10:32am July 17, 2014

Looking for a better term

youneedacat:

I’d like a term for “benefiting from transmisogyny” that doesn’t misgender me.

So, “male privilege” isn’t going to cut it. What will?

Background: I was raised female and I’m genderless. By genderless, I mean lacking gender, I don’t mean androgynous. In lacking gender, I can’t be male, and can’t have male privilege. But I do benefit from transmisogyny. So there has to be a better term than ‘male privilege’. There has to be a better way than assuming that “AFAB” means “trans man” or at least “transmasculine” (and even using “AFAB” as a synonym for “transmasculine”). There’s a lot of nonbinary and genderless AFAB people who are anything but those two things, but still benefit from transmisogyny.

So, better word, anyone? I understand that being subject to transmisogyny is worse than being misgendered, but being misgendered is not good either. And ignoring it because it’s less bad than something else makes no sense to me.

Please don’t try to convince me that genderlessness is purely an AFAB thing or that it’s actually masculinity in disguise, because I’ve heard it before and I’ll never believe it. (Genderless means without gender. Masculinity is a gender. Do the math.) The genderless people I know are pretty evenly split between AFAB and AMAB, for whatever reason.

I hope I’m allowed to reblog this. I think my followers might be able to help?

I’ve always used transmasculine privledged, even though that really wasn’t right, like for me personally. I’m not transfeminine but assuming an opposite, and that the opposite is transmasculine is still binarist.

Totally allowed to reblog it.

Transmasculine privilege works for people whose gender is masculine in some way. It doesn’t work for AFAB genderless people, and it doesn’t work for a lot of AFAB nonbinary people.

Because like… the whole assumption that goes into this most of the time is that the only direction an AFAB person can lean towards, to be trans, is in a masculine direction. But there are plenty of genders that don’t include masculinity at all (or femininity). There are people who are neuter, people who are genderless, people who are ‘third gender’, 'fourth gender’, etc. various forms of nonbinary gender. All of whom, if AFAB, have privilege over trans women and transfeminine people, but who don’t have male or even transmasculine privilege.

I’m thinking maybe “AFAB privilege” (or “trans AFAB privilege”? IDK) is the best suggestion I’ve heard so far, but it feels clunky somehow.

I’m glad that I seem to have worded this post better than my last one on the topic. The last time I tried to discuss this, people assumed that I was trying to deny that I benefited from transmisogyny, which I’d never deny in a million years. I’ve seen transmisogyny at work all the time, I know I benefit from it, and I’ve done my best to educate myself on the topic, for a long time now.

I was just, at the time, trying to explain to people that “AFAB” is not and should not be used as a shorthand for “trans man” or “transmasculine” or “having male privilege”. But people assumed I was trying to say that I didn’t have any privilege at all in that department, and all hell broke loose.

Even after I got across that I was not denying my privilege, it ended with someone trying to convince me that “genderless” was an all-AFAB phenomenon (nope nope nope) and that genderlessness was “coded as” masculine (I think they were getting genderlessness confused with androgyny, honestly… they didn’t really seem to understand what genderless means) and that therefore genderless people did have male privilege after all. At which point I realized we weren’t actually having a conversation, and walked away not knowing whether to laugh or cry.

But I do, seriously, want a “_______ privilege” sort of phrase that doesn’t misgender me (which means no references to male or masculine or transmasculine, because those things don’t exist in me), and if it’s AFAB privilege then I’ll use that even though it feels clunky.

Notes: