If you have to do or participate in something in order to survive, it's not a privilege, right?
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@revoluciana Examine what the problems of the concept are, and frame them
@celestestormysea I'm not sure what you mean by this comment.
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@revoluciana What you are taking issue with, is the very concept itself
@revoluciana Also, it should be said,
If a trans person is not always treated with male privilege, then the male privilege itself is conditional. That is part of what makes it so cruel. It is conditional because it was designed to reinforce a system where if you step out of line you are punished. Our genocide is a symptom of it
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@revoluciana Also, it should be said,
If a trans person is not always treated with male privilege, then the male privilege itself is conditional. That is part of what makes it so cruel. It is conditional because it was designed to reinforce a system where if you step out of line you are punished. Our genocide is a symptom of it
@revoluciana Either privilege is always conditional, Male Privilege is not a privilege it is something else, or the concept of Male Privilege is not coherent.
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@celestestormysea under this definition, if a cis woman works really hard and sacrifices in order to obtain the same benefits, then she is receiving male privilege. That doesn't square up for me.
@revoluciana @celestestormysea consider a butch lesbian who passes as male in order to keep her and her femme girlfriend safe (this was common in the 20th century), the whole point of doing that is to obtain privilege for survival, it doesn't mean she's fundamentally a man, that's not how privilege works
when I was pre-transition there's no question I received *some* level of (reduced) privilege just for being seen as male, compared to how society treats me now. it was never the same as a man receives becuse on some level they know we are different and we can't perform maleness the way a man does. but it's just not so simple as saying I was not treated differently before, and it doesn't reflect on my true nature at all, it was mere coincidence. privilege should be seen as a material factor and not anything to do with identity, and where it intersects passing as something you're not, it's always extremely complex and nuanced. for me, the takeaway of these experiences isn't "I never experienced even the slightest misplaced privilege" but "yeah I did, and that's fucked up and masculinism should be destroyed so this doesn't happen anymore" -
@revoluciana What you are taking issue with, is the very concept itself
@celestestormysea in what sense?
I take issue with the idea that a person who is not a man can experience male privilege, especially given how much they have to sacrifice in order to get something.
In any other context, we don't say a person of color experiences white privilege when they sacrifice in order to achieve or obtain a thing typically afforded to white people through white privilege.
We don't say cis women experience male privilege when they sacrifice in order to achieve or obtain a thing typically afforded to men through male privilege.
We don't say gay people experience straight privilege when they sacrifice in order to achieve or obtain a thing typically afforded to straight people through straight privilege-- even when the gay person is stealth or in the closet.
But when it's trans women sacrificing and we happen to obtain something, we're just men experiencing male privilege.
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Here's what I'm getting at.
Trans women don't experience male privilege before coming out. It's not a privilege if you have to sacrifice everything you are in order to obtain it. And in the case of trans women, we don't even sacrifice who we are in order to obtain male privilege, we do it just to survive. I'm having such a difficult time believing it's privilege when it's bought and paid for, especially at such a high price.
I think there is a privilege, not for everyone, I was fortunate to be in both male and female perceived spaces all my life ... Like being a fly on the wall
It was interesting ... But also one would need to be observant and love watching body language
Hugz & xXx
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Here's what I'm getting at.
Trans women don't experience male privilege before coming out. It's not a privilege if you have to sacrifice everything you are in order to obtain it. And in the case of trans women, we don't even sacrifice who we are in order to obtain male privilege, we do it just to survive. I'm having such a difficult time believing it's privilege when it's bought and paid for, especially at such a high price.
@revoluciana I think it's still privilege even if the requirements for receiving it are a heavy burden. Like a prince who doesn't want to be king still gets all the privilege. I agree with everything else you said, I just disagree that paying for a privilege means it isn't a privilege. A trans woman masking as a cis man is certainly onerous, but they'd still get the social benefits that males do. That doesn't subtract from the constant trauma it causes, though, or even remotely compensates.
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@revoluciana Either privilege is always conditional, Male Privilege is not a privilege it is something else, or the concept of Male Privilege is not coherent.
@revoluciana If someone uses Male Privilege in order to dismiss sacrifices it is creating a new semantic use as a way of dismissing instead of using it as a term for a sociological phenomena.
If someone says that they have sacrificed so it is wrong to say they have Male Privilege it would likewise be a new semantic use that dismisses the sociological phenomena.
The original definition and semantic use as crafted. Would suggest that Male Privilege must simultaneously exist as a complex sociological phenomena alongside other things instead of being used as a cudgel outside its originated context.
It is a term as defined originally that is meant to explore how a set of conditional benefits exploits and harms many people to reinforce a Patriarchal System.
If trans people have Male Privilege as originally defined, it would follow that trans people are being harmed when they have Male Privilege and that the term could be used to label and explore that harm.
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Here's what I'm getting at.
Trans women don't experience male privilege before coming out. It's not a privilege if you have to sacrifice everything you are in order to obtain it. And in the case of trans women, we don't even sacrifice who we are in order to obtain male privilege, we do it just to survive. I'm having such a difficult time believing it's privilege when it's bought and paid for, especially at such a high price.
I know people are trying to explain something to me with nuance, and I'm truly not trying to be a jerk, but all I keep hearing is that the violence we experience as trans women is actually privilege. But not just any privilege, but specifically male privilege. Because we are men. Or at least because people think we are. Which is its own privilege. And we should be so privileged to live through this violence in order to get *benefits* that make our lives easier (at this point we disregard the violence).
I'm just not buying it. Having the effects of our literal torture, self sacrifice, and violence called privilege is just not making its way to me.
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@revoluciana If someone uses Male Privilege in order to dismiss sacrifices it is creating a new semantic use as a way of dismissing instead of using it as a term for a sociological phenomena.
If someone says that they have sacrificed so it is wrong to say they have Male Privilege it would likewise be a new semantic use that dismisses the sociological phenomena.
The original definition and semantic use as crafted. Would suggest that Male Privilege must simultaneously exist as a complex sociological phenomena alongside other things instead of being used as a cudgel outside its originated context.
It is a term as defined originally that is meant to explore how a set of conditional benefits exploits and harms many people to reinforce a Patriarchal System.
If trans people have Male Privilege as originally defined, it would follow that trans people are being harmed when they have Male Privilege and that the term could be used to label and explore that harm.
@revoluciana "I had Male Privilege, here is how it harmed me" is correct
"You had Male Privilege? It must of all been sunshine and daisies for you! You can't speak of the harm in my feminist space" is an incorrect use that is inherently counter to feminism and a common tactic of fascists
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@revoluciana "I had Male Privilege, here is how it harmed me" is correct
"You had Male Privilege? It must of all been sunshine and daisies for you! You can't speak of the harm in my feminist space" is an incorrect use that is inherently counter to feminism and a common tactic of fascists
@celestestormysea this line of thought still isn't clicking for me, but is a different perspective and I appreciate the effort to help me see what others are seeing. I'm going to head to sleep and consider this line of thought tomorrow. Thank you for this.
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I know people are trying to explain something to me with nuance, and I'm truly not trying to be a jerk, but all I keep hearing is that the violence we experience as trans women is actually privilege. But not just any privilege, but specifically male privilege. Because we are men. Or at least because people think we are. Which is its own privilege. And we should be so privileged to live through this violence in order to get *benefits* that make our lives easier (at this point we disregard the violence).
I'm just not buying it. Having the effects of our literal torture, self sacrifice, and violence called privilege is just not making its way to me.
I'm going to go to sleep now and mull over this some more tomorrow.
Thank you to everyone trying to help me see what I don't see and/or engaging with what I do see.
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@revoluciana "I had Male Privilege, here is how it harmed me" is correct
"You had Male Privilege? It must of all been sunshine and daisies for you! You can't speak of the harm in my feminist space" is an incorrect use that is inherently counter to feminism and a common tactic of fascists
@revoluciana If someone wanted to run a feminist space focusing solely on a specific perspective that would be an act of exclusivity that could produce productive conversations only if it then confers with and integrates other feminist views, and, does not gatekeep Feminism. Feminism includes a lot, is not its parts, it is its whole. That is what it means to be Holistic and Intersectional
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@bri7 appreciated. Yup. I already put that in this thread in a reply earlier and also shared it with the person I'm arguing with IRL. But yes, absolutely relevant.
@revoluciana i just feel like it’s the final word: do people go around asking gay people how great all that straight passing privilege was?
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I know people are trying to explain something to me with nuance, and I'm truly not trying to be a jerk, but all I keep hearing is that the violence we experience as trans women is actually privilege. But not just any privilege, but specifically male privilege. Because we are men. Or at least because people think we are. Which is its own privilege. And we should be so privileged to live through this violence in order to get *benefits* that make our lives easier (at this point we disregard the violence).
I'm just not buying it. Having the effects of our literal torture, self sacrifice, and violence called privilege is just not making its way to me.
@revoluciana This is what I said earlier:
"If you dare call the first 17 years of my life a 'privilege,' in which I was brainwashed into being someone I'm not, in which that life systematically ate away and destroyed my insides and took years to rebuild, and in which I lived under crippling levels of self-hatred and shame, you can take a 10 mile hike straight into the November waters of Lake Superior..."
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I know people are trying to explain something to me with nuance, and I'm truly not trying to be a jerk, but all I keep hearing is that the violence we experience as trans women is actually privilege. But not just any privilege, but specifically male privilege. Because we are men. Or at least because people think we are. Which is its own privilege. And we should be so privileged to live through this violence in order to get *benefits* that make our lives easier (at this point we disregard the violence).
I'm just not buying it. Having the effects of our literal torture, self sacrifice, and violence called privilege is just not making its way to me.
@revoluciana I think it is necessary to separate out the male privilege from the lack of privilege from being transgender. It is not an either or - you can suffer greatly being "a man" but you can still have male privilege.
Will you suffer more misogyny as a man or a woman? You have privilege in not suffering that as a man - even if you are cosplaying the role. So being a man has a level of privilege.
Remember here we are talking about what society perceives you as not what you feel necessarily.
It doesn't matter that it makes you feel bad in other ways. We are the SUM of all our privileges.
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R relay@relay.infosec.exchange shared this topic
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@revoluciana If someone wanted to run a feminist space focusing solely on a specific perspective that would be an act of exclusivity that could produce productive conversations only if it then confers with and integrates other feminist views, and, does not gatekeep Feminism. Feminism includes a lot, is not its parts, it is its whole. That is what it means to be Holistic and Intersectional
@revoluciana What bothers me and many others is the tendency in feminist spaces to consider male / female or women / men along the binary dichotomy, that is Cisgender Privilege in the sense that to be able to only ever think in that binary one has to have never been challenged by it or have agreed to it despite its conditionality. And it is especially harmful to be denied consideration as male / female or women / men when someone has it as part of their experience. Spaces like these are inherently exclusionary and non-intersectional. They perpetuate harms that Feminism is meant to counter
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Here's what I'm getting at.
Trans women don't experience male privilege before coming out. It's not a privilege if you have to sacrifice everything you are in order to obtain it. And in the case of trans women, we don't even sacrifice who we are in order to obtain male privilege, we do it just to survive. I'm having such a difficult time believing it's privilege when it's bought and paid for, especially at such a high price.
@revoluciana does anyone have privilege then, by that reasoning? The men trapped by the patriarchy, forced to play the role of a modern "alpha" male? Just like us, they too have to suppress part of who they are, just to a lesser extent.
I moved through the world, where presenting male (if only weakly) made doors open that I'm far less sure they would these days. That was a privilege, as far as I see it, now that I finally see it. Privilege, albeit at a wretched cost.
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@faithisleaping absolutely intersectional and agreed on all of this except for the part here where some aspect was improved because of supposed male privilege, but the point is that you aren't a man, you paid for that so-called privilege through sacrifice.
If a cis woman sacrificed in order to get the same thing, we wouldn't say that she was experiencing male privilege. We would say she sacrificed to get it. Trans women have to sacrifice who they are in order to get so called privilege. But we don't say that she sacrificed, we say that she had male privilege.
Because it's not afforded to her because she's male, it's afforded to her because of the sacrifices that she made in order to be perceived as male, to be acceptable within that context, even if only for survival.
@revoluciana @faithisleaping the way privilege is being talked about here…this might be blunt but it sounds like the way teenagers on tumblr talk about social theory. That privilege is this singular thing that a person possesses based upon identity. That’s not really how I approach thinking about this stuff as someone who has been a social scientist and an activist, I guess?
Okay, let me frame it this way: it feels like you’re still playing the game of oppression Olympics and hierarchies of privilege like someone gets +5 social points or something. That is, if we continue to argue with people arguing things about privilege from this framing and argue on their grounds. This is a disastrous and wrongheaded framing…it’s like so incorrect it’s not even wrong, kind of framing and I would want to take this to a different field of discourse if I was talking to someone insisting that trans women have or had male privilege and thus are more privileged than cis women or shouldn’t be given space in community gatherings or something.
Let me circle around in the morning when I’m better able to articulate some examples, but I would always suggest trying to situate social theories in something more concrete and think about something like privilege as a process or something that is done, where power flows through people and our social relations. And to understand identity as not something one has but something that exists in relation to others.
What happens if you are assigned male at birth but are constantly perceived as falling short or unable to perform the role expected? How is that actively challenged and punished by others? How does a child habituate themselves in order to navigate that?
We can line this up with outcomes in certain ways. Like, trans women have generally experienced sexual harassment or assault *before* transition at higher rates than their cis men peers. This is likely because we often aren’t actually fully seen as or treated as full men even before we realize it.
Other things can be more nuanced and complicated, like income. Many trans women have incomes similar to cis men peers before transition, but there are many who don’t. In fact, the psychological costs on trans women before transition means there are a lot of people who wind up disabled or unable to work normal jobs. Many of us also lag behind cis men peers in our careers for the same reasons. And after transition, we have steep declines in income and job security.
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@revoluciana @faithisleaping the way privilege is being talked about here…this might be blunt but it sounds like the way teenagers on tumblr talk about social theory. That privilege is this singular thing that a person possesses based upon identity. That’s not really how I approach thinking about this stuff as someone who has been a social scientist and an activist, I guess?
Okay, let me frame it this way: it feels like you’re still playing the game of oppression Olympics and hierarchies of privilege like someone gets +5 social points or something. That is, if we continue to argue with people arguing things about privilege from this framing and argue on their grounds. This is a disastrous and wrongheaded framing…it’s like so incorrect it’s not even wrong, kind of framing and I would want to take this to a different field of discourse if I was talking to someone insisting that trans women have or had male privilege and thus are more privileged than cis women or shouldn’t be given space in community gatherings or something.
Let me circle around in the morning when I’m better able to articulate some examples, but I would always suggest trying to situate social theories in something more concrete and think about something like privilege as a process or something that is done, where power flows through people and our social relations. And to understand identity as not something one has but something that exists in relation to others.
What happens if you are assigned male at birth but are constantly perceived as falling short or unable to perform the role expected? How is that actively challenged and punished by others? How does a child habituate themselves in order to navigate that?
We can line this up with outcomes in certain ways. Like, trans women have generally experienced sexual harassment or assault *before* transition at higher rates than their cis men peers. This is likely because we often aren’t actually fully seen as or treated as full men even before we realize it.
Other things can be more nuanced and complicated, like income. Many trans women have incomes similar to cis men peers before transition, but there are many who don’t. In fact, the psychological costs on trans women before transition means there are a lot of people who wind up disabled or unable to work normal jobs. Many of us also lag behind cis men peers in our careers for the same reasons. And after transition, we have steep declines in income and job security.
@revoluciana @faithisleaping there is actually a really nuanced exploration of this topic I’ve wanted to do, but been wary to put in public writing because of how heated people get around this, and how quickly people assume the worst about a person allowing for any room to talk about “male socialization” or “male privilege” in trans women’s lives.
If I’m honest about myself, there are ways I am very confident male privilege and being “socialized male” shaped me and my life in important ways, some mostly beneficial (though some deeply costly). But it also didn’t operate the way that many people probably assume, and it often wasn’t a cost/benefit proposition, but rather a thing that shapes behavior and life patterns.
Anyway, I should go to bed rather than disk horsing. Sorry for probably being messy and careless with some words here
