There is a common refrain among some trans activists that male privilege either does not exist or is insignificant to trans women's experiences. There is a common refrain among some radical feminists, largely trans exclusionary radical feminists, that trans women never lose male privilege at all and that male socialisation during childhood and adolescence is unavoidable, too deeply ingrained, and therefore constitutes a significant difference between female assigned at birth women (hereafter referred to as FAAB or cisgender) and trans women which would either render trans women "not-women" or call for their exclusion from women's spaces. I reject both of these assertions as fundamentally flawed.

Male privilege exists. It is real. Trans women may not have it during periods of female presentation, but this does not mean it does not exist during those periods of male presentation. To argue otherwise is absurd. One need not enjoy privilege or feel comfortable with privilege for privilege to exist. Nor is this experience of privilege insignificant. A trans woman's own experience should be evidence enough of its significance, for it is one of the many ways in which she is shoved into a gender which is not her own. A trans woman may fight male privilege's application to her person, but she cannot stop it from being offered initially, nor can she succeed at all times in preventing its application against her will. It is still privilege, even though it may sound like oppression, because it is one which as at an intersection of lacking cisgender privilege. That intersection does not erase the fact that it is still privilege. If she is presenting as male and she keeps her mouth shut, she can benefit from male privilege. And no doubt she has done so at some point in her life. In order to move the discourse forward, this is a fact that trans women, and especially so-called trans activists (who claim to speak for all of us) must understand and embrace as true. Otherwise there can be no place for trans activists (as separated from trans activism) in feminism.


Is this lived experience of sometimes having or gaining from male privilege, but finding it painful, significantly and radically different from the experience of never having and never gaining from male privilege as experienced by cisgender women? In order to answer this meaningfully, we need to set our goalposts. Terms like "significantly" and "radically" are relative. If we lived in a world where our only basis for comparison was cis women and trans women, then yes, this lived experience of sometimes having or gaining from male privilege most certainly would be significantly and radically different. However, we do not live in such a world, and our goalposts need to compare both cis women's lived experiences and trans women's lived experiences to cis men's lived experiences (and trans men's lived experiences. Although not the topic of this article, trans men's experiences are often closer themselves to women's experiences in comparison to cis men's, as so many men's spaces consider trans men to be women, or at least, "non-men&quot . When we look at that comparison, we begin to see that we have more in common than we do not.


Yet there is an objection to this assertion that cis women and trans women share more lived experiences than trans women share with cis men. What about male socialisation, the objector asks, isn't any period of time being socialised as a male automatically placing that individual in one category while those who were not are placed in another category? We can do that grammatically, in that we can construct a sentence whereby we create such categories, but it does not reflect reality. The lived experience of a trans woman, or a trans girl as is more often than not the case, is not the same as that of a cis man/boy. Cis boys do not cry themselves to sleep wishing they were girls. Cis boys do not start arguments with authority figures over being thought of and addressed as boys as some trans girls do. Cis boys do not worry that their "manly" gender performances will be revealed to be fraudulent because they're actually girls as other trans girls do. These experiences are experiences that clearly separate trans girls from cis boys, and therefore separate trans women from cis men.