been seeing a lot of takes about the AMAB experience(s) of cis and trans people today.

tbh? I'm getting really fucking sick of all the folx making sweeping declarations about what it's like to grow up trans.

I tried really hard for a long time to be a "boy." I am still unlearning the many ways that fucked me up and I will not outlive the guilt I feel for some of the things I did to try and make that work.

The "male socialization" narrative is a real part of my experience.

And a lot of it is the *absence* of socialization that Society presses on AFAB people. Regardless of whether and to what extent that socialization sticks to trans and enby AFAB people, it's withheld from AMAB people as much as Society can manage.

Withholding comprehension of women's experiences is part of male socialization. There's a lot that's withheld from people expected to be men. "Socialization" is an abstraction not just for presence of some pressures, but the absence of others.

And, in my experience, there's a big fucking difference in how you relate to gender if your stance is "none of this makes sense to me and it feels like everyone is always lying about it," versus if your stance is "I understand this system and I'm in the wrong category."

If the "socialization" narrative feels incoherent and hurtful to you, I respect that. And I'm honestly sorry about the inevitably dismissive energy this thread is going to have, because Twitter isn't a medium that can sustain the nuance necessary to prevent it.

But I am FUCKING EXHAUSTED with the popular stance in the online trans community that "trans" is as easy a category to pinpoint and describe as "cis."

The possibility space of "not cis" is inexpressibly diverse. "Trans people experience gender this way" is, unless immediately followed with a lot of asterisks, ALWAYS a bad take.

I know what sparked this discourse, I don't care, and I will mute you if you try and drag this into anybody's particular drama. There's no particular person I'm subtweeting here, I really have seen it from a lot of places.

From many of those places I think it's the honest failure of complexity that emerges from trying to fit Discourse into Tweets.

From some, I think it's throwing nuance under the bus to win Internet Points.

There are people I'm confident are doing the former; I suspend judgment on whether anyone I'm unsure about is doing the latter. It takes more than a bad take to demonstrate bad faith.

(And that doesn't just mean "it takes multiple bad takes." It's possible to be Extremely Wrong in good faith.)