Understanding Transmisogyny, Part Two: Homophobia and Transphobia

Examining the fate of the heterosexual regime's dissidents.

What is it like to grow up in a heterosexualist world when you aren’t heterosexual?

The previous installment was somewhat abstract in its discussion of the culture of heterosexualism, speaking of patriarchy and its engendering misogyny as an omnipresent social substrate, one that we are all immersed in and unable to disentangle our selves, our consciousnesses and our experiences from. In this one, let’s attempt to be more explicit about that process of osmosis, of developing, imbibing and reacting to the perpetual reinforcement of the patriarchal society.

We’ve established how it can already be damaging and abusive to internalize the precepts of a patriarchal society even when you are heterosexual. Children, by dint of being dependents, wards and constantly-learning minds, navigate a world where even if adults do not consciously sit down and explain the nuances of gender to them, they are still exposed to gendered messaging and gendered realms as a matter of course. Teachers expect girls to do less well at mathematical and scientific subjects, a discouragement they pick up on even when the cues are subtle. Boys are given more of a license to be loud, disruptive, boisterous and to ‘misbehave’ in ways girls are more stringently punished for or prevented from doing. Thus, by a simple process of feeling out the bounds of the permissible and impermissible, as all children are wont to do, they grow up feeling the restrictions and borders placed around them by their presumed gender, even if they cannot name it as such.

Of course, this does not necessarily mean that every child accepts their lot, is content with what they are permitted and never strays from what is allowed of them. Children test all these boundaries to different degrees, receive different degrees of backlash and punitive responses and variously resolve to conform or rebel in their own, particular ways. Social teachings are not a simple matter of one’s childhood indoctrination taking root and indelibly dictating their attitudes, actions and beliefs for the rest of their lives, else we’d all be staunch patriarchs and deferential helpmeets, perfectly cleaved along the lines of sex assigned at birth. In our own ways, we steal away and hide the parts of ourselves we are told we cannot express, that we learn we must guard jealously until the time comes when we can be free.

These observations of acculturation are the core of socialization theory, a theory that aims to explicate the manner in which a culture reproduces itself. A key insight here would be that there are many different vectors for this socialization, many of them distinct, if not mutually exclusive: class for example is a critical determiner of how one relates to authority and oppression, whether one grew up internalizing their own disposability or their own inherent worth, based on family wealth. Therefore, while this can account for a certain degree of consistency in belief and behavior, determined by a person’s various vectors of socialization, the kinds of socialization one experiences themselves vary immensely, across one’s various identities. In fact, the singular common thread through this staggering variety of socializations remains that cross-cultural, near-universal maxim: misogyny itself.

That is to say, the constant that cuts across cultures is that we are all socialized misogynistic.

We see this acutely in the way heterosexualism operates and how women, rather than forming a collective consciousness based on their shared suffering, locate their value in their domestic worth or sexual availability to men. This is something that is internalized early, quickly and without necessarily being explicitly stated, but still lived nonetheless. It is not merely that ‘man’ and ‘woman’ are constructed as mutually exclusive categories, but also that women are expected to submit and be deferential, naturalizing what is ultimately a labor relation of sexual, domestic and reproductive extractivism. This internalization of misogynistic precepts also functions as a false consciousness, a form of identification with the oppressor’s view of oneself that prevents the subjugated from self-actualizing and forming solidarity against their own oppression.

Women thus have a great deal to contend with in their socialization and a great many hazards in coming to terms with it. Some dissociate from womanhood by idealizing themselves as exceptions to the misogynistic norm, while others fatalistically accept patriarchal bargains and seek to content themselves with their own mean spheres of influence. Others still attempt to navigate male-dominated spheres by emulating male social dynamics—wearing suits, deepening their voices, obeying certain contradictory standards of requirements of femininity and masculine projection as best they can—to varying degrees of success. In all these cases, there’s a certain negotiation or compromise with misogynistic social doctrines, a desire to mitigate them as best one can and still tolerate one’s everyday existence.

So what is done to those who cannot compromise? If navigating heterosexualism as a heterosexual is so painful, how do those who aren’t fare?

Not well.

An important, implicit aspect of misogynistic socialization is that it carries with it an unspoken edict of mandatory heterosexuality. There is not, at any point in a woman’s life, an interrogation of her own desires, her own sexuality or identity as something that can exist independent of men and men’s desires. Whether she is a lesbian, an asexual, a bisexual who prefers women or even a heterosexual woman who doesn’t favor a particular man—her own feelings, opinions and wants in the matter are considered secondary to those of the man trying to claim her. Irrespective of the particulars of the woman’s condition, a forced marriage will go through, a sexual assault will be rationalized and forgiven, rejection will be demonized, frigidity punished and a man’s claim over her body and subjugated labor held paramount over her own claim to autonomy, to personhood. To be woman means to be men’s, to be consigned to the ownership of another at the very moment of birth.

Not only is this true in adulthood, it is the context that informs and shapes all of girlhood as well. Many cultures do not even consider lesbianism as extant, or have a word to describe it, because everything a woman is or is meant to be is oriented around male ownership. Some go so far as to deny the possibility of romance and sexuality between women as possible at all, describing such emotions between women as intense kinship and even ‘natural’ in its own right, as a ‘precursor’ or ‘practice’ for true, heterosexual romance after ‘maturity’. Lesbianism thus is both erased and infantilized, subsumed into the homoerotic realm of women’s friendship, solidifying the inability of women to be in sexual relationships with each other by reinforcing the inability of a woman to claim another; they are both considered unclaimed by men-in-waiting.

Despite these barriers both cultural and conceptual, where women who defy heterosexuality are granted the burden of having to imagine such an existence from whole cloth, women have managed to exist with each other and outside the prying claws of men’s ownership. Such existences, once actuated, have also been harshly punished if discovered and expunged from the historical record as part of the effort to keeping it obscured, unnamed, and out of the realm of the real.

Rape is a tool often deployed to mandate patriarchal compliance, and I think we need not linger more on the topic. Readers may find some value in punching a nearby cushion and then continuing.

Given the impossibility of existing autonomously as a woman historically, it is perhaps no surprise that people faced with the prospect of their biology consigning them to a lifetime of reproductive and sexual servitude did in many instances resort to masking their gender as best as they could manage. In the absence of modern medical advancements such as hormone replacement therapy, it is unclear whether any particular instance of cross-dressing can conclusively be regarded a trans man or a butch lesbian, especially given that such delineations were not as explicit historically (though of course in some cases, we have the individuals’ own recorded thoughts on the matter of how they would prefer to be regarded even privately, which clarifies the issue somewhat). What we can conclusively say is that even prior to the possibility of medical intervention, individuals have attempted to transcend their biodestiny and leave behind the fetters of womanhood, whether by garb or demeanor, though of course very few were given the opportunity to even make the attempt.

We can thus see that in aggregate, regardless of how those marked for womanhood at birth attempt to dissociate from the most pernicious aspects of that marking, whether they are heterosexuals who seek a modicum of independence or lesbians who seek a total break from gendering and man-centric existence, patriarchy intends to confine and repurpose them all to their singular permitted role under its violent regime, that of the reproducer, the birther, the broodmare, the doting wife, nurturing mother, subjugated woman. This is the totalizing violence that Adrienne Rich called compulsory heterosexuality, the imperative embedded into everything from our cultural messaging to socio-economic structures. The identity of the individual and their self-actualization becomes irrelevant: straight, bi, lesbian, ace, non-binary, trans, none of it matters to the patriarchal order. Whether such an individual has a uterus or not, is even capable of bearing children or not, the logics still apply and their existence is still collapsed into the forced labor of womanhood, the caring for all others besides herself or themself.

Additionally, this remains the biggest axis of delegitimization and oppression for trans men well into the modern era. The dearth of research in the sphere of reproductive health juts painfully into trans men’s healthcare as well, compounding the issue of insufficient research into trans people’s bodies with the thorough, inescapable gendering of all reproductive and natal care. When every aspect of medicine related to the uterus is gated off as “women’s health”, trans men face constant reminders from both the field and the staff inhabiting it that their gendered past will always haunt them. Hysterectomies are difficult to acquire and guidance for those who do want to bear children is sparse, making every aspect of navigating this feminized labyrinth a thoroughly gendered nightmare.

Homophobia and transphobia towards those coerced into the category of the ‘female sex’ is, in every particularity, undergirded by the general principle of treating the ‘lapsed woman’ like a potential womb to reclaim. ‘Woman’s’ social construction strives to orient her towards this singular purpose, prunes every other possibility from the branching paths of her life and tallies up the sum of her worth as nothing more or less than her ability to birth. Should a woman fail this singular imperative, should she fall short of the respectable ideal of male-owned broodmare, she becomes something … lesser. Something more abject than abject, reviled on top of being subjugated, her entire being subsumed into the conceptualized fallowness of bad soil, the charred and lifeless expanses of inhospitable wastes … barren. She becomes, in a sense, reduced to a subset of a subset, more incomplete than even the incomplete man that is ‘woman’, morphing into a thing that only has sexual worth, a servile robot that is only as good as the labor—domestic, uncompensated, unvalorized—that can be extracted from her. Every nominal protection that being a man’s private property could possibly extend to her is forever revoked, unless she can somehow grovel sufficiently to make up for her gestational deficiencies.

Readers might do well to put a pin in this paragraph, to keep it in the back of their minds. We’ll have to return to it later.

Thorough as this regime is with regards to its colonized subjects, one aspect we must also contend with is the regime’s enforcers, those who deploy its violences most regularly and seek to extract the most benefits from upholding it. As it so happens, the wages of patriarchy are not always sufficient to keep its strongest soldiers in line, necessitating the use of lateral as well as vertical violence to maintain order, with desertion meriting particularly severe disciplinary action. For compulsory heterosexuality is a regulation that even men are expected to honor, and even though we do not often conceptualize it as ‘constraining’ men in the same way, given that they are the ones extracting reproductive value from the patriarchal subjects they oversee, in some cases it makes sense to do so. Such as the cases where they do not desire the role of warden over a woman’s autonomy at all.

A fascinating quirk of a misogynistic society is how well it lends itself to homoeroticism, to the reserving of men’s admiration, camaraderie, adoration, respect, affection and in some senses, love, solely for other men. The depersonalization of women, the denial of their capacity to think and feel ‘on the same level’ as the elevated, intellectual, reasoning and ideating Man, also gates the ability for men to truly empathize and engage with women as they do with other men. Men romanticize other men, romanticize the notion of brotherhood and comradeship with their male companions, often ritualized in violent institutions such as the military, or rooted in the petty interpersonal violences of hazing, roughhousing, being intimate with blood and sweat if not spit and cum. It is only logical, consequential—natural, even—for some men to take this innate homoeroticism of misogynistic society to its natural conclusion.

Patriarchy, however, as male-supremacist as it may be, is ultimately founded on reproductive logics. Men may love other men but they must fuck women, must maintain and naturalize the patriarchal order or else risk exposing the farce. Some may still find some refuge in masculinity, in the aesthetics and performance of maleness even while abandoning the function, and indeed some societies have allowed men to retain their male essence so long as they could still be men, still abhor femininity and maintain the social boundary between themselves and essentialized ‘womanhood’. Of course, this has necessitated that their counterpart be ‘unmanned’ instead, having the proximity to ‘womanhood’ quite literally thrust upon them, upholding the gendering of intercourse itself and patriarchy’s blunt, forceful, violent conceptions of sexual relations between two people. If one is, fairly, moved to object that homosexual relations could never mirror heterosexualism, one might have to consider that the nomenclature of top and bottom with regards to sexual roles is perhaps unintentionally revealing in that regard.

Such an unmanned man is a deserter, an aberration that has more wholly given up his claim to manhood’s core tenets, one whose state illustrates a core truth about patriarchal gender construction: that gender has verticality but not upward mobility. Gendered oppression can be intensified but hardly ever alleviated, an ordinance to execute that can be failed in many ways. While the rubric of gendered performance can and has shifted with time and culture, it has also always been narrowly-defined, with definitions particularly prone to contraction in reactionary times. There have been times when all homosexual men have been unmanned, and no periods where none of them were.

Patriarchy, then, is akin to the most stringent of regimes, the harshest of occupations, rigorously segregating citizen from slave on pain of treason. It is much easier to be cast out of its citadels than it is to breach the walls of the metropole, easier to have one’s citizenship revoked than to find a feasible path to naturalization. This is the terror that lurks at the heart of every imperial citizen, every settler on contested lands: the conditionality of their status, which is dependent entirely on how strenuously they fight for their flag. No matter how aggrandizing patriarchy is, no matter how jealously it reserves the qualities of true intellect, valor, strength, virility and sovereignty for men, those are also standards that can be fallen short of and cease applying to a man at the barest suspicion of inadequate ideological fealty.

That is what it truly means for gender to be socially constructed, for our gendered behaviors to be socialized and taught and constantly graded. The gender conservative would have you believe that this is a natural system, a mundane and banal and even drolly simplistic one, blunt in the way all conservative ideals tend to be: a mere division of humanity into ‘man’ and ‘woman’ based on trivially-observed sex characteristics, an uncontested binary of human expression and existence. While I do not disagree that there is a binary that lurks at the heart of gender relations, it is very much not a biologically-ordained one.

It is not rooted in the vulgar materialism of a finite set of sexed features, but the ideological determinants of who is allowed to be master of their own destiny and who must be indentured to them, who is deemed to have worth and who is deemed to be worthless. It is about loyalty to a regime, participation in its everyday violence, conformity to its edicts and unwavering belief in its glory. The binary is one of colonizer and colonized, of naturalized and second-class citizen, of the honored subject and the reviled object.

The binary is the socially-constructed division between who is considered human, and who is not.

Gender, or gendering, rather, can itself be considered a process of violence, a process that is innately othering, dehumanizing and lessening. ‘Man’ and ‘mankind’ are deployed often as synonymous with humanity, with human existence, not because ‘man’ is considered the ‘default’ state of a human, but the only state, the only state that matters. ‘Man’ and ‘human’ are synonyms; ‘human’ and ‘woman’ are arguably antagonistically defined. To gender a person is to un-person them, to make them something lesser than a man, whether that’s potential male property or a failed example of manhood, a state that no person would ever wish to be reduced to.

… Though of course, that begs the question.

What if someone did?

It defies all sense, does it not? Logically, one can see clearly why some lesbians and gay and trans men have historically donned the cloak of masculinity, have attempted to shield themselves from the gendering process by emulating those not subjected to it. No one, no person would ever dream of doing the inverse, of emulating the abject, of actually, actively, sincerely trying to be a woman. It goes against all reason, all common patriarchal understanding! Why would anyone attempt to inhabit the positionality of the degraded, occupy the position of the derided, willingly cast themselves down from the upper echelons of the castes to cavort about as one of the untouchables? It is profane, it is BLASPHEMY, it is PERVERSE and VULGAR and UNNATURAL!!!!

NO ONE, no thing that can be considered a reasonable, sane person, a thinking, intelligent being worthy of being considered human, would ever do such a thing.

And if they did?

If they DARED to?

They would be dealt with. Oh, they would have to be dealt with.