To make a perhaps counterintuitive explanation about my attitude towards gendered socialization, I will relate it to liberal demands to censor the internet. Liberals are actually correct in some way that the internet is facilitating reaction, for example. They may even slow reaction down through censorship. However, the actual source of the problem is capitalist, patriarchal, white supremacist socialization. Capitalism is still socializing into existence, even if in contradictory ways, the subjects that can be exploited by the capitalist internet.

So, liberals could slow down the acceleration of reaction, maybe, but that would not end the baseline subjectivities that are exploited. Capitalism, et al, need male subjectivity, at least under present conditions. It must socialize that subjectivity into existence, and do so as if it’s natural. If subjectivity in accordance with power does not feel natural, it dopes not feel stable. Those who are targeted as Other in this process are indeed incongruous with capital’s schemes and claims around “natural” subjectivity, and they prove that our socialization schemes do not have a claim to nature. However, the socialization as reified is still “real”.

Even if you are Othered by this socialization, that happens to you as a consequence of your environment demanding you conform to its ideals. It would not be helpful to tell the liberal that the internet didn’t accelerate reaction, or that there weren’t subjectivities that could be exploited by it. And yet the liberal answer could only, at best, slow down the path to an inevitable explosion of reactionary society. If you refuse liberals flatly without putting forward a solution, you also leave the problems in place.

You have to attack the underlying structures that force the subjectivities into existence, very obviously. Of course that socialization is a nightmare for those who Otehred by it. Yet there needs to be a socialization process for anyone to be Othered at all. Those who are Othered, are marked out as aberrations who must be destroyed, and this is all in dialectical relation with a repressed truth of the socialization’s unnaturalness.

You can not overcome the reification of gender through theoretical offerings in the university alone, even I think that theory will still aid us. The terf is still going to see “male socialization” because its reification is real. They aren’t even wrong that trans women can be misogynist as a byproduct of socialization, but they see this through surface social appearance alone. Taking cis womanhood as natural and bounded blinds them to how they reproduce patriarchy as well. We all reproduce it. There is a social reproduction that aids the terf’s false consciousness, and cis women equally, or maybe even more, fall prey to gendered reification in that blind spot.

Without attacking the society that relies on gendered division, you have no way to stop the terf from continuing to see trans women as covert men. Part of it is that the terf was socialized successfully into capitalism’s schemes of womanhood and must repress the possibility that she is Other to that socialization. Yet capital pressures all to repress what is Other than their own self-identification, in generating endless social competition. The problems here won’t be settled through theory, even if theory can disprove the terf’s claims. One trans girl growing up might feel Othered and not a part of that male socialization, or may know that she is in fact a woman, and yet the modes of socialization still live on for society broadly, if in contradictory ways.

This does not mean trans women have to especially answer for male socialization. Such socialization is not perfectly capable of interpellating all bodies. Interpellation fails, and does so constantly. We do have to keep track of what socialization processes surround us and think about how we maneuver through them. There is what I would call a fear of weakness that can be shared among all genders, that drives confirmation of patriarchal society. Everyone from straight women to trans men and beyond can play into these fears and exacerbate them. The trans woman who says “male socialization” in not real is at least correct that the trans experience does not have to atone for that socialization specifically. Yet they could be engaging said debate in an aggressive, ideological, egotistical way, that accelerates the problems of competition in capitalist society, and thus helps naturalize the patriarchal, capitalist order. It’s just that the tetf arguing with them is usually doing that even more.

Male superiority is not natural, for example, and yet there are reified practices that will still enshrine such an idea, and it will generate difficulties that we perpetually have to deal with. Men will keep coming to the idea of male superiority if our social practices keep confirming it in appearance. These are relations that continually attempt to reassert themselves through our behavior, and are not detached processes that stand apart from us. We have to catch ourselves in the act of reproducing the “system”. There are no “types” of people who can claim to be naturally beyond any possibility of reproducing it. No one is outside this system. We all aid to the problem in various ways, and in ways that shift. Yet our practices say there is no society, and everyone is alone and naturally at odds with all other groups.

Now, you can disagree with me on all of this, and I would love to have respectful conversations about it. Yet just rolling your eyes as if I’m not attempting to be thoughtful, or as if I’m being some kind of ideologue because I used one piece of jargon you don’t like, is totally off the mark and disrespectful. Anyone claiming to care about social matters like these should be beyond such posturing. It is possible that I could just be wrong and not your personal enemy in the discourse wars, that you must defeat with cheap dunks.