[CW: Discussions of Transphobia/Unsolicited Sexual Behavior]
A “leftist feminist” who disagreed with something I said accused me of having “male privilege” even though she knows I’m transfeminine. She said that “all male people have male privilege,” with the term “male” there including transfeminine people. To do some harm reduction, she said "I didn’t say anything about your gender, just your maleness."
What’s really the kicker is that, even if you like to use this awful “sex and gender are different things” as a means of trying to have one foot on the transphobe side and another foot on the trans ally side, the idea of transfeminine people having male privilege from a systemic point of view is just deeply unserious.
I lost my family, got called queerphobic slurs by them in the process, dealt with extended periods of joblessness while also fearing the potentiality of being homeless with basically no support but Hexbear, and have gone through various other abuses because of my transfeminine identity, including uncomfortable sexual scenarios with men, and I have male privilege?
Well, let’s not forget that she was also
It is so hard for cishets to break free from this thinking. They almost grasp the concept when they nominally understand ‘gender’ to be constructed and distinct from ‘sex’, but then make the same mistake as reactionaries by lumping some non-biological aspect of ‘gender’ back into ‘sex’ in a trans-exclusionary way. At-best they end up misunderstanding the trans experience in a deeply bigoted way, and at-worst they cynically use ‘sex’ as a biologically deterministic justification for transphobia and sexism.
‘Sex’ is almost not even worth preserving as a classification in people, except in some very specific medical treatment questions - but even then, to someone who is transitioned/transitioning many of those medical distinctions become blurred and nonrigid again.
This person sounds like a TERF to me, they can fuck off.