“Male privilege doesn’t lift the social status of all men in the same way”: Trans masculine individuals’ lived experiences of male privilege in the United States.

Abstract

Masculinities and male privilege may be experienced differently by individuals depending on their intersecting identities, including identities related to gender, race, and sexuality. Trans masculine individuals in the United States may be important informants about the experience of male privilege because their unique psychosocial experiences and gender identity development in a patriarchal society allow observation, insight, and critical reflection not available to cisgender people. Using a standpoint theoretical framework, we explored the lived experiences of male privilege as described by trans masculine individuals (N = 227, M = 26.97, SD = 6.90) who responded to an open-ended prompt on a larger online survey. Using thematic analysis, the research team identified five themes that summarized participants’ perceptions: (a) I feel safer; (b) I am assumed to be competent; (c) I am free of traditional female gender role expectations; (d) I am “one of the boys”; and (e) I don’t experience male privilege. Participants’ attributed their experiences to others’ perceptions of their masculine appearance, gender expression, and gender role performance. These experiences involved psychosocial costs as well as benefits, most notably changes in relationships with women and important communities of support. Some participants noted that their other marginalized identities such as race and sexuality attenuated their experiences of male privilege. Together these findings illustrate the social construction of masculinities and male privilege in everyday interactions while further disentangling these concepts from essentialist assumptions of a biologically based gender binary.

Male privilege awareness and relational well-being at work: An allyship pathway.

“…Based on gender norms, the degree of tolerance toward sexism as well as the benefits and costs of male allyship could differ across cultural and national settings (Drury & Kaiser, 2014). Similarly, how men experience male privilege could differ among individuals based on other characteristics such as sexual identity, class/economic status, and age (Clements et al, 2022). For example, transgender individuals and people of color likely experience male privilege along with specific obstacles due to their gender expression and race, respectively.…”

“…Therefore, even though higher social dominance orientation and ingroup favoritism may play a crucial role in influencing men’s attitudes toward gender issues, we propose that men’s awareness of their male privilege (i.e., attitudes toward their own social positionality) can be an important factor in guiding their prosocial behaviors toward the outgroup category of women. Formally, male privilege is defined as “a set of advantages in society given to individuals based on their assumed sex” (Clements et al, 2022, p. 124). According to a widely used metaphor for White privilege, privilege can be viewed as “an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, assurances, tools, maps, guides, codebooks, passports, visas, clothes, compass, emergency gear, and blank checks” (McIntosh, 1989).…”

Psychology of men and masculinities: The journal of big ideas.

“…Second, the concept of male privilege deserves greater scholarly attention in PMM (Flood & Pease, 2005). Can a person’s privileged identity as a man coexist with other marginalized social identities (being a person of color or identifying as trans masculine; Clements et al, 2021; Liu, 2017)? Can the presence of male privilege differ across social situations?…”

What's my intention?: how male undergraduate students make sense of study abroad

“…Since Anderson's (2009) Frauenheim (2020) advocate a rehabilitation of masculine norms in the form of "liberating masculinity", which is defined as "a version of masculinity that releases men from the limiting, damaging, counterproductive bonds of traditional views of manhood" (p. 7). Efforts to broaden scholarship on masculine identity has also produced greater interest about trans-masculine individuals, especially in regard to their performance of masculine norms, experience of male privilege, and perceptions of acceptance and safety by cisgender individuals (Abelson, 2014;Clements et al, 2022;Anzani et al, 2022;Phillips & Rogers, 2021). In short, the possibility for such evolutions indicates the need for scholars to be open-minded and critical of their assumptions about how male undergraduate students experience the subjective norms associated with masculinity.…”