One of my field ‘sites’ is r/ftm. This post is typical in its discussion of sexism, feminism, and the outright denial any of these experiences apply: "I am so privileged to be a man (albeit trans) who doesn’t have to worry about being dismissed for being a woman. I won’t have to face misogyny in whatever study or career I want to pursue... TL;DR... feminism and equality for women is good, but stop directing it towards me, I’m not a woman."
Other members respond: "Statements can be simultaneously true and also invalidating! It’s true that women are underrepresented as pilots. It’s also true that there was a major earthquake in Istanbul a few years back. Neither is particularly relevant to your ambition to become a pilot!"
And: "This reminds me about how 'girl power' statements directed at me made me feel uncomfortable when I was a kid. I didn't even know I was trans back then."
I want to say something about this. Because I remember being wrongfooted by 'girl power' cheerleading, too. As an elementary schooler in the 1990s, the profusion of 'girl power'/'girls can rock at math and science!' introduced the idea that girls weren't good at math and science—an idea that had never occurred to me, and frankly would probably never have occurred to me because it had no basis in my own experience of loving science and math, a love of learning had nothing to do with being a girl or a boy but with being human, a child, curious about everything.
The insistence on 'girl power' made me cringe because it suggested we didn't have any. Because it was almost invariably bubble-gum pink and 'sassy.' Because it was—unlike science and math—utterly without substance, a mere articulation.
It wasn't lost on me that nobody celebrated 'boy power,' that no one reassured boys—before they'd encountered a single hurdle or expressed the slightest hesitation!—that they could do math or science or anything else.
Persist in your independence, your serious-mindedness, your love of math and science, and you get treated as an exceptional girl. An honorary boy, in other words. Adults will praise you for being "not like other girls." By which they mean: for not cutting off your own head.
"Not like other girls" becomes the highest possible compliment, a mark of distinction, worn proudly. Until puberty arrives and your body turns on you, making a mockery of your pretensions. Then it turns out you're just like other girls.
You bleed like they do. Your body goes from being an instrument of your will to an unreliable adversary. The future you never wanted starts to write itself on your flesh, softening all your hard lines.
I refuse to believe that the resistance and horror so many girls feel at these checks on their normal human curiosity and these upheavals in their normal female development means they're really boys. It only means they live and breathe and that, living and breathing, they inevitably chafe against a world that still struggles to see girls as individuals, not paper dolls ('Dress her up in a lab coat! Girls can be scientists, too!')
Feeling uncomfortable with a gratuitously gendered world that puts girls in boxes and then bedazzles the packaging... this isn't a sign you're trans. It's a sign we've got issues as a culture, not so much with letting boys be boys and girls be girls but letting kids be kids.
I so agree. I hate the condescension of the terms only females are called, like "sassy," as you said, or "feisty." Stop all oppression of girls and women and all the propaganda lauding males, and that would help stop girls from feeling they must not be girls. ALL females have "body dysphoria," which is why most try to alter themselves, even to death.
Absolutely, perfectly spot on.