If you have to do or participate in something in order to survive, it's not a privilege, right?
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Do Bacha Posh have male privilege?
Bacha Posh are Afghan girls who are *forced* to act and "live as" boys for the sake of her family, to act as an escort for the women in her family, to access education, to keep her family from starving, and other variety of reasons.
If she is forced to do this against her will in order to access the privilege only given to men, or even for survival, then does that automatically mean she has male privilege?
@revoluciana hm
male privilege i a simplification of broad social conditions that is useful in some contexts but breaks down when the gender dynamics of the sitation at hand get even slightly complicated likei guess like newtonian physics is useful to make general predictions in simple situations, but add too much energy or gravity or speed or look at things too closely
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@CJPaloma @JoscelynTransient @revoluciana @faithisleaping "you still avoided hassles others endured"
I'm sure this is true for some set of people, but it's not true for any trans women I know. I suspect the assumption that trans women must've had this experience is a common part of the emotional reaction to this whole subject. -
@revoluciana hm
male privilege i a simplification of broad social conditions that is useful in some contexts but breaks down when the gender dynamics of the sitation at hand get even slightly complicated likei guess like newtonian physics is useful to make general predictions in simple situations, but add too much energy or gravity or speed or look at things too closely
@spacekatia honestly, this is one of my favorite takes on the whole thing.
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@CJPaloma @JoscelynTransient @revoluciana @faithisleaping "you still avoided hassles others endured"
I'm sure this is true for some set of people, but it's not true for any trans women I know. I suspect the assumption that trans women must've had this experience is a common part of the emotional reaction to this whole subject.@ysabel @CJPaloma @JoscelynTransient @revoluciana
I’m rapidly coming to the conclusion that “privilege” is entirely the wrong concept. We’re all marginalized. We’re all pushed to the side by patriarchy and expected to just deal with it. The exact ways in which two people suffered under patriarchy may be different but the suffering is the same.
When we throw around “privilege”, we’re saying “person who don’t suffer as much”. And while that’s sometimes true and even useful, it’s inherently comparative. Chasing comparisons like that inevitably ends up at the oppression Olympics.
Marginalizations, on the other hand, draw us together. We can say, “I see how you suffered. Here is how that affected me.”
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If you have to do or participate in something in order to survive, it's not a privilege, right? It can't possibly be? I feel like we've already established this. Am I wrong?
@revoluciana I’ve read all the replies and don’t have anything to add from the trans experience since I’m a cis woman, but I’ve been thinking about your question about privilege (as defined in the image below) from the perspective of cis/straight-passing women in general compared to women who don’t fit that societal expectation.
I think multiple things can be true at any given time. Privilege doesn’t equal lack of suffering. Survival tactics can still be part of a privileged existence. It can be multi-layered, just like identities can be multi-layered.I would say that looking and behaving like the societally expected version of “woman” (cis-passing, usually white or paler complexion, slim, feminine, palatable for the cis/straight male gaze, not too authoritative or loud, doesn’t take up too much space, etc) is pushed onto all women in a general sense.
Many women feel forced into appearing and behaving like a specific version of “woman” in order to survive. It doesn’t take away the fact that they have privilege over people who can’t do this.
It’s still survival and it’s still privilege.Women who fit this image of “woman” have some privilege in the sense that they often benefit from acceptance and/or at the very least get ignored because they aren’t seen as a threat.
I have that privilege. I check off several of those boxes on the surface. I can walk around in the world without being looked at.
Compared to men who fit the male societal expectation I struggle in many areas of life, but compared to many other women - cis or trans - I can navigate the world without being questioned for my existence.
I’m still gay and disabled and survive below the poverty line.I hate imposed gender expectations but I have absolutely used my privilege to survive in situations where I felt unsafe. I can choose to not divulge my sexuality and no one questions it. Everyone also assumes I’m a woman. Maybe one day I’ll realize I’m not but I’ve benefited from being seen as “acceptable” thus far.
I’ve had to participate in heteronormative behaviours to avoid violence. But some people couldn’t even if they wanted to because they don’t fit that image (including many cis women).
It was misery for me while still benefiting from having a body that doesn’t threaten the cis white heteronormative male gaze. That has absolutely given me an advantage that was already there by the time I was born.
Is male privilege different from my white, cis/straight-passing privilege? Is privilege based on gender different from race or sexuality privilege?
Does privilege change retroactively when someone comes to realize their identity isn’t what they once thought it was?
I don’t know. But I don’t think it’s ever all or nothing.
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@ysabel @CJPaloma @JoscelynTransient @revoluciana
I’m rapidly coming to the conclusion that “privilege” is entirely the wrong concept. We’re all marginalized. We’re all pushed to the side by patriarchy and expected to just deal with it. The exact ways in which two people suffered under patriarchy may be different but the suffering is the same.
When we throw around “privilege”, we’re saying “person who don’t suffer as much”. And while that’s sometimes true and even useful, it’s inherently comparative. Chasing comparisons like that inevitably ends up at the oppression Olympics.
Marginalizations, on the other hand, draw us together. We can say, “I see how you suffered. Here is how that affected me.”
@faithisleaping @ysabel @CJPaloma @revoluciana I don’t have time or energy to weigh in on all of this, but I’ve been thinking about what I wanted to say more and a key thing is: what is the question we are trying to answer when we bring up “privilege” as a concept, especially male privilege?
There are questions where it’s a useful concept, and others for which it’s not or is a red herring.
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@faithisleaping @ysabel @CJPaloma @revoluciana I don’t have time or energy to weigh in on all of this, but I’ve been thinking about what I wanted to say more and a key thing is: what is the question we are trying to answer when we bring up “privilege” as a concept, especially male privilege?
There are questions where it’s a useful concept, and others for which it’s not or is a red herring.
@faithisleaping @ysabel @CJPaloma @revoluciana like if the question was “should trans women be allowed in women’s spaces” or “are trans women women”, then bringing up male privilege is not only irrelevant, but being used to deny our womanhood.
If the question is something more like, why did my boss go from evaluating my public speaking as very competent and engaging when sounding masculine and then judged me to not be engaging and to be doing a poor job as I took on a more feminine voice, then the idea of “male privilege” is useful for understanding how people make biased judgments, and how trans women’s experiences reveal things about how sexism operates in the world.
I guess this where I would hope to see a conversation around this actually go - what question are we discussing and what is the theory or concept of male privilege doing as an answer to that question
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@revoluciana Okay, I've got a cup of tea, 7 hours of sleep and 40 minutes until my first meeting. Here we go...
You keep contrasting privilege as a thing someone has vs. what someone earns or pays for. And there's something there, I think. But I also think miss the mark because both are centered around the person "having" the privilege. But that's not really the way it works. I don't walk up to the counter at my local coffee shop and ask for the white girl discount. There is no such thing. (As much as the fascists seem want there to be.
)Instead, privilege is something done to you. (Yes, I know that seems to contradict the usual definition but the usual definition comes from a place of privilege, so...) Privilege happens in a moment when the barista gives you a free coffee because she likes your vibe. You didn't ask for that coffee to be free. You didn't earn that coffee. There's no sign on the door saying, "Every 10th coffee free for white people." But if you recorded every coffee interaction over the course of the 18 months she's been working at that coffee shop, she's only ever given free cups of coffee to other white girls.
The same is true of gender-based privilege. If you walk into an auto parts store and you look like a white man, you'll get different treatment than if you look like a girl. You'll get the "one of us" treatment. Even if you don't know shit about cars, they're more likely to try to educate you as a peer than if you looked like a woman. If you look like a woman, they'll splain at you to try and impress either you or the other guys at the shop. In a work environment, your ideas will likely get taken more seriously if you're perceived as a peer of the men. Even other women, annoyingly, will often listen more to the men because they've been trained by misogyny to see them as authority figures.
Pretty privilege is also a thing. Girls who look pretty are treated better than girls who look ugly. But, again, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The person doing the treating (coffee shop girl, the boss, etc.) is the one who decides that she's pretty. They're the one who is changing their behavior based on what they see. And while yes, their idea of beauty is probably shaped by white girl TikTok, there is no one definition. So when the boss is handing out assignments or shifts, some of the women look like they're really trying and showing up and others, to him, look like they're not putting in the effort. So he gives the best assignments to the pretty girls since he's decided they'll be better at it based on how symmetric their nose is or how good their makeup turned out that morning.
But the important thing about all of these examples is that you did nothing to earn them. They were done TO you, based on how someone else perceived you.
Okay, time to really set Fedi on fire... Let's talk about passing privilege.
We've all see the Reddit threads. A trans person posts a photo and asks, "Do I pass?" and a bunch of internet strangers weigh in their opinions. But those of us who've been around the block know that's all bullshit. There is no binary "pass" or "don't pass". It's, again, based on perception. To your racist uncle, you may never pass and he makes a point of telling you this. To the nice lady at the library, she may never think twice about your gender. Again, it happens TO you.
"Yes, but Faith, some people pass better than others!"
Okay, yes, but now we get to talk about why it's cursed...
Passing privilege is when someone perceives you in a way that causes them to give you privileged that they might not if they knew more of your history. For trans people, this means reading you as cis and not applying transphobia. For racialized people, this means reading them as white and putting their racism on pause.
But this is all deeply cursed for three reasons.
First, is that the others in that marginalized group often feel resentment towards the person who often passes as something else. They're keenly aware of the bigotry and how it usually affects them. When they see someone else in their same minority group getting better treatment, it hurts. And when you're suffering under marginalization, it's easy to define yourself by that suffering and start to other the people who don't look like they're suffering as much as you are. Some people "passing" and others not can rip marginalized communities apart.
The second is that the person who does pass a lot of the time can end up in some pretty dangerous situations. Passing is ephemeral and, while I just look like some tall Scandinavian girl most of the time, that can change at any moment. That privilege may allow me to travel through rural Iowa completely unnoticed most of the time. But if the curtain falls, I'm deep in the red with zero support and shit can get BAD.
The third is that passing almost always costs you something. It's not so much that you have to pretend in order to pass as it is that you have to pretend in order to keep passing. Take trans guys as an example. Once they get to the point physically that they're seen as men, a subtle shift happens. They start to hear all the shit men say about women in the locker room. What do they do with this? Do they stand up for the girls and risk getting outed and then having to deal with misogyny AND transphobia? Do they try to play the "female ally" card? Do they keep quiet, stay safe, and listen to all the same shit they know those guys said about them when they were young? There's no good answer.
But, hey, at least they get the good treatment at the auto parts store, right?
Okay, back to your first question... Is it a privilege if you have to pay for it?
Here's the thing: It always was! Or, put differently, that distinction is meaningless.
Privilege is always something that is handed out by power at their whim. The lie is that there is a logic to it. When you "earn" something, you're not earning it. There's no rule that says that if you do XYZ you get ABC. It's simply that if you play power's games, they'll give you a bit of privilege as a treat. But they can just as easily take that away if they stop liking you. And they can give it to people who haven't done XYZ just because they like them.
So... Now finally coming back to the original question (this time for real!)...
Were we given privilege or did we earn it? Or (and I think this is critical for this discussion) were we simply punished in different ways? I think that depends a lot on the experience of the individual trans woman. In my experience and what I've observed, it's all of the above, just with a different mix for different people.
In my own experience, I can point to several ways in which my behavior aligned with the social expectations for boys and resulted in something positive. I have an aptitude for STEM, for instance, and that's something that was encouraged under the societal expectations. I was able to take the classes and have the hobbies that allowed me to develop those skills. My parents bought computers I could tinker with and took me to a computer recycling workshop. My sister-in-law, on the other hand, was told by her teachers that "girls aren't good as math" and was impeded at every step. This resulted in very different educational and career outcomes for the two of us.
On the other hand, I know plenty of trans women who aren't so inclined. Their aptitudes didn't align with allowed masculine behavior and so they were considered failures. Or maybe they were allowed to participate in those things at the cost of being labeled as gay even though they were attracted to other women. (So, still gay, just not that way.) That can be incredibly invalidating.
And then there's dysphoria and the pain of being aware that you're in the wrong role but having to play along anyway. Personally, I didn't feel as much of that as some other girls. (Including yourself, from what I understand.) The "boy" role fit well enough for a lot of things (see also STEM) and, thanks to hormones, I was disconnected enough from my body that I didn't really get what was going on. What I did feel was a strong desire to be friends with girls which was never allowed to be. But also, I'm autistic and we were so socially isolated that my sisters never got to have those relationships either and so I didn't really know what I was missing out on.
So where does that leave me today? I'm a girl with a PhD in math and a great job/career who has trouble finding clothes that fit and has enough trauma that she'll probably be in therapy for at least the next decade. Good thing I make enough to pay a therapist, right?
️ But also, as a woman in engineering, I also need to be careful how I move through that world. I've reached a level of success that very few cis women achieve. When I'm at conferences and looking around at my peers, there are no cis women among them. There's a few cis women who've managed to survive the hellfire of engineering long enough to get there, but they don't have the respect of every guy in the room. That's something I only got because they used to think I was a dude. I'm not cognizant of that and assume it's all because I'm so awesome, I do a disservice to the other women there who have worked just as hard and not gotten that boost. To do so would be to lean on a privilege.
But at the same time, what most of them probably don't fully understand is that I've gone through that hell without the support of other women. I've dealt with the bullies and the assholes without having someone to go cry to. Everyone just says, "man up". Women supporting women is a beautiful thing that a lot of cis women take for granted. That's cis privilege. Is it enough to get them that job? Often, no. But it can be a blanket of emotional support which trans women struggle to access.
But as far as the TERFS go... They can fuck right off! When they make arguments about "male privilege", they're almost never in good faith. In fact, what they pretend is about oppression is actually a privilege war. They're pitting their cis privilege against what they perceive as male privilege in someone else. They're playing exactly the same power games that got us into this mess in the first place.
Real feminism, IMO, lays down power and privilege and focuses on nurturing and lifting people up. It recognizes that cis women and trans women are both oppressed and marginalized by society at large and seeks to build solidarity and support. It welcomes trans women into women's spaces not because we have identical experiences but because we're both suffering under patriarchy and both need that network of support. It refuses to define "woman" by any one set of experiences and upbringing because there is no one girlhood, not even for cis women. But rather, it defines women by who we are, how we move through the world, and how we are treated by it. In that sense, trans and cis women are very much the same even if we have different origin stories.
But TERFS see none of this. They're obsessed with their own oppression and with using what power they do have to push as much of society below themselves on the social ladder in the hopes of rising a rung or two. They're the epitome of "I got mine". There's a reason most of them are white.
@faithisleaping @revoluciana @deirdre @JoscelynTransient You get it. It's enlightening to see so many of us expressing the same things in our own words
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@ysabel @CJPaloma @JoscelynTransient @revoluciana
I’m rapidly coming to the conclusion that “privilege” is entirely the wrong concept. We’re all marginalized. We’re all pushed to the side by patriarchy and expected to just deal with it. The exact ways in which two people suffered under patriarchy may be different but the suffering is the same.
When we throw around “privilege”, we’re saying “person who don’t suffer as much”. And while that’s sometimes true and even useful, it’s inherently comparative. Chasing comparisons like that inevitably ends up at the oppression Olympics.
Marginalizations, on the other hand, draw us together. We can say, “I see how you suffered. Here is how that affected me.”
@faithisleaping @CJPaloma @JoscelynTransient @revoluciana That's sort of what I was shooting at with trying to pin down what "privilege" actually is. Lots of people seem to think privilege means power, and they're not the same thing at all. And someone with lots of privilege can still suffer lots! Privilege doesn't magically make you immune to bad things, it just means there is a class of things that other people deal with that you generally don't even have to notice exists. And from that perspective, trans women (generally) never had male privilege, because they always had to be aware of it in the same way that other non-men/non-boys had to be aware of it.
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@faithisleaping @CJPaloma @JoscelynTransient @revoluciana That's sort of what I was shooting at with trying to pin down what "privilege" actually is. Lots of people seem to think privilege means power, and they're not the same thing at all. And someone with lots of privilege can still suffer lots! Privilege doesn't magically make you immune to bad things, it just means there is a class of things that other people deal with that you generally don't even have to notice exists. And from that perspective, trans women (generally) never had male privilege, because they always had to be aware of it in the same way that other non-men/non-boys had to be aware of it.
@faithisleaping @CJPaloma @JoscelynTransient @revoluciana I do know trans women who successfully, at some point or another, wielded male power in some specific scenario. But cis men (and cis boys) get to wield male power without even having to know that it's happening.
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