Welcome to Manhood

Suddenly everybody's listening and taking you seriously? I have a guess why...

A young white man in a baseball cap blowing out the candles on a birthday cake. Photo by Krišjānis Kazaks on Unsplash.

I got a question in my Tumblr ask box this morning from a trans guy who has found that since coming out, people shower him with respectful attention, trust, and warmth. Rather than behaving with entitlement toward his body or life story, cis people seem to intuitively love him now, want him to be included in their spaces, and treat his emotions with deference, never wanting to offend him. He’s wondering if there is some kind of “opposite of transphobia” that explains why he’s been treated as so special.

(And not to spoil my whole response, but yeah, there is! There is in fact an experience in the world that’s diametrically opposed to gender marginalization, a form of gendered power status that does get a person assigned immense social value seemingly no matter what they do. It’s called sexism, or patriarchy, or more controversially male privilege).

Here’s the ask:

caption...

My brother dear, what you are experiencing is a very common combination of the growing visibility & tokenization of being a newly-out marginalized person, and the massive increased authority, social trust, and social value that comes with being a man.

Welcome to male privilege baby, to put a spin on a far more undermining phrase that typically gets hurled at trans femmes. You will be considered a trustworthy authority on trans issues, a valuable contributor to panels and workshops, a needed (but also highly convenient to access) form of "diversity" for a workplace, and a welcome attendee at all manner of events from here on out, and you'll be deferred to over women, especially trans women, for pretty much the entire rest of your life.

Guys like us are invited, centered, included, listened to, treated with respect, treated with WARMTH, viewed as intelligent, perceptive, sensitive, safe, trustworthy, reliable, and desirable to include. In the eyes of the cis public, we are a "safe" kind of trans person who does not make people uncomfortable to look at, and who doesn't challenge their pre-existing understanding of gender hierarchy; when they listen to us, they get to trust in the certainty of a MAN giving them information, but they can also feel comfortable and safe around us as a kind of enlightened, sensitive nonthreatening figure, a former member of the disempowered gender group who aspired to move into the powerful one, and is now dutifully fulfilling the powerful gender group’s role of leader, mentor, and recipient of attention.

(You can read more about this way of understanding gendered oppression in The Sizhen System’s Substack. Her understanding of gender as a system comprised of three groups: power, not-power, and faggot subaltern is one that I find damn compelling, and it does a better job of explaining how a person might move through different social status layers than most other gender theories I’ve read:)

Faggotization and The Extant Gender Ternary

Trans men are men who can explain sexism back to women. We’re men who still hold some quiet connection to gender marginalization status that makes us seem less physically imposing and scary than other marginalized men seem. In this way, trans men being positioned as a mid-level authority figure and everyone’s buddy reinforces the existing gender hierarchy, which feels soothing and right to people's brains.

You will have to be conscious of this power differential for the rest of your life, around cis and trans women alike, because it plays out in a pretty traditionally sexist fashion: people (especially women) will go quiet when you start speaking, you will be given credit for ideas that were a collective effort, your emotions will be more likely to be taken seriously and seen as a sign of principle rather than weakness, and you will be regarded as special and memorable while dozens of equally skillful and wise people and their concerns are passed over.

This degree of overt social privilege does not occur for all trans men equally, I must say, and it doesn’t occur all of the time.

Black trans men are increasingly scrutinized by police and the white public the more traditionally masculine-looking (and therefore supposedly ‘strong’) they become, because when masculine power is present in a racially disempowered group, it is treated by a white supremacist society as threat. Effeminate trans guys may be targeted for homophobic violence more frequently the more their appearance becomes straightforwardly male, because men refusing to follow the gendered rules of society threatens the existing gendered order of things. And whenever a trans man’s trans status is apparent to those around him, there is a possibility of him losing his tentative membership to the “male” group — he can have medical care denied to him, be physically threatened or assaulted, or be forced into a feminine social position should he fail to give what power he does possess over to the patriarchy.

As is the case for all other marginalized men, trans men always live with the threat of losing their manhood hanging over them. This is how male gender norms, and oppressive power structures more generally, are always enforced.

But even acknowledging all this, there remains the fact that numerous trans men are viewed by society as the “right” kind of man — because we are white, or highly educated, or soft-spoken, yet contributive and bold; because we work hard, because we’re happy to play along with the demands made of us by cisgender people, because we fulfill some poorly-constructed diversity quota without bringing the “complications” or shaking up the institutional culture the way including more overtly oppressed peoples would. Some of us are downright good at being a man, when it all comes down to it: we like speaking in a deep register and standing at the podium, and we’ve endured plenty of hardship before, and so we’re angry, and we find it a rush that our anger is at last listened to.

And so we are rewarded for performing manhood. And if you’re in this position (as I am!) I think you have a duty to observe that it is happening, and really own up to what it means, and then begin thinking about how you can use your position to upend the sexist, transmisogynistic hierarchy that is trying wine & dine you and win you over to its side. More on how to do this in a few paragraphs.

A presenter at a TransVisibility in-person training in Lagos in 2023. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Another factor that is at play in your experience, Anon, is the phenomenon of cis groups making a newly-out trans person their token and educator, because typically it is the newly-out person whom they have the most access to and power over.

The moment that a trans person transitions, it’s quite common for them to start getting singled out as an expert and resource on the trans experience for a voraciously curious cis public. I wrote about this phenomenon a bit in my book Unlearning Shame, and it remains incredibly widespread. It’s not unusual for a trans person who has no prior experience leading any kind of inclusion workshops or publicly engaging with gender politics at all to become rapidly elevated to the position of symbol (and token, and teacher) the moment they announce their gender to the world.

And so, the one out trans girl at work is forced to lead a Trans 101 workshop, even though she works in IT. Freshly-out trans celebrities get lauded with praise for their “trans activism” and given book deals to write about the subject when they have no prior expertise on it, and got famous for something completely unrelated to their transition. Writers who are still in the nascent stages of figuring their genders out are given bylines to do so messily, authoritatively, and in public, and they wind up alienating far more seasoned trans people with the confused declarations that they make — just when they’re in need of community support the most. It’s a mess.

Among the cis public, there a hunger for transition to be made approachable and legible, and it’s often the trans person with the closest proximity to former cisness whom they consider the best qualified to do it. I think on some intuitive level cis people kinda know that the newly-out are in a vulnerable, uncertain state and have fewer communities ties and less experience than more seasoned trans people do, and so they make the ideal "translator" of trans experiences to them as an audience, because they’re desperate for approval and easier to exploit.

In cis people's estimations, you as a newly-out trans guy are not gonna push back against them, complicate their narratives, or be tired of answering offensive questions, and you will be freely available to them as a resource. You won’t demand that an organization make dramatic changes, you’ll just give people a few terms to memorize and then play gender show-and-tell! You'll put a friendly face on transition, one marked by newness and hope, rather than the jaded, complicated, or assertive one offered by a trans person who has spent years in the trenches. That's their expectation.

It makes no logical sense to make a newly out member of the community the arbiter of transness, but it does make sense that a powerful group would view such a disempowered and disconnected (relatively speaking) member of the trans community to be the most attractive to include.

Of course, this might not be true to who you actually are, Anon. In fact, since you described yourself as angry, it sounds like it’s certainly not! But on a gut level, this is how the newly-out trans person is typically seen: nonthreatening, moldable, convenient, so thankful to be included. His stories are simply interesting, and disconnected from a larger collective movement for liberation. He exists completely on his own, as an individual man, a source of entertainment and enrichment for the cis person. And he can slip back into the comfy confines of manhood after he has put on this performance, and enjoy the rewards of being a “regular person” with a “regular” status within the existing hierarchy.

The only way to upend these narratives being forced onto you is for you to speak up every single time you are invited to an event, and demand that just as many trans women be included as trans men. Make sure to have a nice list of experienced, wise trans femme friends whom you can recommend as speakers and co-panelists in your pocket.

More often than not, you will be thanked by cis people and rewarded for having the brilliant idea of including women in a conversation about gender minority status. How the trans women in the equation get treated, well, you'll need to pay close attention to, and be ready to stand up and speak out the moment any passive aggressive exclusionary bio-essentialist fuckshit gets going. You can do it! And lots of times you ARE the person with the power to set things right. You're trans and you're being singled out, but you also are a man.

You’ll also want to build your trans social connections, which it sounds like you have begun to do. Keep chatting with other trans folks online, and take deliberate steps to grow closer to the people who educate you, challenge you in a positive way, support you, and repeatedly have your back. Go out to visit with some of them, if you are able; share a meal, pool some resources, read some books together, and commiserate about the mindfuck that is changing genders in such a binary, patriarchal world.

Not only will having a rich network of trans friends help you fill all those events you keep getting invited to with a greater diversity of people, you’ll need them as friends and mentors when the well-intentioned cis people in your life sometimes let you down. Privilege has a nasty, alluring way of reabsorbing the very men who try to push back against it. Even our protests against its structure get us rewarded and the women around us silenced. But with a strong network of trans people (including lots of trans femmes) at your back, you can remain anchored in the real world of our struggles, and not come to take the relative ease with which you can move throughout life as a given.