In Response To: “A Trans Person Got Nasty When I Said NO To Dating Them- I’m Trans Myself.” by Sieran Lane

The Specter of Male Socialization & Violence from Trans Women

This past Spring, I read Sieran Lane’s story of how he was harassed for rejecting a date with a transfeminine person, for many reasons from being gay & uninterested in her gender to simply being uninterested in going on a date with a stranger. It’s the kind of story that has you hold your breath, waiting for something derogatory to be said because the perpetrator happens to be a trans woman. I held it still as I finished and had yet to find any negative remarks about her gender, and groaned when I opened the replies to Sieran’s story. There it was.

One reader wrote “[…] she was still socialized as male for many many years growing up. That’s why she reacted the way she did. Your refusal triggered the male entitlement to female bodies aspect of her socialization. That rot is deep and doesn’t go away with surgery. Even though you are masc presenting, you were still assigned female at birth. That’s why you’re reacting the way you are too.” They went on to explain how people raised as girls are trained to take the fault for someone’s adverse reaction to not being granted access to us whenever desired, ending it with “She’s just being a guy, like she was socialized.”

I was shocked to see Sieran agree, thinking that surely we all found it offensive as transmasculine people to be told that girlhood is inescapable no matter how many surgeries we get or what names we call ourselves, as if we’re playing dress-up. Even if not, certainly there would be some backlash for directly calling us “female” and a trans woman a “guy”. But, sifting through the many replies, I find that the author whole-heartedly agreed with each comment made to reduce people of all genders down to a simple, binarist matter of what you were assigned at birth, and to our “gendered socialization”.

Gendered socialization is defined as “the process of teaching members of society how to behave according to gender expectations, or gender roles”. In discussion about adult interpersonal dynamics, it’s the idea that a cisgender man or a transgender woman is likely to treat you with the same aggression they’re taught to in boy-childhood, and that a cisgender woman or transgender man is likely to respond with the same helplessness we’re taught as girl-children.

It sounds simple at face value! However, as I responded to just one of those several comments declaring Rebecca (the pseudonym given to the subject of Sieran’s story) a natural-born aggressor with a lifetime of unpacking male socialization left to do, gendered socialization is rarely that uncomplicated.

When I was an early twenty-something, I went on a date with a trans woman I met once at a party. It went well at first, she made the drive all the way out to the boonies for me & we chatted on the way back to her place. It was nice, until she called me “girl”. She paused, and then apologized. I rushed to reassure her that as a Two-Spirited person, bigender (identifying as both man & woman) for simplicity’s sake, I was more than okay with being referred to jokingly as “girl”, especially by another trans person. She insisted, though, on “affirming the most radical part of me” which, in her mind, was my manhood and denied my womanhood to me. It was this moment I recalled when she came onto me hours later in her bedroom, and she read my uninterested face & backed away without a word. This memory, thankfully, is a stark contrast to Sieran’s experience and the only time I’ve ever had to put so little effort into rejecting someone, or faced so little consequences for it. Why, then, if both Sieran’s Discord friend & my date were socialized the same, did they behave so differently?

In fact, further contradicting Sieran’s assertions about gendered socialization being at the root of his negative experience, the most sexually violent relationship of my life was with another transmasculine person. We were “best friends”, him routinely expressing his attraction to me & his disdain for my (trans) girlfriend at the time, and our friendship quickly devolved into regular sexual abuse before ending in a more violent & thorough episode. How do we explain this, if we can’t blame male socialization?

I, myself, live as a disabled, poor, Black & Native American bisexual transgender person who was designated female at birth. Each of these things alter the purpose, means, & effects of the socialization I’ve experienced. At twelve & thirteen years old, as a middle-schooler, I watched the girls around me partake in girlhood in ways I only coveted from a distance. I watched friends hug & hold hands, sit in each other’s laps, share beds at sleepovers, exchange verbal affections. They even joked about being each other’s wives! I, though, had made the mistake of completely unknowingly falling in love with my girl friends.

I wouldn’t know I was bisexual, or transgender for that matter, for many more years, but my older sister & my classmates often interrogated my sexuality. If I held hands with a friend, there were stares & whispers, or maybe even threats. What it was about me that read so differently from my peers, I still don’t know! Something innate I suppose, something unnameable, but I was punished for being readable as gay before my sexuality was even a thought to me.

This punishment meant I was not afforded the girlhood you would expect, and the reasons for that denial extended past my sexuality. I couldn’t be sweet & affectionate with other girls because I was gay, and I couldn’t dress or act girly because I was brown & masculine & too poor for nice clothes. When I did attempt childish girliness, I was responded to with ridicule because I was just so physically “unfit” for it. And so, in the search for acceptance & desirability, I chose to sexualize myself instead. This, apparently, suited me much better. By fourteen, the whispers were in suspense for me to be dress-coded & sent home, though I never did get in much trouble for wearing my shirts low & skirts high. I felt older than my peers, aged by the denial of girlhood, and I was treated as such.

My experience with gendered socialization, at the intersection of race & sexuality, was a degrading, violent one which left me contradicting all expectations. I wasn’t socialized to be at ease & familial with other girls, or to be modest. I was made to be unfriendly & sexually conspicuous. I was raised or socialized to be most things a girl wasn’t “supposed” to be, but typically was if she was anything like me.

But, what does this have to do with transgender women? Much of the transmisogynist rhetoric in the replies to Sieran’s story lamented that, because Rebecca must have been raised as a boy, she must be predisposed to react violently when rejected romantically. My critique centers the idea that there is one male & one female socialization which we all experience equally, the idea that Rebecca was raised as a boy instead of the nonbinary trans girl that she is.

In “Embodying Transgender: An Analysis of Trans Women in Online Forums”, it was written that “As traditional gender norms do not occur for individuals outside the gender binary, transgender individuals try to find not only “an answer as to who they are, but also an answer as to what ‘who I am’ even means”. They are constantly questioned about their gender identity by family and others. Paradoxically, they find that they have to discover their own gender identity, often with confusion, self-doubt, and immense anxiety.” Though transgender-specific, I feel this speaks to exactly the same lack of a uniform binary gendered socialization and the necessity for recognizing that learned behaviors will look different for each of us, especially when factoring in LGBT+ experiences & identities. Not only are we treated differently, we self-conceptualize differently which is just as important to the determination of our being.

Hearkening back to my own vastly different experiences with trans men & women in intimate or close relationships, I believe that transgender women have learned harder than most the value of autonomy and the right to determine what you do with your body. I believe that the fellow transgender man who hurt me did so in ways that can possibly be explained by class & racial disparities in socialization & privilege, as he often held money over my head & behaved with entitlement towards my body, not by gender. And I believe that socialization happens at intersections, just as we each live our lives, and that there can be no such thing as simple “(fe)male socialization” if there is also a white & rich socialization which manifests so differently from my poor, brown one.

I believe that male socialization & trans women’s susceptibility to it, because of this idea’s lack of consideration for self-determination & intersectionality, is little more than a specter. It is a boogeyman which makes it easy to label them dangerous & even easier to turn away from our own capability to do harm as people who were assigned female at birth. If we refuse to neglect to look beyond gender, it becomes clear that someone of any designated birth sex can be socialized to be entitled to the time or bodies or affections of another person. Transgender women aren’t socialized as men anymore than a gay woman is socialized as a straight one or a rich man is socialized as poor! Transgender women are socialized as transgender women.