Artifact 11 - On “Male Socialization”... - Julia Serano

Gendered Lives, on page 152, discusses the difficulties of growing up outside conventional gender roles. It describes this process as stressful, isolating, and fundamentally different from otherwise “standard” gendered socialization in which someone identifies with the gender prescribed to them. In short, the short section makes it quite clear that socialization is relative to and informed by personal circumstance, and that the forces of society stating “act feminine” or “act masculine” do not make up the entire story.

This, then, is the fundamental rhetorical stage upon which Julia Serano’s 2023 writings on so-called “male socialization” of trans women (as well as “female socialization” of trans men) takes place. Some modern groups argue that excluding trans women from women-only-spaces is justified, as trans women receive the “same male socialization” as the men left out of these spaces. This position is, of course, incredibly transphobic, incorrect, and pulls almost directly from the ideas of oppositional sexism, as Serano points out. The childhood and lessons learned therein for trans individuals is incredibly different from that of cis individuals, and comparing them is fundamentally an appeal to biological sexism. To put it bluntly, my childhood was something that could only be experienced by a trans woman, and the fact that I did not cleanly align to masculine ideals resulted in me receiving wildly different treatment from men; so much so that the idea that I was ‘socialized male’ is purely comical to me. The prevalence of this argument in some feminist spaces demonstrates that surface-level transphobia is not the only issue facing trans people, but that there is a deeper-down separation of the evaluations of masculinity and femininity as distinctly non-overlapping which informs this discrimination.