Fighting gender by policing gender - epic FAIL

A week or two ago I read Little Light's post about the violence experienced by a trans girl growing up with male gender policing. At the time, the comments that I read were all supportive. It seems, however, that since I read that post, gender police masquerading as radical feminists turned up (I was alerted to this by Questioning Transphobia, via TrinityVA.

Little Light writes of the way in which violence is used to police masculine gender, and how if you are not of the masculine gender but are born with male body parts then you're the ultimate and perfect target of that violence.

A particularly vile commenter calling herself Margie turns up and uses verbal violence in exactly the same way as those boys used physical violence, and completely fails to see the irony in it when talking about opposing gender.

Extracting here the post that Margie used to define her "argument" - as opposed to the vileness, insults, deliberate use of the male pronouns to refer to Little Light, etc - I have some things to say about that argument. (I hope that my disgust and fury at Margie's behaviour can be taken as read! But here, I want to take a step back from that and deal with the substantive argument)

Margie writes:

EITHER

both males and females are socialized under gendered expectations, due to a patriarchal system designed to benefit MALES, whether they feel like males or not. That's what I'm arguing.

OR

males who feel like females are OPPRESSED and moreso than actual females even BECAUSE they didn't get the oppressive socialization reserved for females, and instead got the privileging socialization that's reserved for males. When I say that masculinity is a privileged socialization, I'm not talking about intra-sex privilege (ie, males over other males, or females over other females); I'm talking about sexism - the fact that masculinity is privileged over femininity, which is used to privilege males over females. You seem to be arguing, however, that males who wish they were female being socialized to be masculine actually makes them MORE oppressed than females being socialized into that second-class status by birth-injustice. That's what I disagree with.

There are problems with both the EITHER and the OR part here (NB formatting altered slightly from the original comment by Margie, to make the structure of the argument clearer).

First, the "EITHER" remark: "both males and females are socialized under gendered expectations, due to a patriarchal system designed to benefit MALES, whether they feel like males or not." Taken as a purely theoretical argument, we have to agree that it is a true statement. Margie thinks that it is exclusively true (that is, she has used "or" in the exclusive sense, "Either A is true, or B is true, but not both A and B are true"), which is far from proven. I am concerned about the use of the word "designed", because that implies that somebody somewhere sat down and worked out how Patriarchy was going to work, and then put it into place (which is absurd). The inclusion of "whether they feel like males or not" is a complete statement of faith and not proven.

However, given that Little Light's post was exclusively about playground dynamics and the ways in which children play a part in gender socialisation, it seems clear to me that childhood socialisation specifically of gender, comes very much from one's own assigned gender at birth peers (so, Little Light having been told by the doctors and her parents that she was male, was thrown to the lions of her male peers instead of her female peers). I do not believe that at that age, children are very aware of the adult kind of gender privilege: boys look down on girls, but girls look down on boys as well; but there is a definite trope of "No Girls Allowed" that boys use, and I am not particularly aware of any similar trope used by girls to exclude boys - but that might be because I didn't grow up wanting to be a girl, and I didn't grow up as a girl, and I didn't really investigate the areas that were traditionally girls-only, so I was never aware of being denied access. All of which is to say that at some point, privileging one's own gender over the other does start to happen among children, and as far as I know, girls are more often on the non-privileged side of that. We'll return to this in the "OR" part of Margie's thesis, but I mention it now just to show that I recognise that some gender privilege does occur amongst children, even though it doesn't have the same level as the gender privilege and gender policing that adults bring to their children.

Margie's "OR" clause does not have any value at all - while her "EITHER" clause had the benefit of having some kernel of truth (albeit one possibly derived more from the adult world than from the world of child-child interactions), the second part is a tangled mishmash of supposition and downright falsehood.

males who feel like females are OPPRESSED and moreso than actual females even BECAUSE they didn't get the oppressive socialization reserved for females, and instead got the privileging socialization that's reserved for males.

The reality is that a trans girl thrown to the lions of cis male children is never going to receive a privileging socialisation. That was the whole point of Little Light's piece. As the second piece of Margie's comment reveals (see below) that privileging socialisation is reserved for males, but specifically for masculine-presenting males. This is the thing that Margie's argument completely fails to understand (even though it contains that truth within it).

But because, as Little Light pointed out, "little boys [shape] each others' masculinity, according to the rules they're taught by older boys and by grown men, with violence", the physical violence that boys generally don't use to police girls' gender roles (other forms of violence are used against girls - verbal and emotional) does get used against the trans girl in their midst, or indeed, anyone whose gender presentation falls short of the acceptable norm (and here I count myself as a victim of that, purely because I chose to grow my hair long when I was a little boy - for no other transgression of gender than that, I was de-privileged by my peers).

So we see a situation where girls are generally not acceptable targets for physical violence and abuse. Trans girls are. If that's not being more oppressed, show me why not?

When I say that masculinity is a privileged socialization, I'm not talking about intra-sex privilege (ie, males over other males, or females over other females); I'm talking about sexism - the fact that masculinity is privileged over femininity, which is used to privilege males over females.

This is multiple fails all rolled into one. While it is true that masculinity is privileged over femininity, and that this is used to privilege males over females, not all males are masculine, so it is inescapable that by talking about masculinity as a privileged socialisation, you are talking about intra-sex privilege, and what is more, you cannot begin to understand how patriarchal systems work and sustain themselves until you understand how it is that males who deviate from the accepted forms of masculinity are sanctioned, policed and either readmitted or else expelled and destroyed.

There is a second fail wrapped up in this, which is the suggestion that trans girls are really males. If we say that male means having a Y chromosome, then it's probably a fair distinction, but nobody in society classifies anyone based on their chromosomes - it just doesn't happen, because the vast majority of us are not equipped with the means to find out someone's chromosomal structure. We could stretch it a bit and allow male as "having male primary sexual characteristics" (i.e. a penis and testicles), but as soon as we do that then we equate masculinity with maleness, which is supposedly the gender enforcement that radical feminism is supposed to be against! But if we can say "this is a woman with a penis, that is a man with a vagina" and suchlike, then we have to accept that Little Light was a girl being forced to be a boy, by the same violent means that boys are forced to be boys.

You seem to be arguing, however, that males who wish they were female being socialized to be masculine actually makes them MORE oppressed than females being socialized into that second-class status by birth-injustice.

This is a fail because no amount of socialisation makes a trans person masculine in the acceptable form - they are not socialised to be masculine, but punished for failing to socialise as masculine. Just as lesbians, tomboys etc are punished for failing to socialise as feminine. Except that trans girls and gay boys are punished physically, with brutal violence and harsh words, disgust, and hatred. A trans girl does not become socialised to privilege (although she can access certain elements of male privilege if she is willing to drag up as a man and go through life denying her sex identity); she is socialised to a second-class status as well - just not the same one as cis women are. Masculinity is not an inclusive status whereby "all people who have quality Y are admitted, and all people who have quality Z are admitted", but an exclusive status whereby "all people who do not have quality Y are banned, and all people who do not have quality Z are banned". Membership has to be earned by demonstrating all the exclusive qualities, and moreover membership status will be curtailed if one fails to show those qualities in future. In other words, being born with a penis is not sufficient to be admitted to all the privileges of masculinity.

It is also a fail because comparing oppressions is rarely useful, and not something that I saw Little Light doing in that post or any other; it's soemthing that Margie brought with her, and something that unfortunately seems to be written into the radical feminist claim that sexism is at the root of all other forms of oppression - a claim that leads the unwary to reason that, "therefore, all other forms of oppression are less oppressive than sexism". Isn't enough to say that a little girl whom others thought was a boy suffered brutality as a result? Does it matter whether that is "more" or "less" oppressive than some other form of oppression?