The Plight of Women
on misogyny from the perspective of a trans woman
Let’s be clear, I do not get treated the same as cisgendered women. It’s not better or worse — it’s different.
My lens is one of an outsider, often excluded. Not fitting into most people’s world-views, I go ignored.
Additionally, I existed for much of my life under the guise of a man. In men’s spaces. Always feeling myself the odd one out. Deep-down, knowing why, but not consciously acknowledging it at most times. Experiencing first hand the horrible damage done to boys by the way our twisted culture can warp them into monsters. Witnessed from the eyes of the perpetrators, the damage they do to women.
From this vantage I have been gifted, or more accurately punished, with a unique and panoramic sight of misogyny’s inner workings.
Yet, when I speak on my experiences of what moving across the gender spectrum has illuminated, I often get tuned out by men and cis women — even more than I usually do. When I speak on this, most often, my insights are ignored out of projected insecurity. The fact I feel the right to speak on misogyny, as a trans woman, triggers people. This reaction hurts my heart because it’s such a plain signifier of someone who doesn’t, at their core, respect my own womanhood. Though, I do forgive… the ladies at least. Knowing these are women whose own womanhood has been called into question and put beyond artificial boundaries created by the ideals of men for them to falsely earn. These women have had to find their own validation. Forge it despite this world around them so inherently demeaning. Each woman’s feminine authority is inborn. Yet, men have constructed a cultural value system which demands womanhood be earned by artificial standards.
It’s gut wrenching.
Things stay the same, and the world spins ever forward.
Happy Women’s Day
What a fucking joke.
My apologies to any women who this may hurt because they’ve found solace in this day. You deserve every bit of peace you can get. Still, I must admit it feels insulting as all hell.
Here’s a day to make up for the fact that you’ve been systematically denigrated and subjugated generationally. That we still haven’t rebuilt our myths, or systems of government, or the world of business to embody more holistically representative ideals.
Instead, we get bad women’s empowerment superhero movies produced and controlled by corporations with executives that are 80% white cisgendered men. Women are pedestalized, infantilized. Emplaced upon by ridiculous expectations and cruelest judgments of crusty old men who rose to power despite their ineptitude because of privilege, see the rising tide of women who are shining competence fiercely, and are fighting to hold onto their perceived sense of power with a death grip.
Make no mistake. This American resurgence of blatant and open Nazism and fascism. Is a pushing back of misogynists against the cultural shift to embody more feminine ideals culturally. It’s a refusal to let go of ways of thinking that make men feel powerful while they run human civilization directly into ruin.
Here’s a day for women though. Happy day.
Why no men’s day? Oh, because that’s every day. This is just the one for their ‘special ladies’.
None of these cultural Band-Aids, like women’s day or breast cancer month, change the fact men still operate most positions of power. That these men have not had to face or look at the truths of what it means for women to live in this world. Blind to empathy. Robots of self preservation and gratification.
These are the men which still objectify women in secret, when doors are closed. That openly treat women with distain who either dare to show and operate with emotion, or even worse, are smarter than them.
Male insecurity will be the downfall of America. A bunch of petulant boys who want their toys, and to rule the playground. Empowered by the structures of a society that has long uplifted them as arbiters of rationalism and born leaders.
Mother fuckers, just go kill us a deer to eat. Let the adults decide how we split it amongst the tribe. Stay in your lane.
Why am I so disdainful of masculinity as it exists in our world? So prone towards anger towards an entire sex of our populace?
Because I was once prescribed to live beside and as one of these boys.
To Be A Boy
I hated my peers. Deeply rejecting, always, the garbage of misogyny and blind idiocies. I never took the bait.
I would try and find friends that hadn’t accepted the cultural stain on their soul that is toxic masculine ideals. Looking for the quiet kids who stayed out of the way. Assuming they were like me, and found themselves on the fringes because they saw how horrific it was too.
Frighteningly, it was even rarer that one of these boys didn’t prove themself a meek and silently toxic force. As bad or even worse as the others. Just also too passive or neurodivergent to fit in with the main crowd, but no less misogynistic.
To be clear, first and foremost, the horror I speak of is primarily what boys say to each other. The way they egg each other on, and teach each other through ways of interacting, how they speak about and treat women — all informed from fathers and grandfathers and culture itself. It’s the actions these perpetuated ideas birth into the world, the mental and physical abuse and manipulation of women created by this brain-rot.
There is a social pressure to conform that we all know well, no matter what social circles or personal history we have.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again — because it’s true — my greatest trauma from living among men through adolescence is not the things done to me by boys, it’s the things I did to blend in.
I perpetuated misogyny along with the rest of them. There was no way not to and keep myself hidden, at least that I saw. Or perhaps, I was selfishly clinging to friends I’d found who I thought I needed for some kind of validation, and lowered myself to their standard so I could still look good in their eyes.
Truthfully, I have trouble remembering specifics. These are hurts I buried deep immediately.
Never did I take part in physical abuse. But certainly mental and emotional.
I can vaguely remember times being cruel to girls with boys, through words. Even when avoiding misogynistic language myself, still standing beside those who were blatantly sexist.
I distinctly remember being silent in the face of horrible things said, always.
Holding my tongue. Practicing a blank and unreadable face. Not approving or unapproving. Trying to simply not take part in the misogyny being regurgitated by my peers in that moment.
Still, the weight of that silence, of not using my words, is one I’m still healing this very moment by using my voice in writing.
I was loosely part of a friend group as a teenager that did very bad things to girls our age. Coercive sexual abuse, in retrospect. They did not invite me to these endeavors. And most of them knew better than to speak about them to me. Still, I knew, I heard — and said nothing about how it made me feel. I remained their friend.
These are what my great shames and traumas feel like. Complete corruption of self. For the goal of blending in. Keeping bad friends. Perpetuating the lie I was living.
Despite the true horror behind the reality of what I’ve seen and been a part of. There is a truth that we should feel bad for boys more often.
There is a crushing weight to boyhood. Met by unfair expectations and toxic men training you to be a monster in the face of them. Also, the sadness born from being the ones least empathized with emotionally. Often, told your feelings don’t have a safe space.
It was only six years ago when I saw a mom and dad walking with a young child in my apartment complex and literally telling him, ‘boys don’t cry’, in the face of his tears. Even this day and age, some young couple.
I wanted to puke.
Took me right back to the crushing weight of being an emotional person taking the mantle and identity of a boy in our society.
Worse for me as a trans woman. Bad for everyone.
Nowadays, some people would assume what I deal with is simply misogyny. Some women might even think — welcome to the club, this is what you wanted.
While I appreciate the irony of the sentiment, it misses the nuance of my experience.
What I Get Is Different
People don’t treat me like they treat cis women. From the most bigoted and hateful MAGA-man stranger. To the most progressive trans-spectrum romantic interests.
Even in my most intimate relationships there are shades of this. Women who include me, yet, not completely. Spoken and unspoken realities of the way I’m treated differently because of my transness.
There is a rare breed. An occasional person or two. Who impart a true sense of feminine comradery without pretense. Without noticeable artifice.
These people are very special to me. Even though they are mostly strangers I run into once.
Even in a passing moment. They touch my heart with their baggage-free acceptance, offered naturally and without the painful awkwardness I’m so accustom to enduring from everyone.
I’m not saying I should be treated the same as cis women. I’ve lived a different life. My purpose of setting up this context is to point out how my viewpoint of misogyny remains as an outsider. But now, even more of one.
I see the clearest reflections of how cisgendered women are treated differently than me. To be honest, I’m glad I don’t get most of that treatment. Especially that of pursued sexual and romantic interest. There is a rare man who doesn’t care about the judgements of society and approaches me in a propositional way publicly. But they’re out there. When I dress up to go out, or just have a good hair day, I am often spoken to by dudes who fancy themself suave. Sometimes its done in a way that doesn’t feel gross or threatening. Usually, not.
There is this rarest breed of man who is just a genuinely kind and progressive force that isn’t triggered by my beauty and treats me with truly affirming energy as I’d like to be, like a human. One in a fucking million though. I literally remember the last one — months ago.
Most other men treat me in the weirdest ways. A bizarre smorgasbord ranging from leering crazy-eyes to awkward stuttering. Some seem completely cornered, surprised, and out of their depth in my presence. Very occasionally, reacting with a projected sense of guilt and panic that makes it clear they have either been harassing trans people online, watching horrendous trans pornography, or both. Greeted by a pleasant and unassuming trans woman that’s not carrying any shame in the way she moves about the world is a shell shock for people with that kind of bullshit going on.
Still, I see how they treat cisgendered women. It’s somehow even worse than I’m treated. The distain most men reserve for me comes from a place resolute in seeing me as a man.
They treat cisgendered women like children. Which is made even grosser by the way they are sexualized. There is a disgusting undercurrent of groomer energy in the older generation of men that is pervasive. It often goes ignored because it’s just too uncomfortable.
There is a whole class of men who haven’t grown with the times. Lots of them are even disaffected boys and young men, trained by passed-down remnants of old patriarchy grasping tightly to a world gone by.
It’s hard to learn to grow together when one side refuses to do the work as a whole.
There is a truth that men need a route to redemption culturally. So many men are truly honorable and embody pure hearted values. In this kind of discourse, they should be afforded more space to not be painted in blacks and whites. To not unnecessarily create even more disaffected men through our own negligence in doing the work to heal with them.
So, in the face of this mountain of perspective…
What The Fuck Can We Do?
This is a problem for people to solve together. My viewpoint is only one drop in the pond, even if a unique one. We all have to come together to fix this.
It’s up to everyone of us to find our balance with moving through a world that requires compromise from us to exist within — including the toleration of people whose attitudes and ideologies make us feel unsafe and unwelcome — while still fighting for truth.
I regret so many things I’ve said and done in my life. Some of the things I feel worst about are the ways I took part in misogyny. Even still, now, I continue discovering patterns within which hold these false ideals of society. I discover new ways I can treat myself and other women in better regard, and offer more grace to men as we all heal.
There are some women and men who will reject the notion outright that there are continued mechanisms of patriarchy and sexism in modern society. People who have found some kind of peace with an idea of living, one that rejects that we are all both victims and perpetrators of this brokenness, choosing to deny the lived truth of so many for the sake of falsely validating their own privilege as hard-earned reward.
People desire to feel autonomous, free, independent — in control.
I get it. It’s empowering to claim yourself free and whole. But the fact remains, as people without financial abundance in this country we call America, we are not. We are given a smallest slice. We are told nice stories. While the hurts of old are perpetuated again and again. While misogyny fights back against its own demise in the most overt cultural terms.
We still need to do so much better for women.
We’ve not truly solved anything. If we believe otherwise, we’re telling ourselves sweet lies.
It’s time to see the nightmarish politics as what they are. Terrible men’s last gasp at taking us into the fires of their own destruction. Women everywhere, and the men who would stand beside us as equals, must rise together and build something new, born from the flames these rotten men of old seem so desperate to make a reality.
Beyond our shames and regrets. Beyond our hurts and judgements. There is a way to re-build in honor of balanced ideals. Women and men empowered to co-exist beyond misogyny, for once.
It can be done.
