(I have an ask sitting in my box about internalized misogyny I’ve been meaning to answer, but this should provide a sort-of part of an answer to it.)



A question a lot of transgender female people ask, as well as female gender questioning people, is “am I trans out of internalized misogyny?” It is probably one of the top questions that women who stopped seeing themselves as transgender get (i.e. “how do I know if I’m trans, really trans, or this is just internalized misogyny?”) and it’s probably the most big, bad bogeywoman question that haunts the general transmasculine community. A lot of trans men spend considerable energy fighting off the idea that they “have” internalized misogyny or that it has anything to do with their identification with a non-woman gender, their alienation from their body, or their feeling compelled to transition. You will hear trans men and other transmasculine people pre-emptively claim that they “have nothing against women”, that if they were a woman “it would be fine” but they “just aren’t”, that they “love and support women” and think “women are great” but they just, somehow, somewhere, for some reason, have some difference between themselves and female people who happen to be women. Quantifying this difference is notoriously hard– the people most invested in appearing non-misogynistic refer to language about personal identities, some refer to scientific claims about “brain sex” or “body maps”, and some just refer to rejection of stereotypes surrounding womanhood– and few people feel solid and secure in their reasons for considering themselves male or non-woman when seriously questioned. Most end the conversation with the exhortation that they need not justify their identities or reasons for transition, and that asking for one is a form of transphobia.



For this reason, detransitioned women are commonly stereotyped as women who merely “mistook themselves” for being trans because of internalized misogyny (even though few women went a fully informed consent treatment route; most were formally diagnosed with gender dysphoria or GID, sometimes at multiple assessments, and given transitional medical care by multiple health care providers) and that this explains the reason that they detransitioned: they stopped transition and/or identifying as transgender because it could not suit them or fix their issues. They were never “actually trans”. Unlike female people who are “actually trans”, those who are seemingly dissatisfied with their female characteristics for reasons having nothing to do with internalized misogyny, detransitioned women as well as women who desist from transgender identity rejected their female bodies and womanhood because it was unpleasant to be the target of sexism, or perhaps because they were even jealous enough to wish to usurp male privileges and powers. This explanation for detransitioned women’s detransitions and female desistance– one that only few reconciling women actually accept about the difference between them and female people who remain transgender identified or who affirm their decision to transition– is exacerbated by the fact that most detransitioned and desisting women will freely discuss the effects of misogyny on their lives and the decisions they made, and they explicitly name it as misogyny, whereas female people who presently see themselves as transgender rarely do. What many people do not realize is that this difference includes most detransitioned and desisting women prior to their decision to reconcile, and that these women usually did not represent to themselves their transgender identity and/or transitions as “because of misogyny” in the way they do now. Many women who cease seeing themselves as not-female struggle to integrate their transgender-identified previous selves with their current selves precisely because their self-narratives were dramatically different; they must learn to reinterpret their previous, very strident assertions about their experiences as well as the effects that these beliefs had on their life with a full appreciation of their life history and trajectory that they did not have at the time of being transgender.



Telling a woman that her experiences and life choices are “just because of internalized misogyny” is often a dismissive, sometimes frustrated reply leveled at women who make choices influenced by patriarchal threats and demands that limit the scope of her life. You sometimes hear it between women, some of whom level this at other women because they do not understand the bargains another woman has made and believe that their personal bargains are better, some of whom level it at other women who are making choices that hurt women directly or make it more difficult to resist pressures that hurt her in particular. Accusing another female person of “just having internalized misogyny” is used in a similar dismissive way in transmasculine communities, where trans men or others sometimes vilify the identities or choices of trans AFABs with less stable narratives than themselves, or whose justification for transition or personal choices seem to threaten the legitimacy of their own (either to themselves, other trans people, or to those people who would permit them access to transition resources or recognize them as non-female).



One of the most important things people miss about the idea of internalized misogyny is that it is an essential part of misogyny proper. There is a popular, liberal feminist conception of the effects and mechanisms of misogyny that acts as if “misogyny” is an act perpetrated against women, which is separable from the personal act of “taking in” its effects. If you combine this with the individualistic, folk-popular psychology idea floating around Western cultures– particularly in United States consumer culture, but also psychiatry and general resources for self-improvement, from your parents to your guidance counselor the military to Rick Warren to The Secret– that the effects of your environment, your social group, and other persons are a different entity entirely than your self-contained experiential-agency apparatus, and that you have a choice to let in or not certain messages as well as how to react to them, you get the horrid concept that socialization is not real and that misogyny cannot affect you so long as you never “internalize” it. More postmodernist interpretations of transgender identity cite this as proof of whether a trans woman counts as a woman or a trans man is a man; all people internally rejected or accepted misogyny or male privilege according to their “actual gender”. This looks at first to integrate misogyny with internalized misogyny (since to have gone through misogyny, you must have internalized misogyny) but it is actually dependent on a way of thinking about oppression that separates acts which constitute misogyny (such as differential treatment of girl and boy children, or sexual violence against female people) from its effects on a human being undergoing these acts. A person may or may not be immune to the effect of let’s say, witnessing a close girl friend getting sexually harassed walking back to her home from school, depending on how they “internalize” it.



This conception of internalized misogyny is inherently threatening to female people identifying as transgender, because it would make illegitimate their claim to not being female. If they internalized misogyny, it must mean that they chose in some way to take it in, or that at the time it affected them “appropriately”. Hence the term “misdirected misogyny” is used in some circles to explain what trans men and other trans females experienced as children or as non-passing transmasculine people; misogynistic behavior was directed at them in some way but it was not something they experience as “hitting the mark”. The acts happened toward them or around them but they did not internalize it or take it up in their self-narrative or self-conception. It was misogyny, but not internalized misogyny. Under this sort of logic, having internalized misogyny implies indirectly or directly you are a woman.



Women-identified female people, whether coming out of transgender identity or not, often feel tremendous guilt for “internalizing misogyny”, because under this conception of misogyny it was a choice or at least not inevitable that they “take in” misogynistic messages. While they experienced misogynistic acts, they did not need to experience them or their implications about the worth of female people as part of their self-conception, and they certainly are personally responsible for whether or not they applied these implications and learned behavior patterns to their relationships with other female people. This guilt is often so crushing that female people struggling with their gender identity will delay or avoid reconciliation with existing as female because personally acknowledging the history of being female in this world (experiencing misogyny) comes with the idea that they are now responsible for feeling and acting upon its effects (they are responsible for internalizing it). This monstrous shame complex is in part behind identities like “demigirl” and “woman-aligned nonbinary AFAB”, and explains a lot of the complicated, often apologetic and meandering storytelling trans men who refuse to disavow that they experienced misogyny often utilize.



The fact of the matter is that this is not actually a good model for how misogyny or internalized misogyny works, it is not a good model for understanding how female people can heal from the effects of misogyny, it is not a good model for understanding why some female people are transgender and some are not, or why some female people affirm their transitions and some detransition, and it is not a good model for understanding how female people can make better choices about relating to other female people given that they live in a world that devalues them extensively. Misogyny is a hierarchical relationship between male and female people– directly, between individual men and women, and at a group level with very complicated effects on relationships between people of every gender– where female people are exploited. “Internalized misogyny” is best understood as the name for the resulting patterns of emotion, thinking, and behavior of female people under misogynistic conditions. It includes behavior female people have towards male people, female people have towards other female people, and female people have towards themselves. No female person is uniquely free of internalized misogyny, although some female people after great amount of work can limit or contain patterns of behavior that replicate or continue the exploitation of female people, including themselves. Limiting internalized misogyny always means limiting exposure to misogyny in various ways. Some female people only have control over what misogyny they perpetrate on themselves, and focus on limiting practices like restricting their eating, insulting their appearance, or striving to be feminine. Some female people have more control over their circumstances and can limit the harmful effects of male domination on their lives, either by setting boundaries with men, forming strong solidarity bonds with other female people, or avoiding men as much as possible.



A woman continually exposed to the cruelest of misogyny will have an exceedingly hard time even coming to know she has enough agency to attempt to escape or limit it; this is the deepest form of internalized misogyny, which is the belief that the subjugation of female people is a necessary feature of the world, that worlds where it does not exist are impossible or somehow wrong or incomplete. Internalized misogyny does not just coincidentally happen as a result of misogynistic acts, either because of the personal character weaknesses or deservedness of particular female people (as the individual liberal model implies). Misogyny is built to inculcate these patterns of thoughts, emotions, and behaviors in female people because it facilitates their exploitation. “Internalized misogyny” is simply the features of misogyny that cause female people to comply with their own subjugation in their own self-interest because their survival is continually held hostage in this scheme. While female people make choices and can be held responsible to some degree for their particular methods they use to ensure their survival, especially if they are cognizant that they are making choices that will enhance their chances of survival but will harm other female people in the process, female people are not responsible for being subject to exploitation in general, nor the fact that they maintain a will to live and preserve their integrity in the face of it. The liberal model of internalized misogyny, perpetuated by naive feminists and transgender activists, faults female people for their selfishness and arrogance for daring to have any self-interest or desire for self-preservation at all. This is a form of misogyny in itself, because it asks female people to make their exploitation complete through negating their personhood entirely.



I want to note that I try my very hardest when I discuss internalized misogyny or other concepts to delete from my work the idea that female people are personally responsible for the effects of being subject to misogyny, and that they are doing something morally negligent or wrong for attempting to survive. When I say that female people consider themselves transgender because of internalized misogyny, I try to acknowledge three things: that transgender female people are in the same boat as the rest of us, that they are trying to survive like hell, and that they recognize and reject their own exploitation through finding a way to survive in a world shaped/distorted by the same exploitation. This is what I mean by saying gender dysphoria is continuous with other female experiences, by knitting the interactions of transgender female people with medical transition technology together with other forms of female body modification, by recognizing trans men as siblings to gender non-conforming women, by talking so much about misogyny in my life and the lives of the female people I know who once or still live as transgender.



I have been criticized by readers for making female people feel personally responsible for “not loving their body”, for letting women down or betraying women or breaking female solidarity, for their feelings of self-hatred or self-alienation, for having the wrong conception of themselves or their life. I don’t think this is an unfair criticism– speaking this way without intense clarification in a world-context where female people are held personally responsible for these things as if they are ethical failures or intrinsic character faults can serve to uphold these ideas, and I think it is what is behind the genuine pain transgender female people feel when detransition and desistance stories are discussed in public forums. I try to clarify where I can, and hope that this better explains where I am coming from, and hope I can be responsible for the times I have genuinely put these ideas on others. By speaking about my life and my decisions, I hope to create a world where you can begin to reclaim your ability to reject your exploitation more thoughtfully and with careful consideration of your values, to gain a clearer understanding of what pushes and pulls you and why you are here and where you will go forward, now . You already are fighting; I wish some rest to you before you regather and fight some more.