So much of “trans critical” ideology just ends up being really reactionary and regressive. Well, I say “ends up”, but that’s how it starts. It’s literally just bog standard patriarchy, not even patriarchy 2.0. It’s unexamined cisnormativity.

But the position it leads to people adopting… you get people who are supposedly gender abolitionists and who will yell until they’re blue in the face about how trans existence reifies gender as innate acting like gender IS innate. It turns people into biological essentialists. They’ll decry biological essentialism as a philosophy while espousing biological essentialist ideals.

And then there’s this idea…

Okay. I saw a trans critical post tackling the idea that trans women grow up with male privilege but don’t have it any more (which isn’t how I’d phrase it, but in the story being told, is how a trans woman phrased it), and the trans critical response was “but growing up with it IS the privilege”.

And it’s like… really?

That’s what you think “male privilege” means?

There aren’t structures in society that affect how people are treated as men or women, it’s all… men are more confident because teachers pay more positive attention to boys, and THEREFORE men get better paying jobs and have their rights as human beings respected?

Trans critical ideology literally states that the only source of societal advantage for men is because they’re more assertive.

If that argument sounds familiar to you, it’s because it’s a bog standard defense of male privilege.

Contrary to the fictional trans critical narrative about us, I don’t know a single trans woman who actually denies that our experiences growing up are different from cis women. I don’t know a single trans woman who actually denies that having a trans childhood instead of a cis childhood affects us as adults. But it’s impossible to have a nuanced discussion about that among ourselves (much less with others/in public) when there are people who are only interested in the existence of these differences as a reason to discredit our existence, or who want to employ underpants gnome logic in order to conclude “…AND THEREFORE, MEN.”

And note to trans-critical trans women: you’re doing their work when you say “…AND THEREFORE, MALE.” In the English language, “male” is among other things an adjective that refers to men. Asserting that you are male but not a man is semantically shaky ground. You could attach caveats that you’re speaking in a particular narrow biological sense, but I’ve never seen a trans critical trans person do this. It seems like a prerequisite of being trans critical is to accept the reductive and reactionary viewpoint that “male” and “female” only have one definition and use. Which, again, is just standard Patriarchy.

It is to the advantage of the existing status quo and the current dominant social construction of gender to pretend that sex is as starkly simple as possible, that it is completely binary, and that it is immutable.

Basically, the patriarchal construction of gender is that it doesn’t exist but sex does and sex is overwhelmingly important. And if that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s identical to the flavor of gender abolition favored by trans critical trans women and radical feminists.