I had cause to be brought back to my early days of transition. Before chest surgery. Before I knew how to adopt straight male gender cues. Before my voice found its lowest register and stayed there. Before the flat chest. Before I felt safe in my body.
The fear that I could have my male privilege removed by being labeled a woman, a freak, a faggot (all of which I was named), was more present then. When that fear is real, it seems to me that the nature of FtM male (as opposed to white) privilege is far more conditional.
I was terrified that I was going to get assaulted if my interrogator decided that my body betrayed their principles. In those moments my male privilege seemed to evaporate. Those times only reappear at airport security and visits to doctors I don’t know. But my male privilege always orbits around and through this body I have, which, sadly, threatens the psychic integrity of some people. The scary times are far less now. In fact, almost never.
But the potential is always there.
The The Conditional Nature of Transmale Privilege by Jay Sennett, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.
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Well put! Thank you for sharing.
Cheers,
Jay
So true, and completely overlooked by those who would view us as sellouts. We’re not hermetically sealed in male privilege; we are precarious in that paradigm at best. Nor does everyone realize/acknowledge that many men want to make each other “prove” their “worthiness,” and as you point out often we’re targets for these contentious assholes.
And, of course, openly claiming trans gets us tossed out of the “club” completely.
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