Transmisandry is Not Real

Trans men suffer under systemic transphobia and sexism. But no one is oppressed for being a man.

Photo by Daniel Páscoa on Unsplash

There is a certain class of transmasculine person who is very adamant in claiming that trans men’s struggles represent a distinct form of oppression, fundamentally different from anything faced by cisgender women, nonbinary people, trans women, or cisgender queer men. This unique form of oppression is something they call “transmisandry”, or sometimes “transandrophobia”, both terms supposedly representing the intersection between transphobia, and society’s hatred of men. 

There’s a big problem with that conceptualization from the very start: there is no systemic “misandry”; men are not oppressed for being men. It is pointless and even damaging to try and create an “intersection” between a genuine form of oppression (such as transphobia) and one that does not exist on any systematic scale (“misandry”).

Though men face discrimination, exclusion, and even violence due to oppressions such as racism, ableism, or yes, transphobia, none of their experiences are caused by people hating men — or by society underprivileging men (relative to women, or other gendered groups). 

There is simply no social structure under the sun in which men hold less power than women. Even when men are outnumbered by women, such as in fields like education and psychology, they are paid more than women are, are more likely to be promoted to prestigious leadership positions, they are treated in a more deferential way, and their work is regarded as more practical and authoritative. 

This phenomenon is not isolated to cisgender men. As Cordelia Fine writes in her landmark book, Delusions of Gender, many trans male academics experience a shift in how their colleagues regard them following their transitions. A scholar who is frequently talked over and rarely cited as a “woman” may suddenly be noticed and listened to once he is a “man.” After his transition, neuroscientist Ben Barres frequently got told that he was a far more serious, accomplished scientist than his “sister” — who was, of course, just his pre-transition self. 

The difference in how I was treated following my transition was so obvious as to be laughable: I published in obscurity as a woman for a decade and a half, but within a month of starting testosterone, an essay of mine reached a readership in the millions, and I’d been hired for my first clinical assistant faculty position. I’d have a book deal with a major publisher by the end of that same year. 

Nothing had changed about the quality of my work, or how hard I had toiled; life as a man had just immediately gotten easier. When I spoke, people quieted down. When I produced something, others promoted it for me. People seemed strongly motivated to locate the brilliance within even my most pedantic or long-winded of points, even when in the past they would have eye-rolled at them. Though I now had to cope with more overt transphobia in the courthouse and the doctor’s office, in my workplace, I became a man, and thus, a person of importance. What’s more, I didn’t have to pass in order to be awarded these huge benefits — the moment I slotted myself into a male social category, I began to enjoy them.

Of course, not every trans man has such a positive experience. Due to transphobia, many trans guys never get fully viewed and regarded as men. Their managers pass them over for promotions, the cisgender men on their teams steal credit for their ideas, they are paid less, their bodies are commented upon by both men and women, and if they come forward to speak about mistreatment, they risk being branded hysterical.

These injustices follow trans men outside of the workplace, too: their doctors may accuse them of making up symptoms, the same way they’d do to their women patients; their dates feel entitled to their bodies just the way they would a female partner’s; their access to reproductive healthcare is legally curtailed. These are experiences of systemic oppression: they’re discrimination in every legal, economic, and societal sense. But they are not caused by misandry. They’re caused by sexism and transphobia. 

Transphobia is a form of oppression that, by definition, involves assigning a person a fixed social position that they cannot escape. A trans person dealing with transphobia, then, will always have to face being misgendered and receiving mistreatment related to their perceived gender assignment at birth. That does not mean the trans person actually is the gender they were assigned at birth in all ways, even socially. It just means they have been targeted by transphobia. 

A trans woman, for example, might face sexism in the form of harassment and unwanted groping, right alongside transphobic claims that she can’t really be a sexual assault victim, because she is a predatory “man.” Trans women have written entire self-defense guides to help cope with the horrific double-trauma of being sexually assaulted, and then immediately accused of sexual assault. Such an experience for trans women really is that common.

You can read the full self-defense guide here.

Calling a trans woman a predatory “man” does not make her one. It certainly does not confer her any social privileges, nor does it make her any less a victim of sexism. It just means that, in addition to sexism, she is experiencing hateful transphobia. Experiencing sexism at times, then, does not make a trans man a woman — it makes him a victim of transphobia.

It is therefore not “transmisandry” for a trans man to be a victim of the gender pay gap, for example. The gender pay gap is caused by institutional sexism, and if a trans man is a victim of it, that’s because of transphobia. His employer is treating him the way they would a woman, and the employer treats women like shit. The trans man’s oppression here is inextricably tied to the oppression of all women, and of all trans people. It has nothing to do with him being “oppressed” for being a man.

It is wrong for anyone to be underpaid due to the gendered categories they occupy; it is not uniquely wrong for a trans man to be underpaid just because he is a man. Fighting any semblance of “man-hating” in the culture or lobbying for men’s liberation will do nothing to help the trans man, here. What’s needed is for a large and diverse group of gender minorities to fight for the end of the unfair treatment of women, and all other gender minorities.

This same logic applies to any form of so-called “transmisandry” that is really just repackaged or misdirected sexism. If a trans guy’s words are taken less seriously because his voice is high and he gestures with his hands a lot, that’s due to decades of sexist conditioning punishing those qualities because they are typically associated with women. It’s not “transmisandry,” it’s garden-variety sexism that’s being applied to the trans man because of transphobia. Gay men and gender-nonconforming men frequently are on the receiving end of this bias too. Because of sexism, it is considered socially unacceptable for men to exhibit “feminine” traits.

If a trans man fails to receive enough support as a new parent, that’s probably due to the sexism that has long alienated new mothers and offloaded all child-rearing labor onto them, and which has trained people to associate nurturance only with womanhood. It’s not “transmisandry” that causes the mothers to gaze at a trans man suspiciously during Lamaze class. It’s transphobia — and the deeply-ingrained sexism of being taught that a father can never be a birthing parent. Similarly, it is not “misandry” when stay-at-home cisgender dads draw stares and curious comments.

Trans men will only stop experiencing sexism when women do — and when all trans people stop being regarded as the gender they were assigned at birth. It’s not a unique experience for a trans man to be treated as less of a respectable, worthy human being because of his gender minority status. He shares that experience with all trans women, cisgender women, and nonbinary people. So there is no need to parcel out his experience and label it as a unique form of oppression like “transmisandry” or “transandrophobia.” To do so is to confuse where trans men’s oppression even comes from.

And it’s certainly not helpful for trans men to harass a trans woman online (as has recently happened to many public-facing trans femmes, most recently Jessie Gender), claiming that simply by discussing the sexism she faces, she is somehow erasing the experiences of trans men. Such criticisms sound eerily similar to Men’s Rights Activists claiming that feminists erase men’s concerns. It’s telling that both groups’ major form of “activism” involves criticizing women for not catering to their interests, rather than building any kind of political movement to uplift gender non-conforming men or support vulnerable men when they experience racism, poverty, and other injustices.

Of course, transphobia does look a bit different when it is directed at a trans woman compared to when it is directed at a man. That’s because transphobia by its very nature seeks to undermine a trans person’s identity and recast them as their assigned gender at birth, even when all their experiences, their identity, their relationships, and their social positioning would suggest otherwise. What a trans man finds dysphoric is not, generally, what a trans woman will, but they’re both dysphoric, invalidating experiences.

Besides, just because two experiences of oppression look different does not mean they come from completely different social dynamics. Gay men and lesbians are both victims of homophobia, after all, and for gay men, that homophobia can look especially like a fixation on perversion and accusations of ‘child grooming.’ Homophobia directed at lesbians, in contrast, is less about accusations of sexual depravity, and more about claims that their lives are incomplete without a man.

This unique flavor of homophobic experience does not mean gay men are suffering from “androhomophobia.” The homophobia they face is sometimes more overt and sex-focused than what lesbians face because men are seen as powerful beings with real sexual agency, and women are not. It’s not because men are uniquely oppressed. Both forms of homophobia are homophobia, and at the end of the day they can be equally traumatic and violent.

It seems to me that some trans men who talk about ‘transmisandry’ seem to find it outrageous that they experience sexism. It seems fundamentally more wrong to them that they are sexually assaulted, denied tubal ligations, asked to remember in-law’s birthdays, and mocked for enjoying ukulele music and slash fiction than when women are. 

But this is sexist bunk: it is equally wrong for any group of people to be undervalued and exploited in these ways. The dysphoria a man gets from experiencing sexism might feel unique, but the sexism itself isn’t. It has the exact same origin point as the misogyny that trans women, cis women, and nonbinary people face. It is important that we trans men see ourselves as part of a larger class of gender-marginalized people, so that we can communicate about our shared struggles and unite to work against them. The straight men who were bullied for being crybaby “sissies” have a place in feminism and stand to gain from it. Trans men do too. Both groups of men ought to participate actively in the gender liberation of other groups.

There is another form of unjust treatment that certain trans mascs point to as ‘transmisandry,’ beyond misplaced sexism: It is the uncomfortable, often confusing experience of being told that one belongs to a powerful group. Many trans men report feeling horrified the first time they notice a woman crossing the street to get away from them, for example, or state that upon being widely recognized as a man, they started facing a greater risk of violence at the hands of strangers or the police. 

There are several dynamics involved here. First, it is not unusual for a man to be more subjected to random acts of violence than a woman: cisgender men are far more likely to be physically attacked by strangers than women are, despite all the True Crime industry narratives that focus on (usually white) female victimhood. 

When women are attacked, it is by people close to them who hold power over them, generally speaking. But because men typically enjoy more freedom and agency in moving throughout the world, and are therefore more likely to go out alone at night, random attacks against them are more common. This is not a consequence of misandry — men aren’t robbed or randomly punched because masculine people lack power in society. If anything, their relative social and physical power leads to them being viewed as a more “acceptable” target for violence in some situations. They are also more likely to be feared.

Trans men don’t always have a framework for understanding this dramatic shift in how they are treated when it happens. Some “transmisandry” posters complain that they are oppressed as trans men because strangers no longer smile at them on the sidewalk and service industry professionals treat them coldly, for instance.

Photo by Johannes Roth on Unsplash

On an emotional level, this experience does suck! It hurts to move from being treated with warmth and a baseline level of trust, to being regarded warily because you’re now perceived as a being with strength and the ability to do harm. But it is not oppression. 

This particular complaint is especially common among white trans masculine people, I have found, because when we moved through the world as white women, we were frequently showered with positive affect and attention that our Black and brown peers never got. White women are seen as the ontological victim: frail, precious, in need of protection, and incapable of harm. They hold a high degree of status, but their power is concealed, and not meant to be acknowledged. White men, conversely, are the highest in both power and status of any group, and so they are more openly feared. 

For a white trans masc person, the switch from being coddled as a white woman (filled with fragile, menacing white women’s tears) to being withdrawn from as a more obviously dangerous white man can be jarring. We get accustomed to people fawning over us. To not be smiled at and complimented can feel like a profound loss. It can feel like “misandry.” It can feel like maybe women have it easier, that they are allowed to be soft and frivolous while we have to be strong — even while male rage and violence is socially accepted in a way women’s never is. 

But it is not “misandry” or “transmisandry” to suddenly be recognized for having power. And while yes, sexism harms men, and men deserve tenderness, patience, and the ability to cry and to be weak, the fact they are denied such things is not due to men being oppressed by “misandry.” It’s just sexism and the gender binary again. 

The final form of oppression that “transmisandry” advocates often point to is the oppression of otherwise marginalized men. Many Black trans mascs have to grapple with heightened police scrutiny and baseless accusations of violence, for example, and many fat trans men deal with restricted access to gender-affirming surgeries and discrimination in the worlds of dating and sex.

I have heard some trans mascs say that the presence of such intersections is proof that “transmisandry” exists. In reality, they are examples of the many ways in which a person can be severely oppressed while still being a man — and how the powers and privileges of manhood are denied to men whom society sees as less than human. 

When Black men are accused of being predators by white women, followed around shops by untrusting store clerks, labeled a “behavioral problem” by unsympathetic teachers, and viewed by sexual partners as unfeeling “brutes,” it is not due to a widespread societal hatred of men or of manhood. It is due to the widespread dehumanization of Black people, and the terror that white supremacist institutions feel at the prospect that a Black person might have any power. 

In too many cases, Black men are regarded by our social institutions as less than men — less human, less capable of agency and morality, more animalistic, less in control, less competent, and less deserving of sympathy than their white peers. Black men are intensely dehumanized because of anti-Blackness; they have the privileges and respect typically afforded to men taken away from them. 

It is for this reason that striking Black sanitation workers in Memphis carried protest signs in 1968 declaring that they were men, and were entitled, as protestor James Douglas put it, “to have the same dignity & the same courtesy any other citizen of Memphis has.”

Sanitation workers demonstrating in Memphis in 1968. 

These posters have been legendary because they struck such a strong chord with a marginalized group of men who are all too often regarded as subhuman and denied their manhood. When I was working on the campaign to abolish solitary confinement at Tamms Correctional Facility in southern Illinois, many of the Black men formerly incarcerated there chose to recreate the Memphis sanitation worker’s signs, pleading for lawmakers to stop seeing them as menacing Black criminals, and to instead regard them as fully human men.

It was not a hatred of manhood or masculinity that was at play in these injustices, it was a rejection of Black humanity and dignity. When a powerful institution wants to treat you like an object or an animal, they rob you of your gender — as any trans person well knows. This forcible degendering-as-dehumanization happens to all Black people, including ones that are cis. And it’s not exclusive to men, either. Just look at how Black female athletes are treated.

Many Black trans mascs encounter violence and police repression because they are Black men. But many Black butch women are also closely followed in public spaces, threatened with arrest and police beatings, and have to fear being witnessed holding any power, as well. In the documentary Butch Mystique, numerous Black lesbians speak to how uniquely dangerous it is for them to move through public spaces. Men hate them for not being receptive to their sexual advances. Straight, gender-conforming women draw away from them in fear.

It infuriates me to hear certain trans men, particularly white ones, uphold these complex experiences of oppression as proof that “misandry” exists. Black people are widely dehumanized across the gender spectrum: a rich academic literature on misogynoir attests to this. Furthermore, Black feminist and lesbian groups have been outspoken for decades about the ways in which their needs are downplayed both by white feminist groups and by anti-racist Black men. It is bizarre for trans men to try and continue to erase their experiences.

Anyone who has read deeply about systemic anti-Blackness and the oppression of Black women and Black queer people can easily tell you that “misandry” does not make a useful lens for understanding the violence that Black trans mascs face. There are no laws on the books that strip men, specifically, of legal protections or personhood status. But there are plenty that target Black people, and Black gender minorities in particular.

This same overall argument applies to any other specific experience that the “transmisandry” posters online point to: when a trans man is denied top surgery because of his BMI, that is due to fatphobia and transphobia, not due to hatred of him for being a man. Trans women are turned away for gender-affirming procedures based on their body size just as often.

When a trans man is romantically rejected because he has a scraggily “neck beard,” there might be some ableism at play— or perhaps his dates have just been kind of judgmental and shitty in a way that sucks to encounter, but do not merit a systemic oppression label. When a trans guy goes bald after a few years on HRT and some trade on Grindr curves him, that’s due to a real problem of ageism in the dating scene, but it’s not proof that men are oppressed. 

(Yes, these are all real examples of “transmisandry” that aggrieved trans guys have sent me messages about on Tumblr. If you have never run into this particular debate online before, count yourself lucky, and continue to steer clear of dudes who do make the case men are uniquely oppressed. Unfortunately, I have received frequent harassment for merely wading into these waters — like the Gamergaters and Men’s Rights Activists of years before, sexist trans men are frequently outraged by the suggestion they’re not oppressed for being men.)

I have no intention of downplaying the rampant transphobia, queerphobia, and sexism that trans men do encounter; those are forces of systemic oppression that are undeniably material and real. My employer refused to cover my top surgery or any of my hormone prescriptions because of transphobia; my birth certificate from Ohio fails to match my Illinois state ID and passport because of transphobia. It is because of transphobia that I lower my voice when I enter a public bathroom and avert my eyes. It is because of homophobia that I and my partners have been threatened on the street.

It is because of transphobia that I have to fear being held in solitary confinement should I ever be arrested at a pro-Palestinian protest. It is because of transphobia and sexism that so many of us have to stockpile doses of Plan B or pay out of pocket for sterilization surgeries insurance won’t cover. Sexism and transphobia have me making less money than many of my colleagues, despite the social advantages I experience at work. It is because of the traumatic effects of sexism and transphobia that I sometimes still wince looking at my genitals in the mirror.

Trans men undergo numerous painful, difficult experiences related to our marginal position in society. Some of those marginalizations can be especially disturbing to us, because they involve being mistaken as a woman. Some of the privileges we receive can also be unsettling to us, because we’ve never imagined we might move through the world enjoying the respect and strength of a man. 

It can be hard to hold onto both our truths simultaneously — a gynecologist condescends to us, and then women shrink in fear from us on the streets. Yet both these truths can exist at once. We can hold power while also being oppressed. Life can be difficult for us and our social position can be confusing, even as we increasingly accumulate power. Cis women can victimize us, and men can be tender, and you can’t tell how dangerous a person is based on the shape, size, or color of their body. 

Trans men are not oppressed for being men. But we are oppressed. And in that, we can find common ground with every other marginalized group on the planet: trans women, cis women, gay men, Black men, Black women, disabled men and women, fat women and men, nonbinary people of all stripes. It is together in mutual recognition of our struggles that we can collectively move forward. There is no advantage in us, as trans men, attempting to claim a monopoly on our suffering, or to try and parcel it out from the sexism and transphobia experienced by everyone else. Our fight is together. The burden of overcoming it is shared.