Masculine Privilege Without Male Privilege?

Lately, I have been thinking about how masculine privilege exists in and impacts the lives of people who do not identify as male and/or do not pass as society's expectation of men. As defined previously, masculine privilege would be separate from male privilege, and would be the privilege accessed by people simply due to the fact that they are behaving and presenting in a masculine manner, regardless of what their perceived or internal sex or gender may be.

Basically, society privileges men above women, while assuming that men are masculine and assigned male at birth, and women are feminine and assigned female at birth, and any other combination is viewed as an aberration (when society is forced to acknowledge it) or simply not considered (when it is not). Society also views masculine behavior and presentation as more valuable than feminine presentation and behavior. Society also punishes gender variance, which is behavior and presentation that does not match up to the perceived sex and/or gender.

Thus, clearly masculine people who do not get perceived as male by society will be to some extent rewarded and punished for their behavior. In the straight world, masculinity in non-male perceived people (who will all be lumped into the category of "women", as the larger world has the categories of "man" and "woman", with "woman" being the other, with no other allowed possibilities) that goes beyond what is acceptable for a woman is generally very harshly punished; while a very strongly masculine "not-man" might get a little less trouble in a hardware store, ze will often be denied employment, accosted on the street, held up as an object of ridicule, etc. It is pretty clear that in this circumstance, there really isn't a gender based privilege - male and masculine privilege are not separate in the world as a whole, so, in addition to being put in the oppressed class of woman, as a gender variant person, ze is placed in the oppressed class of "transperson" by cisgenderism.

This is not an argument that an oppression cancels out a privilege; since the privilege is based on what one is perceived to "really" be, and how well one adheres to the role assigned to that label, the gender variance that masculinity is in someone who is a "not-man" is just another source of oppression.

The situation is a bit more complicated in the queer subculture. More gender variance is allowed, masculinity is still privileged, however there are expectations of gendered behavior. However, this will vary from community to community. There is still a definite view that at a certain level of masculinity, one is supposed to want to be a man in certain circles (and FTMs who pass as cismen, even if their past is known, definitely get far greater access to male privilege in queer circles than those who don't), and the converse is true. However, this varies from subgroup to subgroup. Quite obviously, in circles that owe a lot to the traditional butch/femme community structure, masculinity is highly valued, and very masculine non-male IDed people are not questioned to nearly the same extent as they would be in other communities. However, in circles that are more heavily populated with people who identify or present in ways that are often called "andro" in lesbian circles, certain forms of heavily masculine behaviors and presentations become suspect, in a form of overt (fears of "butch flight") or more covert (viewing all butches as male-identified, or as patriarchal sell outs) transphobia.

In the latter communities, masculine privilege of course exists, and ties into femmephobia; just as butches are viewed as "too masculine" and suspect, femmes are also suspect of not being authentically queer. In a sense, the gender standard for people put into the category of women has just shifted a bit, and those within that category but toward the masculine edge are viewed as most legitimately queer, and are accorded privilege. While those that are too masculine for community standards are certainly also viewed as legitimately queer, they are also subject to transphobia (in the application of "those who transgress gender norms"). In these instances, both have masculine privilege, as those who aren't viewed as excessively masculine are privileged due to the masculinity of their behavior and/or presentation. However, transphobia is operative and only somewhat separated out from expression of masculinity. It should also be noted that the people who are accorded masculine privilege in these communities but do not suffer from transphobia also suffer oppression in the larger world for gender variance, but generally not to quite the extent that people such as hard butches and FTMs who do not pass as cismen suffer, though obviously oppression is not something that can be quantified on a case-by-case basis, and should never be compared across oppressions. However, the ability to hide gender variance, or having it not be as visibly extreme, can prevent or mitigate instances of oppression.

The remaining question, when discussing the possibility of masculine privilege without male privilege, is whether it is proper to consider systematic preferential treatment that only exists in subcultural groups, and not in the larger society as privilege, or just a subcultural preference. If it is proper, we are justified in talking about masculine privilege as a separate thing from male privilege. If it not proper, we should probably talk about a preference for masculinity, that exists across cultural lines, along with differing gender standards based on location and subculture, and different levels of oppression suffered by gender variant people based on location and subculture.