One Angry Episode Away
We’re going to acknowledge that our society is inherently patriarchal, that it systemically hates/devalues women, but now say that men simply rape, abuse, and assault others because they get angry? Suddenly these issues are now personal instead of systemic?
When trans women get angry about something, it’s used as proof of their male socialization. It can be personal, political, or private, and suddenly when a trans woman or fem shows an ounce of anger, suddenly their “inner man” is showing. Such rhetoric has been used by so-called allies, feminists, and Leftists as reasons to silence, exclude, and/or de-platform trans women/femmes; not because they’re trans women, mind you, but because they’re making conversations dangerous and uncomfortable for everyone else there.
The difference between transfems/women and cis women being angry over the oppression, violence, and marginalization they suffer is that when trans women do it, it’s “male anger” and when cis women do it, it’s “female anger.” We’re told it’s because since trans women were socialized male, they express anger in a “male way,” the same way that leads to violence toward women.
The argument here is that trans women are one angry episode away from assaulting, raping, or verbally abusing women because they were socialized to do so when being raised as boys. When this rhetoric is parroted in feminist, queer, and Leftists spaces, it’s laughable at best. We’re going to acknowledge that our society is inherently patriarchal, that it systemically hates/devalues women, but now say that men simply rape, abuse, and assault others because they get angry? Suddenly these issues are now personal instead of systemic?
Not Anger But Hatred
Trans women are expected to sit and remain silent as if we’re guests in the house of womanhood because we supposedly don’t know what it is like to be socialized female but they somehow know what it is like to socialized male as a closeted transgender child.
This is equating the feelings of anger at oppression and exclusion with the systemic hatred of women under patriarchy. In other words, we’re equating anger with hatred: “…please remember that it is not our anger which makes me caution you to lock your doors at night, and not to wander the streets of Hartford alone. It is the hatred which lurks in those streets, that urge to destroy us all if we truly work for change rather than merely indulge in our academic rhetoric.”1 It’s fallacious to reduce the actions of patriarchy to simple anger. When men rape, kill, assault, and verbally abuse women, it’s not out of anger but hatred.
This argument turns away from the power imbalance created by patriarchy and turns it into “how do we make men less angry?” This feels so obvious I don’t know why I feel the need to explain it. It’s for this reason any notions of reverse-sexism against cis men doesn’t work: “This hatred and our anger are very different. Hatred is the fury of those who do not share our goals, and its object is death and destruction. Anger is the grief of distortions between peers, and its object is change.”2 Misogyny is not anger at women but hatred toward them. Buying into the idea that men violate women solely out of anger is exactly what patriarchy wants.
As Lorde had written,
It is not my anger that launches rockets, spends over sixty thousand dollars a second on missiles and other agents of war and death, pushes opera singers off rooftops, slaughters children in cities, stockpiles nerve gas and chemical bombs, sodomizes our daughters and our earth [...] which corrodes into blind, dehumanizing power, bent upon the annihilation of us all unless we meet it with what we have, our power to examine and to redefine the terms upon which we will live and work; our power to envision and to reconstruct, anger by painful anger, stone upon heavy stone, a future of pollinating difference and the earth to support our choices.3
Saying trans women have “male anger” is another way of saying “trans women are just men.” But it sounds rational because it makes sense that someone raised as a male would act out their rage in the way they were taught because females do the same. But while acknowledging this difference, it ignores that beyond how boys and girls are socialized is a patriarchal system. Trans women are expected to sit and remain silent as if we’re guests in the house of womanhood because we supposedly don’t know what it is like to be socialized female but they somehow know what it is like to be socialized male as a closeted transgender girl.
To Simple Anger
But to assume anger always equals hatred and vice-versa is to downgrade the oppression of women. It reduces hatred to an emotion we can prevent and raises anger to a sort of power to be avoided.
This problem with “anger” has been used in the past to exclude women of color and queer women from predominantly White and straight feminist and women’s circles. Black feminists were characterized as overly angry and unlikable, often masculinized in their portrayal by both White feminists and conservatives. And there were fears of lesbians in these communities preying on poor straight women, oh no! Much of the writings I’m drawing upon for this post, specifically that of Audre Lorde, is based on the exclusion of lesbians, Black women, and women of color in second-wave feminist spaces. There are no new ideas, it seems; just the same old points used time and again to exclude specific types of women.
Part of the reason is that women, especially White women, equate anger with hatred. “I hate the patriarchy,” they say. “So I'm angry at it!” Not that women don’t hate the patriarchy or that you can be both angry at and hateful of the same thing, but the key differences between a woman’s disdain for the patriarchy and our society’s hatred toward women are power and target. Feminists should hate the structure in which women are subjugated, and we lack the power to create/maintain systemic oppression against men. Our society hates women as a group and has the means to oppress, attack, and violate women regularly.
But to assume anger always equals hatred and vice-versa is to downgrade the oppression of women. It reduces hatred to an emotion we can prevent and raises anger to a sort of power to be avoided. Lorde defined anger as “a passion of displeasure that may be excessive or misplaced but not necessarily harmful.”4 As opposed to hatred which is “an emotional habit or attitude of mind in which aversion is coupled with ill will.”5 In other words, “Anger, used, does not destroy. Hatred does.”6
If you silence or exclude trans women over fears of “male anger,” I'm assuming it's either stupidity at best or blatant transmisogyny at worst. Male anger doesn’t exist. Again, it’s fallacious to reduce the actions of patriarchy to simple anger.
If all our miseries—our indignities—are born and bred within our minds, then all group action is impossible. If society alone is responsible for the cramping of our lives, then all individual action is impossible.7 It is circumstances that make us just as much as we make circumstances.8 We make our own history, but we do not make it just as we please; we do not make it under circumstances chosen by ourselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given, and transmitted from the past.9
Further Reading
“Trans & Nonbinary 101” by Nico Bailey
The German Ideology by Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx
“Tragedy and the Common Man” by Arthur Miller
Transgender Marxism, eds. Jules Joanne Gleeson & Elle O’Rourke
A. Lorde, “The Use of Anger: Women Responding to Racism,” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, Revised ed. (Crossing Press, 2007), 129.
Ibid.
Ibid, 133.
A. Lorde, “Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and Anger,” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, Revised ed. (Crossing Press, 2007), 152.
Ibid.
Ibid.
A. Miller, “Tragedy and the Common Man,” The New York Times, February 27, 1949, https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/00/11/12/specials/miller-common.html?_r=1&oref=slogin.
K. Marx & F. Engels, “I. Feuerbach: Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlook; B. The Illusion of the Epoch,” The German Ideology, trans. Progress Publishers, Marxist Internet Archive, 2000, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01b.htm.
K. Marx, “Chapter 1,” The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, trans. S. K. Padover, Marxist Internet Archive, 1995, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm.