Colette Saxon
I have been haunted by the failures of cis men all my life. I grew up a closeted trans lesbian in a house with a father who knew how to drive but never did. My mom, who cooked all the food, cleaned the house, did the dishes and the laundry, and taught my brother and me, also did all of the driving for the household– from small trips to the grocery store to hours-long trips we took as a family.
One night, when I was ten years old, my mom started crying in the Holiday Inn hotel room my family shared on vacation. “I can’t keep doing everything by myself,” she told my father, my brother, and me. “I know that men see the world differently than women do. I think you all just don’t see the messes around the house – dirty dishes in the sink, clothes and toys on the floor – but I see them and I’m the only one who ever cleans it up. I need you all to pick up more, to see the messes and take care of them without my input.”
I felt a sinking feeling in my stomach. I felt so guilty having added to her burden, but more than guilt, I felt responsible for fixing the problem. I knew she was talking not just to all three of us, but to me, specifically. I was the only one who could be counted on not to put my wants and needs first. I resolved then and there that I would be better, that I would need to see the messes and do something about them as soon as I saw them.
But looking around the dimly lit hotel room, it was clear that I was the only one who felt this way.
My father nodded at my brother and me. “We have to be better about this,” he said. “We all can’t keep taking advantage of your mother’s work, and we all need to pitch in.”
My brother and I agreed: We would be better. We would do the dishes, we would pick up after ourselves without prompting. My father said the same.
From then on, I tried to be more mindful of how I could help. I cleaned up where I could, I emptied the dishwasher when I saw it was clean or when I was asked to. My brother did not. And my father, who would later take over the dishwasher, never did more than that.
After I moved out of the house in my early twenties, whenever I returned home for long stretches of time, I would be sure not just to clean the dishes, but also to help meal plan and even plan and cook at least one meal. My brother, who returned home after college, did not. My father, who continued to work from home even as my mother got a full time office job, never did.
The men in my family are not unique. Men fail women in a myriad of ways, to the point that simply being a woman – or at least not a cis man – can be actively dangerous. More than one in four women and girls will experience intimate partner violence.1 Queer women are even more likely: Over three quarters of all queer women in the U.S. will face harassment or violence.2 And trans people, especially Black trans women, are perhaps most likely of all, with rates four times higher than cis people.3 Men commit about 80% of all of this violence.4
But the problem is, even putting aside the worst cases, so many men seem to lack the ability to empathize with the women around them. They are incapable of putting themselves in women’s shoes, of imagining how it might feel to be left out of experiences, to be sexualized simply for existing in public, or of all the little demands that keeping a household running involves and how much work those demands add up to – something known to feminists as the mental load.5
Even the good, feminist men struggle with this. I have been in the car with these men, the ones who split the mental load with their partners, who cook and clean and do their own laundry, who have an intellectual understanding of the struggles women face. When I was a teenager, long before I came out to anyone, including myself, I remember riding in the car with a group of male friends, many of whom had an intellectual understanding of feminism and misogyny. With the windows rolled up, I heard them discussing the jogging woman we drove by, making comments about her, dissecting her body into component parts: her boobs, her butt, her overall hotness. I sat in the back of the car, silent, imagining what that woman would think if she could hear what these teenage boys were saying about her, wishing I was anywhere else. Why couldn’t they understand how dehumanizing an experience it would be to know or even guess that was the way people saw you? Could they not put themselves in her shoes?
I am not alone among trans women. Go into any online space frequented by us and you will find deep distrust and vitriolic hatred of men. It would be easy to assign this distrust of maleness as an attempt to separate ourselves from the sex we were assigned at birth and the behavior we have been tarred with. It would be comforting to think that trans women are simply trying to “I’m Not Like Other Girls” our way out of masculinity. And there may be a grain of truth to that. But I don’t think that paints the whole picture.
The truth is, we have lived as sheep in wolves clothing all our lives. My experiences with men are not unique, nor are they, all things considered, as bad as many trans women’s experiences are. We know what men are like – at their worst and at their best. And we know that we, and all women and gender marginalized people, deserve better.
Being a trans woman gives me a unique insight into men’s culture. I grew up among them. Like an undercover agent, I have been among them when they take their masks off because they think there are no women around. These experiences, of watching the men in my life fail in so many ways to understand how their actions or lack of action affects the women around them, have made me distrustful of cis men. And beyond distrustful. I believe that they cannot be counted on to treat the women, non binary, and trans men in their spaces as true equals. I believe that all cis men benefit more from the patriarchy than they suffer from it. And I have little patience or empathy for them when they complain about the way society and people in their lives treat them for being cis men. I am, unfortunately, a misandrist.
- ‘Violence against women and girls – what the data tell us’, World Bank, 2022 <https://genderdata.worldbank.org/en/data-stories/overview-of-gender-based-violence>. ↩︎
- Bec Roldan, ‘Many LGBTQ+ women face discrimination and violence, but find support in friendships’, NPR, <https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/07/01/1185536324/many-lgbtq-women-face-discrimination-and-violence-but-find-support-in-friendship>. ↩︎
- A R Flores et al., ‘Gender Identity Disparities in Criminal Victimization: National Crime Victimization Survey, 2017–2018’, American Journal of Public Health, 2021 Apr;111(4):726-729. ↩︎
- ‘Crime in the United States 2012’, FBI <https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2012/crime-in-the-u.s.-2012/tables/42tabledatadecoverviewpdf/table_42_arrests_by_sex_2012.xls>. ↩︎
- ‘Mental load: What it is and how to manage it’, UCLA Health, <https://www.uclahealth.org/news/article/mental-load-what-it-and-how-manage-it>. ↩︎
Reading into Culture 