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@deirdre@corteximplant.com
Post #2916961
2026-05-06 11:37 UTC
@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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@deirdre@corteximplant.com Thank you for this. This is probably the best explanation to at least get me much closer to seeing this perspective in a much clearer light, even if I'm still trying to sort through it.
Part of me is wondering if Mulan was experiencing male privilege when she went off to war.
Or, because of the work I've been a part of, I often come back to this: if the Afghan girls who pose as boys, in all aspects of life, so that the women in their family have an escort in public just so they can go to the market without being murdered by the Taliban (it's illegal to do so without a male chaperone, even if that chaperone is a child), if these girls are experiencing male privilege. They're forced into posing for survival, but if they're found out, it's dangerous. Is it male privilege for a cis girl to pretend to be a boy, to "live as a boy", to survive under the threat of the Taliban, and to also worry about getting caught? I can't with a straight face call this privilege (let alone male privilege), only survival.
Open ##2916962