I Got A Brain

You don’t know what privilege is until you gain or lose it.

A number of my trans men friends say once they transitioned it is almost like they got a brain. One friend said that it is amazing anything he said people listen to him, all of sudden he is an expert in everything.

Trans Men Open Up About Their Experiences With Male Privilege
“Walking down the street is so glorious — I can actually think!”
Huffington Post Queer Voices
By JamesMichael Nichols
August 19, 2016

Trans men occupy a unique space in their identity: many (thought not all) people who live as trans men have experienced the privileges of being read as both male and female at different points of their lives.

In this new video from MTV, a group of trans men open up about male privilege and the unique perspective they have on the topic, having experienced the world and in a multitude of different ways throughout the course of their lives.

“A man can just walk down the street and no one is going to bother him,” Tiq Milan says in the video. “No one is going to ask him to smile, no one is going to ask him where he’s going, no one’s going to ask him if he’s married, no one’s going to ask him if they can walk with him. But this is something that I know women experience every day.”

It becomes very obvious when you gain or lose privilege. When you’re a project manager and you are asked to get the coffee. When you are looking for an electrical part at Home Depot and you get a lecture on how to install. When you go to an auto parts store and the clerk asks if you are getting the part for your boyfriend. These all happened to trans women friends. The first person has a BSEE and a MBA, the next trans woman is a master electrician and the last trans woman has worked on cars all her life. It is like that we got lobotomies.

It is the change to makes it stand out; all of sudden there is the change in privilege that sticks out and it is not only our expertise but it is the things that we took for granted like walking back to the car at night. As a man we never thought about that but as a woman we should be aware of the dangers  but many times we are not.

I tell the story of one late night I had to walk back to my car and I had to go right by a sports bar, I had to walk right by the patio were the men were sitting. I hesitated in the door of the event I was leaving and four lesbians coming out of the event asked me what was wrong, one of them saw where I was looking. She took my arm and cradled it in hers and the five of us walked arm in arm by the men. I would never have even giving it a second thought about walking by a bunch of drunken men but as a woman..