The last place I lived before I left Kansas City was a house I rented with my best friend. It was grungy and drafty and the first real house I had lived in since I’d moved away from my hometown in suburbia. It had dark wood trim and low doorframes and an iron chandelier that looked like it belonged in a dungeon more than a dining room. At the top of the stairs was a little sun-room, maybe 6ft square, with dirty windows on three sides and a view of the clover-covered back yard. From the door to my bedroom in the attic, you could see how the sunroom twisted to one side like a funhouse, one corner of the lower-floor’s foundation slowly sinking into the earth.
My bestie-roommate liked to make a game of pointing out which men on TV hated women. Not characters, but the actors who played them (although playing a murderer or a rapist really clinched it). This wasn’t based on any knowledge of these men’s relationships or personal lives— it was a vibe check, as if you could tell at a glance from face or affect who possessed a blackened heart and a latent (or merely secret) thirst for domination. Jon Hamm, Ralph Fiennes, James Franco, the younger and handsomer the more likely the accusation— You can tell he hates women. It was 2019, we were on our nth round of #metoo reveals, and I knew what they meant. There was a dark humor in admitting to a distrust for men who represented the looks/money/status aspirations of MRAs— the things that career misogynists like Andrew Tate think will make them irresistible to women are less like a peacock’s plumage than they are the colors of a poison frog.
My friend worked at a library and was always reading, reading, reading, and while I did little but drink and sleep and watch TV, I was desperate for someone with any insight to talk to about all this gender and feminism stuff. Even though I was the one with a completed college degree— that stupid piece of paper that weighs so much more than it’s worth— I felt that I knew basically nothing. I was annoyed that so many of my peers treated me like a supercilious intellectual when all my citations were tumblr posts and wikipedia entries. I thought friends in the trans clubs at school had been too precious to dig up the contradictions in our shared liberal politics and look them in the eye, and I finally had someone close to me who cared enough to read and explain the texts I was too sad and scared to crack open myself. In the summer, we would spent most nights of the week sitting on the porch with the fireflies and mosquitos, drinking shit beer and talking about Emma Goldman and Shulamith Firestone and Andrea Dworkin. We talked about the moral calculus of “revolution,” the push and pull between the needs of the individual self and participation as part of a collective— you know, mid-20s leftist stuff. Every so often, this friend would remind me that they had room for exactly three men in their life, and I was lucky to snag a spot on the list. I couldn’t help but agree— it’s one of the few seasons of my life that I remember with more fondness than agony, by a pretty wide margin. If there is such a thing as heaven, what waits for me on the other side of the pearly gates better be that fucking porch.
My friend was a radical lesbian feminist, but they did not come within a hundred miles of the anti-trans stereotype that a “radical feminist” label tends to evoke today. Like Dworkin, they saw trans women as radical sisters, living examples of what it looks like to truly reject power and the strength of character it requires. This mirrored what I had already heard from many trans women over the years about the moral-political relevance of transfemininity. Years before Andrea Long Chu wrote about crushing on Valerie Solanas, trans women on tumblr discussed the virtue inherent in pursuing their own abjection as non-men.1
My friend described our society as maintaining a three-gendered hierarchy that went something like Man > Woman > Failed Woman—“the worst thing a man can do is be a woman, and the worst thing a woman can do is fail at being a woman”— which disrespects and disenfranchises all subjects-cast-as-“female” regardless of whether they can get pregnant. This gives womanhood a kind of transitive property, such that not only do trans/intersex/infertile women count as Real Women, but also the marginalization of trans men/gay men/nonbinary people can be understood as misogyny with extra steps: society hates women, and it hates queers because they are similar to women.2 This has always been what I thought typical for a vaguely-radfem framing of gender, where “woman” is used synonymously not with “baby-maker” but with “gender minority.” If our concept of “gender” only exists to be the category-justification for a dehumanizing hierarchy, there is one natural conclusion: to rid ourselves of the hierarchy, we must also be rid of gender.
Understanding gender’s hierarchy seemed deeply important to me because I knew already that anyone who who intends to reject a hierarchy must be aware of their own place within it. I wanted to follow the example of anti-racist politics— it isn’t enough for white people to claim that racial identity is trivial, we must acknowledge and understand racism in order to spot its insidious manifestations. When specific identities are targeted for abuse but the abuse’s justifications strategically elide the identity itself, we can call out the unfairness of fair-seeming policy through redoubled acknowledgement of who, exactly, are its obvious targets. Even interpersonal attempts at “fairness” can easily lead to outcomes that are more-or-less identical to the outcomes of the past, and reparations for old wounds can seem deeply unfair to those who have to give something up so that others might finally stand on equal footing. The importance of context-at-scale remains consistent whether we are talking about redlining of school districts or the bite of a slur when it passes through the teeth of one person vs another. Unaware of this context that reaches beyond ourselves— our town, our friendships, our personal lives— our compliments become insults, our comradery becomes entitlement, our requests become demands.
This is the way that progressive culture raised me to think about power and the weight of history when it came to the question of how to treat other people. I still stand by it even though I felt destroyed by the way it was applied to me by the people I was close to. I was utterly convinced that my male identity and appearance conferred a kind of indescribable social weight which I had a duty to subvert or deny whenever I could. It didn’t matter that I couldn’t work, couldn’t afford top surgery or a therapist or medication to fix my shit, could only pay rent by maintaining a pathetic connection with a family who hated me and did not want to know what I did with the money they put into my account whenever it dipped below my thousand-dollar “safety net.” It didn’t matter that I felt hated (and deserving of it) by nearly everyone I knew in KC and had spent my time post-graduation failing to provide for a partner— another trans person— who stole from me, had affairs with my ex-classmates, and left me the instant they no longer needed me to cover rent for the both of us. It didn’t matter that most of my time as a man had been spent with people who thought I was arrogant and powerful in spite of my history of familial neglect and self-hatred so intense I barely left the house except to buy cigarettes and liquor. It didn’t matter that I soaked constantly in guilty terror at the risk of offending or disappointing the women I spent so much time with, who I both admired and depended on as wise and insightful teachers. I could not bring myself to dismiss or demean the criticisms of people who told me that I had an obligation to listen and be better for their sake. If their bar for decency-in-manhood was too high for me to clear, then the failure there must be mine.
What was I supposed to do with that? What did it mean to have male power when it didn’t seem to put me in a better position or allow smoother passage through the world than was afforded to anyone who couldn’t shut up about how powerful I was? How could I possibly justify that I was worth the air I breathed, as a man or as a person— let alone the effort everyone told me it took to endure my borderline personality— if I barely had the resources to dig myself or anyone else out of the pit society had dumped us in? I didn’t have much to give, and whatever I did have was clearly worthless and unwelcome. Asking for what I needed to grow or repair myself was just another way to prove my masculine selfishness and accumulate new resentments from people I loved.
The eternal problem with identitarian politics in any direction is that we too-often use broad swaths of identity as shorthand for the things that actually matter. White identitarians believe that producing a just society involves enforcing homogeneity, and when some number of white people inevitably fail to act civilized, they are characterized as “degenerates” polluting their racial identity, rather than living examples that whiteness is not hand-in-hand with the goodness they claim to pursue. On the left, we talk about “power” as if it is a metaphysical property shared among members of a demographic, rather than noticing if the people around us actually have meaningful agency over their own lives or hold any socio-cultural cachet within their own niche. This means that we have little care to spare for the disempowered members of a majority demographic, but also makes the goal of rejecting power functionally impossible for anyone deemed powerful. Put bluntly, radfem folk-theory goes: there are no “good men” in the same way that there are no “good cops”— they only exist at all because they are hierarchy’s brute squad of enforcers, and if they wanted to not oppress people, they would stop being what they are. The reality that it’s a bit more difficult to quit your gender than to quit your day job hasn’t done much to inspire us to seek out a more nuanced or pragmatic understanding.
Maybe all this is a lot, or maybe it’s a lot of things you’ve heard before, but it’s the contextual preamble for my attempt to hammer out an artist statement for a series of paintings I’ve been working on, titled:
DO I HATE WOMEN?
The way the culture describes it: to be a misogynist is a relic of ancient times, an idiot with no political self-awareness, an uncivilized animal who knows nothing but take and eat and fuck and win, and it poisons everything about him. He is a domestic abuser or a serial killer or a #metoo moment just waiting to happen; when it does, no one is surprised, and every man in his orbit is implicated for their failure to stop him. To be a misogynist is the ultimate masculine failure, the kind of extreme failure that sends you to hell when you die, to the point that even entertaining the question of do I hate women? long enough to count your sins can suck the air out of the room.3
Misogyny is the sort of thing that can only be safely admitted in hindsight. We want men to self-interrogate, but to do it out-of-sight, where it won’t upset anyone. This is in spite of the fact that it’s unclear what all misogyny might entail, behavior- or politics-wise, when we know that rape and murder and the rollback of Roe v Wade are not the only ways that patriarchy exerts its grip on women’s lives (and that this grip also encloses people who aren’t women). Our current pop-feminist culture does not entertain men’s collective potential as helpful political actors or generative community participants; when men are good, it is in spite of ourselves. We do not complement men for being good men, but for being not like other men.
This combination elicits neuroses among feminist men, trans men in particular— I know this sounds harsh, but I am one of the poster children for trans men with intense feminist moral anxiety. The more transmascs I talk to, the more I find that others are likewise hurt and confused about their purpose, potential, and worth. With our tendency to emerge from trans- and lesbian-feminist communities, we often approach manhood while closely relating to women who make frequent reference to the inescapable power of men— their danger, their entitlement, their unearned superiority. What’s left in the absence of positive possibilities is an endless sin-seeking anxiety about what we boys might be doing wrong and what must be broken within us that makes us do it.
It often feels that everything I do is evaluated on the basis of whether it reveals an unspeakable misogynist heart. If I’m not impressed by endless paintings of sparkly anime girls, do I hate women? When I feel residual anger and resentment toward women who have hurt me, I think, do I hate women? When I feel angry that a woman on TV or twitter said something fucked up or blatantly untrue, do I hate women? When I don’t laugh along with a woman’s quips about how men are gross or ignorant or eager to do violence, do I hate women?
We press men to indulge in femininity to prove that they’re not insecure in their masculinity— if I don’t feel ~freed~ by sleepover manicures, does that mean I hate women and also that I’m not a big enough man? Some say that trans men only want to be men because we hate ourselves for being women— if I don’t want to be a woman, does that mean I hate women and also hate myself? If I don’t want to spend my life interrogating my every move, does that mean I hate women and also I hate the effort that feminism requires of me? Did feminism teach me that I, too, ought to own my gender, my art, my hysteria— or do I just hate women? It only gets worse from there.
What if I think pussy power blood-paintings and tearjerker transfem “trying on your first dress” scenes are equally repetitive and tiresome? What if I think it’s hypocritical to wrinkle your nose at movies about men punching each other and clap for movies about torturing rapists? What if I find PSAs about an “epidemic of violence against women” darkly absurd when men kill themselves and each other an order of magnitude more often than they kill women? What if I know that, compared to women, there are at least twice as many men who are homeless, twice as many addicts, ten times as many incarcerated? What if I have been personally objectified, harassed, dismissed, pathologized— most notably by women in positions of power over my healthcare and employment? What if I think women are fully human in that they are about as motivated as any other to be intellectually-lazy, merciless, self-aggrandizing assholes? Do I hate women?
I don’t fucking know. You tell me. I’m tired of trying to justify an answer or provide cover, for myself or anyone else. I’m tired of fretting over whether I am free of sin. I want someone else to sit here in the shit with me and sweat it out.
I want us to share the blinding heat of the spotlight, this perpetual mortifying interrogation. I want everyone to ask themselves why they think they can tell which men hate women based on their image, their desires, their flinch reflex. I want us to consider, together, whether men are fully human, especially men who are unwilling or unable to do what women want them to do, and what it means for feminism if they are. I want people to look every weeping, furious, broken boy in the eye and justify to themselves why they’re so afraid of him.
I’ve been writing a lot here, especially lately, about my frustration with my own cultural niche of trans-feminists and our apparent inability to follow our ideas to their conclusions. (I’m starting to get on my own nerves, and I would rather find something else to write about for a while.) The radfems I met in the first half of my 20s conceived of a world where the political weight of my gender rendered me bad and inhuman, but at least they were honest about it. At least they were not trying to sell me merch or hypocritical platitudes that I should dislocate my sense of self from the political world around me. In fact, many of the unhinged tumblr girlies who ruined my mind c2013-14 were doing mutual aid, in whatever ways they could with what little they had. Trying to help each other get hormones, get paid, get out of their parents’ houses, and, yes, make art together. Even my roommate, who told me every day they hated men, would come home from work with travel-size toiletries and cigarettes to offer the unhoused men who set up tents in the park across from our house. We kept an eye on these men’s things from a polite distance while they ran errands, and we let them know if the cops had come sniffing around.
It’s been extremely strange to watch radfem rage and the rhetoric of “sex class” grow increasingly mainstream— both in online discourse and in the ways trans communities organize themselves in person— but without the mutual aid. When last I was on twitter, I watched my peers repeat panic-fantasies of a “trans genocide,” but good luck finding anyone who’s stockpiling testosterone or organizing to get it de-scheduled. The fear that cis men will cheat at sports is of such grave importance to everyone that cis men who cheat at sports are a more reliable source for T than other trans people.
I think this shift reveals that the mainstreaming of radfem gender-hierarchy rhetoric is not because it is a blunt instrument which is sometimes useful for enacting political change. If we are being honest, I think the mainstream has simply digested “radical feminist” concepts and shit out an opportunity to shuffle around the social hierarchy— how we decide whose problems matter and obligate change, vs whose problems can be chalked up to the cost of doing business— and the relative esteem of whatever we call “masculine” or “feminine” this decade. Politics has little to do with it.
I feel like most of what I have learned over time is that feelings of rage at injustice are as motivating as they are inconsistent. When we don’t have many options for how how to act on our desire for change, we will accept whatever framing makes those limited options look meaningful and effective. It has become increasingly easy (maybe even emotionally necessary?) to frame all of our bad experiences as political injustices, no matter one’s identity. The “culture war” seems to be just a bunch of people rolling their eyes about the unseriousness of the Other’s problems.4
I’m glad that the people who gave a shit and the shit-talkers were running in the same circles where I could at least see both at the same time. I’m glad that I was not too delicate to keep looking for answers within feminist criticism, even when those answers implicated me in a bad way, or when other answers turned out to be confused or incomplete. I’m glad I was not self-hating enough to accept that transitioning would make me an inevitable enemy to my own political goals or the people I loved. But doing this kind of serious engagement with feminist thought and culture has taken about a decade and was intensely painful and isolating to attempt, and whatever I am supposed to do with the “social” part of “social justice” is still either unclear or unactionable.
I do not want to make women responsible for my caretaking, but I have been for many years a person who needs care. I cannot tell rapists and catcallers to just stop it— they do not care what I think. The fabled Old White Men In DC would not deign to speak to me on the street after dark any more than a woman walking home alone from the bar would— though their reasoning is different, their pull on the omipotent levers of power is different, the effect of rendering me an unperson unworthy of public life feels the same— and, if we are in the game of framing feelings as inherently political, what do we do with the feelings that dissent against our politics?
When every “community” I approach either has nothing of substance to offer and/or are very clear that they do not want me there, it becomes impossible to find & invest in the connections that would allow me to get my own needs met or do anything very useful for anyone else. I cannot follow the beaten path of patriarchal masculinity, but it seems I also can’t stray from the path without having my skin shredded in the overgrowth. That is the tension I want myself and others to sit with, in the hopes that maybe, together, we will figure out something better. Something that does not obligate me to adopt the same typecast abjection that women have so rightfully fought against.
A few weeks ago, I churned through Jessa Crispin’s My Three Dads, where she mentions that old rental house and “Charlie,” a passive-aggressive, ghostly patriarch who haunted the same attic I used to sleep in. I am forced to wonder why it is that Mr. Charlie hassled Jessa so insistently, but largely left me (and my roommate) alone— in spite of our endless drunken antics, indoor-smoking, and queer sexual escapades in “his” house. Was the intractable attic bedbug problem a result of my sloppy housekeeping, or his attempt to manifest a punishment for my lack of good manners? Did we little punk queers creep him out? How much of my life’s sabotaging was patriarchy’s doing vs my own? How much have I gotten-away-with or been-subjected-to not because I look like a man or a woman, but because I look like a public nuisance?
I “don’t believe in ghosts,” but I did see the mysterious, brackish footprints appear from time to time by the basement door. That part is just like she described. But when I was home alone and thought I heard a voice from another room, I always thought the speaker was a woman.
This essay is perhaps in part a response to Harron Walker’s heteropessimism podcast Why Do I Like Men? and Noah Zazanis’ On Hating Men And Becoming One Anyway, an essay that I thought was very good but still found wanting.
I just want to note here at the end that I don’t choose the music for these posts trivially or ironically. I actually really like “girl power” music, god help me, and Mannequin Pussy’s entire I Got Heaven album has gotten me through some shit this year.
“Baeddel” politics are something of a discourse third rail for trans people who are old-and-online enough to have been on tumblr a decade-ish ago. It feels cringe to cite tumblr, but if you want to understand the full context of my first swing at understanding trans-feminism in high school, I am obligated to mention that moneycat was the first person I saw reference Marx without a sneer. (I hear she’s doing pretty well now, and I sincerely hope that’s true. Good luck out there, sister.)
Sure. Fine. Whatever helps you give a shit.
Whether this patriarchal-inversion counts as a kind of hegemony in 2024 is perhaps worth considering.
It feels especially easy to fall into this trap when you are a person of mixed privilege. White women with mean coworkers, suburban queer kids with mean parents, men with mental health problems and tfw no gf, etc. If you have spent your life feeling blown-off and disregarded, it feels necessary to inflate the scale and urgency of your pain if you want anyone to care about it at all. Unfortunately, feeling like no one takes you seriously is a more-common emotion than we would like it to be.
hey! AMAB guy/non-binary-ish person here - i have never seen someone else approach this ugly side of things when it comes to being a man - in particular, within environments with bits and pieces of rad-fem inspiration.
fuuuuuck. it is refreshing to hear stuff like;
“I was utterly convinced that my male identity and appearance conferred a kind of indescribable social weight which I had a duty to subvert or deny whenever I could. (…) It didn’t matter that I soaked constantly in guilty terror at the risk of offending or disappointing the women I spent so much time with, who I both admired and depended on as wise and insightful teachers. I could not bring myself to dismiss or demean the criticisms of people who told me that I had an obligation to listen and be better for their sake. If their bar for decency-in-manhood was too high for me to clear, then the failure there must be mine.
(…)
Our current pop-feminist culture does not entertain men’s collective potential as helpful political actors or generative community participants; when men are good, it is in spite of ourselves. We do not complement men for being good men, but for being not like other men.”
from someone else. actually insane. i always feel such a deep impostor syndrome as a staunch male feminist, to the point where i think it detached me from masculinity. i’ve been thinking about writing on that, actually. this might be a sign
I was on tumblr at that time. Trying to figure myself out while following people on the fringes of both the baeddel side and on the -later turned out to be TERFs- butch lesbian side (because they seemed to be the only ones being somewhat positive about masculinity even if still being shitty about men).
Wasnt a fun time.
Your writing gives me hope that if i start being more open irl about this sorta stuff i wont be alone.... tho a lot of other trans writing on here dims that hope a little lol...