Thinking about "socialized as" narratives, and how they're often created by and/or twisted into the cis agenda. Even non-TERFs seem to have this idea that our sense of ourselves and our place in society is based on behavioral conditioning specific to the gender our parents/teachers/friends assumed we were. This can look like a lot of things, but Ember Assington and I had a chat about a specific example of childhood gender socialization: Christian sexual "purity".
No matter how loudly some Christians claim "no sex outside of marriage" applies to boys equally, they aren't fooling anyone here that it's really about controlling girls. Girls need to "save themselves", girls need to dress "modestly", and married women need to suddenly do a 180 and become sexually available (but on *his* terms).
Ember and I both got a heavy dose of this growing up. We both tried to peform to the best of our abilities, and we both knew which gender role everyone expected us to fulfill. But we didn't internalize those gendered messages they were attempting to target us with, not really.
I never really believed I had sinned when I had sex before marriage. It was fun! I was glad to finally express myself sexually. I knew I had to play "virgin" still, and yes, that in itself is oppression. However, I wasn't dealing with any guilt or shame because I was incapable of feeling like it really applied to me as a non-girl.
Ember's experience was, sadly, the inverse. All the "male socialization" in the world won't give a non-boy feelings of entitlement to girl's bodies or a sense of sexual autonomy. They instead deeply struggled with guilt and shame of "impurity", the natural result of being a girl under Christian patriarchy.
And that's just one aspect of what trans socialization really looks like, one drop in the bucket. We all have so many different experiences which are constantly being retroactively misgendered by cis society (even feminism). I hope for a day when our stories aren't estranged.
What are your stories?
