Alys+

I've tried to stop paying attention to Wu's bad takes.¹

In order to make myself feel better about writing about it, I'll say I think this last one is indicative of her Whole Deal.

Her post reads:

The most visible parts of our community are now shaped by people who were never socialized by women, who don’t know how to relate like women, who were never taught emotional regulation, softness, or interdependence. Instead, they learned their identity through memes, porn, and Twitter pile-ons.

The result is that much of trans culture today is fundamentally male-coded, even when it claims the language of feminism. It is competitive, hierarchical, entitlement-driven, and obsessed with controlling others instead of understanding them.

While there are doubtless transfeminine-only group chats and hangouts or parts of social media that are heavily tilted that way, I'm pretty doubtful there are many parts of the community who were "never socialized by woman."

First, there's the smell test. Do you think in the year of our lord 2025, as trans people are more visible and trans people are coming out at younger ages, and young people remain generally very supportive of trans people, that the average newly out trans woman has less experience around other women than her peers did ten or twenty years ago?

Obviously, there isn't hyperspecific data on this, but we can pull in related figures. Pew actually asked LGBT adults how many of their friends are LGBTQ, and 21 percent of trans people said all of them. That might be a bit higher than I'd guess, but having exclusively LGBTQ friends does not mean they're all T friends, let alone trans women. More trans people also say they are connected to the community as a whole than other groups and they have more in common with other groups.. The most friendly plausible interpretation for Wu is that trans women are befriending relatively few straight cis women, but it seems pretty unlikely they aren't socializing with queer cis women.

We can get a sense of trans people's other connections. The 2022 US Trans Survey shows about 67 percent of adults have supportive family members, up from 60 percent in 2015. So it's at least within the realm of plausibility that these people are spending time with their female relatives, who are probably mostly cis. Also, this possibility has grown over time. I wish I had more comparison numbers, but the 2022 US Trans Survey has unfortunately come out slowly and I don't think those numbers are out yet.

I guess I can't definitively rule out that trans high school girls today are joining homogeneous cliques of other newly out trans girls and not socializing with anyone else. However, this seems pretty out of step with how queer people socialize in my experience² and impractical at most high schools. Even if a good three percent of a high school is trans, at a (pretty large) 1000-person high school, there would only be 30 trans people, and a bunch of those would be a different gender (e.g., trans boys) or in a different year. (In fact, since Wu is presumably only thinking about who she counts as transsexuals, they're probably even fewer in number.) There's also the fact that there are cis teen girls who socialize exclusively with other teen girls and this usually isn't presented as a problem.

That in fact, is the biggest issue. Why is it bad for trans women to mainly socialize with other trans women but not cis women to mainly socialize with other cis women? I daresay we can probably all conjure up imaginary scenarios where a trans woman—or a group of trans women—have sexualized and caricatured images of womanhood they are aiming for. While these groups have existed, I suspect the ease of imagining that scenario has more to do with transmisogyny than reality.

Look, in a vacuum, is it good for trans women to have cis women friends? Yes! I think everyone is served by having diverse social circles and breaking down the barriers that would separate them. But the idea that trans women need cis women specifically to shave off our rough edges is silly to me.

The rest of this tweet is just transmisogynistic garbage, attributing masculine traits to transfeminine people writ large. Wu might argue that she's saying they were merely socialized male, rather than these being inherently male traits that trans women have due to being biologically male. (She actually does believe trans women, including herself, are biologically male, so who knows.) That interpretation makes it less overtly transmisogynistic I suppose, but is still wrong. People don't respond to socialization, male or otherwise, in a uniform way. I also don't think people "grow out of" past socialization in a uniform way.

It's also just silly and simplistic to act like trans women should definitely want to be resocialized in a "female" way. Outside of attitudes like toxic masculinity, which we could chalk up to harmful socialization, there's nothing wrong with a trans woman deciding to retain the speaking style, nonverbal communication, social role, personality traits, interests, etc. that are male coded and that she picked up from male peers³. For a variety of reasons, wanting to change zero of these during transition is probably not all that common. If she makes that choice, both transmisogyny and good ol' classic misogyny mean a trans woman will be penalized for those traits.

One explanation of this take is that the trans women most visible to Briana Wu do in fact behave in the ways she describes, even if her transmisogynistic explanation is bullshit. This could be because she seeks them out to cringe at or because she spends significant time on Twitter. My suspicion is that relatively few trans people remain on Twitter, and it's conceivable many of those that are left interact in a way that's aggressive and irony-poisoned⁴. For example, I could imagine some crypto-fascist trans people who spent too much time on 4chan and haven't shaken off their reactionary beliefs might be inclined to stay on a site owned by a fascist. To be clear, these are a tiny minority of trans people, generally, but they might be a noticeable subset of trans people on Twitter.

Relatedly, it's common for people to single out individual posts, selfies, photos, etc. from trans women and misinterpret them. I don't want to do the same to Wu, but when she complains about people learning their identity through "memes," one wonders how much she's jumping to conclusions based on a small number of posts.

One thing Wu is right about is that support for trans rights seems to have receded. Worrying as it is, we don't have a lot of data points, so there's still some ambiguity about how much of a steady trend this is. I'm planning to do some substantial work on this elsewhere. Suffice it to say, her male socialization explanation is probably the least convincing contributing factor and one of the most odious.