legitimately my first feminist awakening as a ten year old child was realizing that girls were expected to respect “boy stuff” but boys were never expected to respect “girl stuff”
my science fair project in fifth grade was basically i had this printout of a bunch of toys that were stereotypically boy toys and girl toys, and i would have my classmates study the sheet for some short period of time, idr if it was like 30 seconds or a minute or whatever, then put it away and had them recall to me as many toys as they could remember. my hypothesis was officially that boys would remember more boy toys and girls would remember more girl toys, but secretly in my head i knew that girls would probably remember boy toys and girl toys relatively equally but boys would still remember mostly boy toys. and that ended up being the case. and i still remember this 20 years later because it hasn’t fucking stopped. and you know what they didn’t even like my project. participation ribbon. i was a fifth grade feminist theorist and no one cared
well i was not expecting the notes on this to say the least so i just want to add that the reason i was thinking about this again is because it’s a perfect introduction to how transphobia that transmasculine people experience is different from transmisogyny. the idea of people who were assigned male at birth doing “girl stuff” ie transitioning and being women is a different level of abhorrent to people whose worldview depends on biologically essentialist gender roles. why the fear of trans people boils down for many bigots to the “men in dresses” stereotype. the wave of feminism that now allows even cishet women to commonly wear pants didn’t have a mirrored rise in cishet men wearing skirts for some reason. and it’s exactly this. and that’s why i need fellow transmascs to understand that like. transphobic discrimination or microaggressions that trans women face are often ones we don’t.
like going back to the example of children and their interests, no matter what people think of tomboys, which i’m in no way saying is always approving, there at the very least still exists a concept of the tomboy: a child assigned female at birth who is into stereotypically male stuff. there’s no word for a child assigned male at birth who is into stereotypically female stuff. there’s just slurs.