This holiday season, shut the fuck up about how much you hate pumpkin spice lol
Nuance moment here: I think that the ideas behind phrases like “all men are trash” and similar that are based in sort of ironic misandry often result in spaces being (usually unintentionally) hostile towards transmasc people, which is something I think we’d all like to avoid if possible.
I am simply a random intersex nonbinary woman so it’s not my place to speak on that in detail, but it’s something I’m becoming more and more aware of in online spaces.
I am going to go full gender understander here. Trans men are men and as such get the good with the bad. Enjoy the lifelong masculine urge to be a dumbass like the rest of us. Is it unintentionally hostile to our comrades to treat them as full members of our broken male species? As a cis man I am not offended by it. Should not it be the same for all men? I get it would be slightly more comfortable to deny them that flavor of manhood but it feels patronizing. Like, they have to watch an old episode of “The man show” and feel despair same as I do.
E: I just wanna clarify that I’m not trying to call you out or criticise you, I just think that it’s a place to learn and grow that people might benefit from.
I mean, this sort of concept is basically just repackaged radfem rhetoric. The idea that men are inherently bad or flawed is basically just gender essentialism, no matter how trans-inclusive you make it. People are not inherently flawed, the flaws in question are based in culture and capitalism, not inherent to men.
The point isn’t to shield or protect just trans men and other transmasc people from criticism of men, but to refocus the criticism away from “all men are trash” towards the actual problem, “capitalism and western culture pressure men to behave in toxic ways”. It’s not masculinity that is the problem, it is the cultural perception of what masculinity is supposed to be.
You can look at and analyze that culture through the lens of it being bad, but that is not in any way a condemnation of you or other men in some inherent way.
The following is based on a couple of conversations I’ve had with others, not personal experience, so other people’s mileage and experiences may vary and I’m not even passing this on firsthand: the reason that concepts like “men are trash” are particularly harmful towards transmasc people is because it implies that those flaws are an essential and necessary component of masculinity and a lot of transmasc people did not and do not participate in that particular toxic masculine culture, and essentialising it results in them being othered, saying that either they are flawed in this way or they’re not truly male.
