If you have to do or participate in something in order to survive, it's not a privilege, right?

[joscelyntransient@chaosfem.tw]

@revoluciana @faithisleaping love you too!

[revoluciana@chaosfem.tw]

@iris well said. Appreciated.

[revoluciana@chaosfem.tw]

@iris totally understand. I mean, clearly I've caused some heat by bringing it up, so I definitely understand but I think that at least people like me aren't going to sort this out in our own minds without being able to discuss it, so I really appreciate hearing the perspective so I can learn, whether I adopt a particular stance or not from each person, having other perspectives is its own education.

And yes, you're words are very much appreciated and felt.

[cjpaloma@mstdn.social]

@ysabel @JoscelynTransient @revoluciana @faithisleaping

To piggy back: presenting a certain way in the world is both an individual AND a social act- always.

Privileges are given to us by others -without our permission -they are socially conferred. For ex: it is grown assed men who -choose- to catcall teenage girls, not you.That doesn't negate (huge) individual struggles with that assigned identity, but you still avoided hassles others endured

People choose to pass for similar reasons

[revoluciana@chaosfem.tw]

@ellesaurus I apologize, I did misunderstand that first part.

And yes, I was intending to (shift?), I'm not trying to stand my ground, I'm trying to learn, and incorporate the perspective of each of the people that are helping educate me on this thread. And by bringing up the "male-passing" part, I'm exploring whether or not my original proposition is wrong that "no trans woman..." and incorporating and exploring the idea of, if I'm wrong about that, where is the possible intersection of what I see (and don't see), and what other people see (and don't see). So, I'm trying to explore different ground by saying that, other ground that someone else suggested.

I'm not sure if it fits. Because I'm wondering if I can conceive of what they called "male-passing privilege" vs. male privilege. I'm not sure I do, but maybe? I still don't see it as privilege, but at the same time, if other trans women are calling what they've experienced as male privilege, I don't want to simply talk over their experiences even if I don't see it. But I also know my own experience, and calling what I experienced as male privilege is not something I can currently swallow. I have all sorts of other intersectional privileges that I readily acknowledge, and I acknowledge there are many I am also unaware of and still experience, but I just can't make it work through the logic when it comes to applying specifically male privilege at least to my own experience, if nothing else.

And so idk. Maybe a third thing is happening that isn't quite the same thing, that makes our experiences and perspectives different. Or maybe I'm flat wrong. That's why I'm trying to understand better.

[what@chaosfem.tw]

@revoluciana @ellesaurus I’ve been following this conversation over the past days and it seems like the big divide between you and your respondents is that you’re viewing privilege as some overarching thing bestowed upon one, while the replies are talking about privilege as a series of advantages given contextually. I don’t think there can be any doubt, as Elle’s example illustrates, that there can be particular situations in which a pre-transition trans woman could benefit from male privilege. I also don’t think that fact says anything about the overall privilege they do or do not experience.

[ellesaurus@toot.lgbt]

@revoluciana Fair! I just wanted to clarify where you're coming from.

I personally don't really care about the label so much, and if viewing the label as "male passing" helps I think that works too and may avoid some baggage from weaponization.

I do think English is lacking a gender adjective in the way we might use for "male pilot" when we mean a pilot who is a man, causing male/female to be overloaded, and fail to encompass non-binary identities.

[revoluciana@chaosfem.tw]

@CJPaloma @ysabel @JoscelynTransient @faithisleaping

To be clear, I don't think passing is necessarily a choice, it often isn't. And I don't think I passed when pretending to be a man. In fact I know I didn't because people tell me now I didn't and they told me at the time, too. I mean, I primarily lived in the girls dorms in college despite not transitioning for another 14 years because the girls saw me as more or less one of them. I was dating someone there, but boyfriends were kicked out, but not me, and whenever I broached the topic with them, they looked at me with such a confused look, because obviously the moratorium on boys didn't extend to me. I wasn't invited to do mens things, I was *always* invited to do women's things when I was ever invited to do anything at all throughout my entire life, even if I was also gatekept at times, too. I was put in a box that varied in its proximity to womanhood, but was never in the box of manhood. Ever.

And maybe that's part of the reason I'm having such an issue with this. People did not really perceive me as a man before transition. Even at my most masc presenting, they knew something was off. So I wasn't treated as a man. At the absolute most, I was treated at times as someone who is supposed to work harder to become a man but wasn't one. I was very much treated as someone *not* man, even if I wasn't exactly treated as a woman.

Even if this resulted in privilege, and I'm really not sure it does, it doesn't seem that this is *male* privilege, but something else. Because despite the fact that society only consciously recognizes a false gender binary, individually and socially, people inherently have the ability pick up on at least some of us who don't fit that mold.

[cjpaloma@mstdn.social]

@revoluciana @ysabel @JoscelynTransient @faithisleaping Sure, and passing also has a long and fascinating history -not related to gender identity- which is more what I was thinking of. I was thinking much more in terms of why POC chose to pass for white: to -avoid- hassle/abuse.

I think most folks generally think of that as -avoiding discrimination- which it is, but it seems to me, a huge amount of "being privileged" does amount to "the avoidance of being subjected to certain downsides"

[faithisleaping@anarres.family]

@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.

@deirdre @JoscelynTransient

[kats@chaosfem.tw]

@revoluciana She nailed it.
I think the one thing she missed was calling out the way TERFs deliberately abuse the dual meaning of "enjoy". That specific type of wordplay is a recurring motif among their ilk.

To address this in terms of my own experience:

• Yes, male privilege was conferred on me.
• Yes, I enjoyed the fruits of that privilege: getting to explore lines of work that interested me, and getting paid well for it, moving freely at night without fear, etc.
• No, I did not enjoy the fact of the privilege itself, nor did I take pleasure in wielding it. The process of coming to recognise it for what it was, and what an unfair advantage it had given me, was a deeply unpleasant one.

This is on the level of asserting that gendered socialisation is an outcome, rather than a process inflicted on each of us. As Julia points out, their reaction would be very different if we'd been born with vaginas, which brings us back to the categorically anti-feminist stance of biological essentialism.

Now that I'm looking at it from that original-sin angle, it reeks of the argument that "womanhood is defined by suffering, trans women didn't suffer the same set of things, therefore they're not real women."

In closing: they can take their sophistry, coat it in ground jalapeño, and jam it somewhere uncomfortable.

[faithisleaping@anarres.family]

@revoluciana Yeah, passing is not always a choice. And some of the side effects @CJPaloma pointed out are precisely because of that. Part of the curse is having people you should have solidarity with push you out because you look like the oppressor.

And... we see that in the trans community, too.

And maybe that's part of the reason I'm having such an issue with this. People did not really perceive me as a man before transition.

I suspect that has a lot to do with the emotional reaction, yes. There's a lot of different experiences among trans people. I personally had a lot less of the body horror and the constant social push-back that others experienced. Instead, I grew up in a cult and got loaded up with that pile of trauma.

But "had decent parents" privilege doesn't have the same ring to it that the others do.

@ysabel @JoscelynTransient

[cjpaloma@mstdn.social]

@revoluciana @ysabel @JoscelynTransient @faithisleaping Long ago, an unmistakably Black co worker told me she'd been stopped at a check point x times in the past month, where my white ass had been stopped half as often in a full year. None of that was because of my choosing. Nor was I aware of holding that privilege as a white person until that exact point. Had we asked an Asian co worker?…right…they didn't get the expressly anti Black hassle, but they got a different set of issues. So yeah….

[thesquirrelfish@sfba.social]

@revoluciana without having read the rest of the context, my response above is based on the idea that it's a privilege to be able to survive.
Privilege isn't something based on what you do - that's the whole point, it's something you get without having done anything to earn it. That's why people can be ignorant of the privileges they've experienced - they may have never even seen or interacted with anyone who hasn't had the same privilege.

[revoluciana@chaosfem.tw]

@faithisleaping @deirdre @JoscelynTransient

So, I said I was going to take a break from replying on this thread, but you wrote such a long and thoughtful post and I really just wanted to at least post let you know how much I appreciate the perspective and everything you shared.

[thesquirrelfish@sfba.social]

@revoluciana @celestestormysea actually there's passing privilege - where someone can pass as white because of their name, the color of their skin, their background etc and access privileges that aren't available to all Black people.
This is something I recently heard brought up by a Black intellectual talking about being on a Black academic/intellectual panel - three Black people were chosen, and two were first generation from Africa and one had a white parent. This doesn't actually represent the average Black American experience, and there's often a weird mix of privilege in these kinds of cases.
I've seen related stories from people who present as "gayer" - everyone knew they were gay maybe even before they did. They didn't really have the "privilege" of the closet - which yeah it's not much of a privilege, but does provide additional survival opportunities.

[ysabel@toot.cat]

@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.

[spacekatia@girlcock.club]

@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 like

i 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

[revoluciana@chaosfem.tw]

@ysabel @CJPaloma @JoscelynTransient @faithisleaping

Agreed.

[revoluciana@chaosfem.tw]

@spacekatia honestly, this is one of my favorite takes on the whole thing.