CIRCLE WITH A DOT

@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.

@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.

@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.

@JoscelynTransient @revoluciana @faithisleaping An idea that might help is that privilege is often about the things you don't have to think about, not some sort of magic power. Male privilege is largely about the things men don't have to notice but women absolutely must. White privilege is largely about the things white people never see but people of color live in every day. And so on.