“Female Socialization” is a Transphobic Myth
And it’s holding us all back. Here’s why.
And it’s holding us all back. Here’s why.
It’s early in the summer and I’m having coffee with Skyler, a cisgender woman who teaches History at a college a few miles away. Skyler’s school has just gone back to in-person classes after a year of remote learning, and an old, familiar demon is back to torment her: the presumption she is incompetent because she is a woman.
Online, Skyler could hide behind her name and keep her avatar a shady gray box, and have students treat her neutrally and respectfully. Now, thrust back into physical reality, she is a woman in people’s eyes again, and the boys are picking apart her knowledge and expertise.
“If I even say the name of a battle, I start getting quizzed,” she tells me. “Who was the general? How many men fought for each side? How many deaths were there? Where were they buried? Where is the king’s skeleton kept now?”
Skyler has to gird her loins for these encounters, studying up on minutia that isn’t even relevant to the class. She practices clapbacks and witty retorts in her head, in case a cocky, entitled male student decides to challenge her. Skyler has to remind students to call her Dr. Skylerslastname, not “Miss Skyler,” every time someone raises their hand. She has to walk to the back of the room and hover over students when they ignore her and have side conversations. Every day is a battle for her dignity. She was free from all this sexist bullshit last year, but now it’s like she’s teaching with a set of weights on.
“I forgot how much of my energy used to go to fighting these assholes,” she says to me, wearily. I’m frowning sympathetically but don’t have much else to offer. She asks me, “How do you handle things like that?”
“My students have never treated me like that,” I say.
Her brow furrows. It doesn’t compute. “They don’t do that to you?”
I shrug. It always baffles cisgender women when I tell them I don’t experience sexism. I have to tow a careful line as I explain it, detailing to them the extremely privileged position I have, providing enough examples to convince them I do have that privilege, but not lording it over them or bragging. Even if it is annoying for me to bring up, I find it’s important to acknowledge the status I have.
“I have never had a student question my knowledge,” I tell her. “People get quiet and listen when I talk. They ask me for advice. They call me Doctor. ”
Her eyes scan the grass between us, trying to gather up some explanation for this. “What do you do to make them take you seriously? I’ve tried being friendly, I’ve been mean, I send emails about class policies and call stuff out…”
“I never had to do any of that,” I tell her. “They just listen to me.”
Even when I was young and had long hair and wore dresses, students had no difficulty listening to me. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I can’t imagine how infuriating it must be to deal with this every day.”
Skyler gets quiet. My experience is a puzzle to her, as it is to a lot of cisgender women. They assume, because of their own latent transphobia, that deep down I’m really just like them — a woman, with all the experiences women have and all the same disadvantages. But that has never been the case for me. Even when I looked, to most people, like a woman.
When I talk, people listen. When I walk down the street, people get out of the way. When I present myself as an expert on a subject, people believe me. When I was a child, my family was quick to pick up on the fact that I didn’t want to get married and didn’t want children — and though I had my own tormented, dysphoric feelings about it, they never forced the issue. As an adult no one has asked me about those feminine-coded life goals at all. My sister, in contrast, gets asked when she’ll accomplish those milestones all the time. When I am uncomfortable or unhappy, people bend over backwards to accommodate me. I rarely have to assert a boundary more than once.
People interpret my words in a favorable light, even when I’m being kind of prickly. When I say something inelegantly, people give me the benefit of the doubt. I’ve watched as my female friends get tone-policed, misinterpreted, and shut down in a way that I never would. I get paid for my art. I have people thank me for my expertise. Meanwhile Skyler has to fight every single day to make people realize her expertise even exists.
“I thought all afab people struggled with this,” Skyler says sadly.
I have to confess I find it irritating and offensive when cisgender women assume I have led the same kind of life they lead. It feels very invalidating to be treated like just one of the girls no matter how frequently I articulate that I am not one, and don’t live as one. But I recognize that for me, it’s just an annoying act. I can brush it off and remove myself from the spaces where I don’t belong, with no harm done except to my feelings. For transgender women, however, this idea that sexism is linked to one’s genitals or one’s assigned gender at birth gets a lot more dangerous.
Even in fairly progressive, trans-accepting circles, I routinely encounter talk about the trauma of “female socialization” or of being “afab.” There’s this assumption that every person who was assigned female at birth was undermined, disbelieved, talked over, deprioritized, and physically intruded upon throughout their whole lives, and that everyone who was assigned male at birth was believed, heard, valued, and rewarded for their brilliance.
“Female socialization” is a really common TERF talking point. Trans-exclusionary folks love to claim that since many transgender women didn’t experience a conventional, cis-woman “girlhood,” they must not know how sexism really operates. They must have had it easier. And since TERFism lauds feminine suffering as a sign of moral virtue, any woman who didn’t experience a traumatic “girlhood” must be suspect. Entitled. Predatory. A faker.
Unfortunately, it’s not only trans-exclusionary people who think this way. Many trans allies (and many trans folks ourselves!) still dabble in the idea that a person’s gender assignment at birth determines how they grew up and who they are at their core. People who claim to support trans rights throw around the words “afab” and “amab” as if they tell you anything about a person’s life or identity. They describe “female socialization” as if it were some singular, universal experience that cuts across all classes, races, cultures, and families, but somehow never across assigned sex.
It’s time we all stop acting like we can predict anything about who a person is or how they have lived based solely on the gender label that was forced onto them as an infant. In fact, that’s kinda the whole goal of trans liberation — to stop assuming a person’s destiny is determined by a label they didn’t choose for themselves, or consent to.
There is no singular ‘female socialization,’ no universal afab or amab experience, and it harms all of us to pretend that there is. Here’s why:
Socialization Never Ends
When people talk about being “raised as a girl” or experiencing “female socialization,” they often act as though childhood is where all gendering begins and ends. If people viewed you as a girl when you were a child, the logic goes, you learned what it meant to be a girl. You absorbed the lessons and traumas of girlhood, and they will never, ever go away. You’ll always be more prone to folding in on yourself, to getting quiet, to letting the “male socialized” people around you talk first.
This is a laughably simplistic understanding of how humans develop. In reality, human development never ends. Our brains are forever adapting to our circumstances, learning new patterns, and pruning old pathways that no longer serve us. Our behavior and social skills are forever adapting too; the best predictor of a person’s actions is typically the social context they are presently in, not their personality or identity. So even if a person used to move through the world being seen as a “girl,” they can quickly adjust, behaviorally, to being deferred to as a man.
When a person hops from an oppressed category and into a privileged one, their behavior and outlook both tend to change. Teenagers who rebelled against the authority of adults grow up to become adults with authority, who wield that authority against teens. Students who were treated with suspicion and condescension by their teachers grow up to become educators, who also look down on their students. Our views and actions are tainted by the power we possess, and that is true even if we lacked power in the past.
What this means is that even if a person were “raised as a girl,” so to speak, their actions and sense of entitlement can rapidly shift once they are given the power a man has. I’ve seen this play out many times. A transgender man will come out of the closet, start presenting and behaving in a more masculine way, and suddenly everyone treats him differently. Colleagues think his ideas are brilliant and his manner of speaking is compelling. Guys start regaling him with lurid stories about sexual conquests, and women start crossing the street to avoid him at night. If he is a Black man, he might get the cops called on him a lot more often, or he might get hypersexualized and objectified by white women. The trans man is, in real time, being “male socialized” — because socialization is an ongoing process that never stops, for anyone.
In her book Delusions of Gender, Cordelia Fine writes about a transgender scientist whose work immediately started receiving more acclaim once he came out as a man. People appreciated his work more, simply because he was a guy. The scientist even overhead people gossiping about him, saying that his research was much more well-done and impressive than the work of his sister. Of course, the scientist didn’t have a sister — people were speaking about his own pre-transition research, which was done under his old name.
Being treated with more respect (or more fear) changes how you feel about yourself. It alters how you move through public life. The same is true of suddenly being seen as more weak, unintelligent, soft, or feminine. Numerous trans women have been vocal about losing what semblance of ‘male privilege’ they enjoyed upon coming out — to the extent they ever enjoyed it at all. Though we may remember our early childhood experiences of being forced to play football or wear dresses, our minds aren’t locked in amber, unchanged by the power and position we now possess. So to speak of “gender socialization” as a single, linear experience that ends in childhood is inaccurate.
Socialization Is Interactive
Gender socialization is a two-way street: as you are exposed to it, and you respond to it. People in turn react to your response. It’s a dance, a negotiation, and never-ending conversation. No two people have the exact same childhood experience; ask any set of siblings, including twins, and you’ll quickly see how a person’s characteristics shape the social reactions they get.
Infants who smile and sleep easily are held for longer, and treated with more kindness, than infants who cry a lot. That kind, affectionate treatment goes on to affect how kids think about themselves and how readily they attach to other people. Children who conform to gender norms are rewarded for being easy to understand. Those of us who flout gendered expectations are punished, excluded, and ignored. From a young age, many of us learn to hide our gender-nonconforming traits in order to survive. Or we are just passed over and treated as invisible, because our lives do not compute.
In her book Uncomfortable Labels: My Life as a Gay Autistic Trans Woman, author Laura Kate Dale talks about how her Autism was ignored because she had very feminine characteristics and interests. Though she was assigned male at birth and viewed at the time as a “boy,” Dale liked stereotypically feminine things. She was quiet and daydreamy. And so, like many Autistic girls, her disability was overlooked. Laura Kate Dale had a pretty iconic “female socialization” experience — we might even call it a “female Autism” experience — even though no one at the time identified her as a female. She was behaving in feminine-coded ways, and the world reacted to that. Gender socialization is an interplay of what is expected of us, and how we respond.
Academic and author Grace Lavery has also written about how before she transitioned, she was sexually preyed upon and abused by straight men, the exact same way many cisgender women are. Though Lavery went to a well-regarded boys’ school that funneled into Oxford, and received what she considers male privileges before she came out, men could tell there was something distinctly not cis male about her. She was feminine in ways she couldn’t hide, even when she was still in the closet. And she paid the price for it.
Throughout my own life, my demeanor and mannerisms have caused people to treat me more or less like a man. When I was on the debate team in high school, I looked like a “woman,” but I was an assertive, almost arrogant competitor, firing off retorts in a rapid clip, always wearing loose, no-nonsense suits, and meeting my opponents with a forceful stare. I got great reviews from judges, went to Nationals twice, and was ranked top seven in the country in Impromptu speaking.
On my ballots, no judges ever remarked on my appearance, or accused me of being too aggressive. Not even once, in four years of multiple bouts per week. Conversely, there was a girl on the debate team who was more conventionally feminine than me. Though she was a brilliant speaker and writer, judges always commented on her clothing, her hair, her makeup, her mannerisms, and her attitude in an unfavorable way. They told her she dressed too sexy, and didn’t take competition seriously enough. My partner on the debate team was a feminine gay man, and he received very similar comments about his affect. Judges said he was too uncertain, too hesitant — not masculine enough, in other words.
Of the three of us, I was the debater who got the most conventionally “male” treatment, even though I was living as a woman at the time. And part of that is because I was already holding myself to very male standards of behavior. I knew who I was, and how I wished to be seen, and I comported myself accordingly. Even though no one would have said I was a man then, they subconsciously picked up on it, and rewarded me for it.
Socialization Is Observational
Gender socialization does not happen in secret or in a vacuum. Even when society tells you you are meant to be a “girl” or a “boy,” you are constantly witnessing the expectations and norms placed on the other gender at the same time. You notice who in your family does the laundry and who cleans out the gutters. You watch TV and movies filled with male and female characters. When a boy skins his knee on the sidewalk and begins sobbing, you witness him getting reprimanded for being weak , and you learn lessons from that about what manhood means — regardless of if you are one.
We all grow up in a cissexist world, which teaches us that a person’s body determines how they are supposed to dress, which bathroom they are to use, who they’re allowed to hang out with, and what they should aspire to in life. We learn these expectations for both binary genders, and we witness how failure to conform to either role is penalized. If anything, it’s more accurate to say that each and every one of us is cissexism socialized, trained to see ourselves and others in a binary, biologically determined way.
I never wanted to be good at girlhood. It didn’t matter to me that I was told being a girl meant wearing makeup or wanting to have babies. I paid more attention to what it meant to be a “boy,” in society’s eyes. At the same time, I didn’t want to be the perfect portrait of straight boyhood either, so I had to find male role models who were a bit different — usually effete, gay-coded ones.
I remember deciding one day in middle school that I was going to emulate my favorite fictional character, Hannibal Lecter. I inhaled Thomas Harris’ books, and tried to speak and carry myself like the classy cannibal: aloof and well-read, fussy and austere with a deep-seated penchant for violence. I spoke in an practiced, artificial elegance. I got into fights that year, stabbing a boy who had been teasing me in the thighs with a pencil several times. Nobody messed with me again after that. I was proud of myself for living like a masculine, queer-coded villain.
The girls I had been friends with in elementary school decided they wanted nothing to do with me. I didn’t care about celebrity gossip, shopping, or calling boys the way that they did. So I started hanging out with alternative kids: punks and goths of all genders, emo boys who wore women’s jeans, and girls who would later find out they were gay or bisexual. None of us could have articulated we were united by queerness, but we had found one another all the same. We were being “socialized” the way all gender-weird and sexuality-weird kids are — by being pushed aside and viewed as freaks.
Being Closeted is a Traumatic Socialization Experience
When people discuss gender socialization, they frequently act as though the process looks the same whether you are good at fulfilling your assigned role or not. That really makes no sense, once we take a look at the actual lives of genderqueer and trans kids.
If a “boy” is abused and berated for loving dolls, is ostracized by the other boys for being too girly, and only feels safe around their sister and female teachers, can we really say in good faith that kid had a “male socialization” experience? Could we really describe a kid who has been beaten for being feminine as someone who doesn’t understand gendered violence? Their whole life has been gendered violence! In fact, they have gone through a particularly pernicious, statistically hyper-dangerous form of gendered violence: transmisogyny, a hatred of trans women that goes beyond, and intersects with, the misogyny cis women experience.
People who experience transmisogyny are not only subject to gendered violence at exceedingly high rates, they are also portrayed in media as the source of violence rather than the victim. They’re on the receiving end of misogyny, but when they name that misogyny, they’re accused of being dangerous pretenders who are appropriating womanhood. Transmisogny renders a vulnerable group of women at once hyper-visible, and hyper-excluded. Throughout their lives they are othered, yet denied the language and agency to name that othering.
Most people understand that being a closeted gay person isn’t the same thing as having “straight privilege.” We don’t talk about closeted gay kids having grown up being “socialized straight.” When it comes to sexual orientation, people comprehend how damaging it is to be forced to live as something you’re not. How not knowing yourself can leave you feeling broken, and insane, consumed with self-loathing and confusion. How people still detect there is something “off” about you, and penalize you for it, even before you it becomes an identity you can name.
It’s not a privilege to be assumed straight when you’re queer. Why would it be a privilege to be assumed cis when you are trans?
As a transmasculine person, being “raised as a girl” wasn’t the real source of my gendered trauma. It was being forced to be cis. To focus on the harm of “girlhood” or being “socialized female” is to completely miss the real problem for me, a problem that will remain as long as we keep forcing genders onto babies without their consent. Fighting sexism, though a vitally important goal, won’t free me from the pain of cissexism. And ending misogyny against cis women won’t free trans women from transmisogyny either. As long as the world enforces cisgender norms, there will be a uniquely painful socialization experience waiting for all of us who diverge from it.
Socialization Is Raced, Classed, and Enculturated, as Much as It is Gendered
What it means to be a woman or a man varies across culture, time period, class, and social circumstance. So when we speak about a person being raised as a boy or a girl, or socialized into a gendered role, we need to take these factors into account.
The idea that to be feminine is to be soft spoken and weak is an idea rooted in the myth of white innocence and fragility. Historically wealthy white aristocrats viewed their wives and daughters as delicate flowers in need of protecting. This belief served to keep white women unempowered and isolated. It also justified racist violence against Black and brown people, who were presented as violent, masculine threats to white purity. When we act like girlhood is all about dresses and tender feelings and soft pastel flowers, we ignore how artificial this image of femininity is, and how it’s only really been afforded to a certain small subset of girls.
Similarly, staying home to raise children a is only a ‘traditional’ feminine value in families where women could afford to not work. If you are descended from enslaved people, or recent immigrants and diasporic peoples, the women in your family probably always worked. And if you family or home culture knew the taste of poverty, you probably didn’t learn to associate womanhood with being idle, beautiful, dainty. The women in your life were probably forced to be strong.
White feminism has long had a problem with oversimplying the fight for gender justice, assuming that all women need to be liberated from the exact same restrictions. But for many Black women, it is the presumption of strength that can prove oppressive, not the soft vulnerability associated with white womanhood. For Black women, shedding tears can be a bold act of defiance in a world that never treats your emotions with tenderness. If you grew up in poverty, putting a lot of care and time into your appearance may be the unusual thing. There is a reason being a femme was an expression of queer identity in predominately working-class lesbians specifically.
There is no single feminine mold that all women need to break free of equally. There is no masculine ideal that cuts across every single culture, class bracket, or moment in time.
Unfortunately, in mainstream conversations about gender, people talk as if all women are expected to behave the same way. This obscures the distinct experiences of multiply-marginalized women, such as trans women of color. Trans women of color don’t usually grow up being expected to be delicate, quiet mothers and wives, but that doesn’t mean they move through the world with more power than white cis women. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Being assumed to be weak isn’t the only way to be weakened. Often it is even more dangerous if other people assume you are scary or strong. This complex constellation of factors is why trans women of color die at the hands of transphobes and racists at such high numbers, and why society continues to ignore their marginalized status. Their suffering it is not neatly or conveniently understood through the lens of white cis womanhood. To conquer sexism isn’t enough to save them, or any of us. We have to tear apart racism, transmisogyny, and misogynoir as well.
…
I wish that when Skyler considers the sexism she routinely encounters, she would take a moment to notice how specific and narrow her feminine experience really is. The sexism she faces is real, and the need to fight against it genuine. But rather than seeing her own oppression as part of a much larger web of cissexism, transmisogyny, and racism, she thinks her misfortune is located within her assigned gender at birth. That view will always stifle the fight for feminism and trans liberation. In the end it doesn’t help Skyler, and it erases everyone who experiences sexism differently from how Skyler does.
So as annoying as it is for me to do so, I will keep reminding Skyler that my life is nothing like hers. I’ll keep debunking the idea that there are “afab” or “female socialization” experiences common to all of us. And more crucially, I will keeping bringing up the distinct and damaging roles that transmisogyny, cissexism, and white supremacy play in gender based oppression. Because we are never going to move forward if we keep obsessing over socialization or acting like sexism is only a problem for the afab.