Trans Women vs. Male Privilege

It's not a fair fight

Source image by Jorrit Verduijn

One need not look very far to find examples of people assuming that trans women have male privilege, and challenging our identities or transitions on that basis. Here’s a whole Quora page of it, but if you’re not familiar with the tropes, there are two main ones:

• “You’re transitioning? But why would you give up male privilege?”

• “Trans women aren’t real women because they grew up with male privilege.”

As a trans woman, I want to address both of those tropes. Spoiler: they have the same answer.

The Dynamics of Male Privilege

We can’t tackle those tropes without first being clear on what privilege (male or otherwise) actually is; how the underlying dynamics of privilege actually work and how they play out for men.

Privilege itself is is a set of benefits society grants to some class of people solely on the basis of perceived membership in that class. Critically, members of the class receive these benefits for free, without having to ask or do anything at all. The people and systems of society itself actively bestow these privileges without demanding any thought, effort, or sacrifice from the recipients.

There’s lots of kinds of privilege out there. To name just a few: White privilege. Cis privilege. And of course, male privilege.

Just so we’re on the same page, it’s worth a minute to examine the broad benefits of male privilege: These are mainly economic, social, and quasi-legal.

Economically, men are paid more than women for the same work, and are promoted and given raises at higher rates. Socially, men are afforded more freedom to act as they want without interference from others, and are routinely granted absolution for sins they may commit or mistakes they may make. Legally, the de jure status of men and women in the U.S. is to have equal rights and protections, but de facto, we all know that men benefit both legislatively and judicially from that routine absolution.

This is what men get, for free, without asking or doing anything. This is what society bends itself over backwards to give to them.

Breaking Down the Tropes

That first trope observes that if you’re a man, male privilege is a pretty f*cking amazing deal. Men get all those benefits? For the low, low price of absolutely nothing at all? Who on earth would turn that down?

Between the lines, the first trope asserts that trans women must be crazy to walk away from all that.

The second trope is much less subtle in its assertions. First, it asserts that trans women have male privilege to begin with. Or at least that we do before we come out.

And second, it asserts that our identity is somehow contingent on having had that privilege; contingent on how other people have treated us during our lives. I’m not going to talk about that part except to point out the obvious error: you are who you are, and I am who I am, regardless of how anybody treats us. We are not defined by other people’s choices.

Source image by Mark Freeth

How is it for Trans Women?

I will 100% grant you that male privilege is a fabulous deal for men. It is truly the greatest of all deals.

But that is not the deal trans women get, even before we come out.

It’s true that trans women receive some benefits from male privilege. Before I came out, I certainly did; society saw me as a man, and definitely gave me some stuff for it. I know I had an easier time breaking into a career in tech while being perceived as a nerdy young man than if I’d been perceived as a nerdy young woman; the tech industry’s gender bias issues are well documented.

But we certainly don’t get all of the benefits of male privilege. Notably, cis boys get the privilege of being allowed to just be themselves. Trans girls get encouraged to be ourselves, but then when we do, we get punished for it: mocked, insulted, assaulted, excluded, shunned. That is, trans women never have social benefits of being free to act as we want without interference; that interference comes rapidly in the form of gender policing. I can’t comment on the quasi-legal benefits; I stayed out of trouble and never tested whether I’d receive that routine absolution from the legal system, too.

Regardless, we can get some benefits, so it’s worth addressing the assertions of that first trope. The thing is, the other half of the privilege dynamic matters a great deal because trans women don’t get the same deal as men. We get a vastly different and exponentially sh!ttier deal.

Here’s the difference: Men get male privilege for free. Trans women have to pay.

Addendum

The first draft of this article was met by quite a number of trans women with scorn over the idea that they ever experienced any benefit from male privilege at all. That all they experienced were the costs they had to pay (see below). And on reflection, they’re right.

I write this from the perspective of a middle-aged trans woman who spent over 50 years with the world believing I was a man. But as I look back on my life, the only benefits I received were the economic ones that came in my adult years, in career settings. If I were writing this article at age 20, I too would be hard-pressed to name any advantages I’d received.

The costs, though? Yeah, I could name those. Those who critiqued the first version of this article are making the excellent point: the younger you are, the worse the deal is. Because even before you are in a position to receive the benefits, you still have to pay the costs.

What are Those Costs?

Now I’ve made an assertion: Trans women pay for the subset of benefits we get, if indeed we get any at all. That assertion needs to be backed up. How do we pay? To what degree? In what coin?

Every moment of every day, with every breath, we pay in the coin of dysphoria.

We pay in the emotional cost of trying to live up to something we never were.

We pay in the destruction of our self-esteem, in feeling like constant failures because we simply can’t live up to the male standards society pushes on us.

We pay in the loss of our emotions, going through life mostly numb and unable to truly enjoy or fully experience anything, because numbness and disconnect is the only way to survive the crushing pain of dysphoria.

We pay in the constant stress and anxiety that living with gender dysphoria causes.

We pay in the loss of all the self-affirming experiences we should have had growing up, but weren’t allowed to have because “boys don’t do that” or because we just didn’t want to get called “weirdo” or “loser” or “freak” or “fag” and beat up again.

Every moment of every day, we pay and pay and pay this extraordinary price, this tax on our souls. Short of death—a price far too many trans women do end up paying—can you think of a higher price than the sacrifice of one’s very identity? I can’t.

And what do we get for paying so exorbitantly? We get the scraps of male f*ucking privilege. Something we never wanted or asked for, but were quite literally forced to purchase at the cost of our souls.

It’s not Privilege, and We’re not Crazy

Put simply, trans women don’t grow up with male privilege: if it’s not free, it’s not male privilege. And it certainly isn’t the broad set of benefits people think of when the phrase “male privilege” comes to mind. Call it something else if you want, but it ain’t that. The watered-down benefits we may receive, that thinnest of tarnished silver linings, certainly do not justify their cost.

It’s not crazy to walk away from an absolutely sh!tty deal. Male privilege is a hell of a deal for men, but it’s a sucker’s deal for trans women.

And we’re not suckers. Fortunately for us, we can stop paying: we can transition.

What do We get from Transitioning

The question un-asked by those who invoke male privilege at us—the missing trope, if you will—is what do we get from transitioning? What do we get that’s so much better? What do we get from refusing to pay that terrible cost, that unjust and unconscionable tax, for once and for all?

Let’s also remember that transitioning isn’t free either. It comes with its own significant costs, financial, social, and (increasingly) legal. So what do we get for refusing to pay the old costs but taking on the new costs of transitioning?

What do we get for choosing to be openly and visibly transgender in an increasingly transphobic society? What do we get for paying the financial costs associated with hormones and surgeries and hair removal and new clothes and legal name changes and all the rest? What do we get for accepting that we’ll be paid less for our equal work? What do we get for enduring the physical pains of surgeries, recovery, laser hair removal and electrolysis? What do we get for revealing that we belong to a group that is heavily discriminated against? What do we get for the dramatic increase in the chance that we'll face violence or murder from intimate partners or even just random bigoted strangers?

What do we get for those significant costs? That’s easy: we get something we actually want. Something we’ve been denied our whole lives. Something real and priceless.

We get ourselves.