I’m seeing tweets that use language like “trans men aren’t The Oppressor Class,” implying that an attribution of “privilege” erases someone’s oppression, and I want to remind everyone of how quick we are to ascribe transfems male privilege/DMAB privilege/visibility privilege, etc

Even the framing “the oppressor class” implies that the TME concept is arguing that trans men are at the absolutely top of a hegemony, indistinguishable from the most powerful people in society. This is absurdly dichotomous. The vast majority of cis people aren’t even this.

This kind of dichotomy is incidentally why I used to think so much about a primary oppressor vs secondary oppressor distinction, though I found it was more like a spectrum so the line was blurry and seemed less distinct

I’ve seen so many people over the years utter sentiments like “I just can’t see AFAB people as oppressors” and the thing is:

-I don’t know how it could possibly be made clearer that “the oppressor category” isn’t “AFABs.” Cis men aren’t “AFABs” lol

-this is dangerously close to “if I am oppressed then I am an innocent victim who has never harmed anyone”

People, we are ALL oppressors in some way, of somebody, and that’s one of the premises of this whole business that we should all already be operating on

We ALL have responsibility toward each other in some way and largely the point of all of this is to build a community standard of taking that responsibility in the most self-aware way possible and counterbalancing harmful power dynamics

I also really urge everyone to examine the emotional reflex that so often goes into seeing “AFAB people” (others’ words, not mine) as neglected and harmless and simultaneously seeing transfems as pedantic, mean, dominating, and having a unique level of debt to others

“Transfeminine debt” is such a powerful and recurring perception that it pervades how we talk and think about transness even when the word privilege isn’t used, although the trans community has never been short of various ~privilege axes~ to impute onto transfems specifically

The theme is that transfems have gotten it really good—all that visibility, all that pre-transition male appearance to enjoy, all that community dominance—and have a burden to “pay it back” through labor, through caregiving, through deference

This is just another way to reinforce the pattern of transfeminized labor. Once you see this, many other dynamics in trans circles make MUCH more sense.

Why there is constant debate over the precise degree of male privilege/socialization transfems have, for one

If you think about it, the cyclical loops of analyzing the maleness/male energy/patriarchal power of transfems is absolutely necessary because of the cultural identity of being transfem is the sense of lacking innocence + owing something to others, including other trans ppl/women

So thinkers like Andrea Long Chu have to occasionally say things like “duh of course trans women have male privilege and at best lose it as we start to pass” because this is the toll we pay. It is an essential piece of transmisogynist mythology. Ask yourself what the point is

Because when we tell cis men they have male privilege, the idea is for them to relearn how they interact with and unconsciously take advantage of women (and trans ppl).

But when we tell trans girls and TMA people that we have *male privilege in the past,* something we can’t doing anything now but lurks always in the brickwork of our background, we construct a narrative of unending debt. A thing that’s always being made up for