Believe it or not, I try to not comment if women I don’t personally know regurgitate the tired old “All men are trash” deal. For a lot of reasons. Today one of them actually directly addressed me and so I felt it appropriate to respond to their insistence that this “doesn’t include, (me), of course” by letting them know that “That’s okay, that generally just lets me know I don’t have to listen to the rest of what that person says so I just tune out.”
So I guess if you aren’t a total abusive violent asshole you aren’t a real man. I guess when you define masculinity by harming other people you might be lead to believe that all men are trash.
I get it. I have a degree in Men are Trash. Technically most degrees are degrees in men are trash because the level of trash behavior that men have sunk to globally has made the world the way it is. Taking the glory of today over the peace of tomorrow has gotten us here, the values of the nomadic warrior tribes who slayed sedentary farmers and took over their harvests.
Western cultures associate destruction, violence, selfishness, greed and pride with the male identity. Concurrently, Western cultures assume that all male identities are also cisgender identities. Collapsing every man or every woman or every person of any gender into something like the idea of garbage is also very Western. Collapsing and erasing trans-masc people, particularly trans-masc afab people is an act of violence.
I exist. I am many things and one of those things is a man. Ignoring the fact that I have way more in common with cisgender women and other afab people is something you are being directed to do. Similarly, racist patriarchal mechanisms work to divide Black folks from queer folks (while of course assuming they aren’t the same person) because of our inherently overlapping struggles. We fight to be free from the idea that the kind of person we are can used to deprive us of our rights.
Because what is the alternative to cisgender women demonizing and excluding transgender women while the fact that trans-masc people exist generally gets ignored in a popular culture that can barely remember what non-binary means in the first place?
Well, I think you might be excited to learn that the alternative is that every gender except cisgender men would realize their common struggle. That group makes up a rapidly dwindling portion of the people on this planet. It makes me downright tingly inside to think about what would happen if we stopped insisting that amab people are inherently rapists just because they have a penis, wouldn’t you agree?
From an afab trans masc perspective, my perspective, imagine feminist women you cared for and admired passively stating that the body you know you’re supposed to have, or that you even just want, will make you a sexual predator. Will make you into someone like the person who victimized you in your life because trans afab people have some of the highest rates of sexual assault of any group. Imagine the life you dream of having being characterized as violent. The body you would die to live inside of decried as the source of every manner of moral evil. That your temple was just really a killing field. Honestly, you probably already know what that’s like, too. So show us both some compassion.
Honestly, I write this because this hurts. Maybe that’s my problem. Maybe people will read this and hate it. More likely nobody will read it at all. This was the kind of shit I was writing from a really queer-ignorant angle in about 2005 so I don’t expect these ideas to get a good reception for a while and that’s honestly quite fair. Patriarchal domination has caused existentially fatal wounds if we’re quite honest with ourselves. It’s perfectly reasonable to condense all of that into “Men are trash” in many lights, I agree. But now you can’t say you never thought of it like that.
Queer Pandemic 