a collection of crap
august 11, 2026
i hate talking about this shit because stuff that is overtly political is always a powder keg. people will not carefully read what you say, project biases onto you, and assume things about you in bad faith in order to interpret you as poorly as they can. i avoided doing anything with these comics for months because of it. but i guess someone has to talk about it. i kept saying to myself, "lol, and it's not going to be me." it doesn't have to be me, either. people have been talking about this stuff for decades. i just read the book "stone butch blues" and that basically confirmed for me that, yes, this pain i've been feeling is nothing new. anyway, here's what i had to say. read it, or don't.
there is a powerful humiliation in being a man but being insecure about being a man. "man" is a position within a power hierarchy where you prove you're worthy of holding and wielding the power it grants in order to be entitled to it as an identity. you do not get to BE a man without first proving that you are one. OTHER MEN grant you manhood, you do not proclaim it. you aren't supposed to whine about how people are hurting you, you're supposed to Be Strong and Take Control and a lot of people's only idea of positive masculinity is Protecting Women (Who Are Weak And In Need Of Your Protection, As A Man). these ideas permeate even the most progressive of spaces. there's even an intensity to this idea in a lot of queer spaces, specifically trans spaces, that's more pronounced than in general society. if you're a trans guy who is advocating for your humanity by pointing out that people use your masculinity to hurt you (specifically because you don't have most of that hierarchical power, if any, especially if you're on any other axis of oppression), there are a lot of trans guys who respond by belittling you for failing to Be A Man by being sufficiently stoic and A Woman Protector. again, because you don't just say you're a man, you prove it.
on the other hand, you have a lot of trans guys (a distressing amount, frankly) who want to embody patriarchal masculinity because they feel they should have been born men and have fully internalized patriarchal ideals in the pursuit of attaining masculinity they feel they have been unfairly denied. i have seen some trans guys say they WANT women to be afraid of them because it means they are perceived as a man, which is gender affirming. inversely, there are some trans women who want to feel weak because it makes them feel feminine (but i will not speak at length about this because i'm not a woman, or a trans woman, and i have no idea what the experience of yearning to be a woman feels like or how it influences your behavior and perceptions). i have been told that a lot of women view being perceived as delicate and weak as gender affirming, and that a lot of men view being perceived as dangerous and threatening as gender affirming. i had no idea about any of this. it sounds so surreal to say it plainly, but it must be true because the evidence for it is everywhere.
the point i'm trying to arrive at is that all of this describes "gender essentialism," which is a word some people seem to say without knowing its meaning. "cultural feminism," which is an offshoot of what is colloquially known as "radical feminism," is a belief built on the bedrock of gender essentialism. when i am asking you, as a trans man, to examine what kinds of gender essentialism you may have internalized because it's causing harm to me, i am not doing so from the position of a man seeking power over women. i'm doing it as a trans person asking you to think about the things you take for granted and what it means to apply those ideas to everyone, not just men.
it's a fucking mess. it sucks badly. the premise of feminism, i thought, was supposed to be "there are very little (if any) inherent (biological, psychological, or otherwise) differences between genders, and all should be treated as equals." that was an idea i had internalized at a very, very young age. my mom taught me growing up that neither boys nor girls are better than the other. i accepted that. it made sense. why would they be different or one better than the other? we're all people. what's gender got to do with it?
i retreat into genderlessness, i think, as a coping mechanism. i did it pre-transition to escape my forced identity as a woman. i do it now to escape my embodied identity as a man. both of these situations cause pain. but as i've said, saying so makes people roll their eyes. a man crying about being victimized by women again? what a joke.
sure, maybe it would be a joke, if that was what i said.