becoming pregnant that they're still women, that they aren't men since they can't be?
The only comfort to so many trans people around the world is believing in an inherent gender when they are denied it by their country and can't escape.
Would you tell that to the woman in a Florida prison saying "no matter what they do to me, I'm still a woman"? Is she wrong for believing she's inherently female?
I am not implying that transness is physically based -- I stated explicitly that transness is socially constructed. Trans people who haven't transitioned are still trans because of our social constructions of gender. So, for instance, we have a number of ideas about behaviors, dress, and so on that are associated with different genders. For the sake of clarity, let me be reductive in this example: in the United States, we generally have the idea that a person who has long hair and is wearing a dress, makeup, heels, and earrings is a woman. A person who was AFAB and desires to dress like that will be permitted to do so. On the other hand, a person who was AMAB and desires to dress like that is going to face serious backlash. This backlash is worse if that person also understands herself to be a woman as opposed to a gender non-conforming man. She is only a woman because society has provided the term Woman to identify with in the first place. It's not that her spirit is ontologically female. But because her definition of woman and how she relates to it differs from what social expectations of Woman are, there is immense opposition that drives her into the closet and prevents her from transitioning.
I've been reading David Valentine's Imagining Transgender recently and I think he's done a very good job so far demonstrating what I mean when I say these terms are socially constructed. They don't actually mean anything past what we have constructed as a culture. Just earlier, I specified the United States in my example because the little I know about Afghan culture is still enough for me to understand that my simplified characterization of what a woman is doesn't necessarily translate 1:1. So no, your Afghan friends who are incapable of transition are not the same as cis people: they understand themselves as something different (as do I, and in this conversation we use the term "trans" to describe them). Because of this difference, they are denied bodily autonomy and are at risk of very serious consequences, such as physical and sexual violence, police brutality, imprisonment, homelessness, unemployment, homicide, and more.
I’m reading this as someone who wants to educate herself further about some of the nuances of the gender debates that are happening right now. I really like the freedom of the movement to define ourselves away from the oppression of cultured gender norms. I was proud to call myself a feminist in the late 1980s and early 1990s when the word was a term of abuse in popular discourse. Now, I still use it, as oppression is still very real, but I’m starting to prefer “humanist”, because it makes the point that I don’t just care about one group of people to the exclusion of others. I haven’t come across the term trans masc before, for example, so I’m reading and learning. Things can often get heated when people are debating important territory, so it was interesting reading your thoughtful take on gender boundaries and identities and how we define them and how we can debate these matters better without losing our tempers all the time 👍