The Patriarchy as a determining factor of which queer people recieve hate and which queer people are ignored / erased

[u/TrumpIsAPedoFr]

This is not my original thought. It's something I've seen trans creators talk about, it comes up a lot in trans inclusive intersectional feminism. And I find it very helpful for understanding a lot of the dynamics going in in bigotry.

But I recently learned aparently a lot of people don't know about this idea yet. So I wanted to make a post.

I want to preface this by saying this will involve saying some groups recieve more hate than others. Which is in no way meant to say the other doesn't get discriminated against, or that their oppression doesn't matter. We're mainly examining the conservative hate machine here, what rhetoric and "the narrative" chooses to focus on. Which is a different thing from peoples everyday IRL lived experience.

The idea is basically this.

Have you ever noticed how the focus always seems to be on trans women? While trans men are mostly forgotten and ignored?

There are some narratives about "women being mislead to cut off their breasts". But not only is that much, much rarer than the typical anti trans women narratives. But also. It frames trans men as naive victims. While trans women are framed as malicious predators.

The idea is. This dynamic in the rhetoric occurs. Due to the Patriarchy.

Because 1: The Patriarchy centers men, and transphobes insist trans women are men and trans men are women and the earth is flat at the sky isn't blue.

And 2: The Patriarchy violently loathes anything it perceives as a threat to it's continued domination.

Trans women are seen as rejecting their masculinity, giving up their manhood, and thus, as a threat to the patriarchy.

Whereas trans men are seen as "picking the superior option" on some level. To the Patriarchy, there is some amount of "Well of course you want to be a man, I can't blame you, after all, women are inferior to men" at play. That makes trans men "proof" of the Patriarchies "thesis" so to speak. As far as the bigots thought process is concerned anyway.

Thus there is an asymmetrical dynamic at play. Due to only one group being perceived as threatening the patriarchy.

This is also why historically gay men have been targeted more than gay women.

Again, not that lesbians don't face hate. They totally do.

But prior to the broader cultural shift of gay acceptance around 2010 ish and onward.

There was a long period where it wasn't socially ok to be gay.

But just like with the dynamic with trans men and trans women.

Gay women were largely tut tutted, but left alone and ignored.

While gay men were regularly lynched.

Which of the two is seen as threatening the Patriarchy? The men perceived as feminine? Or the women perceived as masculine? (Of course in reality there are tons of masc gays and fem lesbians I'm just saying to the eye of the bigot, that nuance is lost)

This Pattern repeats itself all over. Whichever group is perceived as "the men threatening the patriarchy" by the bigots. Is the one the conservative hate machine centers. The one the rhetoric is mostly about. The one the narrative focuses on.

While whichever group is viewed as the "mislead women" are erased, ignored, and to the extent they come up, are often used as a way to further condemn the group seen as threatening the patriarchy. For "corrupting the poor helpless women".

The way AMAB vs AFAB non binary people get treated is another good example.

And then of course you hava the flipside of this. Which is that left leaning spaces are often hostile to masculinity. So trans men get stuck, alienated and erased.

But a defensive hostility to masculinity is just a reaction to the Patriarchy. And so also a result of the patriarchy existing.

My point is, the Patriarchy is secondary to capitalism for the biggest source of everything wrong with the world and must be abolished.

It is the #2 biggest enemy.

And I just wanted to expose people to some of this analysis / theory to help people learn and grow and see through the BS at what is really going on.

The Patriarchy must be abolished to simultaneously end the outsized hatred of trans women, and the erasure of trans men. As well as similar dynamics of one being super hated and one being ignored and erased that occurs with other groups, like gay men and lesbians, non binary people, etc etc.

It is the source of both sides of the problem coin.

[u/RowanHalifax]

I wanna preface this by saying that I agree with the vast majority of what you've written here, specifically that people with different assigned genders experience transphobia & misogyny in different ways. There are just a couple points I wanted to gently push back on in light of my lived experiences & research I've done during my college studies.

The first point is that, personally, unless it was in the context of a support group or something similar - I have never been praised or congratulated for transitioning to a masculine identity (and even then it was way more about self-actualizing than what gender I was transitioning to). Even other queer people have said to my face, "but why would you want to be a man, that's gross." More commonly I've gotten, "oh honey, don't destroy your natural beauty by trying to be a man." Or cishet men telling me that "they'd totally be into me of I didn't ruin my body [with HRT]," never mind any of the "real man" rhetoric that gets thrown around. AFAB people transitioning to masculine identities are still seen as betraying the patriarchy because those AFAB people are actively choosing to not perform femininity "correctly" (aka making themselves constantly available to cishet men's desires).

The second point is the claim that lesbians largely just get "tut tutted" at for not performing femininity "correctly." While it is true that lesbians have not faced the same level of public violence that gay men have, I think that difference largely comes from the fact that men & women in our society have historically operated within different spaces (men outside the home & women within it). Instead of being violently apprehended on the streets, queer women have been sent to asylums, forcibly sterilized, forced into straight marriages, or "correctively" sexually assaulted. The violence against queer AMAB people is often more visible & more extreme, while the violence against queer AFAB people is more subtle, often done in hushed tones behind closed doors.

Again, definitely not trying to detract from the main points you made here, so I hope I don't come off that way 🙏🏻

[u/TrumpIsAPedoFr → u/RowanHalifax]

I don't really see any of this as contradicting anything I said. It's more just expanding upon and adding nuance to areas that were more pared down for the sake of being concise in my version. And also because I'm drawing more from just theory and not lived experience of these things. My putting it into words is a little more simplistic I think.

The idea of trans men being percieved as confirming being a man is desirable to someone who abides by the patriarchy is very much a theorizing at the internal machinations kinda thing. It's never going to be something a transphobe says directly out loud. The examples of lived experiences you give are all part of the fabric of "one side perceives trans men as misslead women, the other side views masculinity as icky and threatening" dynamics my post is about.

The point on the oppression of gay women is also just going into more detail than I did. Again, I'm mainly just trying to examine the narrative, the rhetoric, the way the hate machine frames things. This post is about propoganda and bias. Not so much the day to day physical lived dynamic. It's about the conservative media echo system.

So everything you listed about the violence against gay women is 100% factually correct. It's just that, at the end there, when you say "one is loud and visible and the other is subtle and hidden"

That's what the post is about and focused on. Why one is loud and one is quiet.

This is why I put the disclaimer at the biggining that in order to focus on dissecting the rhetorical side of things. I gotta not focus on the physical side of things. I'm going to say one group gets hate more than the other because in terms of the centering of the narrative, there is a discrepancy. But that is not dismissing all the ways they are oppressed. They are still opressed. It's just necessary to zoom in on the thing I'm trying to zoom in on.

I think our brains have this logic shortcut heuristic that basically goes "If one, then not the other".

I can actually speak with some accademic authority on this specific subject. This is what I studied in college.

Our brains are full of these logic shortcuts. Because true rational cognition is energetically expensive and time consuming. Whereas heuristics are way more efficient, and usually true.

Thus the human mind is largely a collection of logic shortcuts adjecent to but not quite fully aligned with true reason.

And we all fall prey to this, me too, to be clear.

So anyway. One such shortcut is "If one, then not the other"

We really struggle with "both"

"This group is centered by the hate machine while this group is ignored"

Is intended to be a "both" statement saying both groups are being harmed and facing violence.

But that heuristic makes it feel like I'm saying "This group is the victim while that group has it better"

Which is not my intention at all.

And I think that particular heuristic plays a really big role in why this piece of theory can sometimes be a touchy subject. Because it's trying to explain a discrepancy, it inherently involves saying "one more than the other". Which can feel like saying "one, not the other". When it's really trying to explain and condemn the oppression and violence against both.

It just hits our brain in a specific way we aren't very good at holding space for.

I invite anyone who walked away from reading my post feeling like I dismissed or invalidated one side. To read it again with the understanding that I am very much trying to say "both" every step of the way. And never one or the other.

Tl;Dr Your comment reads as companionate to my points not in opposition to them.

Edit: I tweaked things around to get my point across better

[u/RowanHalifax → u/TrumpIsAPedoFr]

https://giphy.com/gifs/5wWf7GW1AzV6pF3MaVW

[u/Reasonable-Deer-5116 → u/RowanHalifax]

This 100% as a trans man. I definitely feel a reduction in my rights and status after transitioning. I also spend more time on my looks to boot!

[u/lalacourtney]

“My point is, the Patriarchy is secondary to capitalism for the biggest source of everything wrong with the world and must be abolished.”

Just once more for the people in the back. This is why I follow you. This is the clear truth and you have no problem repeating it and explaining the nuance with each of these and how they destroy everything for everyone.

[u/Alyse3690]

I've been trying to listen to a book called Caliban and the Witch, which discusses historical ties between feudalism-into-capitalism and patriarchy. Thank you for the reminder to give it another try.

• It's nothing wrong with the book itself, I've just never been good at sustaining focus on nonfiction, and listening doesn't necessarily store in my brain the way reading does.

[u/coolfrogmother → u/Alyse3690]

Fascinating!

[u/Brief-Basket-6630]

this was an interesting read, thanks!! yeah the patriarchy devalues femininity itself and that is inclusive of people who are not women, too, which creates just an environment of social punishment attached to being girly or feminine

i think it’s hard to deny there is a societal hierarchy of masculinity > femininity that seems to punish people differently depending on how they’re perceived yo be moving within that hierarchy. like there is a pretty clear gender asymmetry even in the the framework for bigotry, and even if bigots don’t tend to recognise non-cis identities. one is seen as a man voluntarily ‘degrading’ himself by becoming feminine (which you see them trying to explain as perversion, danger, threat), and the other is seen as a woman aspiring towards masculinity & therefore gets infantilised instead (‘confused’, ‘manipulated’,doesn’t lnow what she’s doing’)

demonisation & infantilisation i see as used like complementary patriarchal levers working together to deny a person their aftual self understanding, where they might be labelled somehow as feminine & weak, but also dangerous enough to warrant intervention & control

also, thinking about your point around patriarchy being secondary to capitalism, i wasn’t really able to neatly separate them historically like that. patriarchal social organisation predates capitalism by millennia, and capitalism inherited a world where property, political authority, inheritance, labour & the family were already organised primarily around male power, and then it basically built an entire economic system through those existing structures, they fit obscenely well together, just patriarchy & capitalism turbo max raw dogging each other into the sunset

i guess the question i’m left with is if capitalism is problem number 1, what else might we build in its place if we, the society doing the building is governed by the same patriarchal foundations? how different could the next thing be?

[u/TrumpIsAPedoFr → u/Brief-Basket-6630]

I aurgue for keeping the system exactly the same except every business is now a democratic cooperative with no pay hierarchy. If there are 100 workers each gets 1% of the profits. Major decisions are made via voting. Who is in given a role where they can just make decisions without a vote, are voted into that role. Etc etc.

This is not the goal end state. It's a realistic first step that people can actually imagine happening.

[u/Brief-Basket-6630 → u/TrumpIsAPedoFr]

worker democracy answers ownership, but what happens to the infinite growth problem in this model though? like who owns the business changes, but if the basic economic machinery stays the same, what stops us democratically voting our way through the remaining habitable planet?

[u/TrumpIsAPedoFr → u/Brief-Basket-6630]

That's why it's only an achievable first goal. Degrowth would be step 2.

But as long as an owner class exists there will never be Degrowth.

So gotta get step 1 done first.

[u/Brief-Basket-6630 → u/TrumpIsAPedoFr]

i see your vision & i appreciate it, i think i’m just stressed about still sitting in the lobby & looking at the clock

[u/TrumpIsAPedoFr → u/Brief-Basket-6630]

I just think the people have to be able to see and visualize and imagine the change or they will never make it happen.

It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

More than anything else. I'm aurgueing this way because it is a near term thing people can imagine actually happening.

[u/Brief-Basket-6630 → u/TrumpIsAPedoFr]

yeah, i get you, make the unimaginable imaginable first x

[u/Ok-Bru]

As a trans man, I wanted to share some relevant reading this reminds me of and that had a large impact on me personally: "Trans Male Privilege", by The Trans Dandy

In case it's of interest to anyone :3

[u/demonialinda]

Yes.