By David Futrelle
The angry misogynists who call themselves Men Going Their Own Way like to think of themselves as gender nonconformists of a sort, refusing to give in to what they see as intense social pressure to settle down and become husbands and providers — even if such pressure doesn’t actually amount to more than occasional naggy questions from relatives and coworkers about why they’re not married, and even though the overwhelming majority of married women themselves work.
But if you think their oft-proclaimed status as, er, gender outlaws of a sort might give them a tiny bit of empathy for or understanding of trans people — whose very existence challenges traditional notions of a simple and immutable gender binary — well, let’s just say you’d be very disappointed. Indeed, MGTOWs’ takes on trans women are as fucked-up as their takes on cis women, if not more so.
Today on the MGTOW subreddit — one of the largest MGTOW forums online, with more than 90,000 subscribers — some of the regulars are discussing this little screengrab, evidently nicked from one of the chans:
Naturally, the regulars agree with this assessment wholeheartedly, seeing the logic as self-evident: women have lives that are so much better than men in almost every way that men are deciding to go trans as a way to make their lives easier.
Clearly this deserves a reaction gif of some sorts, though I can’t think of any quite strong enough. Perhaps some turbocharged combination of these two classics?
But this is what these guys really and truly believe.
“The game isn’t just ‘too hard’, it’s biased and rigged,” writes a MGTOW Redditor calling himself fasterfind.
Women treat men like shit. The only way to be an acceptable member of society or to be treated nicely is to be a woman. Until then, you’re disposable and nothing matters. You’ll also play as a man, which means that if you’re looking for love or acceptance, then your resources will be depleted and taken, then you will still be disposed of. It’s not worth it.
While sympathetic to the boys he thinks are “becoming girls” to make their lives super-easy, Fasterfind concludes that it makes more sense to simply refuse to “play the game” in the first place, becoming a MGTOW who demonstrates his complete independence from women by complaining about them on the internet all day.
“I’ll admit I’ve considered popping easy mode pills before,” confesses someone calling himself shetoldmeto80.
[N]ow I am too old and too masculine looking to get away with it.
This wasn’t some gender dysphoria thing really, it was a social/practical thing I guess. Why not live life on easy mode?
In another comment, shetoldmeto80 uses the alleged “fact” that cis men are deciding to become trans women to make things easier for themselves as further evidence that life really is easier for women.
What is truly in question then, if this is a big trend, is how much more priviledged women are that men want to become one for practical reasons… If most men going M2F are doing it for practical reasons, then we can safely assume that society is sexist towards men and gender equality actually means “female domination”…
A lot of “iffing” going on there.
You do not see many F2Ms simply because there is no major upside to becoming a man. There was an article back then of some woman trying out testosterone injections for a while and stopping because she claimed it was a fucking nightmare.
Well, no, dude, the reason you “do not see many F2Ms” isn’t because trans men don’t exist; it’s because you — and society in general — isn’t really interested in recognizing their existence.
Though hard numbers on the demographics of the trans and gender nonconforming population are notoriously difficult to come by — for assorted reasons mostly connected to transphobia — one recent study based on Centers for Disease Control data concludes that the ratio of trans women to trans men, while not 1:1, is much lower than previous studies have concluded (and the popular imagination has assumed), with roughly 46 trans women to every 33 trans men.
Not that the MGTOW Redditors would be much interested in knowing about trans men, because their existence in large numbers undermines the crackpot theory that trans women are, for the most part, really men seeking an easier life.
Given that the MGTOW Redditors think that trans women are really men, it’s perhaps not surprising that they think these men make better women than “real” women do.
“What is really fucked up,” writes someone called
T0000009,
is that those boys are actually better looking and more feminine that real females
“Even the ones that don’t look better usually look more FEMININE,” declares someone called Tsukikoselenia, who turns out to have rather a lot of opinions on the subject.
Thing is, a MtF has to really try in order to look feminine. Biology is pretty much against him, even if he wasn’t a “buff guy” to begin with. Aside from fakeup, it usually implies a complicated diet for a while in order to ensure the desired fat redistribution, etc. Few people know the typical female body characteristics (such as the importance of eyebrows when it comes to gender identification as an example; something women don’t care about and jut remove them and draw them with a pencil instead…) as well as a “serious” MtF.
Although I’ve also seen quite a lot of them that were just thinking that putting a dress and using 2 filters on snapchat meant switching gender. But whatever about these ones.
Thing is, if you want to be good-looking, no matter the gener, it requires efforts. It’s just that for women these “efforts” nowadays mean crap like only fakeup and nail art, or dressing in a slutty way. Of course compared to this, anyone doing even the bare minimum will look ok if not better.
In another comment, Tsukikoselenia expounds further on the alleged failure of “real” women to do the hard work necessary to become sufficiently hot in his eyes.
If you care about your body enough to try to transition, chances are, you’ll try to avoid looking like a landwhale and eating junk food every single day. Most actual women don’t give a crap about this. Look at them complain about how they -need- makeup because men just don’t know how bad a woman’s skin is without makeup, instead of just eating better in order to avoid looking like a zombie. When the other side doesn’t even try anymore because it is too lazy and because of feminism and PROGRESS, it’s quite easy to look better compared to it.
A few commenters actually come out and say that they would prefer to date trans women over their “real” counterparts. Someone called Vrabo spells out what he sees as their many advantages:
More feminine, has a cock, speaks your mental language, can’t hit the wall, doesn’t have female rights to fuck you over…
I’m in.
But not all of the assembled MGTOWs are willing to go quite so far. While agreeing that these men-turned-women-who-are-still-basically-men do look better than “real” women, a commenter called DarkNights292 declares that he doesn’t think he “could get past that it has a dick flopping around.”
Yes, he used the word “it.”
Still, his outright transphobia is probably a better thing for trans women than Vrabo’s brand of trans fetishisn — rooted as it is in misogyny and transmisogyny. No woman, cis or trans, deserves to be burdened with the sexual attentions of a MGTOW.
H/T — Thanks to trans researcher Os Keyes for pointing me to the study on the demographics of the trans and gender nonconforming population.
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