misandry 2: electric boogaloo
on being the boot, transgender calvinism, and swimming upstream in a river of piss
Thank you to everyone who left kind and interesting comments on my last piece about “misandry.” I got a few comments from people asking me to expand on that, so here you go: my best swing at summarizing about two-to-ten years’ worth of thinking so hard about feminist theory and culture that steam comes out my ears. That last piece was intended to very carefully invite people who hate men into thinking a bit differently; this one is for the boys.
The personal is political, as they say, so when trans men have personal problems, we try to figure out how this connects to our feminist politics. This usually goes very badly for us, but I think peering at our failed attempts to square that circle can reveal a lot about what gender means to modern society. Hopefully I have done an ok job of making clear its relevance outside the trans twittersphere.
EDIT 1/18/2025: Added and edited some things for tone and clarity. Ugh, as if this thing wasn’t long enough already. Thanks again to commenters for your insights. Clumsy cheap-webcam-mic youtube reading can be found here, if you’d rather listen than read.
THE ULTIMATE UNDERDOG
A pretty large swath of American culture views gender as a kind of unethical social hierarchy, with men on a higher rung of the ladder than women— and, y’know, if we want to have a moral and functional democracy, we should probably try to balance those scales somehow. The whole of feminist theory is significantly more complex than that, and there are a lot of differing opinions about what “balancing the scales” might look like, but that is the gist of what has suffused into the mainstream through tweets, takes, and TV. When Bo Burnham makes a song about how men don’t have real problems for his Netflix special, I think its safe to say that feminism has reached the water supply.
This is partially because a lot of contemporary feminist advocacy (and leftist advocacy more generally) is conveyed by pointing out statistical disparities. Personally, I got started with my little millennial feminist education through facebook graphics in the late 00s, and I think I’m far from alone there. Disparities are useful for that— you can make a compelling case that society has a problem with women when you, for instance, point out that the median income for women is (yes, still, today!) about 75% of the median income for men.1 It’s especially useful if you are trying to convince a lot of people very quickly, or when you need to have a stern talk with Congress about it.
The only problem is that putting a lot of weight on disparity inevitably incites pissing contests. If you want to advocate for your own wellbeing, socially or politically, you get the sense that you must demonstrate that your problems are worse than someone else’s. For men, the result is that you are compelled to either invert the hierarchy (“um actually, it’s men who are the real victims”) or leverage some other aspect of your identity if you want to make the case that anyone should give a shit about how you’re doing.
Radical feminists are especially attached to this idea of hierarchy— not only are men privileged, they say, men are the oppressors. Men not only have less problems than women, they are the primary cause of women’s problems.2 If you have a beating human heart, you probably consider “oppressor” synonymous with “evil,” and of course you do not want to be evil. You can’t snap your fingers and turn the world into an egalitarian paradise, so you focus on the things you can control— you try to be very careful not to do toxic masculinity in day-to-day life, even by accident, even in situations where it does not seem like a big deal. You try to put women first, try not to question them, try not to ask them for much. When they treat you like shit, you say, I get where you’re coming from— I would be mad at me, too. It’s okay, I can take it.
Whether, in practice, this alienates you from your gender identity, makes you suicidally self-hating, and marginalizes you within communities that say they want to support you is irrelevant. None of that matters, because it’s all for the greater good. That all of the women you admire make a game of shouting from the rooftops about how they can’t stand you isn’t mere petty cruelty, it’s a sign of progress. To borrow a phrase from Natalie Wynn, I think this is an expression of a “masochistic epistemology”— whatever hurts is true.
NOT LIKE OTHER BOYS
I’m sorry for my crabby-ass tone, but this shit makes tguys go crazy, myself very included. For myself and a lot of my friends, it elicits paranoiac despair and a habitual, nitpicky self-policing of our thoughts, feelings, and behavior which goes way beyond anything that would be actually useful or reasonable-to-expect. We turn ourselves inside-out fretting, how could we possibly exist around women as the traumatized little perverts we are without werewolfing out and becoming the kinds of men we really, really don’t want to be?
Our presence in feminist scenes— privileged as men, oppressed as trans— complicates the gendered hierarchy, which in turn complicates the social dynamic of everyone trying to consciously resist that hierarchy. When people talk shit about men to our faces, it comes off as pretty transphobic, but the only option for trans men to defend ourselves is to strongly delineate ourselves from cis men. We put self-conscious caveats on our male identity, mostly to avoid pissing off the girlies by insinuating that cis men, too, might deserve a little sympathy.
So you get guys like Jude Doyle, tying himself in knots trying to rationalize it all by saying his radfem colleagues (who seem to love trans women and hate his guts) are simply deft at covering exactly ½ of their transphobia. He says: they don’t hate me because I’m a man, they hate me because they hate trans people, in a way that just so happens to only hurt me and the other lads. Sure, buddy! Whatever helps you sleep at night.
His conclusion is what I would call a Transgender Calvinism: Yes, men are the oppressors, but it’s not my fault I’m a man— I was simply fated to be one. The best he can do is beg his sisters to love the sinner, hate the sin, and we already know how that goes.
You also get Devon Price, who once spent nearly four thousand words meticulously reframing every transmasc problem as a kind of abstracted misogyny-splash-damage, as if this is any different from just calling us all women. This is about as incomplete as conceptualizing homophobia as hatred of men for being too similar to women, as if leather daddies and rough trade just get a free pass from the horny police.
Even Noah Zazanis (who I consider a friend, and who I think did a much better job addressing this subject) still concludes that this contradiction cannot be resolved, and you just have to do some Marxist dialectics about it. “[Men] want from feminism something it can never give us: to be acknowledged as men within a m/f paradigm, without reproducing m>f.”
And, I dunno, maybe he’s right! But I don’t think that bodes well for any of us. It would mean that feminism is unequivocally bad for trans men, and potentially all men who buy into it. It would mean that it is it impossible for feminist trans men to see themselves as real men and also as real people with real problems at the same time, and that any validation of our identity as men is inextricable from the harm we might do to women, such that any good we get is a kind of “fuck you, got mine.” This framework burdens us with a moral obligation to strip ourselves of the identity which we have fought and suffered for, because that identity is inevitably synonymous with a terrible power. It asks us to assume that the concept of maleness only exists at all so that some people can exert control over others, and the only egalitarian future is in a world without gender— rather than seeing gender as a valuable tool for making meaning out of all the tragedy, confusion, and unfairness that inevitably fills each human lifetime no matter who is in the White House.
I can’t accept that this is just the best we can do. I think all that shit sucks, really. Gender isn’t a totem pole, it’s just more complicated than that. I do not believe that feminism is a misanthropic philosophy which must make men into martyrs— that’s certainly not what I got out of it, anyway. For trans men, being trans and being a man are the same thing, and every attempt to separate one from the other— even if the point is to defend us— can be deeply damaging to our sense of identity, our ability to understand our problems politically and advocate for our needs among the women who make up the majority in feminist communities. Since every trans community is culturally feminist, that would leave us with nowhere to go.
SEPARATE SPHERES
[Trans] men continually fail to resolve this tension not because it is impossible, but because it is a massive social liability to try. If a guy stops to think: “Hm, it seems like stereotypes about men— that we are aggressive, entitled, hypersexual, controlling, insecure, violent, stupid, and oppressive— are very present in this culture, in a way that makes me hate myself and makes other people distrustful and cruel. [stage whisper] Could this be… bigotry?”
What answer does he get? A resounding “No, and fuck you for asking.”
If I am trying to convince a feminist that misandry is both real and politically relevant, the obvious way to do that is to reference The Hierarchy and say: Well, shit rolls downhill, and hatred of men does the most damage to the people at the bottom— trans women. If someone with a vicious and hateful fixation wants to ruin some poor tgirl’s day, they often try to flay her with sinister male stereotypes. They call her a duplicitous threat, a disgusting pervert, and/or clumsily unfeminine. TERFs in particular are very clear about how they hate trans women because they think trans women are men, and so they slander tgirls as members of the oppressor class trying once again to exert their power and control over “real” women.
So, while I am very distressed that trans women have to endure this kind of bullshit, I resent that I feel compelled to advocate for myself by saying, “Sure! Men are not oppressed for being men, but women are! And you do care about women, don’t you?” I resent that I must frame all of my problems as trans problems rather than man problems, trivializing my shared struggle with other boys in the attempt to scrounge up support for myself. I do not like this self-conscious sleight-of-hand, where transmascs accept that affiliation with cis men is a liability.
It feels very similar to when Suffragettes claimed that, while “women” deserve the vote, black women did not, because they claimed black women were more similar to men than women (!!?!)3 Or when the National Association for Women in the 70s argued that including lesbians in the political activism of the second wave would make feminism look unserious to the heterosexual mainstream. None of us, even feminists, are immune to that dark urge to be the boot on someone else’s neck for a change.
I would rather point out that patriarchal societies have historically included positive and negative stereotypes for both men and women. For instance, I grew up in a Pentecostal church which followed roughtly the same gender-paradigm as was taught by the Catholic church for hundreds of years before: that God designed men and women to be a complementary whole, with innate strengths and weaknesses which balance each other out when joined in holy matrimony. [Insert derisive wanking gesture here, etc.] During the Victorian era, secular patriarchy did a little shuffle-step to say that it was Nature, not God, which ordained that women are best-suited to the domestic sphere while men were purpose-built to have the adventures (and face the risks) of a life in public.
Of course, this is all still deeply condescending. Telling women that they are just the best at raising babies and keeping the house is sort of like telling a child that he’s soooo good at taking out the trash— it is an attempt to exert control through flattery instead of force. It’s awfully fucking convenient that a bunch of institutions already run by men all shook hands and agreed that men were just naturally suited to having all the property rights and government positions, that men are the only ones who can even sort-of be trusted with agency over their own lives, but maybe less convenient that they are also the best at getting killed en masse on behalf of their local lord’s war-gaming. (I don’t have to justify this, you know this song.) Holistically, examining history and culture does not add up to a patriarchy which simply loves men in all their toxicity while feeling only disdain for womanhood and femininity. It looks more like masculinity’s supposed innate virtues and flaws largely serve to justify why everyone outside the house of the king must remain a peasant.
None of this is to say feminism bad— I came to my conclusions thanks to Simone Weil, Kimberle Crenshaw, bell hooks, Judith Butler, Betty Friedan, as well as living geniuses that I don’t want to implicate by citing them in such a contentious piece. It’s just that any ideology which lays claim to the moral high ground can still be manipulated to betray its own foundational principles. Shit happens, it doesn’t mean the whole thing is rotten to the core, and we shouldn’t feign surprise when people are usually doing politics for the sake of their own needs before anyone else’s. That is just how it goes. But surely this is not the best we can do.
ROSE-TINTED LENSES
I started writing this specifically in response to that Jude Doyle essay blog post I mentioned— three different people sent to me to ask for my take, and I had to tell all of them that I hated it.4 Let’s return to that for a moment, because I think it’s especially illustrative:
When a trans man tells me that nobody chooses to be trans, he is mostly telling me that he cannot imagine that any reasonable, morally-upright person would want to be a man. If he tells me that his identity is a metaphysical, internal thing, what I hear is that he thinks his sense of self cannot be damaged by other peoples’ rejection, nor can it be built up by their participation, and that is certainly not my experience. When he says that he had to become a man or else he would have died, it feels like I am watching someone tell me about how they almost burned to death when their house caught fire because the only window to jump from would have landed them in the lake, and they really hate swimming.
How does he defend this series of conclusions which are clearly anathema to his emotional survival? Like so:
Gender is the act of elevating some people and oppressing others; “woman” is merely a label for that specific form of oppression. […] The patriarchal binary divides the world into two tiers: “Men” and “women,” people who get stomped on and people who do the stomping. That’s objectively true.
Hm, you don’t say! Thanks for telling me, man, all about Objective Truth. I guess we should all go commit seppuku over Valerie Solanas’s grave so as to reduce the number of oppressors on the planet.
I’m sorry again, I know, I’m putting a cool twenty in the Toxic Masculinity Jar as penance, mea culpa. Jude Doyle does not deserve get dunked on by a pissy little dweeb like me— he has enough problems as it is, and these are not his original ideas anyway. But you understand why this ideology makes trans men want to die, right? It doesn’t leave many other options for a guy who believes that radical change needs to happen and that his personal lifestyle is the only change he can affect. In a social context where all of your friends and supporters— what few you even have— agree that this is the objective truth, it’s no surprise that men who care about gender-politics feel like the best they can do for the world is just… stay home and try not to make everything worse.
Please don’t flinch when I say this, dear reader, but feminism is not about laying out the “objective truth.” Feminism is a lens for critiquing the landscape in front of you, a pair of tinted glasses you put on to see what stands out which would otherwise just blend into the background. If you want to argue about objective truth, you wind up in a pissing contest with everyone who wears a different pair of shades— you get Warren Farrell trading his pink lenses for blue and deciding that he’s the one who sees the world as it really is, and I’m not interested in doing that. We are not talking about facts, here— we are talking about the narrative framework which allows us to glean meaning from the facts.
So let’s try something different for a change. What do we get if we look for a lens that both validates feminism and does not make trans men constantly fantasize about death and detransition? I really don’t think it’s that hard, and it would probably be useful for other men, too.
A NEW LENS
We could start by trying to understand masculinity— even “traditional” masculinity— as something genuinely valuable and desirable for reasons other than “power.” We would have to understand that part of how gender is constructed is in the way that we describe it politically; constructing men as oppressive makes maleness repulsive to everyone with a functional empathy gland, especially to those who feel that their maleness is inevitable. Of course I mean trans men who feel like being forced to live inside of womanhood would be a death sentence, but I also mean closeted trans girls, nonbinary people who are viewed as men, and cis guys who just like being guys.
We could instead hand trans men a framework to understand themselves as men alike to other men, and let them know that this affiliation is a good thing— it is part of what it means to be one’s gender, and they are not hurting women by wanting it. We could say that actually, you are not being an insecure toxic patriarch if you don’t want to be female or “feminine”— our contrasts and variety mean that when we are in community together, we are greater than the sum of our parts and richer than when we are alone.
We would have to accept that even men who seem to fit the ideal of ~alpha~ masculinity are tightly constrained and damaged by that role in ways they can’t just decide to stop doing. They have put a lot of stock into that for sympathetic reasons, because identity is always a negotiation between the social and the personal. Maybe men— including trans men— who say they are esteemed as kings-of-the-world represent men and masculinity about as well as a woman who says her joyous life’s purpose is to be some Mormon billionaire’s baby factory represents all women.
We might notice that the vast majority of men and boys who aren’t tech financiers or LA gymbros have to endure constant jabs from both patriarchy and feminists that they are fucking worthless and no one will ever help them, and nobody deserves that. Men know that the current system sucks, and they don’t like it either, but they can’t just decide to fix it— they don’t have that kind of clout. It has to be a group effort, which includes women reckoning with the way their sisters contribute to the problem. That’s not exactly easy, but I don’t feel like it’s any more of a tall order than it is to expect men to unpick their “toxic masculinity” or whatever.
We might have to consider that men and women are in a position where life does not treat them kindly, and that is why they act out. Hurt people hurt people, and a great way to reduce the amount of pain inflicted is to reduce the amount of pain suffered, and try to actually heal the pain which could not have been prevented. We have a responsibility to one another to have mercy for those whose trauma has made them hard and cruel, but also not use our own pain as an excuse to wantonly treat each other like children of Omelas.
We would have to let go of the idea that gender is a hierarchy, and embrace a more intersectional understanding of power. And, I dunno, maybe if women start to actually feel their own empowerment, heterosexuals can start having fun again. I would like that for them.
BOY PROBLEMS
I don’t think that any of this conflicts at all with the notion that our society is A Patriarchy. That will continue to be true until and unless we see actual parity in positions of government, a democracy whose leaders proportionally represent its populace and where there is not a cartoonish disparity in which people have access to wealth. Creating a world of true wealth equality will require us to move mountains, and in the meantime, culture and the social world are invaluable to surviving the whims of fate both physically and emotionally.
“Feminism”— though it means different things to the many people who invoke it— taken as a whole is a vast and complex political philosophy which has been in development for well over a century, and its myriad thinkers have tried to address in detail the problems of politics, culture, psychology— everything which can enhance or diminish our agency over our lives. I would not have spent so much time considering and investigating it if I thought its contributing members had not done good work.
But I don’t know if The Culture™ can accept that my framework is “feminism” or if it must be something else entirely. We have spent so much time behaving as if solving the problems of men and women are contradictory goals, even when feminist theory has already so clearly explained what we have in common. This idea of gender’s strict hierarchy undermines the central motivation for why we should not tolerate a misogynist culture: consigning whole classes of people to demeaning stereotypes affects both their self-worth and political standing, and the political world which impoverishes certain people gives others power to treat them like punching bags. If misogyny is bad for women, misandry is bad for men in all the same ways— least of all because it makes marginalized men enemies to the political movements which claim to uplift them.
When I left the church that raised me to think of myself as a second-class woman, I emerged into a trans culture that treated me like I was dangerously overpowered as a man. As a result, I have been an unwanted child all my life, and have spent all 30-some years of it trying in vain to meet differing standards of conduct and composure which I was falsely assured would provide security, trust, and esteem. I have been exploited and abused by women I deeply admired and tried to do right by, and have spent years internalizing that I deserved it. I have flunked out of “real” employment and most of the social world and I wouldn’t be writing at all if I felt I had much left to lose. I’m well aware how I come off.
I will be the first to tell you that I am not a “good person”— I am an insane transsexual, a melancholy self-pitying alcoholic, I am lazy and abrasive and critical and cringe. But ten years of watching everyone around me harp on “toxic masculinity” convinced me that all of my antisocial and self-destructive behaviors were the fault of my poor character, while the women I adored despite their cruelty— every one of them just as angry and traumatized and afraid as I— could never do any real harm. It would be vile to expect those women to simply be better people, to rewrite their personalities and keep perfect composure while I step on their toes, but this is exactly what they have always demanded of me.
I have looked for trans people who talk about men and masculinity in other terms, and I have not found any. Trans culture has leaned hard into a nouveau gender-essentialism to explain why we exist— it’s just who I am inside— and while I wouldn’t call anyone a liar over it, that shit does not speak to me. It feels like the advice for men from the whole morass of books and podcasts and youtube all comes down to improve yourself: make your bed, go to the gym, fix yourself, have some respect, stop being bad. I have tried very hard at these things, dear reader, and I will never stop trying, but I can tell you two things: self-improvement is a lot easier when it improves you for your own sake, and no man will ever be enough for women who think that hating men is praxis.
It feels like the culture I left and the one that I landed in have told me the exact same thing: You are scum. The world is filled with temptations you do not have the strength to resist, and your salvation will not be found on this earth. Your every word will be picked apart, your heart constantly searched for sin, and what mercy you may find is in God alone. Hell has no depths, only an endless fiery plain, and sins of any scale will see you burn just the same.
So in most of the places I have turned to for community among women and trans people and like-minded leftists who agree that the world needs to change, I find people who go out of their way to remind me at every turn what a problem I am for the cause. They expect me to be a different sort of man because I am trans and gay— kinder, safer, more self-aware— and have little patience when I am just as angry and sad and confused as everyone else. They discourage me from sympathy for the cis men that are just like me—the faggots, the nerds, your run-of-the-mill softboy, the obsessive thinkers and crazy troublemakers— the men who motivated my transition to become their kin, as if loving them was some kind of betrayal of the women I did not want to be. And still they say they love me, they’re looking out for me, unlike all of the boys who have always, always, ever since I was a child, treated me so much better.
I don’t know how else to respond to this except to say, J’accuse! I do not accept this, and my patience for those who do gets lower every day, until it seems all I can do is make myself more alone. Instead of soaking in resentment like the manosphere or self-flagellating like the other male feminists, I would rather make myself useful by redirecting everyone’s attention to feminism’s moral core: the idea of a fundamental human dignity and our right to agency, what we owe each other to make up for what this horrible world steals away, and the political cooperation required to change the world. I don’t know if my writing is convincing to anyone who is invested in the hierarchy one way or the other, but I don’t really care. I am not interested in telling women what to do. I just want my boys to be okay.
Thank you so much for reading, I know it was very long. I got a lot of shockingly kind responses to my last piece about misandry, and I hope that trend continues. Figuring out an actual intersectional feminist framework for understanding my own identity as a man has been extremely good for me, and has done a lot to dissolve my previously-intractable anger and despair and desire-to-die. It was a lot of work and I did not get much support, and I would like to see fewer boys trying to puzzle it out the long way like I did. So I hope this will be useful to someone.
I’m clearly going through another manic phase, so I will probably try to take a break from writing for a bit after this. I’m sure there are angles and perspectives I have not thought of— I didn’t try to extrapolate much of this to include nonbinary people, for one— so if you are wearing lenses which reveal something I don’t see, I would be glad to hear from you. We are all in this together.
Look, I know this statistic is contentious, but having investigated it myself, I think it’s pretty inarguable evidence of an unethical, systemic disparity, no matter how you slice it.
It’s hard for me to tell how “radical” this opinion even is anymore. I have known a lot of people (especially trans people) who think that “men are the oppressors” is fundamental to all feminism rather than a specific strain of radicalism that conflicts with later theories of intersectionality. It’s unclear to me what “feminism” means to any given person anymore.
Since I was advised this could use a citation: The Trouble With White Women: A Counterhistory of Feminism by Kyla Schuller
I am not trying to roast Jude Doyle, but he has a tendency to speak very confidently on behalf of all trans people while saying things that are not true. For the record: Death is not the only future for people who want to transition and can’t. That is propaganda, and it does not work— I think trans people are shooting ourselves in the foot when we fervently invoke this kind of high-stakes hopelessness, but I am not trying to talk inside baseball here. Likewise, plenty of people transition for political reasons, for performance art, to escape the obligations of societal gender norms, etc— I know several who fit all of these categories, and they are neither fictional nor delusional. I wrote about my own feminist political reckoning with my transition for my ten-year tranniversary, if you’re curious to see some of what motivated me.
I have some loose thoughts on this I’m afraid to say out loud in case someone comes along and gets furious, which go something like this:
—I don’t think there’s a lot of thought given to the idea of what “men are statistically more likely to be violent to you if you are a human” means, in practice, for men.
A lot of feminist discussion is about the need for women to get away from men who might turn out to be violent, and doing that through creating exclusionary spaces. A man cannot do this, I have found from experience! I did try and be part of a man’s gender discussion group once; it devolved into one particular man saying – trigger warning – “why can’t we just rape everyone we want to?” That was not what I had in mind for the group at all.
This has been a real problem for me: solidarity depends on trust, and there are people who make it clear you should not trust them. If you’re a man who is reluctant to trust men in your body – a dog who is afraid of other dogs – it’s hard to find a space that isn’t just being lonely forever. Men like the one who ruined our group are probably fine because they can band together, and are doing so. But men who don’t actually like those guys end up isolated in a polarising discourse.
I’ve come to think that “Not all men!” is a cursed phrase because it cuts this thought off: if you aren’t a man, anything that reminds you of a man is an object of fear, so there is no space to advocate for yourself as a subject who exists in the world. And there is no way to earn trust, or to end up with an expectation you should be trusted? There’s a lot of feeling miserable for other people’s crimes
Gonna try to keep these thoughts organized, lol. I am a cis guy, who has always had trouble with gender. The long and short of it is that it is insane to me how deeply this resonates with me.
"We turn ourselves inside-out fretting, how could we possibly exist around women as the traumatized little perverts we are without werewolfing out and becoming the kinds of men we really, really don’t want to be? ... [y]ou try to be very careful not to do toxic masculinity in day-to-day life, even by accident, even in situations where it does not seem like a big deal...” guided by "a 'masochistic epistemology' — whatever hurts is true." Gender Calvinism results.
To me, some combo of childhood experiences served to make 'masculinity' synonymous with what we now call 'toxic masculinity,' which in turn was synonymous for lack of self-awareness, arrogance, and appetites (because ofc these could become urges which could override reason). hooks' passage "Hence the underlying message boys receive about sexual acts is that they will be destroyed if they are not in control, exercising power," hit me like a ton of bricks because it succinctly summarized the driving force behind a lifetime of intropunitive spiraling.
Idk man I'm just choked up and really appreciating this piece. I think the rising prominence of queer men writing is doing magic for the wreckage of the gender war discourse.
The last thing I'll say risks entirely unsolicited moralizing. I recently got out of a long period of alcohol abuse which was driven by social anxiety and self-loathing, and which resulted in all these suppressed feelings leaking out and me really hurting other people. Sobriety has enabled a couple of years of really significant self work which allows me to think through these things in a way that is productive and to start living outside my own head. Obviously, you've got a good perspective, so I won't presume to know what you need to do. I'm just in a sappy place now and hoping the best for you.