For a while now I've seen many people (cis and trans) use the phrases male socialization and female socialization to talk about how their experiences growing up under a specific gender has shaped them. In general, this idea seems really useful. It can help describe our behaviours, ours anxieties, etc.: "Of course I'm quiet and not assertive. Girls are socialized to be quiet and non-assertive". It even sounds official and academic. Yet, despite the fact that it seems useful, emphasizing socialization is counterproductive, it is fundamentally gender essentialist and is most often used as a way to perpetuate transmisogyny1.
Socialization rhetoric is, by its very nature, reductive. It reduces the active and present violence of patriarchy, misogyny, etc. to some distant set of life lessons that one was taught as a child. When a cis man talks over a woman, he is only parroting the misogyny that he was exposed to as a child. It transforms him (and all the bystanders) from active agent(s) that are perpetuating misogyny into blameless automata. When a cis woman is being non-assertive, gendered socialization says that she is raised to behave that way, ignoring the fact that there are potentially good reasons to be non-assertive in that moment (she may be labelled bossy or a bitch, for example). This removal of agency over one's actions dehumanizes the oppressed and the oppressor. The oppressed are no longer observing and reacting to the (hostile) environment they are presently in; rather, they are acting on the instincts of their gendered socialization. And likewise, the oppressors are no longer actively choosing to enact violence but passively echoing what they've been socialized to believe is acceptable.
This simplification also often strips all context from the events that caused gendered socialization, often removing the humanity of our past selves. There is only considered to be male and female socialization. This sole focused on assigned gender at birth erases class, culture, race, sexuality, internal gender, etc. from consideration. It proposes a strict cannon of socialization experiences and their effects (often based on the experiences and values of white suburbia), obfuscating other aspects of a person's identity and denying that these other identities may cause someone to process experiences differently (potentially subconsciously). A cis woman and a trans man have the same socialization, their own (internal) understanding of gender need not apply. A person has no agency (conscious or not) in how they internalize their socialization, nor can they experience and internalize socialization that is not of their assigned birth gender.
By reducing these experiences to some past event from some unknowable date, stripped of all nuance and context (except for assigned gender), it makes socialization immutable. The fact that these experiences happened cannot be changed and thus your socialization, derived from these experiences, must also be permanent. Someone who experiences male socialization is forever male socialized and likewise someone with female socialization is forever female socialized. It makes the gendered socialization a sort of default state that a person is in, and that person must then diligently work against this, functionally innate, part of their being. A cis man will always carry the male socialized violence and thus never truly be safe for woman. A cis woman will always have female socialization, and thus will never be truly equal to (cis) men.
So, socialization reduces one's experiences to their assigned gender at birth and allows little deviation from that. This simplification also obscures the way misogyny (and transmisogyny) influence us. When we say that socialization causes a woman to accept that sexual coercion is normal, we hide that men were also "socialized" this way, we omit the fact that misogyny affects everyone. Likewise, this framing also denies that trans woman (who are said to not have female socialization) could also be a victim in this way. This is the true danger of socialization rhetoric: it's underlying transmisogyny. It is a repackaging gender essentialism into language that is, at a glance, acceptable to most people who might be uncomfortable with naked bigotry. The phrases "real women" and "biological male" might raise eyebrows in a way that "male socialization" does not. By passing as acceptable language, it subtly reinforces gender hierarchies in communities that are meant to reject them2.
With the reintroduction of the gender hierarchy in a space (assuming it had ever been abolished), transmisogyny can no longer be effectively challenged there and it is allowed to flourish. A trans woman who is being a little to loud, assertive, annoying, that is her male socialization3. A cis woman or trans man not being comfortable with trans women in their spaces, that is just trauma from their female socialization. And if a trans woman were to call out this transmisogyny, that is simply more proof of her male socialization, her otherness, her disconnection from "true" womanhood. It pushes trans women further to the margins. If we want to truly want to challenge and abolish transmisogyny (and transphobia, misogyny, etc.) we must be careful and critical of the language we use. We cannot hold on to bigoted ideas with new names because they are convenient. Instead, we should be challenging why we feel they are convenient. It might feel easier but we will never build a better world by applying a new coat of paint to the old one.
↩1 Transmisogyny being the unique bigotry that trans women face that cannot be explained by simply a combination of transphobia and misogyny. It is a door that cis women and trans men can pass through but that trans women cannot.
↩2 The hierarchy being that those with male socialization but claim womanhood are third gendered (neither man nor woman); people with male socialization that don't claim womanhood are men; and people with female socialization are women.
↩3 It should be noted that cis men almost never receive this critique, and when they do it there is no implicit threat of violence that comes with it. Men will not be socially isolated, socially murdered, etc. because of their male socialization the way that trans women and trans feminine people are. That is why it is is transmisogyny.
