
i wish people would stop trying to fit transgender people into boxes of male and female no trans person was socialized the same way as someone who is male or female. its more accurate to say they were socialized as trans men/trans women etc. like are you really socialized as a man when you’re not connected to it and other men literally exclude you for your feminine qualities shit never made sense to me
i feel like we need another word. the way i think im understanding socialization is not the way i think everyone else understands it. for example, even though i am a trans man and have been a boy/man my entire life, i was born in a way seen as female by everyone around me at least to some extent for many years. i wasn't really included by girls or considered traditionally "feminine", and generally rejected that altogether, but there was still a lot of expectations and ideas put on to me because
others thought of me as a girl. even though it didn't "work" on me, i still felt the impacts of going against that societal expectation. in that way, i was "socialized female", meaning i was viewed by other people as being female and treated as such. now i think the idea of having different ways of socializing people based on perceived gender is fucking stupid, but that doesn't mean it's not true in most modern society. i also don't mean this to say being "socialized female" or "socialized male
means you're going to turn out a certain way, or carry certain immutable characteristics from that. thats just some weird bioessentialist crap. i just mean that others have ideas of how to treat you based on how you're perceived and whether or not you fit into the mold of what's expected of you. it doesn't make you any one way or another, but it does seem like something that would influence a person. i feel like my understanding of the word "socialization" may not be correct
That would be the good faith understanding of what the term means, but it’s not being used in good faith, often, in my experience. In many ways it is the rhetorical stick used to force trans women into the “man” category without wrestling with the undeniable differences in our experience. In some cases the role of the word is more obscured than in others. I’d just ask that you be careful when reading, lest the term become a thought-terminating cliche.