this is an article in construction. I welcome feedback and ideas for improving this entry. At the moment it is still at a very ealry stage - very much a draft version. I share because I want your feedback. And any links to good articles?
The issue is laid out here https://www.quora.com/How-does-gendered-socialization-affect-transgender-people-To-what-extent-are-trans-people-more-likely-or-less-likely-than-cis-people-to-buy-into-the-gender-stereotypes-we-are-all-taught-as-children-and-how-do-they-relate-these-stereotypes-to-themselves
This blog asks the question: how does gendered socialization affect
transgender people? To what extent are trans people more likely or less likely
than cis people to buy into the gender stereotypes we are all taught as
children, and how do they relate these stereotypes to themselves?
How do transgender people compare to cis
people in this regard?
Kate Bedenbaugh answers the question: by asking another question and that is "what level of impact
does socialization have on our children?" Obviously some is probably the consensus. More than 0% and less than 100%.
"The second question to ask is what level of socialization
can be attributed to the influence of the adults in a child's life and how much
is a personalized internalization of social messages that they are exposed
to. Socialization is a catch-all term
for both of those processes.
A child who identifies as a girl more than as a boy "is going to
internalize social messages aimed at girls and seek to embody the roles they
advocate. If [a trans girl is] getting significant
pushback when she does that (or is sufficiently terrified of the backlash),
it's possible and entirely likely that she will be motivated to absorb those
messages at an even greater level than cis girls do.
"Unlike cis girls, however, she won't get the subtle but
incredibly important remarks from her parents, relatives, and teachers
encouraging her to pursue less technical fields (or "softer"
technical fields), and discouraging her from pursuing more (and
"harder") technical fields. In
fact, she'll be encouraged to do these things.
"On the other hand, this again is going to vary by how much
she's hiding the fact that she's a girl.
If she's not fully hiding it, she's more likely to receive hatred and
abuse from everyone in her life than she is subtle pushes toward various career
tracks.
"A trans girl who doesn't know she's a girl will be less
inclined to absorb messages aimed at girls in the first place, but may also be
disinclined to absorb messages aimed at boys.
In that case, she'll probably have a strong personal sense of gender
equality, but will still benefit from the encouragement of the adults in her
life in much the same ways that a cis boy would.
"If you look at what fields trans women are actually in (for
the trans women who have the opportunity be in fields in the first place),
you'll find that there are a significant number of trans women in STEM fields
(though less than the rates for cis men).
There are probably three reasons for that. One is that yes, the encouragement of adults
in the lives of trans girls has a notable impact on their life decisions. The second is that STEM fields cater more to
introversion than do many other fields, and trans women with dysphoria
gravitate toward those areas in order to avoid human interaction that may trigger
it. And lastly, trans women receive the
most overt discrimination in fields that require a lot of human interaction
because of the assumption that the public is not comfortable with their
existence.
"There are a lot of factors at play here and it's impossible
to say which has the biggest effect, especially given that any individual's
personality is going to greatly impact the relative importance of those
effects. I think the biggest takeaway is
that while the experiences of trans girls differ from those of cis girls, they
differ more from the experiences of cis boys.
At the end of the day those of us who aren't trans women
need to stop asking "why" when talking about trans girls and trans
women, and stop trying to take note of all the ways that they differ from their
cisgender counterparts (whilst ignoring all the ways they differ from cisgender
men). It's more important to fight for
equality than it is to take inequality as a fact of life and perform an extensive
analysis of who has the moral high ground to say they're worse off than others
impacted by that inequality.
another responder says:
"However, if a trans person embeds fully in the cis culture
of their expressed gender, they are likely to be resocialized to a large degree
very quickly, particularly if they are willing to listen and emulate the cis
people around them. This isn't necessarily best from an equality perspective,
but it helps one to blend."
For me the following is the best response I’ve seen on this subject – but remember this is
still a generalised scenario and might not represent the experience of many or any actual trans
people – rather our experiences will be clustered around this scenario.
"If we lived in a world
where our only basis for comparison was cis women and trans women, then yes,
this lived experience of sometimes having or gaining from male privilege most
certainly would be significantly and radically different. However, we do not
live in such a world, and our goalposts need to compare both cis women's lived
experiences and trans women's lived experiences to cis men's lived experiences. When we look at that comparison, we
begin to see that we have more in common than we do not.
The lived experience
of a trans woman, or a trans girl as is more often than not the case, is not
the same as that of a cis man/boy. Cis boys do not cry themselves to sleep
wishing they were girls. Cis boys do not start arguments with authority figures
over being thought of and addressed as boys as some trans girls do. Cis boys do
not worry that their "manly" gender performances will be revealed to
be fraudulent because they're actually girls as other trans girls do. These
experiences are experiences that clearly separate trans girls from cis boys,
and therefore separate trans women from cis men.
"There are two major
ways in which a trans woman's experiences are like a cis woman's experiences.
The first is trans girls' internalisation and attention to patriarchal messages
intended for girls and women.
The second reason
trans women have more in common with cis women than they do with cis men is
that from the moment they in some way announce they are not men, they are
treated as not men. Non-men. Unmen. Man is default, and trans women are
immediately othered. This may take the form in childhood and adolescence as
bullying, either verbal or physical. It may take the form of the
microagressions used by family or authority figures. It may take the form
during transitioning of references to trans women being "failed men"
or "bad men" or "men in dresses." The most pervasive form
it takes is the treatment of trans women as women. Even when discrimination
ceases because a trans woman now "passes" and is read as cisgender,
she still continues to suffer misogyny. She is subjected to cat-calling, she is
subjected to sexual assault, she has the same issues with being believed if she
reports that sexual assault, and God help her if she hasn't had SRS or her
gender markers changed, because then she goes right back to adding on that
previous treatment, she will still find herself earning less than a cis man,
she will still find herself passed over for promotion, and this assumes, again,
her gender history is not found out. She may spend childhood and adolescence
struggling with male socialisation, and she may spend twenty to thirty years going
in and out of male privilege, but after the point of transition, she will
forever be treated as woman".
