I’ve heard this a lot too, but it doesn’t seem substantively different to me.

Like, this is just socialization, isn’t it? Like, the cumulative effect of being socialized to believe that men are the best and should be deferred to, ends up in an attitude of entitlement, no?

The thing about this attitude, if we take the anti-essentialist stance seriously, is that it isn’t inherent to men. Like. Attitudes of entitlement are not only something that men have, white ppl have it, rich ppl have it, and so on.

If I understand things correctly, the whole notion of privilege/oppression makes it such that institutions reward or punish individuals for how they choose to leverage their entitlement. White women will be punished for acting entitled in a ‘male’ fashion, but rewarded when this attitude is white in nature.

Someone on FB mentioned something similar to this re: feeling entitled to conversational space and trans women not having the learned skills to understand that we shouldn’t take up this space.

But I’m still unclear as to how this even challenges my view. Since all it means is that, in some regards, trans women take longer to socialize as women. What is the difference between a five year old girl being told to talk softly and defer to boys and a twenty-five year old woman being told the same thing?

Usually the argument goes: well the 25 yo trans woman has 25 years of male socialization and this is why, idk, at age 30 they can still get called out by feminists for behaving like a ~man~. But this doesn’t account for the 5 yo girl who grows up and, well, never learns this particular lesson. And there are women who’ve imperfectly/impartially learned their socialization. Or women who learned it well and come to resist it.

All of this is incoherent unless we buy into biological essentialism. Then it makes sense to split the difference between ‘male’ and ‘female’ socialization. Or to think that somehow, male entitlement is different than white entitlement. Especially when the result is much the same: oppression, just with overlapping but somewhat different targets.

Last… while the perception of manhood does involved receiving certain privileges, I find the fairly common thread of trans women who, after coming out, talk about how they felt they were ‘living a lie’ or ‘not their true self’ or whatever. I guess I’m not sure how to coherently connect a notion of external privilege to internal entitlement/attitude when you feel like everything is a lie and like you are living a fraudulent life.

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