Originally posted on 8 May 2026 by Mousidy

Anonymous asked:

hi there! tme person here. i've been trying to educate myself on transmisogyny and i recently found out the term "male socialization" presents problems for trans women and we should avoid using it. i'm wondering if there's another term to describe like... the way cis men specifically move through the world, i guess? i've been having conversations with cis male friends recently, trying to explain that there are certain cis guy behaviors and privileges that they have, which they usually learn really young and that come alongside exerting power over people who are not cis men. i'm trying to avoid the "socialization" language because i know there are issues with it, so i'm wondering if there's a more accurate term to describe the stuff cis guys have going on. (obviously it's not trans women's job to invent new terminology to describe this stuff, i'm just wondering if there is already terminology that tme ppl should be using that we don't know about!)

Mousidy answered:

male privilege

I don't think socialization theory is like, completely wrong really, just that it's very frequently deliberately misunderstood and used as a cudgel against trans women

I often hear it said that trans women are "socialized faggot" as opposed to "socialized male," because many of us have inclinations toward femininity that single us out for misogyny and mistreatment from a young age, often by the very male peer groups we are lumped in with

and, if a trans woman does grow up avoiding all that and really is "socialized male" in the classical sense, those behaviors lose the teeth of male privilege once she comes out. so no matter how "male socialized" anyone thinks a trans woman behaves, her socialization confers no actual power any more than a cisgender woman who is brash and overconfident could be said to have power or privilege about it

I think a lot of what people attribute to socialization, also, is really just how people tend to act when they're used to being able to bowl over a marginalized group

many twerfs who accuse trans women of "male socialization" for speaking up for ourselves exhibit plenty of behaviors that they would immediately call male socialized if they observed them in a trans woman--being loudly and confidently wrong, shouting us down, speaking over us, belittling our femininity, making horrible and invasive comments about our bodies--and that's because their behavior is rooted in the fact they are enabled to act the way they do, it doesn't say that there's something "male" about them