Trans Male Privilege

Yes, we need to talk about the boys again. Desperately.

Content warning for discussions of child abuse, physical and sexual violence, and pregnancy. Names have been changed for the sake of privacy.

i. Trauma Dump

In 2023, I was scared shitless. The state legislature had just passed the first anti-trans law of its kind and nobody had any idea what to expect. We didn’t know if we would be criminalized for using bathrooms or banned from updating our gender documents. For a month, it felt like some terrible fate was looming without any reprieve until, at least, my fiance brought me into a local group planning a response. Our campaign was straightforward: we demanded our city to not just pledge to protect trans people, but to implement new policies that reinforce that pledge. By that point, we had just about a month before the law went into effect.

To get things done as quickly as possible, we invited any and all people to help us accomplish our mission. Soon there emerged a core group of us who attended meetings, organized events, and pasted flyers around town at a moment’s notice. Long story short, we won before the summer was even finished. We were an incredibly efficient group despite how frantic the moment was -- and, of course, despite Anna.

The first interaction I ever had with Anna came through an email chain. There, I scolded her after she made a careless remark that resulted in a trans woman ending her involvement with the campaign. Later, when we were formally introduced, I learned that she apparently had over a decade worth of experience as a queer organizer off in a great big city on the coast. She identified herself as simply gender nonconforming. To anyone, she was easily read as a white woman, albeit one who was not invested in dressing up. She did not deny being a woman for the most part.

As fate would have it, I was not the only person who took issue with Anna. She took a bizarre oppositional approach to everything we agreed upon as a group, so much so that I wondered if she was intentionally following the CIA’s Simple Sabotage Field Manual. Ultimately, the group banded together to remove her from our organizing spaces. But when it came to arguing with Anna prior to that point, nobody did so more than me.

Despite the two years that have since passed, things she said to me still repeat in my mind regularly. Early on in the campaign, when I was particularly upset about the law, she asserted that I was incapable of fully understanding the stakes because I wouldn’t really be impacted by it. When I confronted her for repeatedly sabotaging our efforts, she labeled me a dictator. When I would prepare a public comment, she would drum up allegations that I was erasing people of color and women. When I finally pointed out that she was cis, she accused me of being transphobic and dangerous to trans people. And when, at last, we removed her from the organization, she started leaving random comments here and there online that insinuated that I am an obstacle to trans rights.

I’m still sometimes stunned at how badly her treatment affected me. After years of not having nocturnal panic attacks, I had to resume my SSRIs because of how anxious I felt just knowing that she would pick a fight with me or somebody else in the group at any moment. Even after we completed our campaign and she was gone, I was filled with the constant fear that she would return and turn public sentiment against our organization. And while everyone agreed that she was ultimately in the wrong, while rationally I know that we are so successful that she cannot hurt us, I still dawdled to finish writing this section because what if I really am the bad guy, what if I really am a detriment to trans people, what if she really did know better, what if this will give her the fuel she needs to finally destroy the beautiful community we worked so tirelessly to build.

---

Nearly a year later, the organization had come to a lull. There were still a few of us doing what we could to keep things active, but the interest had largely died down. People stopped showing up. So when a moment arrived that had the city on alert once again about trans rights, I knew I had to jump at the chance.

While I had organized events with the group before, I had never planned anything entirely on my own. I got to work using the contacts I had and made considerable headway in a day or so. At some point, someone mentioned that another person in town was planning a similar rally. Because I didn’t want to step on anyone’s toes -- and because I was eager for new connections to revive our organization -- I reached out to them. Quickly, we agreed to work together.

Soon after, we met in person. They were a femme named Nina, maybe 15 or 20 years older than me. They owned a business downtown that I had heard of before. Towards the end of our lengthy conversation, Nina disclosed that they would like to use they/them pronouns and bond more with other queer people in the city. I was elated after the conversation; this seemed like a great connection.

My initial vision for the rally changed shortly after. I wanted to host it in the biggest park in town for the space and publicity; Nina, on the other hand, wanted to host it in their business venue. The compromise we came up with was to meet at the park, march downtown, and convene at the venue. We made a flyer with all the necessary information that garnered an incredible amount of attention. Dozens of people were set to attend.

On the day of the rally, I arrived early at the park only to discover that Nina had started the event without telling me. Reporters were there, special speakers had already made their remarks, and the march was just beginning -- nearly an entire hour before we had advertised.

I was mortified. People who knew I had planned the event questioned me on this time change and I didn’t have a good answer. As the march commenced, I thought of all the people who would arrive at the park at the correct time only to find that there was nobody else there. This opportunity to revitalize my organization would tank its reputation instead. And as more embarrassing hiccups ensued due to the venue’s awkward location and size, I selfishly decided to let Nina take center stage as the primary organizer while I would just be a supporter. I didn’t want people to remember this as the first rally I had largely planned on my own.

Sometime later, my fiance expressed his frustration with how the event went with me. In response, I was inconsolable. It was like a dam broke, unleashing a frantic stream of frustrations and insecurities. Nina had hijacked the event from me. Nina had humiliated me. I threw Nina under the bus by allowing them to take credit. Everything was ultimately my fault because I allowed Nina to make bad decisions and then avoided accountability. Or maybe it all went wrong because I had incorrectly believed that I should be allowed to make decisions at all. I had no right planning a rally. I was taking up space. I was a dictator.

Contrary to my agonizing, Nina’s reputation only seemed to grow after the rally. I was relieved to still be within Nina’s good graces despite how terrible I thought I had been to them. A little over a month later, when I launched an emergency campaign to stop an anti-trans bill, they offered their business venue as a place to organize. Through the combined efforts of my organization and others like us, we successfully stopped the bill in its tracks. My organization had made a comeback; Nina seemed to be flourishing as well. In the glory of it all, I swallowed my shame and let bygones be bygones.

---

The first time I ever yelled at someone -- really, truly yelled at them, completely out of my senses like a wild animal had been unleashed -- was shortly after I first met Anna in 2023. It happened during a meeting with the biggest queer organization in town, Q, after they refused to platform our campaign during Pride Month. The betrayal and anguish and dread was so visceral that I couldn’t hold back. I knew that it was only going to get worse for trans people. If the first Pride was a riot, then goddamnit, why shouldn’t grassroots trans activism be prioritized over coddling corporate sponsors?

Later that year, after our campaign had finished, I started doubting myself. One of the leaders of Q -- the one I had yelled at, coincidentally -- had made multiple attempts to amend the relationship with my group. Eventually, I reached out to that person and apologized. When Pride Month arrived the following year, things were far better between our groups. I still had my reservations, of course. But they were openly acknowledging us. I was invited to various events to speak about trans politics. I appreciated that they were promoting the work my group did.

In the aftermath of the 2024 election, hundreds of people in the area flooded to my group. We were at the forefront of reporting on anti-trans legislation at both a federal and state level as 2025 began. As the primary political spokesperson and organizer for my organization, my role kicked into overdrive. In the first three months of the year alone, I spent hundreds of hours creating and writing informational posts, encouraging and guiding hundreds of people to submit written testimonies, traveling to the State Capitol to testify, coordinating with other activists on events, speaking to the news, analyzing bills, tracking legislators, and holding educational presentations.

I absolutely could not have done this alone -- I have a brilliant leadership committee who have similarly put in a staggering amount of work in their respective roles. Additionally, our members are so enthusiastic, reliable, and willing to help. I have never once regretted doing this work for free and without recognition and I never will. We created a sanctuary for trans people in increasingly frightening times. That’s all I ever wanted.

Yet when I learned that I had been nominated for an award given by Q, I couldn’t stop the excitement from welling up within me. The award recognizes someone who contributes considerably to the local queer community. While I have never expected celebration, it also never hurts to be appreciated for your labor, especially when your rights are relentlessly under attack. So when the night of the award came, my fiance and I got dressed up and headed out to the location. We smiled and danced and eagerly waited for an hour until the award ceremony finally arrived.

The Emcee -- one of Q’s leaders -- started by reciting a phrase I frequently use in my public speeches. They shared that the winner was someone that people flocked to for their leadership. They’re a known organizer, the Emcee said, and they mentioned that first rally I had ever planned. But the real thing that set this person over the edge -- the real reason why they deserved this award -- was because of their dedication to small business owners in the community.

When Nina walked on stage with tears of joy on their cheeks and thanked everyone for the honor, they didn’t mention trans people or my organization a single time. In fact, even outside this event, they hadn’t mentioned trans people or my political efforts since Trump’s reelection at all.

I finally exploded the next morning. My fiance held me as I sobbed into my bed. Nina had exploited me for their own profit -- literally. I brought in new customers to their business and lost relevance as soon as that business shut down. And Q didn’t care about my organization or what I did; they only promoted the work I did to avoid having to do any political work of their own. They knew that I couldn’t yell at them again if they had me do all the work for them. Neither Nina nor any leader from Q had ever shown up to a rally or to the Capitol or my informational sessions. Most of them didn’t bother to share my campaigns or information.

My fiance held me while I sobbed because nobody gave a fuck about the trans kids losing their right to transition. They didn’t give a fuck about the fact that all of my gender markers had been forced back to F or that I couldn’t work in schools despite getting a degree to do so because of these laws. They didn’t give a fuck about all the trans adults fleeing to places that may not be safe for long or that I would be following soon. Nobody gave a fuck that I left the event right after that award happened. Nobody reached out, nobody thanked me. Nobody asked me if I was doing okay despite everything. Nobody offered to help.

For days afterward, I lived in a fog, angrier than I had ever been before. I didn’t know it was possible to be so angry. Over and over, I said I wouldn’t ever work with Q again. Ultimately, that was a lie; I’m writing this section hours after delivering another political speech on their behalf. I figured that allowing them to exploit me brings publicity to my organization. And that, at least, gives trans people an actually safe place to go.

Nina still hasn’t mentioned any of this year’s anti-trans legislation. I gave up waiting a while ago. I smile and talk to them when I see them.

---

ii. Schrodinger’s Man

There’s a common sentiment you see in trans men. When you point out that they’re men, especially in response to some kind of supposed or actual privilege they possess or transgression they’ve committed, you’ll hear them say something like, “But I’m not the same as a cis man.” Sometimes, this mutates into other related sentiments: arguments that we’re different because we were “female socialized,” rebuttals that we can’t be cis men because we’re oppressed in x, y, and z ways, or maybe even an outright denial that we’re men at all.

I’m intimately familiar with this tendency. For years, I battled with it myself. Each comparison to being a Man -- the dreaded, terrible, loathsome White Man -- evoked a deep sense of outrage and disgust and confusion and self-loathing. This reaction was particularly strong during the 8 years I spent waiting to be safe enough to start medically transitioning. It felt like a cruel mockery in a way, a complete denial of the alienation and constant disrespect that were so pervasive that they were indistinguishable from my own identity. Even when calling me a man was warranted, even when it was correct, even when it was used in a decidedly non-derogatory manner, it was like someone opening up an old wound to dig around for a bullet that they could never remove.

And yet, at the same time, acknowledging me as anything but a man was hardly better. It hurt differently, though. When you’ve been nothing but misgendered your whole life, you become numb to it. Every so often, that nerve springs to life and makes you scream out in pain, but then it dies again, and you forget. It’s exhausting.

Maybe the fatigue of it all is exactly why we have such a visceral reaction at times to being called men. So often, when we are acknowledged as men directly, it’s to scold us, like when someone points out instances of us being (trans)misogynistic. And while these criticisms absolutely need to be made -- God knows I make them frequently -- I also understand the resistance to them. When nobody ever sees you, when everyone only ever treats you like shit, it just makes you want to scream, for the love of God, shut the fuck up! Look how bad it is for me! Look how mistreated I’ve been my whole life! I’m terrified of men too! Why do you hate me! What did I ever do!

When I struggled with being a Man before, I often found myself resentful of trans women. I couldn’t articulate it well then nor understand why I felt that way. It’s very much the same feeling I had as a child in an abusive family whose abuse was never noticed. The older I got, the more I anxiously hoped that one day, my dad would finally just hit me, that my mom would slip up in front of all the teachers and say something really, really terrible, that I would come to school bloodied and bruised and everyone would notice me at last. The kids who were abused in much more obvious ways didn’t do anything wrong to me, but it was hard to not resent them conceptually. It seemed like they were getting all the attention while I not only suffered in silence, but had my suffering denied and punished whenever I expressed it.

Of course, those same kids live their own uniquely traumatic lives and rarely receive the care and love they need. But that’s no reassurance when you’re a child flailing in the water while all the adults are too busy talking to notice. And so when trans men are Men, it feels like that suffering is being denied again, and when trans women receive any kind of attention, sympathetic or antagonistic, we think to ourselves, if only we had bruises, if only we had busted lips, they would understand how bad it is. What do they know about how bad it is? What did they do to deserve so much attention? Why does nobody care about us? Why does nobody even notice us?

---

The morning after the award ceremony, when I was sobbing in my bed, I kept saying, over and over, “But they can’t exploit a white man. They can’t exploit a white man.” It came out without thought, the consequence of a series of incidents all crashing down at once. There was Anna criticizing me for taking space away from women and people of color, of not truly understanding what it’s like to be trans; the trans woman in town decrying an article she didn’t read about my participation in stopping an anti-trans bill because she assumed I was pushing an anti-trans position; the numerous bad faith actors who complained about me being too liberal or too radical, whichever is more convenient in the moment, and not focusing enough on other (more important) issues; the people online and in person who dismissed me as privileged and out of touch because I have medically and legally transitioned. In all these cases, in every single one of them, people have used “white man” as a pejorative, as a way to discredit me. I’ve even used it to discredit myself, like with my interactions with Nina, because a femme of color should always be prioritized over me, and the fact that I was willing to let Nina take the fall for the rally revealed how much I didn’t prioritize their safety and wellbeing.

Let me make this clear: I do not believe for a second that I’m being discriminated against because I’m white nor because I’m male. No, what’s happening is transphobia through and through, but White Man is used pejoratively to justify mistreating me. That is, I’m not being exploited as a trans person because I’m a white man. It’s impossible to exploit or mistreat me as a white man. In fact, anything I do should be done for free to atone for my sins. The best thing I can do is shut the fuck up and keep my head down. And I definitely don’t deserve credit for anything because I’m a parasite exploiting others, actually.

The emotional impact of bad faith Man allegations affects more than just me. Last year, for instance, when the leadership committee was myself and two other trans mascs, we had a conversation about what we must be doing wrong to not have any trans women who were as interested as us in steering the direction of our organization, as if we were doing something morally reprehensible for stepping up. This worry plagued me again when I went to the State Capitol earlier this year to testify against an anti-trans bill. When I saw that there were a large number of us trans men there to speak but only one trans woman, I immediately began wondering if our mere presence somehow bullied more deserving trans women out of speaking.

I realize this sounds ridiculous. There’s no evidence at all to prove my concerns. My therapist told me this is called inferential confusion. But even knowing that doesn’t change the fact that this is genuinely how I felt and still continue to feel. For so long, I have operated under the assumption that what I have to say doesn’t matter all that much. That the work I do is hardly worth appreciating because I probably do more harm than good. That I don’t actually have any real authority to talk about the things I have personally lived through, the things I’m currently experiencing. And of course, if anything does go wrong, or at least seems a bit out of the ordinary, it is unquestionably my fault. If only I weren’t a Man. Then I wouldn’t be an ontological black hole.

---

The night of the award ceremony, I messaged those two other trans mascs on the leadership committee to express my indignation that Nina would receive the award instead of any of us. Their response? Nina deserved it for everything they’ve done. We should be happy for them. They’ve worked so hard. What exactly it is that they did was never really explained; they just deserved it.

We haven’t spoken about it since. We keep our heads down and work quietly. We’re dependable that way. I’m not sure if others know their names despite how much they do.

iii. Seen and Not Heard

The celebrity gossip and weight loss tips touted by the magazines in the Walmart checkout lanes were suddenly interrupted by a bombshell headline: a man had become pregnant. Of all the cover stories that baffled me as a child, this one felt particularly noteworthy because all the adults seemed just as confused as I was. I had a sense that asking my parents would cause trouble, so I tried to bow my head and look away instead. That was no easy feat when every magazine had that same picture.

Sometime later, we were driving home on a dark country road. My sister was asleep; my mother had the radio on for once instead of one of the CDs we always listened to. Once more, there was the pregnant man again, only without the image to accompany it. The talk show hosts explained that he was transgender.

My mother explained to me that being transgender was a sin. You shouldn’t ever want to change your body like that. I was fearfully and wonderfully made and so was Thomas Beattie, but the devil won and he made the wrong decision. For years, he was the only trans man I knew about.

---

I don’t actually remember when I first learned about trans women. I do have a vivid memory of watching “gender transformations” as a middle schooler and stumbling across an old queen who may or may not have identified as a trans woman. Before that point, though, I can only remember the same cultural tropes that everyone is exposed to: the unserious male crossdresser who drops the act when it’s no longer funny or necessary, or the serious transvestite who is an inherent menace to society. It wasn’t until the seventh grade that a friend explained drag queens to me. At some point that shifted into an awareness of trans women.

The fact that I can’t actually determine where my awareness of male cross-dressers and drag queens ended and where my knowledge of trans women began is a reflection of the way in which society degenders trans women. The degendering of trans women manifests as understanding them not as men or women, but as something different altogether, as a third kind of sex tainted by the worst properties associated with the other two. This process often results in a barrier of empathy that justifies violence and dehumanization. As Talia Bhatt explains:

We thus serve as objects of macabre fascination for cissexuals, either a hypersexualized fantasy with no autonomy or agency of its own, or a monstrous creature whom it is permissible to abhor, violate, and brutalize. Our transgression of gendered strictures, our demonstration of sex’s mutability and unfixity is a capital offense that most react to with an irrational fury. Our existence is itself an abomination to a heterosexual, male-supremacist regime, one that must be stamped out and denied at every turn.

Therefore, we are only ever subconsciously regarded as women. We are womanized in the way everything considered beneath a Man is feminized, yet our womanhood is repudiated, even as those who seek to destroy us bring the full force of misogynistic degradation to bear. We are assaulted and told we invited assault, that our deviancy and perversion and pretensions to womanhood carries implicit permission for deviants and perverts to treat us like women. We are discriminated against in employment and housing, frequently impoverished and turned out onto the streets, pushed disproportionately into survival sex work, and routinely face stringent access barriers to transition technologies.

As the “objects of macabre fascination for cissexuals,” it’s no wonder that I was more familiar with depictions of trans femininity over trans masculinity and yet cannot name the first trans woman I ever knew about. Trans men, conversely, have not been the subject of this fascination -- at least, not until recently. And even then, the current cultural fixation on the ROGD Tumblr girls mutilating their bodies because of social contagion (of which I am a proud poster child) does not derive from the process of degendering. Instead, trans men are subject to the process of regendering, in which we are forced back into womanhood. Bhatt elaborates:

Where transmisogynistic forces marginalize and ostracize the transfeminine from society, rendering us unworthy of any fate outside of being treated like sexual chattel, transemasculative forces deny the transmasculine any possibility of escaping reproductive exploitation and seek to re-gender the transmasculine--viewed as lapsed reproductive assets--back into the confines of womanhood.

…This is also why the most common forms of transemasculative rhetoric beat the drum of the ‘mutilated girl’, itself an echo of the idea of damaged goods. Being a reproductive asset under patriarchy is not an enviable fate, but patriarchy, in the process of dehumanizing the transmasculine, still accords them--no, not humanity, don’t be absurd, but utility. The transmasculine can still be “of use” to a natalist, heterosexual regime and can still be instrumentalized for their gestational capacity and ability to further patrilineality. And so, they are assiduously discouraged from changing their sex or altering their embodiment, lest they jeopardize their precious ‘fertility’ and render themselves ‘undesirable’, unfit for reproductive exploitation.

Regendering was the key to making everything make sense to me: our knee-jerk reaction against being considered the same as cis men despite being, well, men; the way it seems like trans women get so much more attention than us, because degendering requires public humiliation and scorn while regendering necessitates that nobody notice us at all. The manipulation innate to regendering also leaves us ensnared in constant self-doubt and self-loathing because your wellbeing is never taken seriously until others sense they’re about to lose control of you. That’s why my family never cared about the way my father abused me or my mental health in general, for instance, until I came out. It was only then that I was a poor victim, a little girl who never stood a chance, someone who’s sick and can’t help it. So why don’t I confide in them now, why don’t we become best friends now, and oh, by the way, I don’t really want to be a big, hairy man, do I? My dad used subliminal messaging and advanced psychological warfare techniques to make me think that but it’s a lie. I’m just traumatized and I’ll be healed once I let the silly trans thing go. No, they never abused me, they have nothing to account for, not back then, not now. All of this is the tragic outcome of an evil man who called himself my father exploiting my precious, feminine body.

I also think of regendering as a trans masc-specific manifestation of compulsory heterosexuality because of the way it instills within us a deep fear of being sexually undesirable to men specifically. Bhatt touches on this point:

There is, sometimes, a point of no return, past which the transmasculine are no longer as heavily subject to regendering, having committed the cardinal sin of exercising autonomy over their own sex…. If they are recognized as transmasculine, even if they can navigate the world as men, transmasculine individuals become subject to degendering, vilification, and monsterization. The goods have been damaged, and the heterosexual regime seeks to discard them as it discards all of us who do not fit into its vision of ‘natural’ reproduction.

This is why I considered never transitioning at all when I began dating my fiance. Even though he had always known me as a trans man, even though he had always reassured me that he would be attracted to me even after I transitioned, the part of me that had been told over and over and over that my only value was the value I could have as a wife and mother continually outweighed the reality of the situation. If I transitioned, my body would disgust him and he would leave me. With him would go the most love I had ever received from anyone, and nobody would ever, ever love me in any capacity ever again. My life would be empty. It would be meaningless. I would be nothing.

If the fact that he is now my fiance didn’t make it obvious, my anxieties were completely unfounded. Time and time again he’s told me that he’s more attracted to me now then when we first met, back when I was mostly closeted for safety reasons. Transitioning with him by my side has opened up a world of possibilities that I never dreamed were possible. But I also know that I am lucky; many trans men do lose their partners and often struggle to identify self-worth outside of having proof that somebody else -- frequently a man -- sexually desires them.

So when trans men retreat into Being Female, when we close the biological sex trap around us and surrender to this gender fatalism, it makes sense in a way. As much as being a woman sucks, it feels like the lesser of two evils. It seems better to shut up and deal with the cards you’ve been dealt instead of trying to sneak a new hand. And when the only sympathy you ever seem to receive is because of your apparent femaleness -- regardless of whether or not that sympathy is sincere -- then there is something of an emotional incentive to return to that. Being a man is a dog eat dog kind of world. Being a trans man only makes it harder.

---

Regendering can be sneaky, I think. Even though all those magazines referred to Thomas Beattie as a man, it says something that he was the first trans person I ever learned about. He was notable because he was pregnant. Since then, when I see trans men in the news, the stories are commonly about their pregnancies, too. And to be absolutely clear, the conversation about trans men and pregnancy is incredibly important to have for the sake of their health and the health of their babies. But it says something that trans men are notable when they are pregnant. They are a spectacle to gasp at and condemn. And yet, the trans men who don’t have babies are spectacles in our own way. So much of the anti-trans hysteria at the moment has latched onto the supposed tragedy of supposed little girls supposedly sterilizing themselves for no reason.

When we’re not talking about whether or not we’re pregnant, though, when do we actually appear? The question of “historical representation” as some would call it has always been difficult to answer. You can find a trans man here and there, but there is a gaping hole for the most part. And when trans men do appear in queer history posts, it’s the same trans men over and over. None of them are ever known for their trans activism; essentially all of them were stealth their entire lives and either forcibly outed while living or right after they died.

In my years of reading about queer history, I have found some trans men who were well-known organizers and activists -- people like Lou Sullivan, Marcelle Cook-Daniels, and Rupert Raj. And yet I have never seen any of them mentioned in public celebrations of queer history. The work we do for ourselves and for each other out of a love for our own community goes unrecognized. This, unfortunately, isn’t new. In fact, in 1987, Rupert Raj discussed this in his essay Burn-Out: Unsung Heroes And Heroines In The Transgender World:

I have been serving the transgender community in a variety of capacities (administrator, educator, researcher, counselor, peer supporter, social convenor, public relations/liaison officer, networker, editor, writer, chairman of the Board - you name it, I’ve been it) for the past 15 ½ years without any form of monetary remuneration whatsoever. In fact, my preoccupation with the welfare of the transgender community is the reason why today I am without a paying career or steady source of income. Don’t get me wrong, this was my choice and mine alone (my mission or calling in life) to serve this neglected, misunderstood, and even today, stigmatized class of people - rare victims of what Kim Stuart has so aptly termed “the uninvited dilemma”. Afterall, I am a post-op F-M TS myself and I guess I want to “take care of my own”.

Still the fact remains: resource people in this area - many of whom have spent years trying to fill the widening gap left by gender clinicians and other helping professions - not only deserve a measure of gratitude and recognition that the people they are helping could never begin to express, but they also desperately need a well-deserved rest (or, in some cases, retirement) from “the scene”. And contingently, they need successors - who will be as dedicated and as competent as they have been - to fill their shoes and take up the slack left by the medical community, the professions of psychology and sexology, individual counselors and therapists, social service agencies, the schools, the Church, the law, the State, the media.

…I/we desperately need resources (money, people and time) in order that I [and other activists and organizations]... might survive. So, it’s now up to you, Brothers and Sisters, to work together - to take up the torch and keep the flame of faith burning bright…

It’s easy to performatively praise Marsha P. Johnson when she’s dead. But it’s suddenly a different story when there’s actually trans people doing the same tasks she and Raj and everyone else was doing in your area. To be a “voluntary gender worker,” as Raj calls it, is to be underappreciated and exploited until you can’t take it anymore, no matter how much you love your trans siblings.

Raj is clear that both trans fems and trans mascs experience this phenomenon. But when it comes to trans mascs specifically, I wonder if this is also a part of regendering. That is, if women are meant to be seen and not heard, if women are meant to perform labor for everyone else without the expectation of gratitude or acknowledgement, then what does it mean when you’re a trans masc working your ass off to keep your community together and politically engaged and have nobody ever thank you for it? To have people even accuse you of having overtly nefarious intentions when you assume leadership, take a stand for what’s right, or express anger? To have people endlessly criticize what you do while never offering their help to do it better? To have people expect you to nurture the trans community while also dismissing you as ineffective, inept, or insincere?

Why are the only notable trans men the ones who give birth or keep their transness a secret?

---

In The Independent’s Pride List 2025, the only trans man, Jake Graf, makes an appearance at #44 out of 50 entries. He doesn’t even get a spot to himself; instead, he shares the entry with his wife, a trans woman named Hannah. The two are known for a BBC documentary chronicling their journey to parenthood using a surrogate mother. Despite the fact that he’s a filmmaker, there’s no mention of any of the films he’s made about being trans.

---

iv. Male Privilege

Basically everything I know about organizing comes from my fiance. He was in a socialist party for years before he moved across the country and met me. When he first came out here, he tried to keep organizing, but eventually had to give it up. In a city where opportunists use identity politics like spears, he couldn’t ever adequately fight back. There was always something wrong. It didn’t matter that he’s bisexual, Mexican, or that his grandmother belongs to one of the indigenous communities there. Nor did it matter that he grew up impoverished. There’s always something about him that’s just too innately oppressive. No, they’re not just saying this because he is engaging earnestly and because his earnestness gets in the way of a grifter’s greed. It’s because he’s, uh, a cis man! Or because he’s not really qualified enough to talk about being racialized, or because there’s no way he could possibly understand what it’s like to be poor and subject to abuse and violence!

This is the game you play when you see “liberation” as synonymous with “clout.” The same thing happened to my meta. Her sin, though, is that she’s white and cis, and because she’s white and cis, it becomes completely fair to ignore the amount of time she’s spent promoting Black feminists, writers, and academics, or the fact that she was the one who initially started the campaign that turned into my trans organization. Shortly before she was essentially fired for being a disabled, anti-Zionist communist, her supervisors had tacitly threatened to end her position under the guise that she had not done enough to serve people of color.

Are any of us oppressed for being white, or cis, or men? No, of course not. That’s just what happens when you encounter opportunists and reactionaries who want to keep their prejudices quiet. They bastardize concepts to gain control. That’s why you’ll see people sometimes accuse people of color of being white, of queer people being straight, of trans people being cis. I’ve even been angrily accused of being a trans woman when speaking about my experiences as a trans man! It’s a way to avoid genuine criticism and critical thinking, to short-circuit an actual debate, to shirk accountability by claiming moral superiority via identity alone. Instead of engaging with the actual dynamics at play, it’s easier to leverage someone’s perceived exemptions from marginalization and hardship to deny that they’re doing any harm to them.

This act of denying people authority over their own lived experiences and positioning them as too privileged to listen to an act of denying epistemic authority, as Ajmani, Bhatt, and Devito describe it. While it may dress itself up as progressive, it ultimately isn’t. It’s there to preserve the hierarchies in place and remove any culpability in upholding them. Whatever it takes to shut down actual movements. Whatever it takes to climb to the top and remain there.

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A decade ago, back when Everyday Feminism was a hot thing, they posted an article about how trans men understand what it’s like to experience both misogyny and male privilege. This article and others similar to it made me expect that there was going to be some grand moment where I transitioned and my life would suddenly improve because I was a Man now. I was on the lookout to see when my male privilege would kick in. After three and a half years, though, I’ve come to a shocking conclusion: my life seems more dangerous now, actually?

While I’ve had frustrations with the concept of privilege in general for a while now, male privilege in particular has fallen apart for me. That isn’t because I believe that men are oppressed and women aren’t; no, it’s quite the opposite. It’s just that the idea of male privilege is incredibly oversimplified. For example, when I worked as a cashier prior to transitioning, I once had a customer hit on me for a bit and offer to be my sugar daddy. It was uncomfortable, but it was brief. Since I’ve been perceived as male, though, I’ve had a stranger threaten to kill me, another corner me for nearly an hour and try to get me to fuck him, a group of men jeeringly catcall me on the street, and yet another stranger try to get me to make borderline pornographic content for him while I was working.

It was jarring to have so many people try to convince me that I was trans because I was sexually violated, and that being sexually violated was an innately female experience, only to discover that the sexual harassment and violence escalated when I started living as a man. It should be noted that none of the strangers I mentioned before knew that I was trans. They pinned me as a faggot, though, and that’s all they really need.

Many trans men who retreat to Being Female never address this reality. It complicates matters too much to mention that gay and bi men experience sexual violence at rates similar to heterosexual women, including child sexual abuse. This is a fact that I was also oblivious to until my fiance started opening up to me. He had been repeatedly molested as a child; assaulted as an adult; stalked and harassed for rejecting the advances of another man, which also contributed to him leaving the political organizing scene. His experience with his sexuality is so intertwined with violence that he views being queer as an inherently violent thing because the straight men will beat you (his back is still scarred from all the times his father whipped him for being too effeminate) and the queer men often cross too many boundaries too fast. Nobody who has ever accused him of being suspicious or overbearing simply for being a man in a political space seems to consider that maybe he knows what it’s like to be exploited and abused.

And, to be fair, neither did I until I let go of the Female Trap and just started being a guy. Now I wonder how many men have actually been beaten and threatened and abused and molested and raped. I wonder how many men sit with that and never tell anyone because it doesn’t really matter because men are not supposed to be the victims.

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Many people don’t like the adage, “hurt people hurt people.” But it’s true. It doesn’t mean that everyone who has ever suffered is doomed to be a terrible person for the rest of time. But it does mean that people who have suffered are going to struggle more with interpersonal relationships. When the only sorts of relationships modeled for you are violent and uncaring, then it’s only natural to mimic that model.

I had a professor who was a social worker for 50 years. For a long time, he worked in prisons. His main population: men convicted of domestic abuse and sexual violence. Of all the sex offenders he worked with, he estimated that up to half of them had been sexually abused as children. This is not just an anecdote; numerous researchers have found similar patterns (1, 2, 3, 4). This does not mean that people with histories of sexual abuse are likely to be sexually violent. But it does create questions about the nature of violence and social conditioning.

I’ve noticed this odd idea that some people get into their heads about violence, particularly systemic violence. For instance, back when I was more of a Tumblr SJW sort, there was an idea a lot of us subscribed to -- consciously or not -- that to be a victim was to be intellectually and/or morally superior. The underlying belief here is that violence happens because the aggressor simply cannot empathize with the victim nor cares to do so. So when we talked about something like gendered violence, then, there was an attitude that men are far more likely to be sexually violent because they just don’t understand what it means to be sexually violated. Likewise, because women are more likely to be sexually violated, they are ultimately far less likely to be sexually violent, because they know what it’s like. From here, the belief became more and more generalized, until it turned into “to be male is to be innately capable of violence, and to be female is to be innately capable of being victimized” -- hardly a revolutionary thought under patriarchy. This is something gender essentialists would likely agree with, after all; it naturalizes the unjust social order and absolves participants of intentionality.

But if it’s not true that men are innately more likely to be violent by virtue of being men, then what explains the fact that they are disproportionately more likely to be violent? You could come up with a number of explanations -- biological, psychological, social, whatever else -- but I want to turn back to my professor’s experience here. Shockingly, as it turns out, to be violent and to be victimized are not mutually exclusive, as he illustrated -- especially in a society that normalizes abuse. So what if men are more violent not because they are never victimized, but because they are incentivized to be violent in order to avoid victimization?

What if the capacity for violence is actually how one maintains their place in the hierarchy?

This doesn’t mean that everyone who experienced violence or abuse at the hands of a man posed a threat to them first. No, what it means is that men are conditioned to be violent because the violence that men face is generally understood as violence that is justified. Think, for instance, of the millions -- if not billions -- of men who have died during combat. Their lives are expendable, just a tool to be used in the name of some greater cause. Maybe the Belgian families mourned the losses of their loved ones in the Battle of Liege in 1914, and yet Germany and France and the United Kingdom responded with even more fervor, sending millions of men to die in flooded trenches, in snowy mountains, in oceans, in fields, in deserts. And the deaths of these men were justified either because they were fighting for an abstract concept that may or may not matter to the masses in a matter of decades or because they did not fight hard enough. They are nothing but fodder for nationalist violence; the proof of their manhood and the proof of their stake in the nation are intertwined, and they must have the capacity to commit violence to provide this proof.

When I said earlier that being a man is a dog eat dog kind of world, this is what I meant. If you don’t prove your capability to take charge -- your capability to be violent -- it will happen to you first. And if this is the kind of culture we live within, is it really so surprising that men become desensitized to the violence they do to each other? Is it a surprise that they start jeering at and attacking and sexually assaulting each other at a young age? Boys learn early on that they are expendable, that they are a dime a dozen, that they have to prove themselves worthy of the manhood they are expected to embody one day. They learn this first-hand when they hurt each other in the locker room and in the school hallways and in the park on weekends. When people say boys will be boys, that’s what they’re referring to: that boys will be, should be, must be violent, and that they can direct this violence at acceptable targets. Those who fail to live up to this expectation become one of those targets themselves.

Ultimately, discussion of gendered violence boils down to the fact that it’s considered such because the violence is in itself an act of gendering. The misinformed idea I had earlier on -- that to be male is to be innately capable of violence, and to be female is to be innately capable of being victimized -- is partly true in a way. It’s not that women can never be the aggressors and that men can never be the victims. But to be a victim as a man is to ultimately be emasculated. You’re weak, a sissy, a faggot, whatever else. So, as a man, you keep the hurt you experience to yourself and nobody assumes otherwise. There’s a good number of men who would feel insulted if you did assume differently.

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Professionally, I connect people with disabilities with necessary resources. Two of my clients are remarkably similar: they were born within months of each other, come from a nearly identical social background, have similar substance abuse and criminal histories, struggle with inadequately treated neurodevelopmental disorders, and have experienced some pretty profound trauma as children and as adults. The biggest difference between them is that one is a man and the other is a woman. Another notable difference is that he is a convicted felon while she is not.

If you were to interact with him, you would probably be shocked to learn about his criminal history. In my experience, he is level-headed, reasonable, and deeply honest. If anything, you would probably assume that my female client, who is generally bubbly and affable but struggles considerably with emotional regulation, would be the one to have the felony. And yet, despite her admitting to being violent with loved ones repeatedly in the past, he is the registered violent offender.

The more I learned about him, though, the more I understood why he snapped the way he did. That is absolutely not to say that what he did was justified by any means -- he would be quick to tell you that it wasn’t. It’s more so that it makes sense how he arrived at that point. His disabilities resulted in constant victimization throughout his life -- intense bullying as a child, leading into friendships and romantic relationships as an adult that were so abusive it’s a wonder he’s still alive. Yet hardly anybody even noticed, let alone intervened. He told me once that the first time he ever felt like someone noticed him was when his junior year English teacher actively intervened to help him pass the class. Because of this, he explained, he learned pretty early on that he had to strike first to keep bullies at bay, because no adult really cared to help. The incident that got him convicted of a felony was just that -- a first strike during a particularly emotionally vulnerable moment.

Of course, it’s worth mentioning that my female client did not develop the same mindset despite having a similar background. When she becomes violent, it’s far more reactive, more defensive, an explosion of fear and anger and confusion that she just cannot articulate or express in a healthy way after she’s been pushed too far. I think that’s also why she’s never been violent to the same extent that he’s been violent -- she pushes, hits, and throws things instead of attacking someone with a weapon. The difference here also reveals what people are trying to get at when they talk about gender socialization: Man is more likely to be violent because he is culturally understood as an agent, Woman is less likely because she is culturally understood as an object. As the agent, my male client feels empowered to take an offensive position while my female client, as the object, generally operates from a more defensive sort of mindset. Though they are both prone to violence, they have experienced different upbringings and justifications for that violence and don’t have the same relationship to it -- or to the enabling of it. That is, when she tips over the edge, it’s to protect herself against perceived criticism, disappointment, and so on, whether or not her perception is correct. But when he lashed out the way he did, it was to prove a point, to scare another man off, to get the “upper hand” before the other man could.

Waiting to be a victim is always dangerous, but for men it’s dangerous and emasculating, which adds an entire other dimension. For example, I think of how my female client’s parents are quick to accept the idea of their daughter as someone who has been victimized while my male client’s parents -- and his father in particular -- agonize over how unmanly he is, as if that’s the biggest problem in his life. He’s unmanly despite being a registered violent offender, unmanly despite being an ostensibly masculine man with a long beard and distance from effeminacy. It’s embarrassing that he can’t just be more like his dad. They’ve never mentioned how much he’s struggled in life, while my female client’s parents are quick to explain all the ways in which she’s been harmed by others.

When I talk with him, he vents a lot about his parents. It feels like nobody has ever really taken him seriously before.

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I want to make this extremely clear: I am not a men’s rights activist. I do not mean to imply or assert that women are taken more seriously than men because this is absolutely not the case. My female client is also generally disregarded by others, and this is true for all the other women I work with -- women are expected to put up with this sort of abuse. Likewise, there are plenty of instances where women are the aggressor and go on the offensive. What I’m trying to get at, though, is that there are social roots for patterns of violence, and that being victimized and dismissed is not an innately female experience. Both men and women experience violence -- and men are more likely to be violent -- because it is a function of maintaining control and domination under patriarchy. Despite the fact that patriarchy refers to a system of male control, men do not actually all get treated the same under patriarchy -- hierarchies are generally going to have a small group of people at the top, which necessarily excludes most men! Patriarchy is a form of socioeconomic organization, not a prescriptive standard for how every single person is treated based solely on gender.

If this is confusing, I’ll put it this way: a father might beat his only son and never lay a finger on his daughters, but the son will eventually grow up to inherit the estate. Patriarchy doesn’t mean that fathers would never abuse their sons -- no, beating his son serves as a way to maintain power over him, to remind him who’s really in charge, to “teach” him what is expected of him as a man. But patriarchy does mean that this same father, the one who was far kinder to his daughters, might never even consider willing his estate to any of them. Patriarchy means that the son will materially benefit here even if he is physically and emotionally harmed in the process. Meanwhile, the male workers of the estate don’t benefit either way, but maybe, theoretically, one day, they could be an estate owner too, and maybe they go home to their wives and children and have final say over the family finances. It’s all a rat race, a proto-American Dream that concentrates the power in the hands of a few men while the rest fantasize about becoming those men.

So when trans mascs retreat into the Female Trap, when we argue that being victimized, dismissed, mistreated, ignored, abused, whatever else is proof of that femaleness, all I have to say in response is: no, actually, this is an extremely male experience, too. In a way, there is sort of an inherent violence to being a man, but it’s more so that men are constantly waiting for someone to be violent to them first, and that they’re expected to guard and maintain their status violently. After all, there’s a reason why men are far more likely to be murdered, physically assaulted, and killed in accidents. But to take men’s pain seriously would require fundamentally undermining the mechanisms of patriarchy. Without the violence, you can’t stay on top, you can’t coerce your wife and children into following your will, you can’t drag the country into war for your own benefit. We are all Isaac waiting to be slaughtered when the will of God calls for it. We’re always looking for the ram in the bushes.

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v. Synthesis

So what? What was the point of all of this?

Normally, I plan what I want to write in advance. This essay, though, is the rare case where I just sat down and poured out whatever came into mind. It is the outcome of over a decade simmering on what it means exactly to be a trans man and all the arguments I’ve had about it along the way.

Ultimately, this is my attempt to put into words what I think a lot of us are feeling and experiencing -- and my attempt to think about it more critically. In the name of keeping things simple, here are the conclusions I’ve come to along the way:

1) Trans men are men. We are not the same as cis men because we are trans. But that does not mean we are not men. Men are not a homogenous group with identical experiences.

2) Being a man absolutely does not invalidate any of the experiences we’ve had with mistreatment, discrimination, violence, or abuse. Statistically speaking, men are more likely to be victims of violence, anyway. We have that in common.

3) Experiencing mistreatment does not mean it is impossible for you to mistreat others. Likewise, those who mistreat you have likely experienced mistreatment themselves. Being victimized does not result in an intellectual and/or moral enlightenment.

4) When I am mistreated, it’s not because I’m a white man specifically or a man generally. In the examples I gave with my organizing experience, being anything but a white man absolutely would not have done anything to improve the situation, and would not have secured me any further cache. The issue is that these people are reactionaries -- they do not want progress to be made, and are acting purely from self-interest. There are plenty of members in the organization who aren’t trans masc and who aren’t white. I know similar criticism would be leveled at them if they were in my place.

5) Because we live in a cissexist society, we have historically lacked the language and framework to make sense of our experiences. As a result, we start feeling resentment towards the wrong people. For instance, we become upset with trans women for making sense of their life experiences, especially when the framework they developed seems to contradict what we’ve been through.

6) Instead of attempting to build upon existing trans-specific frameworks, we often feel like we have to choose between no framework at all and forcing ourselves into cissexist feminist frameworks. Oftentimes, we do the latter -- this is where that Female Trap comes from, that urge to understand ourselves as innately Female because of x, y, and z experiences. I think a lot of this just comes from historical and sociological ignorance, which is not the fault of anyone, really. Many people don’t really understand what it means for something to be a social construct and instead lean on essentialist and deterministic ideas of gender. They understand society and culture to be the consequence of ideas or inherent ways of being instead of external realities, like economics, access to resources, historically significant events, and so on. If you want to better understand what I am talking about, I highly recommend reading at least the introduction of Gerda Lerner’s The Creation of Patriarchy.

7) The tendency to resort to an idealist understanding of social relations -- that is, reality is the consequence of our ideas, beliefs, and consciousness as opposed to external forces that influence how we think and act -- gives credence to identity politics. This isn’t to say that there’s no use in identifying how certain categories of people are treated differently within society, but to say that people become more focused on the identity in and of itself as opposed to the forces that create and shape that identity. So instead of understanding Man and Woman as descriptors related to property relations and kinship, for instance, we understand them as some kind of fixed, eternal concepts that you are simply born with, like they’re encoded in your DNA. And if that’s the case, it is far easier to make the argument that somebody is innately oppressive for this or that reason. It’s not just politically left people that do this -- right-wingers have been doing this for centuries. What do you think race science was about?

8) Because the idealist concept of identity politics is so easy to weaponize, reactionaries utilize this to obscure the real conflict at hand. Nina exploiting me for their profit is not a matter of them as a femme of color vs me as a white man -- this was a matter of them as a small business owner, a member of the petty bourgeois, versus myself, a member of the working class, a proletarian. Just like Rupert Raj, I do what I do completely for free because I care about my community of trans people and want to take care of us. Nina is not in community with us; we’re just customers and free, positive publicity.

And so, with all that said, after this beast of an essay, I come to my ultimate, final conclusion, the one that I really want any trans mascs reading this to take with them: the reason you hate yourself, the reason you want to distance yourself from being a Man, the reason why it feels like everyone hates you for being a man, is because the world does not want you to be a trans man. They’re driving you crazy on purpose because they hate you for being a trans man. You are disgusted with yourself and you wish you were dead because society hates trans men and it’s really fucking hard to be one.

No, you are not innately female, no, you are not so different from cis men that you cannot be considered a man in any sense, no, feminism is not lying to you and men are not really the oppressed ones (even though it can feel like it because so many feminists produce god-awful analyses).

With that said, though, people are absolutely undermining and downplaying your feelings and experiences because you are a trans man. Gaslighting is an overused pop psychology term at this point but that’s kind of what’s happening here. What you are experiencing is real and fucked up and is probably traumatizing you to some extent and it’s because you are trans.

At this point, you’ve probably realized that the title of this essay was to bait you into reading this. There is no trans male privilege. It doesn’t exist. You can experience male privilege interpersonally, maybe, like someone taking you more seriously or giving your input more weight than a female colleague’s, but there’s no specific, systemic privileges to being a trans man. It’s similar to how other kinds of marginalized men are still men but also experience the consequences of racialization, queerness, disability, whatever else. Consequently, we are oftentimes alienated from hegemonic manhood and have our experiences delegitimized.

Likewise, there is no ‘transmisandry’, or whatever you want to call it, because it identifies manhood as the root of our oppression when manhood is fundamentally not marginalized under patriarchy. Transmisogyny, which transmisandry is mimicking, refers to a specific kind of misogyny that impacts trans women; there is no such institutional “misandry” for us to refer to here. Men are systemically devalued in a way under patriarchy -- I think I’ve done plenty to explain this in this essay -- but the devaluing of men is a double edged sword that derives from men being treated as agents in a way that women are not. Men devalue each other to maintain control; women may participate but they generally don’t wield the same power. Maybe the wife of the man who beats his son doesn’t do anything to stop him, or perhaps even encourages it. But when her husband passes away, her son is now in charge of the estate, and she is now reliant on him. The material relation just isn’t the same. The violence of patriarchy chews up and swallows men and women alike because it is a violence to determine who has the right to access, inherit and control property. Women are included in this system as property, as their role is to provide sexual and reproductive labor. There is power in this; men have to control them for a reason. As such, if any discussion about transphobia specific to trans men has to occur, then Nsambu Za Suekama’s concept of anti-transmasculinity more accurately identifies the targeting of trans men based upon our transness instead of our manhood.

In the end, we are left with this simple truth: to be a trans man specifically is to be systemically erased. While many marginalized groups experience epistemicide -- the silencing, devaluing, or annihilation of a knowledge system -- trans mascs are very acutely impacted by this. We do not exist because we are not supposed to exist. The world at large will do everything in their power to force us to be women.

My word of advice? Don’t give them that satisfaction. Don’t retreat into gender essentialism, don’t allow others to bully you into silence and submission by disguising their transphobia as something else. Be a trans man and force them to witness it. Be a trans man and refuse to shut up.

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I extend my sincere gratitude to Talia, Emma, Alice, and my fiance, Miguel, for providing me feedback while I was writing this essay.