Post #2065857

2026-05-06 06:28 UTC

I know people are trying to explain something to me with nuance, and I'm truly not trying to be a jerk, but all I keep hearing is that the violence we experience as trans women is actually privilege. But not just any privilege, but specifically male privilege. Because we are men. Or at least because people think we are. Which is its own privilege. And we should be so privileged to live through this violence in order to get *benefits* that make our lives easier (at this point we disregard the violence). I'm just not buying it. Having the effects of our literal torture, self sacrifice, and violence called privilege is just not making its way to me.

Replies (4)

@SamanthaJaneSmith@lgbtqia.space 2026-05-06 06:49

@revoluciana@chaosfem.tw I think it is necessary to separate out the male privilege from the lack of privilege from being transgender. It is not an either or - you can suffer greatly being "a man" but you can still have male privilege. Will you suffer more misogyny as a man or a woman? You have privilege in not suffering that as a man - even if you are cosplaying the role. So being a man has a level of privilege. Remember here we are talking about what society perceives you as not what you feel necessarily. It doesn't matter that it makes you feel bad in other ways. We are the SUM of all our privileges.

Open ##2065856
@revoluciana@chaosfem.tw 2026-05-06 06:39

I'm going to go to sleep now and mull over this some more tomorrow. Thank you to everyone trying to help me see what I don't see and/or engaging with what I do see.

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@timberwraith@mastodon.social 2026-05-06 06:47

@revoluciana@chaosfem.tw This is what I said earlier: "If you dare call the first 17 years of my life a 'privilege,' in which I was brainwashed into being someone I'm not, in which that life systematically ate away and destroyed my insides and took years to rebuild, and in which I lived under crippling levels of self-hatred and shame, you can take a 10 mile hike straight into the November waters of Lake Superior..."

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@deirdre@corteximplant.com 2026-05-06 11:37

@revoluciana@chaosfem.tw 🤷 it’s both, all of the above like i get what you mean, and in particular it’s a tough thing to address because 99% of the conversations around it are either bad-faith or ignorant. and i think calling it “male privilege” is a deep misrepresentation, we desperately need a better term. because yeah, i don’t think a lot of pre-transition transfems actually have access to what we typically think of as “male privilege”—at the very least not to the same degree as average cis men. BUT, for 37 years i never had to worry about walking alone at night. never had to worry about ordering food delivery and getting a creep delivery guy. didn’t think about people putting things in my drinks. didn’t text my friends to let them know my date didn’t murder me. never got catcalled. never got grabbed. never owned pepper spray or thought about self-defense training. and i didn’t have to start thinking about any of this as a literal child the way a lot of cis women are forced to. are our pre-transition lives, on the whole, privileged as a result of our presumed gender? no, i don’t think so. but do we have access to specific privilege in specific contexts as a result of our perceived gender? well, yeah, and i don’t really see any other way to view it. like, all the pain and trauma and shit that we go through as a result of growing up in cisnormativity, yeah that’s demonstrably extremely harmful…but i just don’t buy that the violence we are exempted from is a form of violence against us. and despite that our pre-transition lives are generally not marked by a net positive of privilege, i think it’s *really* important to acknowledge and examine and critique the specific ways we do access privilege during that part of our lives. failure to do so leaves us ill-equipped to examine other kinds of privilege and oppression.

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