The infantilisation of trans men
Over the last three years in the US and the UK a series of detransitioners have been promoted by right wing news sources attempting to discredit trans healthcare. The majority of these have been cis women who stepped back from being trans men often after having top surgery and taking testosterone. Chloe Cole and Keira Bell are the most prominent of these, both held up as helpless women exploited by the trans medical industrial complex. It is telling in the narrative that neither are given agency over their gender identity, it is always the medical profession that has railroaded them both through their surgeries and hormones. This issue of agency and desire to protect fragile women from the possibility that they may indeed be men suffuses the public narrative surrounding trans men, to the point that trans men are treated as women in need of protection from themselves.
JK Rowling, Piers Morgan, and Andrew Neil in the UK, and many right-wing commentators in the US have fixated on this notion that the transes are corrupting teenage girls, that somehow knowing you are male is an act of patriarchal warfare against girl’s bodies. Much as the notion of trans panic flows from the fear of the dick, trans men are treated as subverted all that is sacred and holy about maidenhood and womanhood. To be woman is to know your place, to be desirable, available, breedable to masses of men who theoretically may want to bed and wed you. Lesbians have long felt the semantic sting of subverting womanhood, and trans men as far back as the 18th century have been punished for living as their authentic selves.
You read any article on the Daily Wire, Daily Mail, Fox News et al relating to trans men, trans surgery, and teenage transitioners and Chloe Cole is used as the prime piece of evidence against trans healthcare. Her presence at hearings has amplified the narrative to law makers, and her picture-perfect fragility is the counterpoint to all the other trans masculine folk who overwhelming disprove her point. No trans man should ever have to prove his masculinity, yet daily they are getting called girls who have no idea what they are doing to their bodies, their agency stripped by those who wish to make girls into infantilised women at home as broodmares. Even when trans men are shown to be firefighters on 911 Lone Star there is still that nagging doubt that the masculinity is merely an escape from troubled waters.
This pincer movement against trans identities is fuelled by a desire to keep girls in their place. To be a girl is to be an object of desire, a chattel without objective agency, to forever be subject to your male betters. In becoming self-made man society seeks to make that manhood something lesser, where chest scars are freakish and signs of deformity, not a sign of agency over self. The inherent misogyny built into these arguments is not hidden, it is the very foundation anti-trans masculinists use to tear down trans men.
None of this is new. Jeanne D’arc was burnt at the stake for transcending the masculine world, her crime written in the bible from the Bronze Age. There is this nagging narrative tug of history every time a trans man is hauled before the court or splashed across the papers, namely that he is really just playing acting and that really all she wants to do is go back to petticoats and serve a man. Penance is only served once she has debased herself back to the lesser thing she was assigned at birth. He is erased, his autonomy and agency irrelevant. This is the narrative that plays out again and again when Chloe Cole and Keira Bell are weaponised by the right.
When we talk about trans women being women there is an inherent understanding that womanhood is constructed as each sees fit. In saying trans men are men, while there is the same inherent object truth, there is also a fight back against the drive to infantilise them. Trans women are a threat to womanhood due to the phallus and possibility of sexual violence; trans men are the manifestation of the stripping away of womanhood, removal of breasts, growing of muscle, hardening of features, and possibility of removal of womb, the very centre of “virtue”. Trans men are treated as wilfully disregarding all things sacred in the pursuit of error. A logical fallacy in the objective truth of immutable sex. This is the battle all trans men face, and both Cole and Bell are fuelling this conflict.
Trans men are men, full stop. This is not a matter of objective or subjective facts. It is a matter of personal understanding. Regardless of culture, society, or country, trans men’s masculinity is self-defined and made in the fullness of self-understanding. In infantilizing trans men we strip them of autonomy, of the ability to grow and make mistakes, and ultimately of living their best selves. This right-wing warfare against their identities is designed to force these men back into petticoats, to serve men, and objectively make them lesser than their totality. This battle is different to trans women, yet it requires all the trans community to push back against. Trans men are adults in the fullness of themselves. Full stop.
