Evo psych is bs and smarter people than I have discussed at length why that is. This pattern of behavior though is def something I’ve experienced and observed throughout my life, especially as the majority of my hobbies and workplaces have always been male dominated. What fucked me up the most tho was the form this behavior took in the .mil. It’s notable bc the .mil has an extreme and explicit form of institutionally enforced hierarchy so the behaviors are particularly toxic and unsubtle and vile.

I refrain from going into how race and class and sexuality etc affected the dynamics not because I didn’t see or experience it, but because I don’t want to write ten thousand words rn. I might type it out and clean it up and post it here at some point bc it’s been rattling around in my head for years and I need to process it. Until then, assume everyone involved is a wh*te cishet enlisted soldier from families of similar income levels.

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The acceptance from high skill males was conditioned on demonstrated competence. There’s always an initial distrust from the misogyny ofc, but the second I or any girl proved we could hang (i.e. be good at the job and perform at least some aspect of masculinity), the most skilled and professional guys took us under their wing and kept other boys from fucking with us.*

Skilled males treated the unskilled women slightly worse than they treated similarly unskilled men. Unskilled males treated unskilled women with more contempt than they treated other unskilled men, and the skilled women on par with the below average men.

If a woman met or exceeded the current cultural beauty standard (and thus performed too much femininity to be taken seriously by brains riddled with patriarchal brainworms), she was taken less seriously by both groups than plain janes and uggos—I counted myself among the latter and it was repeatedly made clear to me that my assessment was correct—that were at similar competence levels. If she was skilled she was taken slightly less seriously than the skilled plains/uggos. If unskilled she was take much, much less seriously.

Regardless of competence the attractive women had more success at the social aspect of the job and thus had slightly more opportunities given to them by less skilled males that had a high enough rank to grant them favors they hoped would result in them getting their dick wet. They often succeeded because they mostly targeted low ranking women who couldn’t really say no because of the implication.

High rank unskilled males treated the unskilled plain/uggo women with disdain but more or less ignored them like they ignored low ranked unskilled men. With skilled plain/uggo women they had active contempt for them and went out of the way to fuck with them. If a skilled plain/uggo woman didn’t have the protection of a high rank skilled man of equal or higher rank to the high rank unskilled man, skilled plain/uggo women were in for an especially miserable time.

Now that I pass as a cis guy and am stealth irl, I feel an immense relief that I’m no longer subjected to the treatment women get.

I’m still a militant feminist and revel in using cis male status to advocate for women and shut misogynistic behavior down, but like yeah, not being treated with automatic contempt because of my gender is so freeing. It’s a similar reduction in the background stress I got from getting top surgery, and I sincerely cannot emphasize enough how freeing top surgery was.

Tbh it feels silly to say but I think I’ve got a sort of survivor’s guilt from it. Because of the dysphoria rather than the hardship of being perceived as a women there’s no way in hell I would ever go back, but I do feel like I abandoned the homies.**

*when I was in there was a soldier shortage and almost every unit was understaffed, so idk how much of this “acceptance” was driven by the necessity of needing every able body they could get to do the job. I’m curious to know if the pattern holds when they’ve enough skilled males. I’d also be interesting in knowing how each job and each branch’s culture influences the pattern.

**Until I was able to articulate this to myself, I respected but didn’t really fully understand why some binary trans men that identified strongly as a butch lesbian or even non butch lesbian prior to realization/transitioning continued do so after transitioning. Like there’s a whole culture to being a woman, a stronger culture to being a lesbian, and an even stronger culture to being a butch lesbian–culture and community is such an essential part of our lives that dropping them is like chopping off a favored limb, and no one should be obligated to chop off a limb.