Transmisogyny and the Myth of Trans Women's "Male Privilege"

One of the more persistent claims in contemporary feminist debate is that trans women, having been assigned male at birth, possessed or benefited from "male privilege" at some point in their lives, and that this prior privilege either disqualifies them from women's spaces or makes their inclusion in feminism politically suspect.

The argument runs through a specific radical-feminist lineage, from Janice Raymond's 1979 The Transsexual Empire to Sheila Jeffreys' Gender Hurts (2014) and on to contemporary "gender-critical" writers. Its rhetorical force comes from borrowing feminism's own analytical vocabulary, privilege and socialization and structural power, and turning that vocabulary against trans women.

This claim is wrong about how the relevant social dynamics actually function. The trans studies scholarship of Julia Serano, Talia Mae Bettcher, Sandy Stone, Susan Stryker, Emi Koyama, Viviane Namaste, and C. Riley Snorton, together with social scientific research on the policing of childhood gender nonconformity and on minority stress, shows that "male privilege" mischaracterizes the lives of trans women in three structurally distinct ways.

It conflates conditional, revocable, costly social passing with durable structural privilege. It ignores the documented mechanisms by which assigned-male feminine and gender variant children are punished out of any straightforward access to masculine status. And in practice it works as a gatekeeping device, policing the boundaries of "real" womanhood much as earlier waves of feminism policed those boundaries against women of color, working-class women, and lesbians.

The term transmisogyny was coined by the biologist and trans theorist Julia Serano in Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (Seal Press, 2007). Serano's core argument is that the hostility directed at trans women is not adequately captured by the general category "transphobia," because it sits at the intersection of two distinct sexisms. Traditional sexism is the belief that maleness and masculinity are superior to femaleness and femininity. Oppositional sexism is the belief that male and female are rigid, mutually exclusive categories.

Trans women violate both at once. They are assigned-male individuals who claim womanhood, which violates oppositional sexism, and in doing so they embrace a femininity the culture codes as inferior, which activates traditional sexism. Their existence destabilizes the patriarchal premise that masculinity is the desirable default no rational person would abandon.

This is why transmisogyny operates asymmetrically with transphobia directed at trans men. A misogynist culture can read trans men's transitions as "upward" movement toward the more valued category, and tends to meet them with a mixture of erasure and condescension rather than the lurid sexualization, fetishization, and lethal violence directed at trans women.

Trans men are not absent from transphobic violence, but the cultural pattern differs. Trans women are scapegoated as feminine, because feminine, and for being feminine in a body the culture insists is male.

Later scholars developed this analysis. The philosopher Talia Mae Bettcher, in "Evil Deceivers and Make-Believers: On Transphobic Violence and the Politics of Illusion" (Hypatia, 2007) and in her recent Beyond Personhood (2024), describes what she calls reality enforcement: a structural mechanism in which the public gender presentation of trans people is treated as a claim about private "intimate appearance," meaning genital status, so that any divergence between the two is coded as either fraud, the "evil deceiver," or pathetic pretense, the "make-believer."

Trans women are caught in a double bind. Passing exposes them to the deceiver charge; not passing exposes them to the pretender charge. Black feminist and trans-of-color writers, notably Moya Bailey and, in a different register, C. Riley Snorton in Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (2017), extend the concept through transmisogynoir, the specific compounding of transmisogyny with anti-Black misogyny. Susan Stryker's Transgender History (2008) and Viviane Namaste's Invisible Lives (2000) ground these conceptual moves in the material conditions, housing and employment and health care and policing, that produce dramatic disparities for trans women, and especially trans women of color.

The point of "transmisogyny" as a term is that single-axis analyses fail. A feminism that treats trans women's oppression as merely "transphobia" misses the misogyny. A feminism that treats their oppression as merely a variant of women's oppression misses the specifically anti-trans dimension. The concept names the joint where the two meet.

The strongest version of the trans exclusionary claim runs as follows. Gender, on a radical-feminist analysis, is not a private identity but a social caste system, a hierarchical structure that distributes resources, recognition, and bodily safety along lines drawn at birth. Membership in the male caste confers a set of structural advantages, economic and sexual and epistemic and physical, absorbed unconsciously through socialization. These advantages do not require the bearer to want them or to identify with maleness; they accrue automatically by virtue of being read and raised as male. Janice Raymond made the move most baldly in The Transsexual Empire: a man who calls himself a woman, on her account, has not surrendered his privilege but found a more insidious way to use it. On this view, trans women who enter women's organizations bring with them the residue of male formation, the assertiveness and confidence and expectation of being heard, and inevitably reproduce male dominance in those spaces.

Sheila Jeffreys, in Gender Hurts (2014), and contemporary writers in the same lineage refine the argument in several directions. Some maintain the full claim, that trans women retain durable male privilege throughout their lives. Others adopt a softer "male socialization residue" version, in which trans women may not consciously enjoy privilege after transition but the formative years of male upbringing leave behavioral and psychological imprints that affect women's spaces. Still others articulate a conditional or partial version, in which trans women had access to male privilege only when and to the extent they were perceived and treated as male, and may continue to access "passing privilege" when they are not read as trans.

These distinctions matter, and a fair rebuttal has to address each. The strong claim asserts an unconditional, ongoing structural benefit. The middle claim asserts a durable psychological residue. The conditional claim retreats to the more defensible empirical observation that some assigned-male people in some contexts received some male-coded treatment. Only the conditional version has any traction in the actual evidence, and even it does not support the political conclusion, exclusion from women's spaces and denial of feminist solidarity, that all three versions are deployed to license.

The picture of male socialization the privilege-attribution depends on imagines a comfortable, frictionless absorption of male status. The empirical record for gender-nonconforming assigned-male children says the opposite. The landmark longitudinal study by Andrea Roberts and colleagues, drawing on the Growing Up Today Study cohort of more than 10,000 participants ("Childhood Gender Nonconformity, Bullying Victimization, and Depressive Symptoms," Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 2013), found that children in the top decile of childhood gender nonconformity faced sharply elevated risk of bullying, caregiver abuse, and later depression, with boys and heterosexual gender-nonconforming children at particularly elevated risk, and with bullying and abuse accounting for roughly half of the depressive-symptom disparity.

A separate Yale–Harvard review found that gender-nonconforming boys are more likely than girls to be rejected and verbally abused by their parents, and that men who recall being feminine in childhood report higher rates of childhood sexual abuse. The pattern is well-replicated. Assigned-male children who deviate from masculine norms get punished, frequently violently, by peers, parents, teachers, and often their own internalized policing.

The relevance for trans women is direct. Whatever male-coded treatment was extended to them as children was conditional on a performance of masculinity that many of them experienced as agonizing, dissociative, or impossible to sustain. Serano puts the point sharply in her 2022 essay "On 'Male Socialization' and the 'Trans Masc Versus Trans Fem' Discourse": young trans girls tend to experience being treated as male as disorienting and terrifying, not as confidence-building or self-affirming. To call this "privilege" requires a definition of privilege so detached from subjective experience and relational reality that the word loses its analytic purchase.

Feminist privilege analysis, in its serious form, distinguishes between being read as X and being structurally positioned as X. Whiteness, for example, is a structural location that confers durable, inheritable, relational advantages: generational wealth, presumptions of innocence by police, professional networks. This does not make whiteness fixed or unconditional. Its boundaries are historically fluid, as the gradual reclassification of Irish and Italian Americans as white attests, and the protection it offers a person who only contextually reads as white can be withdrawn, sometimes violently, the moment their racial otherness becomes legible.

The point is that while the reading holds, it operates structurally: it shapes wealth, housing, and the way institutions respond to a person across years, not merely in the passing moment. That is the difference between perception and position. A momentary social reading is not yet a structural location; a structural location is a reading that has been sustained long enough, and backed by enough institutions, to compound. When the privilege framework is applied to gender, the same distinction holds.

Male privilege, where it exists, is a position in a relational system, sustained by a network of identifications and recognitions over time. It is durable while it is sustained, it is transmissible across generations, and it does not switch off simply because the bearer dislikes it or disidentifies with the category.

Whatever many trans women received before transition fails these tests in a way that ordinary conditional privilege does not. The conditionality is of a different kind. Racial passing, even when contextual, can still compound structurally for as long as it holds; what trans women had was conditional on concealment, on actively not disclosing the identity that, by their own testimony, was the truth of their experience.

It was revocable instantly upon being read as feminine, gay, or trans, at which point the bearer faced the very violence male privilege is supposed to insulate one from. It was not durable: it ended at transition, and in most cases its psychic preconditions, the dysphoria and dissociation and closeting, made it experientially closer to torture than to advantage.

It was not transmissible, a trans woman's daughter does not inherit her mother's pre-transition male reading. The distinction is not conditional versus unconditional, since almost all privilege is conditional in some respect. It is between a conditionality that still compounds while it lasts and a conditionality that purchases nothing, costs the bearer enormously to maintain, and leaves no residue once it ends. What trans women had access to was, at best, contingent passing, a brittle and costly accommodation rather than a position in a hierarchy.

The minority-stress framework developed by Ilan Meyer ("Prejudice, Social Stress, and Mental Health," Psychological Bulletin, 2003), and adapted to trans populations by Hendricks and Testa (Professional Psychology, 2012), gives empirical content to the qualitative point. Pre-transition trans women are not enjoying a holiday in the male caste.

They are accumulating distal stressors, the discrimination and victimization and family rejection, and proximal stressors, the concealment and internalized stigma and anticipated rejection and vigilance, that together produce the well-documented mental-health disparities, the depression and suicidality and substance use, that follow trans people into adulthood. To call this experience "privilege" inverts the meaning of the word.

This is also where the "male socialization residue" version of the claim breaks down empirically. Socialization is not a one-way transmission of programming. Trans girls and women, often from very early ages, identify with and internalize the messages addressed to women, including the misogyny addressed to women. Serano, Koyama, and others document the ways trans women absorb femininity's devaluation, beauty norms, sexual objectification, and self-policing, often instead of the masculine confidence the privilege claim attributes to them. Serano's stress test for the socialization theory is hard to escape: would those who deploy it accept as a woman an assigned-female person raised forcibly as male into adulthood? Most concede that they would, which exposes that the operative criterion was never socialization at all but birth-assigned biology, dressed in sociological clothing.

The "male privilege" framing also depends on a tacit universalization of a white, middle-class trajectory. Once race and class enter the picture, it changes further. The Human Rights Campaign's annual Epidemic of Violence reports document that since 2013, roughly 84 percent of trans homicide victims in the United States have been people of color, and approximately three-quarters have been Black trans women specifically; Black trans women are killed, on average, about five years younger than non-Black trans women (Halliwell et al., CHPRC, 2024). The 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey found that Black trans respondents experienced poverty at roughly four times the U.S. rate and faced layered exclusion from employment, housing, and health care.

Snorton's Black on Both Sides traces the longer genealogy of these conditions: the racialized production of gender under slavery, the policing of Black gender variance, the erasure of Black trans figures from canonical trans history. Telling a young Black trans woman who has navigated childhood violence, family rejection, street harassment, criminalization, and a homicide risk an order of magnitude above the population average that her life has been shaped by "male privilege" is not analysis. It is a category error sustained only by ignoring her actual social position.

If the empirical case for "male privilege" is so weak, why does the claim persist? Trans-studies scholarship has long argued that its real function is boundary-policing rather than description. Sandy Stone's "The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto" (1987/1991), written as a direct response to Raymond's attack on her at Olivia Records, named the dynamic: Raymond's accusation that Stone enjoyed "male privilege" was the rhetorical instrument by which a particular faction of feminism declared trans women constitutively unable to belong. The structure of the argument, you cannot be one of us because of what you were before you were one of us, is older than the dispute over trans women. Black feminists from Sojourner Truth onward have documented its use against women of color. Working-class feminists have documented its use against poor women.

Lesbian feminists like Adrienne Rich documented its use against lesbians within heterosexual feminism. In each case the move is the same: a feature attributed to a subset of women is treated as evidence that they are not really women, or not really feminists, and the resulting exclusion is presented as a defense of feminism rather than as itself a form of patriarchal sorting.

Emi Koyama's Transfeminist Manifesto (2000) makes the corresponding positive case. Transfeminism insists that a feminism unable to extend solidarity to trans women has misunderstood patriarchy, because patriarchy itself does not distinguish between cis and trans women when it punishes femininity, polices reproductive labor, and enforces gender.

Bettcher's reality-enforcement framework supplies the further point that the "male privilege" charge is itself a form of transmisogyny, it is the policy expression of the demand that trans women be readable, accountable, and ultimately legible as men, on pain of being marked deceivers or pretenders. The gender-critical movement's recent legal and institutional campaigns, the bathroom restrictions and sports bans and healthcare prohibitions, make the gatekeeping function unmistakable. The argument is a tool for stripping civic standing from a specific class of women.

None of this means that every feminist with concerns about specific policy questions is acting in bad faith, and the trans-studies literature does not require that conclusion. It does mean that the foundational empirical premise on which the male-privilege framework rests, that trans women possess or possessed a structural advantage relative to cis women, is not supported by the evidence: not by the data on childhood gender policing, not by the conditional and revocable nature of pre-transition male reading, not by the documented mental-health and violence outcomes for trans women, and not by the intersectional realities of race and class. A feminism that takes its own analytic tools seriously cannot sustain the claim.

Transmisogyny names the joint where misogyny and transphobia meet. The claim that trans women had male privilege is the most sophisticated-sounding form that joint takes when it is dressed in feminist vocabulary, which is exactly why it earns a careful rebuttal rather than a dismissal. The rebuttal is not that trans women have suffered identically to cis women, or that being assigned and read as male in childhood is socially neutral. The rebuttal is that privilege names a structural, durable, relational, and unconditional position, and that what trans women had before transition was none of those things.

It was conditional passing purchased at the cost of dysphoria, closeting, family rupture, bullying, and elevated risk of violence and suicide, and it ended the moment they stopped paying the cost. The dynamics the gender-critical lineage describes as the reproduction of male dominance within feminism are better described by the trans-studies literature it tries to dismiss: the dynamics of a misogyny that intensifies, rather than weakens, when its target is a woman whose femininity the culture insists is a betrayal of an originally assigned male body. The claim of male privilege does not survive contact with how transmisogyny actually works. What survives contact is transmisogyny itself.