TERFs, Trans Mascs, and Two Steve Feminism

Four years into my transition, I have basically given up on the idea of “passing,” or at least, on ever conclusively knowing whether I pass for cis. 

I used to foreground these conversations by telling the reader what my body looks like. I’ve gotten suspicious of that impulse: It feels like I’m making myself into a sideshow, sating cis people’s curiosity about trans bodies while sacrificing any right to privacy or dignity in my own. Gender is social, right? Or, rather, gender identity is an internally felt reality. Gendering is something we do, socially, to each other. My gender remains pretty constant, and so does my body, but the way I get gendered can vary wildly, depending on the social context I’m in. 

For starters: I live in a tiny town where everyone knows everybody else, and I moved here just before I started injecting testosterone. Most of my neighbors can remember what I used to look like. My husband has friends here, and he knew them before I transitioned — those people were introduced to me as “his girlfriend” or “his wife,” and that’s always going to be part of the picture, at least subconsciously. There is one pharmacy in town, and they still have me under my deadname, so every time I pick up my testosterone, they know why I need it. The end result is that I am read as a gender non-conforming woman in the majority of my daily interactions. Sometimes I’ll find a cis person who seems cool — my barber, for instance, made a big deal about how he was fine with me being trans, perhaps forgetting that he wasn’t supposed to know until I told him — but even he will let out a “she” when he’s not thinking. 

The Internet is a small town, too, and it’s unlikely that I will ever be read as a cis guy there. Partly, this is because I write about being trans all the time, but it’s also because I had a platform and a writing career before I came out. I was seen, not just as a woman, but as a feminist woman, meaning that people had no trouble projecting all their negative conceptions of “woman” onto me. People related to me as if I were their ex-girlfriend, their ex-wife, their mother; there were particular social cliques or fandoms where being misogynistic or awful toward me was a way to demonstrate that you belonged to the in-group. Just changing pronouns doesn’t necessarily shake that kind of misogyny. To this day, those groups can’t go in on me without the “shes” and “hers” and deadnames surfacing. Some of those groups are leftist; they don’t think of themselves as transphobic, but they also don’t think of me as me. 

So it is a shock — a welcome shock, but a deep one — when I cross state lines, or go to an unfamiliar town, and am read as a man nearly all the time. I go to Virginia to visit my family once a year, and it turns out that I am an unambiguous he/him south of the Mason-Dixon line — not one cashier or waiter or person floating next to me in a swimming pool has ever gotten it wrong. On trips I take for work, in airports, in train stations, in hotels, I am “Mister Doyle.” My body hasn’t changed. I haven’t changed. My social context is what has changed — if you aren’t expecting to see a trans person or a woman, when you look at me, you won’t see either of those things. You’ll just see a guy. 

Do I want to be seen as just another guy? Sometimes. Maybe. It would be a start. Does it make sense, sociologically, to interpret me as “a guy” in a way that implies a cis life history, dominance within patriarchy, or even just being seen and treated as a man on a daily basis? Not really. Yet most people who do this think they are affirming my gender — or, at least, they tell themselves they are. 

There are two things I want to impart here, at the beginning of what threatens to be a long essay: First, your experience of gendered oppression is not necessarily about who you are. It’s about what people think you are, or what people have been primed to see when they look at you. Second: What cis people tell themselves they are doing, in regard to a trans person’s gender, is often very different than what they’ve done. 

I got into a fight with a cis woman I thought of as a friend, recently. She and I have, historically, been targets of derision from the same assholes, and for the same reasons: We’re both public feminists who are influenced by the second wave. Also, we both liked Elizabeth Warren more than Bernie Sanders. These two things are connected, but not the same.  

At any rate, the woman — Moira Donegan, if you’re interested — was someone I’d felt warmly toward, and tried to be supportive of, both publicly and privately. Some time after my transition, we stopped interacting. This happened a lot. This happens a lot, any time someone transitions; all your cis people just find a reason to be elsewhere. You try to think that it’s not -phobic, you tell yourself you’re paranoid, you tell yourself they’re busy, but the impact is cumulative, and there’s an ache. 

That’s not what Donegan and I got into the fight about. She’d been called a TERF, and she posted a thread on social media about how she was not a TERF, but in the course of writing it, she got tangled up in her own defensiveness, and needed to specify how she was not only not a TERF, but actually a better transfeminist than Julia “Serrano.” 

Now: Julia Serano is also a friend of mine, and she is someone who did not ghost me when I transitioned, so maybe that’s informing my thoughts here. But I kind of think that if you’re going to claim that you understand trans politics better than the woman who wrote Whipping Girl, you should be able to demonstrate some familiarity with her work, by, say, knowing her name. 

Ideally, you would also be able to accurately summarize that work, which Donegan didn’t. She wrote that Serano viewed womanhood as a source of “joy and fulfillment” (I’m quoting from memory, since Donegan deleted the thread) whereas Donegan viewed “woman” itself as a fiction created by the patriarchal hierarchy of gender. 

Now: I do not think a single trans person will dispute the idea that the patriarchal hierarchy of gender is a political construction that is socially taught and enforced through violence. Our lives are proof that patriarchal gender ideology is wrong; why would we subscribe to it? However, if social enforcement were all-powerful, and we all just embodied whatever genders we’re assigned by the dominant culture, there would not be a single trans person on the face of the planet. Nor would there be feminists, because feminism is a rebellion against socially constructed and enforced gender stereotypes. This last point, I learned by reading Julia Serano. 

What Serano has also written — and I concur — is that many or most people have a “subconscious sex,” an internally felt gender identity, which is separate and distinct from the genders we’re assigned by patriarchy. When our assignments and our identities are in conflict, we experience great psychological and sometimes physical distress. This is what’s called dysphoria. The only treatment known to relieve dysphoria is transition. 

Got it? Not that womanhood is a source of “joy and affirmation” — being a woman is often very difficult — but that being a woman, and having to pretend that you aren’t one, is painful. Being a man, and having to pretend you’re a woman, is painful, too, for the same reason. 

This point — that your assigned gender and your gender identity are not the same thing, and that they can conflict with each other — is literally the mildest, most Trans 101 take you can possibly have. It is the first thing anyone learns about trans people. It is the definition of the word “transgender.” 

So it was startling that, when trans people actually started making this point in her mentions — gently and constructively, from what I saw — Moira Donegan, who had just gotten done proclaiming that she was not a TERF, blocked nearly all of them. She blocked me, the guy who thought of her as a friend until .05 seconds beforehand. She then unblocked me, and threw a fit about how I was her enemy, and I had secretly been skeptical of her work for years, and I was out to get her, and I was reading her in bad faith, and I wasn’t being generous, and I was dogpiling her, we were ALL dogpiling her, and how COULD we, and she was the VICTIM here, and and and. It was quite the whirlwind. 

I know Donegan has seen massive amounts of cruel and unfair shit in her life as a public feminist. I know this, because I have seen the same shit, from the same people. The first time KiwiFarms put my home address on the Internet, it wasn’t because I was trans — I wasn’t out yet. It was because I was a feminist. I have taken massive amounts of punishment for my feminism, and I have done it proudly. I have taken the death threats and the legal threats and the harassment and the abuse and the exclusion and the mockery and the poverty, I’ve lived on $13,000 a year in America’s most expensive city, I’ve spent all my income on therapy because I got secondary trauma from covering rape cases, I’ve lost sleep meeting deadlines, I’ve lost relationships because I’m constantly working and/or broke and/or miserable, I’ve lost my mental health and my savings and my privacy and my employability and my ability to just not have my home address posted on the Internet by psychos, and I have done this why? Because the cause matters more than my personal comfort. Because feminism is the work that has to be done. You don’t get to write that out of my biography because we’re having a disagreement. I have been a good soldier. I have earned my stripes. 

So, sure: People don’t like Donegan because she’s a feminist. People don’t like me because I’m a feminist. People don’t like Donegan because she reads Dworkin and supported Elizabeth Warren. People don’t like me because I read Dworkin and supported Elizabeth Warren. People don’t like Donegan because they think she’s a lib. People don’t like me because they think I’m a lib. 

I think we’ve all had enough conversations about stereotyping and unfair attribution of threat to know how this works. If your violent ex-boyfriend is lurking outside your apartment and you call the cops on him, that’s a reasonable reaction. If a guy is birdwatching in Central Park and you call the cops on him, you did it because he’s Black. There was literally no reason for Donegan to view me as an ideological enemy, except one: I’m transgender. That was the sole reason I registered as a threat to her, and that’s transphobic.  

Now, I want you to look back at some of the details of my everyday life — the small town, the  pharmacists, the barbers, etc. — and try to understand that I spend a tremendous amount of time being chill and low-maintenance for cis people. Every time somebody calls me June or Judy or Judith: Oh, ha ha, that’s okay, Jude is a weird name. Every time I hear a “she” from someone I trust: No, it’s fine, people get things wrong, you’re learning. 

I was in the ER recently for chest pains — it was minor, but my grandfather had his first major heart attack at 40, so it’s not something you want to fuck around with — and it’s a hospital with a gender-inclusive program, so it was supposed to be safe. The first doctor to see me spent the entire interview finding different ways to ask the same question — What are your pronouns? Why are you on testosterone? Have you had any surgeries? Is there any chance that… that is to say, I… before an X-Ray, I would do a…. pregnancy test — before I finally realized that he was trying to figure out what my junk looks like. 

I mean: I was admitted to this place with a paper that said I had a “high risk of morbidity.” My daughter won’t leave the waiting room because she’s convinced I’m about to die, and I have to keep calm so that she won’t go into hysterics. I’m scared to go to the same doctor as my husband and daughter, because it’s a Catholic hospital, so they might not treat me. I have to go to the special hospital where it’s against the rules for the doctors to murder me, and here I am, and I am potentially going to spend my last seconds on this planet dealing with some cis person who's taking twenty minutes to ask me if I have a snatch. 

And do you know what I did? I smiled in his face and said, yes, I still have my uterus, go ahead and do the test. Even if I was dying, it was my job to make the cis comfortable, so that was what I did.

I put a lot into being unthreatening, because one thing I have learned, as a trans person, is that if you stand up for yourself even a little, it tends to be perceived as a violent and terrifying outburst. Sooner or later, though, you just hit the point where, for the sake of your own self-respect, you have to say no to people: No, that is not my name. No, outing me to your entire clientele isn’t acceptable. No, it was an “understandable mistake” the first time you got my pronouns wrong, not the second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth times. No: I don’t care that you didn’t mean it to be transphobic. You didn’t know it was transphobic; I have now told you that it was, so you can either apologize or compound the offense. 

Moira Donegan is an adult woman, with a large platform, and she can handle being spoken to in plain terms, because that’s famously how she speaks to everybody. Her reaction was transphobic; her thread was transphobic; both things revealed, in particular, cis feminism’s enduring blind spot when it comes to transmasculine people. And now, out of the generosity of my possibly-failing heart, I will tell you how. 

Because: You've been skeptical of me for years, she said. Given that our first open disagreement had happened five minutes ago, I didn't see how that was possible. But then it hit me: It had been five minutes since I criticized her, but it was four years since I had transitioned. Was that, my transition, why I seemed "skeptical" of her work or her values? Was that what I did wrong?

The radical feminist view of gender Donegan was citing, which is most associated with the works of Dworkin and Wittig, names patriarchal gender as a social construct, and specifically a hierarchy. Gender is the act of elevating some people and oppressing others; “woman” is merely a label for that specific form of oppression. 

I think this is correct, to an extent, and I’ve seen the same theory taken up by transfeminists in promising ways. (I’m thinking particularly of Talia Bhatt — who, for what it’s worth, disagreed with me on this. Bhatt is a really interesting thinker, and I’m not convinced that I actually disagree with her on much, so my criticism here is specifically aimed at, and limited to, Donegan.) It does, as previously noted, fail to account for people’s agency and internally felt identities. It also fails to account for the fact that people use the singular word “gender” to mean several different structures or realities: The patriarchal binary, the “subconscious sex” or internally felt identity, the social norms and visual signifiers of gender within a culture, and so on. 

Failing to disentangle these layers causes massive fights. It’s as if you and I were throwing a party, and I said “Steve is in the kitchen,” and you said “no, Steve is in the living room,” and before long, we’re at each other’s throats about where exactly Steve is, without either of us realizing that we invited two guys named Steve. Multiple Steves can be in multiple locations. Neither of us is lying, but we’re each telling only part of the truth. 

For the duration of this essay, I will ask you to entertain the Two Steves theory: "Gender" is many overlapping things, not just one thing. We’re forced to use the same word for all of them, because the patriarchal binary is deeply impoverished when it comes to ways of describing, naming, or thinking about gender. 

The Singular Steve approach taken by some cis feminists insists that gender is only the patriarchal superstructure. There is no “real” gender to be found beneath it, just a heap of cultural conditioning. There are a few immediate and obvious problems with that worldview. The first is that it leaves no room for non-binary people to exist. If our genders are completely due to social construction, and our society only constructs two genders, then why are there all these people who don’t identify as either one? 

"We’re all a little non-binary,” I suspect, is the radical feminist answer to this question; it’s a line many of us believed before realizing that we were a lot non-binary, and other people weren’t. Singular Steve theory only makes sense if you view being non-binary as an affectation, or a political stance, or an alienation from patriarchal gender, or a perception of the deep-down ungendered reality all people face. Unfortunately, these are all nice ways to say delusional. Non-binary people are not deluded. Non-binary people are non-binary, just as we say we are. 

The second and more dangerous failure of this theory is that it leaves no rational explanation for gender dysphoria. If gender is purely an oppressive hierarchy, and embodiment or internally felt identity has nothing to do with it, then trans people who experience intense discomfort with their bodies are delusional — they’ve bought into the gender hierarchy so hard that they’ve concocted some hallucinatory sense of “being” the gender whose experience they wish to share. 

It is possible to cloak this worldview in a veil of tolerance — trans people are crazy, but they’re not hurting anyone, so let’s be nice to them — but it is, unambiguously, transphobic. It positions cis people as the gatekeepers of “real” gender, with the ability to generously indulge trans people’s delusions or debunk them, as they see fit. 

By refusing to reckon with dysphoria — the fact that living in the wrong gender assignment can literally make you sick or even kill you — this argument also opens onto the classic Jesse-Singal-ish position that trans people are “just” gender non-conforming cis people who went off the rails, and that if they could “just” internalize the lessons of feminism and live unconventionally in their assigned genders, they’d be fine. This, in turn, becomes a rationale for banning medical transition, or even social transition. 

Even in its most polite and sanitized form, this is dangerous stuff, and I mention this because I think many cis feminists still subconsciously hold this view while also seeing themselves as more or less “trans-inclusive.” They may have a few trans friends. They may sometimes say nice things about feminism being for trans women — always trans women, not because they are staunch transfeminists, but because they have not progressed far from the cis-person default of assuming that trans women are the only kind of trans people that exist. 

Yet, because they have not truly internalized that dysphoria is real and that trans people are not just hallucinating their genders, this worldview still admits some incredibly ugly stuff. This is most obviously seen in how these types of feminists tend to think about transmasculine people. (“Not at all,” is how they typically think about transmasculine people, but when they do, it’s a shitshow, so let’s get into it.)

Let’s imagine that you’re this feminist. You know you’re not supposed to be transphobic, but you’re also enlightened enough to know that “dysphoria” is really just a social construct. How do you reconcile yourself to the idea that trans women “want to be women?” Well, you can tell yourself that they’re heroically giving up their Male Privilege. You can conclude that they are sensitive enough to side with the truly oppressed (you, the cis woman; cis women generally) and should be rewarded for it. You can feel flattered, in the way I sometimes felt flattered when my toddler told me she wanted to be “just like me” when she grew up. You can Welcome Them to Womanhood, and thrill in their gratitude and the self-esteem boost you get from being a benevolent gatekeeper. 

None of this involves thinking of trans women as your equals — none of it involves thinking of trans women as women, in fact — but you can tell yourself it’s tolerant, because you’re deploying pity and condescension rather than hate and fear. However, now that you’ve gone down this road, you also have to explain why trans men “want to be men.” This is where your attempts at tolerance will fail you. 

Why would someone who is “really” a woman “want to be” a man? Easy: She’s experiencing sexism, and she wants out. So do you, but you are fighting sexism the right way, by being a feminist. This other person, who claims to have “gender dysphoria,” is just trying to cut to the head of the line. They’re cheating. They’re trying to become the oppressor rather than fighting the oppression. Why would anyone be a trans man? Because they’re a bad, sexist person. That’s the only possible answer. After all: It's not like they will literally die if they don't transition. Right?

I am not being paranoid or attributing malice here so much as I am summing up something that occurs throughout the feminist canon. Janice Raymond wrote (inaccurately) that there were almost no trans men in the world because “the surgery" is intended as "a way out of rigid gender roles," and "women have had a political outlet, that is, feminism, which has helped change the distribution of power for women in society and challenge sex role rigidification.” J. K. Rowling says that, if she grew up in this century, her feminist rage would have been misdirected into transitioning. In my twenties, the biggest RETVRN-to-the-Second-Wave text was Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs, which had a whole chapter about how young women are internalizing misogyny so deeply that they’re transitioning into young men. The idea that the transmasculine person is a failed feminist is deeply embedded in particular strains of feminist theory. 

Now, some transmasculine people will tell you this isn’t true — some trans men, many trans men, will point to their years of involvement in feminist activism before they came out; they will tell you that no matter how feminist they were, and no matter how feminist they are now, nothing actually alleviated their dysphoria but transition — but you, a Woman of Lived Experience, have no need to listen to this kind of mansplaining. If they want to be men, why, you’ll treat them like men! But with a particular, angry emphasis, because you view their manhood as a betrayal! And this is not only feminist, it is trans-inclusive, because you’re treating them the same way you would any other guy! 

They aren’t “any other guy.” They’re trans guys, and you’re a cis person, and as such, you hold social and political power over them, which you are ignoring in order to assume total authority over an experience you do not share, and (this seems pertinent) to get away with treating somebody like crap because they are transgender. You're not treating them the way you treat "any other guy," you're treating them the way you treat trans guys, and the way you treat trans guys is: Bad.

The "enlightened" feminist transphobia that can seem benign and pity-based when it comes to trans women tends to be overt when it comes to trans men: Transitioning makes you bad, untrustworthy, anti-feminist, scheming, selfish, etc. (This gets reversed in the dominant culture, where trans women are openly demonized and trans men are ignored — and, obviously, it is counterbalanced by a whole lot of feminist transmisogyny. Again, I'm discussing a specific, pseudo-tolerant approach.) Yet it all comes from the same place, which is the refusal to believe that trans people are who we say we are. Which is to say, even if a particular cis feminist’s animus toward trans people only comes out in the way she treats trans men, it can be a useful red flag for trans women, also. That kind of sisterhood is built on less stable ground than you’d hope. 

It was pointed out, in the post-block kerfuffle, that more trans guys pitched in to object to Donegan’s post than trans women. I’m not exactly sure that was true, but I do believe there was probably something in there that was slightly more evident from a transmasculine perspective. Here’s what I think it was: Trans guys see a problem with defining “woman” as “a person who experiences sexist oppression,” because, if that were true, then trans guys would be women, and — I don’t know if you’ve gathered this yet — we’re not.  

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. However, it gets complicated when you realize that not everyone sorted into the “woman” tier actually belongs there. This is the uncomfortable reality presented by trans guys: One can actually experience sexism, misogyny, gender-based pay discrimination, sexual harassment, sexual violence, reproductive coercion, the pink tax, and every other form of degradation dealt out to people perceived as “women,” and still be a man. The two Steves, operating independently, work at cross purposes to each other, and in the battle between Culturally Imposed Steve and Personal Steve, culture often wins.

It’s easy to get lost in theory, here, and try to make this all abstract and logical. However, the work of gendering is subconscious; it moves along without much conscious or rational thought. It’s moving along in this conversation, in fact. If you believe that patriarchal gender is roughly sorted into two tiers, which I agree with — I say “cis men” and “gender-marginalized people;” if you prefer, we can say “feminized people,” since the perception of me as a woman is, indeed, a very big part of the problem — then I am a feminized person. I have experienced sexism. I still do experience it, because many people still see me as a woman, and it’s exacerbated by the perception of me as gender non-conforming. I should, in theory, be able to participate in discussions about sexism as an equal stakeholder. 

In practice, when I disagree with a woman about feminism, things get charged and uncomfortable very quickly. There’s a sense that I shouldn’t be able to hold strong opinions about this topic, that I shouldn’t put myself forward, that I should just defer. Why? Well, because I’m a… you know, a guy. 

Where does “guy” derive from, in that conversation? It doesn’t derive from me having the exact same life experiences as a cis man. It doesn’t derive from me occupying a dominant position within patriarchy. It doesn’t even derive from me being seen as a man in my everyday social interactions — as we’ve established, I’m often not. It’s based on the fact that I use the word “man” to identify myself, when I’m not using the words “non-binary” and “transmasculine.” My internal identification as a man remains relevant, even if we’re having a conversation about how internal identifications aren’t real. 

I don’t actually think it’s hard to figure out where I fit in hierarchies of power. I have less social power than most cis women, and more social power than most trans women. I try (try!) to rein in my criticism of trans women and not pursue beefs with them, but criticizing a cis woman for transphobia or other bigotry is punching up, and I have no problem doing it. 

Yet Singular Steve theory — a “man” is an oppressor and an oppressor is a man — means that even saying transmasculine people face misogyny or gendered oppression makes some people uncomfortable. Power and dominance are so integral to how the patriarchy defines “manhood” that we literally can’t imagine a man without them. Thus, it’s common to dismiss or downplay the violence that transmasculine people face, by saying, for instance, that if we pass for cis, our masculinity will protect us. You can ask Brandon Teena how well that worked out for him. Other people will say that, pre-T, we just look like cis girls, and our presumed cis-ness will protect us. Nex Benedict might have thoughts about that. 

It is just never safe to be trans, no matter how you slice it. It is never safe to be any kind of gender-marginalized person within a patriarchy, and it never will be. That is why it’s imperative for cis feminists to reckon with transmasculinity: People are being exposed to sexist oppression, but left out of the circle of feminist soldarity and concern. You “affirm” our genders by not giving a shit about us, which is not affirming, but, pretty explicitly, punishing somebody for being transgender. 

And why? Because you don’t want to deal with an extra data point. Because people’s actual oppression matters less than keeping your theory perfectly coherent. And that — I’m sorry — is TERF shit. It’s the core TERF fallacy: People’s experience of gender conflicts with your theory of gender, so you throw out the people and keep the theory. You can hear that now, from someone who is rooting for you, or you can hear it later, after you’ve really fucked up and nobody trusts you any more. But me? The cringey shitlib I’m-so-feminist trans guy? I assure you, I am your best option. If hearing all this from me is sad, or scary, or embarrassing, then you’re really not going to like what happens when you keep going down this road. At the end of that road, there are a whole lot of trans people who are even more fed-up with cis bullshit than I am, and they don’t care how feminist you think they are. They won’t have to be nice. 

“I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is,” goes the bumper sticker and/or Rebecca West quote. “I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.” People don’t call me a feminist when I do that these days. They just call me a dude. The end result is the same, though: I’m talking, and moving, and there’s nothing for them to wipe their feet on, and they hate it. They want me to shut up and stay still and just lie flat. 

This episode has unsettled me, obviously. I have been trying to articulate to myself why it was so deeply hurtful to be treated as an enemy of feminism — you’ve been skeptical of my work for years! — simply because I pointed out my own existence to someone I thought I could trust. It was the sense that I didn’t count, that I didn’t matter, that I wasn’t a peer, a colleague, a feminist, a person; I was just some obstacle to be done away with because I was trans. 

It was the feeling — and I’ve had it for years, this feeling — that I have no human worth to anyone around me, and that none of the cis people I built my life with ever saw me or cared about me at all. My only worth resided in my “womanhood,” in being a fighter “for women,” and so, even if trying to be a woman was killing me, I had to keep it up, because the only other option was to become The Enemy. I feel, sometimes, that my fellow feminists would rather have me die young of my own misery than participate in feminism as my full self. And it hurts. I would like you to think, for a minute, about what it would be like to be that kind of feminist: To give your life to a cause, to put absolutely everything you have into it, and to be told that your work is worthless because you didn’t die. 

Here’s the thing, though: That sentiment is one that I have heard, in different words or with different specifics, from every trans guy I have ever interacted with. The guys I like, the guys I don’t like; the guys who are sexists, the guys who are feminists; the libs, the dirtbags, the geeks, the jocks, the cringe, the cool; all of us, no matter what our personalities or politics, eventually wind up here. Being treated like an enemy and a traitor because we had the temerity to survive is seemingly one of the core transmasculine experiences. If you can’t deal with that, you can’t deal with us, and you need to deal with us, because we are dying. Trans men are literally dying in the closet, just to prove to you how good they are, how not-toxic and not-sexist and not-selfish they are, how committed they are to "changing womanhood from the inside," how much they care about you and about women and about feminism – they're dying, and they're still trying to keep you comfortable, and you can't be bothered to care about them for one brief second. Take that thought home, sit with it, eat with it, let it sing you to sleep. What does that tell you about who you are?

There is a challenge posed to mainstream feminism by transmasculinity, and it deserves an answer: Is your feminism about uplifting “women” and putting them on the same level as “men” on some imaginary playing field? Or is it about ending patriarchal oppression? You need to know your answer, because once again, my friend, there are two Steves at this party, two things using the same name to operate at cross purposes. One of those things is about making the world better for you, and one of them is about making the world better. Those two goals, though we call them both “feminism,” have never been the same.