The Trans Dandy

Suffer the Little Trans Mascs

CW: This whole essay is about violent crime in the United States, including some potentially upsetting sections about rape.

As a seasoned veteran of trans masc-on-trans masc discourse crimes, allow me to emerge from my cave to swing at the hornet’s nest once more. Today’s installment is inspired by an ancient Bluesky thread that has since been immortalized by Facebook, which is where I saw it. My partner wanted my opinion about it and now I’m making that opinion your problem because, you know, seasoned veteran and all that.

There's a 'ban men' skeet getting a bunch of play this morning so here's your periodic reminder that trans men experience slightly higher rates of sexual violence than trans women and blaming us for the violence of our oppressors is fucking bullshit. When you mean cis men, say cis men.

"You wanted to be a man so we're going to blame you for the transphobic violence of the men who victimize you" is some fucked up shit and y'all need to fix your fucking hearts. I'm fucking exhausted with every last goddamned one of you.

I'm not assuming shit. People have wild ass theories about how being a trans man works that quite frankly do not hold up to contact with reality. Esp in early transition we're seen as gender non-conforming women and punished accordingly.

The sentiment expressed in this thread is a widespread one in trans spaces. It’s also a sentiment that I used to hold and have since come to kind of hate.

It’s not that the sentiment is factually incorrect. Yes, it is true that trans men experience elevated levels of violence. My issue is rather with the framing. Most times, whenever I see this sentiment, it’s done to defend trans mascs’ identities while drawing a hard line between ourselves and cis men and/or to win an argument with a trans woman who may or may not be acting a bit mean online.

Now, I’m not particularly interested in putting this thread’s author on blast. I’m utilizing it because it’s a succinct example of this sentiment and the troublesome framing. But to fully understand my issue with the framing, we need to first do a fact check.

What the Data Says

The Advocate article linked in the thread is a frequently referenced one. The op-ed, published in 2015, was written by Loree Cook-Daniels. Cook-Daniels has been involved with LGBTQ+ activism in the Midwest United States for more than four decades now. Her husband, Marcelle Cook-Daniels, was a Black trans man who founded multiple organizations for trans mascs and trans mascs of color, specifically. FORGE was created by the couple to address the needs of trans mascs and their loved ones. While FORGE technically serves trans people as a whole nowadays, there is still an obvious trans masc tilt to the organization. While Marcelle has since passed away, Cook-Daniels continues to advocate around trans mascs decades after the fact.

In the op-ed, Cook-Daniels writes that “other types of violence -- the kinds of violence that affect thousands more trans people than do hate crimes resulting in murder -- actually happen at least as often to transmasculine individuals as transfeminine individuals.” To back up her point, she shares the results of a 2011 FORGE survey in graph form.

Transcribed: Rates of Violence by Gender Vector. Child SA: MTF - 48%, FTM - 50%; Adult SA - MTF - 28%, FTM - 31%; Dating: MTF - 6%, FTM - 23%; DV: MTF 29%, FTM - 36%; Stalking: MTF - 17%, FTM - 18%; Hate Violence: MTF - 30%, FTM - 29%

While Cook-Daniels does provide a link for this graph, the link is dead. Putting it through the Wayback Machine brings up a two-page fact sheet on the lack of research into the issue. There’s nothing about the survey itself. We don’t know the methodology, or how many respondents were categorized as MTF and FTM, or how these various types of violence are defined, or the demographic breakdown of respondents to see if there are other factors that contribute to the responses received. It’s challenging to draw any conclusions from this without an official report about this survey.

Fortunately, the missing 2011 FORGE survey is not the only one of its kind. I found four much more thorough reports about trans people in the US and experiences with violence: the 2011 National Transgender Discrimination Study; the 2015 US Trans Survey; the 2017 LGBTQ and HIV-Affected Hate and Intimate Partner Violence Report; and the 2017/2018 National Crime Victimization Surveys. I won’t bore you with paragraphs of data, so here is what I gleaned from the surveys:

As for the claim that trans men experience sexual violence more than trans women, the evidence is inconclusive. The 2011 and 2015 reports, for instance, were both published by Advocates for Trans Equality (formerly the National Center for Transgender Equality) yet had contradictory findings: trans fem respondents in 2011 were much more likely to report experiencing sexual assault while the opposite was true in the 2015 report. This may be because the 2011 report focused more on anti-trans violence as opposed to the more open-ended approach in the 2015 report. What did remain the same, however, is that trans people as a whole experience more sexual violence than cis people. So even when trans fems experienced more violence than trans mascs, trans mascs still experienced a statistically significant amount of violence.

Yet the rhetoric surrounding the violence that trans mascs face is rarely talked about on its own terms. As seen in the Bluesky thread I shared, it’s much more frequently compared to the experience of trans fems, specifically. A large part of the reason why this comparison is so common is because it’s often used in arguments with trans fems. But… why? Why do we feel so compelled to express that we’re sexually victimized more frequently than trans fems to their faces, or to just randomly use their experiences of violence as a metric to quantify our own suffering?

A Little Bioessentialism as a Treat

The “ban men” skeet that the Bluesky thread was responding to has since been lost to the void, so we’ll have to make some assumptions about what it must have communicated based on this thread. Given that the author asserts that “blaming [trans men] for the violence of our oppressors is fucking bullshit,” we can reasonably presume that the “ban men” skeet likely expressed frustration with male violence by implicating all men. The mention of trans women may also indicate that the post was either made by a trans woman and/or supported by multiple trans women. Whatever the case may be, I’ll assume that there are two basic points communicated by the “ban men” skeet: 1) men do incredible amounts of violence, and 2) no men would mean much less violence.

Regardless of how you may feel about the missing skeet, the thread author does not actually argue at all with the first point. He directly states that cis men oppress trans men and implies that cis men are responsible for the elevated rates of violence that trans men experience. His issue with “ban men” is the second point -- cis men do violence, not trans men, so “banning” trans men alongside cis men wouldn’t actually resolve the issue of male violence.

This is the framing that irritates me. It’s a classic trans masc discourse maneuver. Discussions about patriarchy and male violence get flipped in a way that removes any negative connotations of manhood from trans mascs and rather frames trans mascs as victims of patriarchy. And to be absolutely, abundantly clear: yes, the elevated rate of violence against trans mascs is because of patriarchy and, from personal experience, is largely done by cis men.

The problem, however, is that this framing also implies that trans men are not men but something more like Men Lite. The implicit logic here is that cis men are naturally brutish and don’t really understand what it’s like to be victims of violence, especially sexual violence, and so to say that we’re men in the same way all cis men are men is wrong.

Except… men do understand what it’s like. In 2024, for instance, the FBI reported that men were over three times as likely to be murdered than women and twice as likely to be robbed. And remember how violence against trans people was best predicted by socioeconomic status and race? The same is true for cis people too, like how Black men constituted 43% of all homicide victims despite being less than 6% of the overall population, or Black Americans as a whole being three times as likely as white people to be robbed.

Furthermore, the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) found that people living below the Federal Poverty Level experienced nonfatal violent crimes at a rate two times higher than the national average between 2008 - 2012. The impact of class is particularly obvious with white Americans, as impoverished white Americans were three times more likely than high income white Americans to be victimized and experienced the overall highest nonfatal violent crime rate.

It’s necessary to note that these statistics are ultimately incomplete. For instance, the FBI relies on data reported by police stations across the country. As the NCVS notes in that study, about half of violent crime goes unreported. The true rate of victimization, especially divided up by specific demographic information, is unknown.

And while yes, men still overwhelmingly make up the majority of crime perpetrators, the point to understand here is that, like women, men are also victimized by men. To carve out a caveat for trans men from blanket anti-man statements because trans men are victimized by cis men is absurd. Take, for instance, the 2016/2017 National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey which found that gay and bisexual men experienced essentially identical rates of sexual and intimate partner violence as straight women -- including rape. The data for queer cis men in this survey is very similar to the data we have about trans men. Does this mean that we should also object to “ban men” on the behalf of cisgender queer men? If so, what about the fact that the people victimizing queer men in this way are most frequently other queer men?

The fact of the matter is that men are more likely to commit violence against others. This includes other men. Men being violent to other men is so normalized that we don’t even really process it at times. This is how patriarchy is ultimately sustained: men are encouraged to do violence unto others to maintain hierarchy and control. As bell hooks succinctly put it,

The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is… that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves. If an individual is not successful in emotionally crippling himself, he can count on patriarchal men to enact rituals of power that will assault his self-esteem.

Violent men are violent because, far more often than not, somebody else was violent to them first. In turn, men are often violent to prevent being victimized. Violence is, unfortunately, inherent to the male experience under patriarchy.

My issue with the framing of the sentiment expressed in the Bluesky thread is its implicit assertion that cis men are, by nature, violent and unable to be victimized whereas trans men are victimized and therefore cannot be understood as something akin to cis men. The explanation for this difference always returns to our assigned sex at birth. While the author of the Bluesky thread did not say this, that’s ultimately the implication: we cannot truly be understood as men because we are not cis men. There is something about the body we are born with that makes us incapable of bearing responsibility for patriarchal violence.

This fixation on our bodies creating some kind of ontological difference that makes us victims instead of perpetrators can get especially insidious when comparing the experiences of trans mascs to trans fems. Take, for instance, the following take, “trans women are privileged because they can’t get pregnant (from rape).”

(The following is transcribed from a Twitter thread)

patriarchists don't want to beat & murder trans men because they don't want to damage their (potential) property.

they can't rape, impregnate, and control us if we're dead.

what part of that don't you understand? they want to OWN people AFAB.

the reason they want to kill trans women is, in part, because trans women pose a (perceived) threat to their ownership & control over people AFAB.

it's why they insist a "real" woman has a uterus. a "real" woman can give birth. bc if they can't, they can't serve their purpose.

this isn't too downplay the danger faced by trans women and transmisogyny, but to point out:

the "harmlessness" of people AFAB is due to their beliefs about subservience, inferiority, and patriarchy, and calling it a "privilege" is deeply misunderstanding the issue.

adding to this:

the thing is, it IS a form of privilege. and I know that contradicts what I just said, but privilege is a complicated topic where connotation is VERY important.

a straight-passing bisexual has privilege in some areas, but is more discriminated against in others.

similarly, trans people AFAB are privy to privileges and discrimination that don't mirror those of people AMAB.

for example, a trans woman can't be forced into pregnancy.

the issue is with CLAIMING a perspective that you do not have, and ignoring any evidence that goes against your core beliefs about the supposed simplicity of trans people's interactions in the world.

it's not simple. it never will be. LISTEN to people. have compassion, please.

The concept of “privilege” is one I’ve found more harmful than helpful for some time now and precisely for reasons like this. “Privilege” refers to some sort of right or advantage that is specially granted to one person or group over another. These rights and advantages are often something that could be granted to all people but aren’t for whatever reason. To say that trans fems are privileged because they cannot get pregnant firstly makes the absurd claim that the physical body they are born with is an unfair advantage granted to them but not trans mascs. It also inadvertently quantifies certain kinds of rape as privileged. For instance, is it a privilege to be raped anally as a person who was AFAB? You can’t get pregnant from that, after all.

(The following is transcribed from a Twitter thread)

genuinely heartbroken today to see how many trans people don't actually care about abortion rights as much as they care about internet beef between an abusive cis woman and a transmasc who's a little cringe. like this one actually hurts, not gonna lie.

for clarity, i think you lost the plot on what "privilege" means if this is a sticking point for you. "privilege" doesn't have to mean you like it. it means you are not systemically disadvantaged by it. as much as it sucks dysphoria isn't a form of legal subjugation

if trans women aren't privileged for not having the threat of childbirth forced on them by the government, why, then, would cis men be privileged by it? do we not acknowledge that loss of abortion right is possibly the most horrifyingly dystopian invasion of autonomy possible?

and, yes, infertile women are privileged by it too. indeed, the grief women experience by learning they cannot carry their own children is heartbreaking and i extend my deepest love and sympathy, but grief and loss are totally different traumatic experiences than legal oppression

i'm gonna have to put my foot down on this. whether you live in a state that grants you the right to abortion or it's just not something you have to think about biologically, it IS a privilege to not have your government put you in jail for not giving birth. my god.

Here, we see a similar flattening and quantifying of sexual violence and an assertion that the bodies of any people who are unable to get pregnant are unfairly advantaged. This user goes a step further to question the political dedication and character of trans women because of their inability to get pregnant. Trans women -- a group of people who have been policed, maligned, abused, neglected, and subject to forced sterilization and medical experimentation throughout history and across many cultures -- apparently cannot comprehend the “horrifyingly dystopian invasion of autonomy” posed by the loss of abortion rights because their anatomy is ontologically privileged.

But this is ultimately a natural conclusion to come to when you are guided by bioessentialism over anything and everything else. When you concede to the idea that violence is innate to the penis (as is implied by people arguing that trans men are not men like cis men are), you also concede to the idea that to have a vagina is to be a victim. A line is drawn in the sand. We stop engaging with human beings as human beings and start to categorize them. This categorization is extremely convenient to the goals of patriarchy as it obfuscates and normalizes violence. Historically, patriarchal violence has been viewed as good and necessary unless violence against a woman specifically results in an outcome that undermines her value to her respectable husband or parents (e.g., an unintended pregnancy).

Arguing that it’s a privilege to be raped and not get pregnant is ultimately an extension of this patriarchal logic. Both trans fems and cis men experience sexual assault more frequently than most people think. But because it’s so normalized we end up with people arguing that trans men cannot be men because men do not experience sexual violence, and that even trans women are more suspect than we are when it comes to being men because their bodies are just too similar to cis men. When cis men harass and stalk and beat and grope and rape and murder trans women, it’s simply boys being boys. Survival of the fittest. She had it coming.

Male Realities

In the 2011 NTDS report, there’s a chapter dedicated to experiences with identification documents. Trans mascs with an F marker on their IDs were 50% more likely to experience harassment when presenting their IDs than trans fems with an M marker. Notably, both groups experienced the same rate of physical violence; oftentimes, trans fems are more likely to be physically assaulted.

When I read this, it didn’t surprise me. My home state of Kansas recently passed SB 244, a law which serves as both a bathroom and gender marker change ban. Many of my trans friends are in the process of leaving or already have left because of this law. Yet the friend of mine who has received the most harassment by far is a trans man who I would describe as a bear. He’s physically big, bald, and has a long beard. He’s taken an outspoken, malicious compliance sort of approach with SB 244; in response, numerous people have threatened to beat and even murder him for being in women’s spaces.

I’m sure when the Kansas legislature passed SB 244, a lot of them imagined that they were ~ protecting the women and children ~ from a transmisogynistic caricature. They certainly weren’t thinking of people like my friend now facing a misdemeanor for not using the women’s restroom. No, the anti-transmasculine caricature at this point is a geeky, fandom-obsessed teenager with short hair dyed an unnatural color. He does not pass for male but rather looks like a weak little girl playing pretend. The trans masc is not a threat but rather a misbehaving child that needs to be reprimanded.

Now, as a former ROGD Tumblr teen, this caricature is a bit painfully on point for myself, at least. But nowadays, I am almost exclusively understood as male. It’s rare that someone misgenders me and when they do, they generally correct themselves without me saying anything and write it off as a misunderstanding. So the caricature is not only bad on its own (i.e. cringe fandom teens deserve respect and autonomy too), it does further disservice by also blatantly erasing and obscuring the vast majority of trans masc experiences.

Do you know who else leans heavily into this caricature without even meaning to do so? If your answer is something along the lines of “trans mascs who obsess over being (sexually) victimized,” you’d be correct!

The third skeet in the Bluesky thread that kicked this whole essay off complains about how the reality of being a trans man does not match people’s ideas about us, “esp[ecially] in early transition [when] we’re seen as gender non-conforming women and punished accordingly.”

Yes, of course there are pre-/early-transition trans mascs who experience discrimination, harassment, and violence because they do not pass. I’m not arguing with that. My issue is the subtle assertion that trans men who pass generally experience less violence than trans men who don’t. This could not be farther from the truth in my own personal experience. The problem is that this thread and others like it don’t differentiate between anti-trans “hate violence” and “other violence,” as Cook-Daniels called it.

No, I generally do not experience direct transphobia in my day-to-day life. I pass as male. But what I do experience now is life as both a man and a gay man, specifically. Since passing as male, I’ve had one man who wanted to have sex with me corner me for nearly an hour before help showed up, another man come into my workplace multiple times to ask me to make fetish content for him, a third man get up in my face and threaten to murder me before my partner was able to intervene, and multiple other men harass me and call me slurs. I don’t actually feel safer walking on my own at night, I feel like an even bigger target. And statistically speaking, my increased anxiety is justified. Of violent crimes committed against men in 2024, it’s estimated that up to 72% were committed by strangers and just 6% by intimate partners or family members. For women, this is up to 40% committed by strangers and 28% by intimate partners and family members.

My own lived experience corroborates these general data trends. Before transitioning, the brunt of the abuse and violence I faced was from my own family. Since transitioning, it’s been exclusively from strangers. Even my experiences with sexual violence mirror this: while women were estimated to be five times more likely to experience sexual violence than men in 2024, up to half of sexual assaults against men were committed by strangers as compared to just under a third of sexual assaults against women.

My point with this is that I do, in fact, experience violence as a man and that I experience it even more as a man than I did when I was understood as a woman. The kind of violence and who is being violent has changed but it still happens. When we primarily locate trans masc experiences with violence in pre-/early-transition experiences, we are, in fact, also ignoring the broader realities of trans mascs. It inadvertently pushes the idea that the violence we experience is linked to what is essentially violence against women. This idea conveniently reaffirms the narrative that trans men can’t be men in the same way cis men are men. That is: we are victimized because we are female, and to be female is to be victimized.

I am not proposing that we stop focusing on any violence directed towards pre-/early-transition trans mascs. I simply want to push back against the idea that the anti-transmasculine caricature is actually a genuine representation of the bulk of trans masc experiences. This caricature means we miss realities like my trans man friend from Kansas who receives death threats because the state legally declared him to be female and the fact that I have been sexually victimized not as an adult woman but as an adult man. And not even as a trans man -- the men who harassed and assaulted me understood me to be cis.

Does this not count in the wider realm of violence against trans mascs? Does violence against me only matter when it can be interpreted as violence against a woman or as anti-trans hate violence specifically? Does this not further normalize men being violent to other men under patriarchy?

Invisibilizing Violence

My partner spent his childhood and adolescence moving between trailer parks and ghettos around the Capital Region in New York with a one-year stint in the mountains of Northeastern Mexico. Violence was a very normal part of his experience growing up. He himself was beaten and sexually abused multiple times. He had to be diligent about where he was and who was around to avoid being violently assaulted like some of his friends were. People around him died very sudden, brutal, and tragic deaths stemming from drug abuse and general negligence. It wasn’t uncommon for his family members and neighbors to be involved with gangs and face the risk of death because of it.

In high school, my partner received a scholarship to a private arts college. It was one of those scholarships meant to help poor (and racialized) kids with potential to achieve more than the humdrum working class life. And while his time there was largely positive, he was also a fish out of water. For example, one of his acquaintances was the son of a literal, honest-to-god billionaire. Although most students there may not be the children of billionaires, the student population skews very rich. So rich, in fact, that they’re not even aware of how rich they are. My partner has a story about a classmate who declared once that while she didn’t know what socioeconomic class she is, she knew that she wouldn’t be able to survive without her vacation home in Maui.

This economic reality was the most obvious difference my partner noticed between himself and the other students. The poor racialized scholarship kids with SAT scores that were too low for the university’s standards were herded together in a specific program. My partner’s friend -- a Black boy from the Bronx -- complained about how the program degraded and paternalized him. My partner’s neighbor -- also Latina, also from the ghetto, also in the program -- dropped out because of how alienated she felt. Because my partner’s SAT scores were high enough, he didn’t have to participate in this program… and technically lost his full-ride scholarship because of it. The scholarship still existed, it just wasn’t full-ride.

My partner describes this as a pipeline: colleges like this “poach” poor kids of color, often from urban settings, so the student body looks more diverse, which attracts the interest of rich white progressives looking for diversity. Those rich white progressives then pay the tuition for their kids to receive the full advertised experience while the poor racialized scholarship kids are stuck within a program that fails to fully respect their intelligence, autonomy, and identity. The scholarship kids struggle to integrate into the study body, become demoralized, and sometimes drop out. The rich kids, completely oblivious to this, have a great time.

So, despite the fact that there’s a sizable population of students of color on campus, they’re largely lower class and removed from mainstream student life. The bulk of student activity comes from the rich, white, mostly female students -- women consistently make up close to two-thirds of the student body each year.

My partner noticed during his time there that on-campus political activism was exclusively focused on sexual and intimate partner violence. While these are very much issues worth talking about, no other kinds of violence were ever discussed or addressed. It makes sense; the kind of violence most likely to happen to upper class, college-aged women in an economically well-off, suburban area is sexual and intimate partner violence.

As human beings, we’ll naturally gravitate to focusing on the things that personally affect us. There’s nothing wrong with that. But what inadvertently happens is that other issues and experiences become lost. One might wonder, for instance, what the student activism might have looked like if the scholarship kids had an active role. Maybe there would have been more of a focus on robberies or physical assault or the failures of policing or violence against men as well. Even if the focus stayed on sexual and intimate partner violence, the participation of poorer kids likely would have improved it. Poverty exacerbates sexual violence; the inability of the rich students to recognize their wealth ultimately encumbers the mission to end violence.

What we’re left with is this: a college crafts a progressive environment partially through the recruitment of poor racialized students; the progressive environment empowers rich female students to speak openly about sexual and intimate partner violence; and the wealth (and racial) disparities of this crafted progressive environment leaves the poor racialized students unable to speak about their own experiences in the same way.

This is invisibilization. It is often unintentional. But it still happens.

The point of this long-winded story is to demonstrate: 1) how we focus on issues that make sense to our lived realities, 2) how we can be oblivious to other realities, and 3) how the focus on our realities can come at the expense of the realities we are oblivious to.

When trans mascs focus on the idea of sexual victimization as something unique enough to trans mascs that it separates us from cis men -- or even trans women, for that matter -- we are participating in invisibilization. When we become so focused on this intrinsic uniqueness that we start saying things like, “trans women are privileged because they can’t get pregnant (from rape),” we are now not just invisibilizing violence but downplaying it normalizing it to some extent.

I’m not saying this from a moral high horse, I promise. I stated at the beginning that I used to agree with the sentiment in the Bluesky thread too but I’ve since changed my mind because my experiences changed. Not even just because I transitioned, but because of other life events too, like moving or changing jobs. Now, I feel invisibilized when people would rather focus on the sexual abuse I faced as a girl than any of the violence I experience as a man. I feel invisibilized when people argue that violence against me primarily matters if the person doing it thinks I’m a woman or figured out I’m trans. I feel invisibilized when people insist that my experiences are far more in line with cis women than cis men.

The ultimate outcome of this invisibilization is the continued propagation of anti-transmasculine narratives and normalization of patriarchal violence. We are men. Men are encouraged to be violent to other men. Maybe most trans men aren’t violent, but I’m willing to believe that the majority of cis men aren’t either. Instead of putting distance between ourselves and cis men, maybe we can make it our mission to be the men who are outspoken about male violence.

Leave the Girls Out of It, Please

With all that said, I have one final plea: please stop using trans fems as your way of measuring how much you suffer. It simultaneously removes the humanity of trans fems and fetishizes their struggles while also failing to actually address issues facing trans mascs. Tovi wrote a succinct and excellent critique of (white) trans mascs trying to make “Protect the Dolls” about ourselves. While she is speaking of transfemcide specifically, her point is broadly applicable:

The hyperinclusion of transmascs when talking about transfemicide is not only conflating and equating our struggles, but de-centers those who this movement is truly about. It also does less to help transmascs than you think.

To make it clear: transmascs deserve attention, support, and campaigns for the oppressive forces against them. Yes, transmascs are killed for being trans, and even experience domestic violence more quietly in relationships, but they are not experiencing murder rates the same as ours. Even if you take into account how transmascs get lumped with cis-women for statistics, (Black/Latina/Native) transfems are still murdered the most. It is disrespectful for their unique issues to be lumped in with ours when they deserve their own specific attention to address and solve their issues. Piggybacking off of us contributes to the erasure of their issues because they are conflated with ours. It's lazy and minimally helpful. It reads like a politically correct move to get them to feel included, rather than a charged attempt to do something. They don't need to be included, they need to be uplifted in a separate but connected way, with (BIPOC) transmasc activists leading that discourse.

This is the grand irony with the trans masc fixation on being victimized. There is some weird, unspoken belief that only the people who experience the most hardship deserve attention. Even if trans mascs were the least sexually victimized out of all people, cis or trans, it would still be an issue worth talking about because violence always sucks to experience. Yet this belief actively undermines the people who suffer the most, whoever that may be, by tokenizing that suffering and also dismisses the suffering of everyone else.

Instead of obsessing over being a Trans Masc TM and trying to force everyone into some kind of standard narrative based on identity, we should look instead to the broader forces making us more vulnerable to violence. Aside from transmisogyny and racism, Black, Latina, and Native trans fems are so vulnerable to violence largely because they have such high rates of poverty. Poverty makes you sicker, limits your opportunities, and forces you to rely on people you might not otherwise because it’s all you have. All people benefit when poverty is ended, trans fems and trans mascs included.

The preoccupation on comparing rates of violence -- and sexual violence specifically -- as a way to assert the suffering of trans men comes off to me as someone who is not politically serious and doesn’t engage with the issue at all. After all, there’s very little said about how to end this violence. Mostly I just see people complaining about other people (mostly trans fems) for not acknowledging how serious violence against trans mascs is. But I suppose that if you tacitly assume that trans mascs are female because to be female is to be victimized and to be male is to victimize, then the conclusion would be that there’s nothing to be done.

Being a trans man has taught me otherwise. I write these terribly long essays complaining about other trans mascs because I do believe something can be done. I want a strong community of trans mascs who are bright, curious, critical, and motivated to make change. I want trans mascs who are confident in being trans mascs and use that confidence to cultivate community instead of taking a contrarian or defensive role. And maybe you can accuse me of fulfilling that role, I suppose, but I write these things not to attack but to build a better political understanding. I hope this essay ultimately continues that project.