Trans Myth-Busting 1: Being socialised as a man or boy

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. 

source: http://roygbiv.jezebel.com/trans-women-male-privilege-socialisation-and-feminis-472949124

"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".