I'm Afraid of Men.

by Vivek Shraya

I realized only after I began transitioning that my lifetime of independence and self-reliance had been largely a result of male privilege. Being a girl has required me to retrain myself to think of depending on others or asking for assistance not as weakness or even as pathetic, but rather as a necessity.

To this day, if I hear someone cough or clear their throat behind me, my body tenses up, shoulders raised, expecting to be a target.

What would my body look like if I didn’t want affection from gay men and protection from straight men? What would my body look and feel like if I didn’t have to mould it into both a shield and an ornament? How do I love a body that was never fully my own?

Trans people aren’t afforded the luxury of relaxing or being unguarded. Mere steps away from “the world’s largest trans march,” trans people are still seen as perverts who touch strangers at crosswalks.

“Does it bother you that I haven’t said it?” I ask, as you lie with your head on my chest. “Said what?” Your face turns up to look at me. “You know. The three special words.” You lift yourself off me. “Oh. I didn’t say ‘I love you’ because I wanted you to say it back.” “You didn’t?” “No. It kind of bothers me that ‘I love you’ is treated like the destination in a relationship. I told you because that’s how I feel and I wanted you to know.”

I’M AFRAID OF MEN not because of any singular encounter with a man. I’m afraid of men because of the cumulative damage caused by the everyday experiences I’ve recounted here, and by those untold, and by those I continue to face.

Why is my humanity only seen or cared about when I share the ways in which I have been victimized and violated?

This praise highlights another problem with the idea of the “good man”—the bar is ultimately a low one, and men are heralded every day for engaging in basic acts of domestic labour like washing dishes.

If we want masculinity to be different, we must confront and tackle the baseline instead of longing for exceptions. Loving your mother, holding a door open for a woman, being a good listener, or even being a feminist doesn’t make a man an exception. Experiencing oppression—including racism, homophobia, and transphobia—doesn’t make a man an exception. If we are invested in perpetuating and glorifying the myth of the “good man,” we are also complicit in overlooking, if not permitting, the reprehensible behaviour of the “typical man.”

How cruel it is to have endured two decades of being punished for being too girly only to be told that I am now not girly enough.

I’m afraid of women who, when I share my experiences of being trans, try to console me by announcing “welcome to being a woman,” refusing to recognize the ways in which our experiences fundamentally differ. But I’m especially afraid of women because my history has taught me that I can’t fully rely upon other women for sisterhood, or allyship, or protection from men.

What if you were to challenge yourself every time you feel afraid of me—and all of us who are pushing against gendered expectations and restrictions? What if you cherished us as archetypes of realized potential? What if you were to surrender to sublime possibility—yours and mine? Might you then free me at last of my fear, and of your own?