Hm…. i notice it too. Its difficult to say, but dmab trans feminine people are, in my experience as a trans man, the most visible (and most poorly treated by outside society) trans subgroup.
Society at large seems to pretend trans men don’t exist (to the point where i wonder how many average people seem to even know that trans men do), and often it parades around trans women like circus freaks for the entertainment of cis folk, het or LGB.
Trans men and women are treated somewhat differently from one another. My theory is the treatment of trans women is notably more violent and aggressive, so socially progressive spaces focus on trans women. It could also be in part due to trans women being vocal about not being heard at all, and the community severely overcorrecting.
Another perception that i’ve seen (even from other trans men) is that trans men aren’t deserving of the same attention as trans women, because we as a group have contributed little if anything to the fight for our rights. I can’t confirm… or dispute this. In all of my time on this website, approaching 10 years now dear god, i have no recollection of people championing trans men. I have no memory of our history being spoken of.
Even the history we do have is stolen from us by cis women who refuse to believe that not every “woman” who dressed up as a man for his whole life is actually a woman. Or often if they do, they deny its importance. You can hear yourself if you listen to the podcast Sawbones (which is good but… unkind, to trans men and nb folk) in the episode on Dr James Barry, a man who lived his entire adult life as a man, and was only revealed to be dfab after his death when his wishes were directly violated and his body undressed, Dr Sydnee McElroy, a cis woman, say that it doesn’t matter if he was trans or actually a cis woman.
It does matter. It does. The word transgender was born to describe an experience that we have lived for millennia.
Another contributing factor could be an unfortunate side effect of most people’s perception of how to treat trans people, then mixed with feminism’s perspective on the opinions of the catch all term “men.” Note, i AM a feminist.
You know the dance. Do not refer to trans people in the past as “when they were a man/woman”. Do not say “when he was a she” or “when she was a he”. Do not do this. You know the phrase: they were always their gender.
The reason i bring this up? Is that cis people (especially cis women) and trans women, which i have experienced first hand from both, rationalize it like this: if trans people have always been their gender, and trans men are men, then trans men have always been men, so trans men have exactly the same societal perspectives and behavioral issues that cis men have, and should be treated exactly like cis men.
And if trans men are basically cis men, and cis men can’t talk about the experiences of women, trans men can’t either. If cis men don’t know about the consequences of living as a woman, trans men don’t either. If cis men talking about what they think and they feel takes away from the voices of women in feminist discourse, then so does trans men talking about their feelings. So trans men, and cis men, are men. And men are unwelcome. We’re tired of the voices of Men, and all that that entails.
So the consequence is trans men cannot speak. We cannot share our experiences about being treated as women. We cannot, essentially, share our experiences BEING women and girls. Trans men share in the traumatic experience of being born a woman, to society. We share the childhood violence that is performed against girls. We know it. But it is denied. If we acknowledge it, we weaken the idea that trans people were always their true gender. So we stay quiet. Our unique trauma and perspectives are lost.
The consequence is the voices of trans men fade from the record, and we cannot engage with our community without being treated as a Diet Cis Man. We cannot engage, so many of us withdraw. The experiences of trans men are not shared, because theyre not respected.
The consequence is we are forced to stay quiet by every community we’re in, and people quickly forget that we’re even there, let alone that being a trans man is still massively traumatic in this society.
The consequence is they don’t think we’re worth mentioning.