So I think this is what is being aimed at with the socialization language—

There’s a male self-image and a female self-image, with their own rules, that children are taught to *acquire.*

And those self-images are what are being called “socialization” https://twitter.com/MattieVvv/status/1173081607391055874

There are several problems that come up with this.

—it’s conflating the self-image, the process of teaching it, and the acquisition of that self-image
—there’s little/no attention paid to whether or how it was acquired, and much attention on what is being taught

So “trans women have male socialization” is true in a sense—in the sense of trans women being expected to acquire a male self-image (and punished for lack of acquisition).

But this is then used to mean that trans women acquire a male self-image

The thing is that being trans AT ALL is strong positive evidence for lack of acquisition!

That is what it means to identify as female—you instead acquired a female self-image. Similarly with identifying as male, as both, as neither, and so on

Trans women are largely DEFINED by a lack of male self-image.

But the concept “male socialization,” which erodes the distinction between acquisition of male self-image and the pressure to acquire it, totally hides this defining feature

Usually the idea seems to be “I think trans women partially reject that self-image but partially, and unconsciously, acquire it, manifest in still following some or all of the rules of manhood, like being assertive, etc.”

But there’s no actual evidence of this, and it’s actually what we should expect of all children—to integrate some of what we’d think of as male behaviors with what we’d think of as female behaviors, because both sets of behaviors are situationally adaptive

“Psychological androgyny” in this sense is what is probably, in fact, the norm!

What the claim reveals itself to be is a fear of the particular kind of androgyny attributed to transfems, and the building of the mythology of an innate predator-gender