Ain’t I a Woman

Trans men. Trans feminists want to help you. Let us.

By Tara Knight

I. Please don’t Invoke my womanhood

A trans man called me a man today because I criticized transandrophobia. He told me to sit down and invoked our forcibly assigned genders at birth as if those letters settled who belonged in feminism. He weaponized his AGAB while Mine became a weapon. he demanded complete respect for his manhood while treating my womanhood as something he could confiscate. He chose to go for it right away. They always do. That hurt more than the insult itself. He didn’t defend his theory. They don’t gotta. He reached for the oldest weapon available and tried to put a woman back in her place by calling her male. A trans man who knows what it means to have a sex assignment forced onto him used mine as a cage. He wanted freedom from the judgment written on his birth certificate while insisting mine should follow me forever.

I respect that he is a man. He couldn’t offer me the same recognition because I refused to agree that men constitute an oppressed sex class. His manhood was a fact feminism had to honor. My womanhood was a courtesy he could revoke whenever I became politically inconvenient. I have been warning about this kind of analysis for a long time. I can handle a man insulting me. What made me cry on the train is watching people who expect trans women to defend them reach for transmisogyny the moment we stop being agreeable. They ask for solidarity while their identities are under attack, then turn around and use our assigned sex to discipline us. I have defended trans men against the people who want them forcibly detransitioned. I will continue defending them because nobody should have a sex forced upon them by the state, their family, or a doctor. That political commitment apparently flows in only one direction for some of them. They expect me to recognize the full human reality of their transition while mine remains a philosophical dispute they can settle against me.

I respect his manhood more than he respects my womanhood.

I chose this title because Black women have spent generations being forced to ask whether our womanhood counts whenever a movement wants our labor without accepting our authority. We are welcomed when there is work to be done. The warmth disappears once we speak with enough force to become difficult.

Black womanhood has always been treated as conditional. Our anger is read as masculine. Our strength becomes evidence that we require less protection and feel less pain. People enjoy our political labor while treating our femininity as a privilege we must earn through obedience.

For Black trans women, transmisogyny follows that old racial path. A Black woman becomes “male” in somebody’s mouth with terrifying speed once she refuses to make herself small. The birth certificate gives them an excuse for something this society already wanted to do. It lets them translate the masculinization of Black women into the respectable language of biological reality.

I can’t treat that as a petty insult. It reveals how quickly the womanhood of transsexual women becomes probationary. Even people who insist that we honor their sexes without question will put ours before a tribunal.

A trans man’s assignment at birth becomes proof that he possesses permanent insight into women’s oppression. A trans woman’s assignment at birth becomes proof that she can never fully understand it. He may leave womanhood and retain political ownership of everything associated with it. She may live as a woman and remain an intruder.

Transandrophobia discourse begins from real hurt. A trans man might face misogyny. They can be denied reproductive care or exposed to sexual violence structured by patriarchal control of people classified as female. Those experiences deserve a language and organized resistance by trans men.

But i have to say:An injury suffered by a man does not automatically demonstrate oppression against men. A trans man can be harmed through misogyny when an institution places him within the female sex caste. He can also be harmed through transphobia because he has crossed the sexed boundary assigned to him. Political categories aren’t your tumblr bio created to make every person feel equally represented. They are supposed to identify a structure. “Transandrophobia” takes violence experienced by trans men and turns it into a theory of structural male oppression. Once that theory is accepted, women who challenge it can be recast as the oppressors. His argument required his assigned sex to remain politically authoritative while mine remained destiny. The theory offered him the best of both worlds. He received full recognition as a man while retaining ownership of female political experience. He could leave womanhood as a social identity and continue governing it as an estate.

This is how “AFAB solidarity” becomes a respectable form of transmisogyny. People who share no common gender, social position, or relationship to patriarchal power are placed together through birth assignment. A trans man who passes as male can claim greater feminist authority than a trans woman living every part of her life as a woman. The man remains an insider. The woman remains suspect.

There is nothing liberating about reproducing birth assignment as a permanent political soul. That is the premise behind every TERF argument about transsexual women. Repeating it through newer language does not change where it leads.

II. Come Fight Beside Us

Trans men, I am asking you to drop this theory.

You don’t have to deny what happened to you. Your history belongs to you. You lose nothing by locating those injuries inside the structures that caused them.

Come into feminist struggle as men who understand something about the machinery of sex coercion. That experience can make you unusually perceptive allies if you refuse to turn it into ownership. Many of you know how forced femininity operates from inside the home and the doctor’s office. You have seen how patriarchy disciplines people whose bodies or behavior refuse its demands. Use that knowledge against patriarchy.

Do not use it as a deed to womanhood.

Your history of being classified female does not grant you jurisdiction over women. It does not make your interpretation of feminism automatically superior to mine. It gives you knowledge from your own life, which can become politically useful when it is joined to a serious analysis of power.

Allyship will sometimes mean hearing a woman say that your framework harms her without reaching for your birth assignment as a trump card. It may even require taking something on the chin sometimes. Defend trans women when a man calls us male. Challenge the people who use “male socialization” to place us outside womanhood forever. Learn to recognize transmisogyny before a trans woman has to bleed publicly enough for you to believe her.

You have an opportunity few cis men will ever possess. You can enter feminist struggle already knowing that sex is imposed and enforced. You know the cruelty of being told that anatomy must dictate your social destiny. That knowledge should bring you closer to trans women. It should make the idea of chaining us to our own assignments unbearable.

Men are capable of feminist solidarity. An ally does not have to become voiceless, and he does have to become accountable to the liberation struggle he joins. You can bring your experience into feminism without declaring sovereignty over it.

We need trans men who are prepared to fight beside women even when doing so means surrendering the comfort of being centered.

I have spent years writing for women. Every argument I make gets fenced inside “trans activism” because people see the word trans before they see feminist. I am expected to concern myself exclusively with the small territory allotted to people like me. The moment I speak about women as a class, somebody appears to remind me that I entered womanhood through the wrong door.

I reject that fence.

I write about the organization of women’s lives under patriarchy because those forces organize my life. My body has been disciplined by medicine and threatened by men. My womanhood shapes how I move through public life and what happens to me in private. Transmisogyny is one of the forms women’s oppression takes when a woman’s legitimacy is made into a permanent public trial.

I changed my body and built a life among women. Patriarchy encounters me through transmisogyny, which punishes me through the claim that I am an illegitimate woman. That accusation makes transsexual women easier to exploit because the people hurting us know that our suffering will be treated as evidence against us.

A materialist feminism worth anything must be able to understand the life standing in front of it. Sex is a social relation enforced through bodies and institutions. Birth assignment begins that process, but it cannot freeze every human being into the same position forever. Transsexuality changes the body and alters the social relation around it. Patriarchy punishes us for making that change.

Calling me male doesn’t state material reality. It erases it.

In two days, I will marry another transsexual woman. We have built a lesbian life under a society that treats our love as fraud and our bodies as public evidence. I am writing this while preparing to promise my life to a woman. I am furious because the insult itself is small while the permission behind it is enormous.

Every trans man who treats AFAB as a permanent feminist credential strengthens the premise TERFs use against us. They also believe birth assignment is the deepest political truth. They believe a person classified female possesses an eternal claim to womanhood while a person classified male carries an ineradicable stain.

You cannot build trans liberation from a premise that makes trans women frauds.

The same political forces trying to force trans men back into womanhood are determined to drive trans women out of it. Those attacks take different forms because our positions are different. Solidarity requires us to understand that difference instead of inventing a false symmetry between the oppression of women and the pain experienced by men.

Trans men gain nothing lasting by proving that they can deny women better than cis men.

I am speaking past the man who called me male now. I am speaking to every trans man who felt defensive when he read this and every trans man who has watched this discourse become uglier.

Look at what happened.

A trans man felt his political authority challenged by a woman. He responded by invoking her assigned sex, denying her womanhood, and ordering her to sit down. He reached for misogyny so naturally that he demonstrated the entire argument in a few sentences.

Decide whether that is the politics you want carrying your pain.

Drop “transandrophobia.” When another trans man calls a trans woman male, stop him before she has to defend her humanity again. When women organize against male violence, join us without demanding that the movement recenter men. When somebody treats your birth certificate as proof that you own womanhood, refuse the invitation.

There is feminist work waiting for you. There are women who need allies prepared to confront patriarchy without asking for a male oppression theory in return. There are transsexual women fighting for our lives who would rather have you beside us than spend another decade arguing over whether you possess a superior claim to our own liberation.

I am done asking men for admission to womanhood. I am a Black transsexual woman and a feminist. That fact is not available for debate whenever a man becomes angry with me.

Trans men have a choice. You can carry AFAB like a gun that lets you police women, or you can put down the weapon and fight the people who assigned it to you in the first place.

Come fight beside us.

Ain’t I a woman?

I am, and I am done begging men to answer.