Are Transmen Oppressed?

Introduction

“Oppression” is a concept routinely invoked but rarely defined with any care. In public discourse it is often treated as a feeling—hurt, exclusion, or interpersonal mistreatment. In academic settings it is sometimes stretched to cover any difficulty at all. Yet neither sentiment nor hardship is enough. A group is oppressed only when its members occupy a structurally subordinate position in a social hierarchy, and when that position can be identified through a clear and defensible standard. Asking whether transmen are oppressed therefore requires first establishing what counts as oppression and how hierarchy is recognized.

Within feminist philosophy, oppression has never meant a collection of personal grievances. It refers to patterned constraints embedded in a society’s economic, political, and cultural arrangements. These arrangements place some groups at a durable disadvantage: narrowing life prospects, heightening exposure to harm, and weakening a group’s standing to interpret its own situation. On this view, oppression lies in relations between groups—who acts and who endures; whose accounts are taken seriously and whose are brushed aside. It cannot be diagnosed by adding up individual experiences. It is visible in how power is organized and sustained.

This paper outlines several influential accounts of oppression—Young on structural injustice, Frye on systemic constraint, MacKinnon on sexual domination, Cudd on institutional coercion, and Haslanger on social positioning. Each offers a metric for identifying hierarchical disadvantage. With these standards in hand, the paper turns to the central question: Do transmen occupy a subordinate position that meets them? The inquiry is not about identity labels or subjective experience. It concerns the social meaning of female embodiment, the policing of female masculinity, and the conditions under which sexual violence, erasure, and misrecognition occur.

My claim is straightforward: transmen meet the threshold for oppression, not as “men” acquiring male privilege but as female and gender-nonconforming subjects whose position is continuous with feminist accounts of sexual hierarchy.

Metrics of Oppression

Philosophers approach the measurement of oppression in different ways, but some common points emerge. Many begin with material life. A group’s social position appears in its income and wealth patterns, employment and unemployment rates, housing stability, health outcomes, and access to education and services (Fraser 1997; Anderson 1999). Young’s well-known “faces” of oppression—exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and violence—make the same point: subordination is visible wherever one group bears disproportionate costs while others benefit (Young 1990). Quantitative indicators do not settle every question, but if a group is oppressed, the fact should be legible in basic social conditions.

A second approach centres violence and coercion. Here the focus is on patterns of sexual and domestic violence, hate-motivated attacks, harassment, and state or police abuse (MacKinnon 1989; Brownmiller 1975). The issue is not whether a group sometimes experiences violence—a near universal fact—but whether it does so at significantly higher rates, and whether the violence follows recognisable scripts of domination. Young’s emphasis on “violence” and MacKinnon’s treatment of sexual objectification both treat routine vulnerability to bodily harm as a clear indicator of subordination. Reliable statistics on assault, homicide, and intimidation therefore play a central role.

A third set of metrics tracks political, cultural, and epistemic standing. Fraser distinguishes between maldistribution and misrecognition, noting that economic marginality and cultural devaluation often intersect but can be analytically distinct (Fraser 1997). Political theorists make similar points by examining who holds office, who governs institutions, and whose interpretations shape law and policy (Mills 1997; Pateman 1988). Work on epistemic injustice adds another dimension: oppression can be traced through patterns of misrecognition, where a group’s experiences are doubted, dismissed, or rendered unintelligible within dominant interpretive frameworks (Fricker 2007; Dotson 2011). Metrics include political representation, institutional gatekeeping, media portrayal, and the routine devaluation of testimony.

Intersectional and critical race theorists warn against relying on a single metric. Groups may gain in one domain and lose in another, or encounter hostility without sitting clearly lower in a hierarchy (Crenshaw 1991; Collins 1990). For that reason, some argue that multiple strands of evidence should align before we describe a group as oppressed. Others resist checklists altogether, noting that strict criteria can obscure people whose circumstances fall between categories.

A reasonable starting point remains. Calling a group oppressed is not the same as noting that its members face difficulty. The question is whether they have fewer workable options and resources, greater exposure to coercion or violence, and a diminished place in public life. These concerns frame the analysis that follows.

Applying the Metrics to Transmen

The next step is to consider whether transmen meet these criteria. The question is not how people describe themselves or how others read them. It is whether female embodiment and female masculinity continue to shape life chances, exposure to harm, and the credibility of one’s accounts.

The discussion moves through three areas: the material conditions in which transmen find themselves, the patterns of coercion and violence they encounter, and the political and cultural settings that either admit or exclude their perspectives. The aim is simple: do the pressures and limitations described in the literature show up in the lives of transmen?

Two common errors need avoiding. One is treating transmen as a wholly separate class whose experiences can be understood apart from other female people. The other is assuming that identity labels determine whether oppression is present. Neither is defensible. If oppression is at work, it appears in recurring patterns of disadvantage and vulnerability. If it is not, the evidence should reflect that.

Three lines of inquiry guide what follows:

1. Material life—whether transmen encounter economic strain, institutional barriers, or limits on ordinary services;

2. Violence and coercion—whether the patterns reflect the social meaning of their bodies rather than the identities they claim; and

3. Standing—how their accounts of harm are received and whether legal, policy, and cultural frameworks recognize them.

The question becomes empirical and structural: do established indicators of oppression appear in the lives of transmen, and through what mechanisms?

 

Material and Social Disadvantage

To understand where transmen sit materially, we are largely limited to two major surveys: the NTDS (2011) and the early findings from the 2022 USTS. Only the NTDS breaks out some economic measures for FTM respondents, while the newer survey does not yet offer that level of detail. That gap matters, because it sets a boundary on what can be inferred.

Even so, the NTDS gives a clear indication of how transmen were situated at the time. Both transmen and transwomen were heavily concentrated in the lowest income brackets, though transmen slightly more so. Roughly a third of FTM respondents reported annual incomes below $20,000, compared with just over a quarter of MTF respondents. This runs against the familiar pattern in the general population, where men tend to earn more. Whatever “male advantage” is supposed to look like in labour markets, it is not visible here. The 2022 USTS shows that poverty remains widespread across the transgender population as a whole, but without separate figures for transmen, it functions more as a backdrop than as a direct comparison.

Employment patterns raise similar questions. Transwomen were more likely to report being denied a promotion, but transmen were more likely to be underemployed—working below their skill level or training. Nearly half of the FTM respondents fell into that category. This form of disadvantage is quieter than outright exclusion but no less structural. It hints at a labour market in which transmen can get in the door but are not easily moved into positions with authority or long-term stability. The overall unemployment rate in the survey was roughly twice the national average, though the NTDS does not separate those numbers by subgroup.

Housing and healthcare show the same unevenness in the data. Nearly a fifth of respondents in the NTDS had been denied housing, and a similar proportion had experienced homelessness linked to their gender identity. The 2022 USTS reports even higher lifetime homelessness. None of these figures are broken out for transmen, so any finer-grained assessment hits an immediate limit. Access to healthcare shows the same problem. Many respondents in the NTDS reported putting off treatment or being turned away, sometimes because of discrimination and sometimes because of cost. But the survey does not tell us whether transmen encounter these barriers differently from transwomen. The missing detail shouldn’t be read as evidence of better outcomes; it reflects a design that never distinguished between the two groups in the first place.

Even with these gaps, a general picture begins to settle. Where the NTDS does separate transmen, their position is no better than that of transwomen and, on some measures such as income and underemployment, it appears worse. Where the data go silent, that silence reflects a limitation of the instruments, not an improvement in transmen’s position. Everything we can see places transmen within the familiar patterns of material constraint that feminist theorists have long treated as marks of structural subordination.

 

Violence and Coercion

Violence often reveals the hierarchy most clearly. Although the available data are uneven, the picture is consistent: once disaggregated, transmen face high levels of violence, often higher than those reported by transwomen, and far higher than those reported in the general population.

 

Sexual Violence

The clearest evidence comes from Closson et al. (2024), one of the rare studies that reports rates separately for transmen. In that sample, about four in ten transmen reported having experienced sexual violence at some point. The figure for transwomen was slightly lower; the figures for women and men in the general population were much lower still. The pattern doesn’t hinge on any one form of assault—completed rape, attempted rape, sexual coercion—because the distribution stays roughly the same across all of them.

These findings are in line with the 2015 USTS, which found that roughly half of the FTM respondents had been sexually assaulted at least once in their lives. The methodologies differ, but the direction of the results is the same. Whatever social recognition transmen may or may not receive as men does not protect them here. The vulnerability reflected in the data maps far more closely onto the social meaning of the female body than onto any contemporary idea of gender identity. The surveys that do not disaggregate (including the NTDS and the preliminary USTS 2022 release) offer no information either way; the gap is methodological, not substantive.

Physical Violence and Harassment

The NTDS gives a glimpse into earlier life stages, especially school years. More than a quarter of FTM respondents reported being physically assaulted at school because of how they presented, and more than a third reported harassment from teachers or staff. A smaller but still troubling proportion had been assaulted badly enough to require medical care. These are not isolated incidents. They suggest a recognisable pattern: masculine expression in a female person is singled out and punished long before anyone is living openly as a man.

Transwomen, in the same survey, reported higher rates of harassment in public settings as adults. That likely has to do with visibility—gender nonconformity in a male body tends to draw more scrutiny. But this doesn’t negate what transmen experienced earlier on, at a time when most would have been read as female. The NTDS also reports that interactions with police often involved harassment or mistreatment, though it does not tell us whether this fell more heavily on transmen or transwomen. That missing detail limits what can be said about state violence, but it doesn’t alter the broader picture of vulnerability.

Intimate Partner Violence

The Closson study also reports intimate partner violence, and here again transmen sit uncomfortably high in the rankings. More than half reported having experienced IPV—higher than the figure for transwomen and markedly higher than those for women or men in the general population. IPV tends to reveal something about where a group stands in relation to gendered power, because the dynamics of coercion inside intimate relationships often mirror the larger social order. The numbers here suggest that transmen continue to face forms of domination typically associated with the female sex class.

Summary

Across datasets that allow separation of transmen from the broader “transgender” category, a pattern emerges. Vulnerability follows from femaleness and from departing from dominant expectations of femininity. There is no sign that transmen acquire a male position in the hierarchy. If anything, the limited data suggest they bear a heavier share of gendered violence—overlooked precisely because they do not fit standard narratives of either male or female victimization.

Political, Cultural, and Epistemic Standing

Material and violent disadvantage do not exhaust the question. A group’s position is also shaped by how it is seen—or not seen—within the institutions that organize public understanding. Here, transmen are nearly absent. Surveys rarely distinguish them from transwomen, and policy debates usually imagine the latter. The result is a political category that erases the very people it claims to represent.

Culturally, the problem is similar. Female masculinity has never had a stable place in mainstream accounts of gender. A masculine presentation on a female body is often read as a rejection of femininity or an incomplete move toward “real” masculinity. It is rarely understood as a legitimate form of embodiment. For that reason, transmen are easy to miss. Where transwomen draw scrutiny, transmen slip from view—not because they are safer, but because there is no settled frame through which to recognize them. Invisibility shields the structures that produce the harm.

Interpretive gaps become most visible when transmen describe violence. A masculine-presenting victim does not fit established narratives in services for violence against women, yet male-oriented services overlook the gendered nature of the harm. Their accounts are reframed or minimised—not necessarily out of hostility, but because dominant concepts do not fit what happened. Philosophers call these failures testimonial and hermeneutical injustice (Fricker 2017). Both appear routinely in transmen’s descriptions of sexual and physical violence.

These patterns reveal a form of marginalization that is not simply about representation. It reflects the absence of any conceptual place from which transmen’s experiences can be seen and understood—a deeper form of subordination that persists even when material and violent disadvantages are set aside.

Conclusion

The evidence shows that transmen are oppressed, not as men acquiring male privilege, but as female and gender-nonconforming subjects situated within a sexed hierarchy and homophobia.

One implication is that transmen belong within feminist inquiry. Their experiences track the mechanisms through which sexual hierarchy is maintained: economic constraint, gendered violence, and the routine devaluation of testimony. Nothing in their accounts requires feminist theory to stretch its terms. Instead, their narratives clarify how sex and gender expression intersect in practice. Being female places them within a class historically vulnerable to male power; stepping outside expected forms of femininity invites further sanction.

A second implication concerns political framing. Feminism offers the better tools for understanding why these harms persist. It keeps attention on the social meaning of female bodies, the rules that police gendered behaviour, and the violence—sexual and epistemic—used to enforce those rules. Identity-centred activism, focused on self-definition, often misses the structural forces shaping transmen’s lives regardless of how they identify. Their difficulties arise not primarily from misrecognition of identity but from the position they occupy in a sexed social order.

A feminist analysis does not absorb transmen or speak over them. It makes visible a social position that has, until now, been easy to overlook.

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