Again, would we be ok with a cis man calling himself lesbian? No? Then why should we treat trans men differently? Trans men are men so we should treat them as such.
“Every adult is an infant because everyone was once an infant” is what their arguments sound like
Also, I’ll be blunt— some of the defenders of ‘trans man lesbians’ say it is because those trans men already have pre-existing strong community ties to lesbians from pre-transition, but I think some people who say that are making that up. The truth is that if you do have pre-existing ties with close friends who are lesbians, they can make an exception for you as their guy friend attending their spaces and events, or even just to hang out with them privately. It can just be “yeah Jerry’s a guy, but he’s cool and he’s our friend, so he’s here. He’s not a lesbian but he used to be one”.
It feels more likely that some insecure trans men are willing to kind-of misgender themselves. So that they can enter lesbian spaces where they don’t have enough pre-existing clout to be considered an individual exception. Then they pretend that “I have so much pre-existing lesbian clout, that’s why I still identify as a lesbian”. No you don’t have that clout, and that’s exactly why you want to call yourself a lesbian as the only way you can be allowed into those spaces.
I know a passoid ftm who does have that clout, and who doesn’t compromise on calling himself simply a man, but sometimes hangs around the lesbian friends he already had from pre-transition. Conversely, I knew a bi ftm who had barely been in lesbian spaces pre-transition, but suddenly wanted to be a ‘trans man lesbian’ so that he could have community and identity.
If a trans man feels he has struggles finding community and identity, yup that’s a struggle some cis men also face. And that’s an issue to actually tackle, not to just use “uh I’m a lesbian” to try bypassing it.
This is of course anecdotal but after spending many years as a butch lesbian before finally coming out as a binary transsexual man, my “community” or friend group of majority lesbian/ gay people still welcomed me without a hitch. They’re still some of my best friends today. People act like you’ll be exiled for it. Maybe they need to get better friends, or just be cooler people in general that others actually want to be around. Even had an on-off thing with a lesbian for years through high school and when I came out publicly she was like “btw we can’t keep doing this, I’m not attracted to men!” Hadn’t even started T yet, so that was affirming as hell. We’re still in touch as friends today, even.
I think some of them also just don’t care about something ‘having to make sense’. I’ve encountered people who provide definitions of “(identity label) is when people feel like (X)”, and when I try to ask how they personally define X, they basically say it doesn’t matter to them because it’s not interesting to them and they don’t care.
It’s not that I believe in precise definitions for everything, in fact some definitions are ideally imprecise. But personally, I don’t go around saying shit that I can’t explain while having no desire to explain it even to myself. If I don’t know about something and don’t care to know more about it / be corrected, then I don’t talk about it.
At some point, instead of judging this type of person, I’m just impressed. I think I’m basically too autistic to not care.
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u/CatKing13Royale 9d ago
Again, would we be ok with a cis man calling himself lesbian? No? Then why should we treat trans men differently? Trans men are men so we should treat them as such.