The long and short of the male socialization debate is that in feminist discourse, male socialization means learned entitlement to women’s bodies/labor and to getting your way with aggression, because your life has rewarded you for taking center stage.

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The concept itself relies on a lifetime of formative experiences teaching you that you are supposed to get your way and that women are supposed to submit to you.

Some people claim “I’m not saying trans women have male privilege, just that they were socialized as male,” but it’s not possible to separate the two concepts as such!

There are transfeminists who separate the concepts of learned male entitlement and “socialized male” in a different sense, as simply meaning having to navigate the world within male gender norms.

But most of the time, when we describe “male socialization” for transfems and most AMAB trans people that legitimately makes sense for us, we’re actually talking about something I call compulsory manhood.

Compulsory manhood includes being faced with an environment that pushes you, often with violence, to internalize a male self-identity. Cis men to some degree do internalize this, and trans girls (for instance) definitionally do not, so the violence and pressure increases

This is what I’ve called the “sorting effect” or self-purification of the category of compulsory manhood, in that in a male supremacist society, “men” as a group is interested in pushing out people who fail enough to assimilate into manhood

Thus we get a kind of gradation of manly cis men, unmanly cis men, and then full-on “unman” who have “failed” to be functionally men at all. Those three groups are treated differently, especially the third group, which is subject to pronounced violence

There’s no way to group trans women with cis men in terms of a “common socialization” without neglecting and erasing what the patterns of gendered violence and stigma in the world are actually like. Trans girls are faced with a great of violence from early on in life.

Research I’ve found that I’ve also talked about on this site has indicated that when all else is equal, trans girls and AMAB non-binary kids are the most likely gender minority to be harassed and victimized in K-12 ages to the point of drop-out.

There are a lot of patterns like this, of young trans girls who aren’t transitioned, aren’t even necessarily “out,” who nonetheless have stories of a lifetime of being beaten, harassed, ostracized, problematized by teachers and parents, sexually aggressed against, and so on.

One of the examples I’ve often seen cited of early male socialization is that school teachers have been shown to unconsciously pay more attention to boys, call on them in class more, listen to them more, help them with schoolwork more, etc.

But trans children of all genders generally are treated by adults, including in school, as Problem Children. Young trans boys tend to talk about often they were described as defiant trouble-makers. Gender non-conformity is usually associated with rule-breaking and non-compliance

Meanwhile young trans girls are particularly likely, not LESS likely, to have “disciplinary problems,” to be expelled from schools, and have other patterns that indicate lack of integration, our complaints not being taken seriously, and being punished for “conflict”

Even if I were to only speak to my own life, it has been full of cases in which I finally worked up the courage to fight back against a harasser and defend myself, then I got in trouble and they didn’t. Or I was punished for essentially “making myself a target”

“Maybe you shouldn’t cry so much” was something I was actually told after the fact, while crying because some boys (and girls!) had beat the shit out of me

That’s another key point: a lot of my “bullies” were cis girls. They put gum in my hair, tripped me as I walked, demeaned me, pushed my things over, and sometimes also physically attacked me.

One of the worst things was how many cis girls entitled themselves to grab me sexually, touch me without my permission, make lewd comments and requests of me, say they wanted to let their boyfriend fuck me, and other creepy behavior.

And for anyone who thinks I’m saying “girls abuse boys just as bad as boys abuse girls,” remember I’m specifically talking about patterns of violence against trans girls. I doubt many cis boys had these same experiences with girls like that, at least not white ones.

One time a cis girl who was bigger than me, much stronger and more athletic than me, and like four years older than me harassed me on the school bus into finally fighting back, then she beat the shit out of me and then I got in trouble for “fighting with a girl”

One reason I’m mentioning these stories is to show that this kind of stuff was extremely normal for me (and a bunch of other stuff I won’t get into here) since day one of being in a public school. Day one literally, like I remember being harassed first day of kindergarten

And more to the point, I don’t think this kind of thing is at all unusual for trans girls and AMAB non-binary kids as a group. If anything research suggests that it’s the norm, way more than most people assume.

You could bend this and twist it to still try to call it some version of “male socialization,” but it’s not the life of entitlement-instilling experiences that term is intended to mean.

Instead we’re talking about compulsory manhood and gendered violence.