Ok so I’ve been talking a lot about toxic masculinity recently. Don’t worry, this isn’t another one of those posts. Instead, it’s time to talk about male privilege.
(Please don’t groan so loudly, it’s distracting me from typing)
An argument that I’ve seen before is that trans women don’t experience male privilege and it’s transphobic to suggest otherwise. Let’s dig into this, shall we?
First of all, I want to make it very clear that trans women certainly do not experience ALL the benefits of male privilege. There’s a post that made the rounds recently about how when you’re a trans woman, transphobes don’t perceive you as a woman, but they also don’t really perceive you as a man. They treat you as the worst of both worlds. And even if/when you aren’t visibly trans, failure to conform with the expectations of masculinity is socially punished, so yeah you probably don’t get all the benefits a cis man would.
So you don’t get all the benefits of male privilege, but do you still get some? Let’s dive into how male privilege works.
Masc presentation
Male privilege isn’t some magic hidden ability that activates when you identify masc. Rather, it comes from being perceived as male by your colleagues, your peers, authorities, and strangers. This means that a trans woman who presents masc (perhaps due to not being out yet, or perhaps because she’s a genderpunk redefining femininity in her own way) will experience many of the benefits of male privilege. This isn’t to say that her identity is invalid, it’s just that her male privilege comes from the way others perceive her.
Gender essentialism
But what about fem-presenting transfemmes? Well, even if people use your correct pronouns and name, you don’t really know exactly what they are thinking. If someone realises you’re trans, they might have conscious or unconscious biases that factor in to their opinion of you. Still today, many people believe that there are inherent differences in intelligence, reasoning, and rationality between AMAB and AFAB people. If they clock you as AMAB, you might benefit from male privilege.
They might not even clock you consciously. They might not consciously know that you’re AMAB, but still consider some of your traits or behaviours to be masculine in some way. You can still experience male privilege in this fashion. Cis women who are perceived to have masculine traits also experience this form of subtle male privilege.
Lingering benefits
Even if we assume that nobody knows you’re trans and they treat you identically to a cis woman, what about before you transitioned?
In my case, I got my first job while I was masc-presenting. I don’t think my team were consciously sexist, but part of the reason I was hired was culture fit, and if I’d been femme-presenting I’m not sure I would’ve landed the job. My jobs since then have been working for teams that were very accepting of femfolk, but I got those jobs only due to the connections and experience from the jobs that came before them. If I’d been a cis woman, there’s a good chance my whole career would’ve looked very different.
So now that I’ve transitioned, my ability to work in my industry is still a lingering benefit of the male privilege I benefited from pre-transition.
Now, not everyone is fortunate enough to have a good career, but this can apply in other ways. As another example, have you noticed that a lot of transfemmes can be quite loud, assured, and outspoken? (Seems to happen a lot on Leftbook, right? Surely you wouldn’t know anyone like that… wait why are you looking at me so intently?) In some (NOT ALL) cases this confidence might have originated from the way AMAB people are treated during their formative years, such as in school.
Cis women often struggle to learn to make themselves heard and to stand up for themselves, but for people who grew up being perceived male, this is deeply ingrained in us.
In this way trans women can continue to benefit from male privilege, without even being perceived as male. You can almost think of this as being a trans-equivalent of intergenerational inequality.
In summary, trans women and other non-men can benefit from male privilege by being perceived as male, by being perceived to have masculine attributes, or by having experienced either of these conditions in the past. This does not reflect on the validity of their gender identity.
