it’s deirdre

@revoluciana@chaosfem.tw 🤷 it’s both, all of the above like i get what you mean, and in particular it’s a tough thing to address because 99% of the conversations around it are either bad-faith or ignorant. and i think calling it “male privilege” is a deep misrepresentation, we desperately need a better term. because yeah, i don’t think a lot of pre-transition transfems actually have access to what we typically think of as “male privilege”—at the very least not to the same degree as average cis men. BUT, for 37 years i never had to worry about walking alone at night. never had to worry about ordering food delivery and getting a creep delivery guy. didn’t think about people putting things in my drinks. didn’t text my friends to let them know my date didn’t murder me. never got catcalled. never got grabbed. never owned pepper spray or thought about self-defense training. and i didn’t have to start thinking about any of this as a literal child the way a lot of cis women are forced to. are our pre-transition lives, on the whole, privileged as a result of our presumed gender? no, i don’t think so. but do we have access to specific privilege in specific contexts as a result of our perceived gender? well, yeah, and i don’t really see any other way to view it. like, all the pain and trauma and shit that we go through as a result of growing up in cisnormativity, yeah that’s demonstrably extremely harmful…but i just don’t buy that the violence we are exempted from is a form of violence against us. and despite that our pre-transition lives are generally not marked by a net positive of privilege, i think it’s *really* important to acknowledge and examine and critique the specific ways we do access privilege during that part of our lives. failure to do so leaves us ill-equipped to examine other kinds of privilege and oppression.

@deepmud@mas.to @celesteh@hachyderm.io my dude, if you were in ally high school they’d make you repeat a grade

@deepmud@mas.to sorry, i will try to be a better ally to myself 😭😭