I don’t know about anyone else, but I, as a trans woman, do not know what it is to be a man. I know what it’s like to be surrounded by men, to be picked apart by them, to have masculinity enforced on me and to have my femininity degraded. I know what it’s like to be targeted for punishment, physically and sexually, for my femininity, for a girlhood the boys and men could see in me, to be queerbashed, to have my head slammed into hard surfaces, to have my genitals fondled, to be injured in all kinds of small and repetitive ways with things like pens, compasses, and so on.
I know what it’s like to be assumed to be a man, and to be abused because I am not. I know what it’s like to be separated from my female friends as a young child because my status as a ‘boy’ meant that I needed to be placed with the other boys, the ones who degraded me and hurt me. I know what it’s like to be beaten and burned. I know what it’s like to have teachers make an example of me because I cannot conform. I know what it’s like to be made afraid of being around other people, because people means abuse.
But I don’t know what it is to be a man. Even after everything they tried, I wasn’t one.
The fact that socialization is a specious argument became obvious to me during an exchange I had with a trans-woman-exclusionist who insisted that my being raised male was the sole reason in her mind for me to be disqualified from entering women-only spaces. So I asked her if she was open to allowing trans women who are anatomically male but who have been socialized female—something that’s not all that uncommon for MTF children these days. She admitted to having concerns about their attending. Then, I asked how she would feel about a person who was born female yet raised male against her will, and who, after a lifetime of pretending to be male in order to survive, finally reclaimed her female identity upon reaching adulthood. After being confronted with this scenario, the woman conceded that she would be inclined to let this person enter women-only space, thus demonstrating that her argument about male socialization was really an argument about biology after all. In fact, after being pressed a bit further, she admitted that the scenario of a young girl who was forced against her will into boyhood made her realize how traumatic and dehumanizing male socialization could be for someone who was female-identified. This, of course, is exactly how many trans women experience their own childhoods.
— Julia Serano, Whipping Girl