There was a chat today where the term "socialized male" or "male socialization" came up quite innocently and it was apparent that it's not obvious the way that phrasing often hurts trans women (I'm going to talk about transfem experience here, transmasc folks experience similar but also notably different violence from terms like "female socialization"). It's a phrasing that is used by TERFs to say that our experiences of being treated like boys, either instead of or in conjunction with our bodies, make us in some way immutably male and therefore dangerous and should not be allowed into women's spaces or communities.

It's a tempting argument. Certainly as closeted trans girls we're treated as boys and given certain messages and opportunities, often encouraged and uplifted in ways that cis girls aren't, and the violence of gendered socialization that is inflicted on us is a masculine one that demands that we kill the emotional relational living hearts of ourselves to achieve strength and dominance, in contrast to the various violences of feminine socialization that crushes strength and demands submission and the performance of emotional labor from cis girls and closeted trans boys.

Trans women's experiences are different to those of cis women, but then cis womens' experiences are also profoundly different from one another as are trans womens'. Trans womanhood is different to cis womanhood, but it is still womanhood which itself is wildly different from person to person. But TERFs wield "male socialized" as a weapon. They imagine these experiences as a mechanical process, unerringly and irreversibly changing a person from one thing into another form. In the way that "mechanization" takes something and makes it mechanical, and "urbanized" takes a place and makes it urban, they imagine "male socialized" takes something (someone) and makes it(them) male, or masculine in some fundamental social sense. They imply with their past tense that this process is successful, that that treatment, those experiences do always have that same effect.

For me I certainly had those experiences, was treated in those ways, was offered those opportunities, and some of them landed. The academic and youth leadership opportunities I was offered were almost certainly more easily accessible to me than they were to my cis peers. I was certainly not actively told to make myself smaller, to clip my own wings in the way they experienced from the social systems around us. But being a trans kid is weird. It pulls you slightly out of one line of fire and slightly into another. Something in you knows that you're not what they think you are. So what they say you should be often doesn't quite hit, their demands somehow don't quite apply. Furthermore if part of you knows what you are is closer to the girls around you, then you do get struck by some of the crossfire telling them what they should and should not be. So you end up experiencing a weird mishmash of violences from both sides, some hitting and some missing from both directions. Furthermore you experience an extra third violence of a kind of uniquely trans socialization. We often somehow know we don't, can't, and maybe will never be able to fit into the demands being made of us from either side, which naturally fucks us up in a whole other way.

The result is that what we are isn't shaped by those various experiences and pressures from different sides in the same way as our cis peers of either gender, but in some weird other way. The machine doesn't make us into what it intends, but just bends and bruises us into something else all together.

So in this way the unconditional "socialized/socialization" phrasing feels like it submits to the TERF idea that we are what they imagine we were made into by the successful or inevitable success of that process. I don't really have a better phrasing to talk about having been subjected to those forces without being changed by them in the same ways as our cis brothers and sisters, instead having this different, profoundly trans experience. It's frustrating as hell that TERFs have used that language so often that their implication feels almost hardcoded in phrasing that otherwise might not include it. Instead I'm left using complex phrasing like "I was treated like a boy growing up" which still feels like it never properly encompasses the profound weirdness of it all. The best terminology I can come up with to talk about the experience that doesn't imply that it was a successful process is "training". I was trained male. But I failed the exam.