Gym Executive Function Survival Guide

Little list (updated as-and-when) for specific problems trans men, and transmasc people with similar paths, experience. I've tried to keep this, as far as possible, centered around the most urgent day-to-day demands; and it doesn't, of course, imply there are no overlaps with other groups (victories against overwhelming odds demand coalitions).

Healthcare

Face stronger legal restrictions for accessing testosterone without a prescription, which is generally an illegal/scheduled/etc substance. Here, the clear answer is solidarity with other groups working toward drug decrimialisation. Greater risks even with a prescription, for example, if a cop won't wait for an explanation.

Routinely excluded from healthcare for queer men, on the basis we are not an at-risk group (for example, accessing a PrEP prescription)

Routinely & structurally excluded from healthcare for people who can get pregnant - be that gynecological care for expectant parents, abortion care, or cervical cancer care, and so forth.

Community-wide misinformation, cruelty, and political judgement on the topic of phalloplasty.

Trans men with autism are particularly targeted with ableist narratives about their inability to know their own mind and make their own choices for their body

Trans men who are teenagers or children are the special target of a Won't Someone Think Of The Children panic, targeted particularly at their access to healthcare (one half of a dynamic with trans women, where the Won't Someone Think Of The Children panic positions them as not victims or vulnerable, but potential aggressors). I'm going to add, on a personal note, that I've had this "too young to make a big decision like this" used on me by a doctor at the age of 32.

Social

Critically under-studied; and what theory/academia is available often assumes we are a kind of butch lesbian (which, while it may be true for some people in some ways, can have negative outcomes for all of us: not grouped with men or other trans people; assumed to be not-transitioning; assumed to be part of a lineage of female queerness; etc)

Isolated in gendered spaces: we do not gain unconditional access to male spaces (including queer ones), while our access to female or queer-oriented spaces is conditional on very strong limiations on our self-expression. Situations of being perceived as too male to speak in some radical environments while simultaneously insufficiently male for others, leaving us without a natural home where our voices are centered and welcomed. Situations of trans men expressing unremarkable transition desires (like taking hormones, seeking phalloplasty, dressing in a masculine fashion) unusually stigmatised within radical communities clinging to an outdated model of patriarchy, or valorising certain genders more highly; a specific kind of gender policing.

Trans men of colour exist in a particularly tricky social environment: simultaneously percieved as hyper-masculine-threat, plus socially-feminine in the manner of racialised minorities in a white-dominated culture, plus attempting to pass on the everyday as well as to gender clinic gatekeepers despite "white standards" of physical and social appearance.

Sexual

In the UK, and based purely on recent legal history, more likely to be targeted by police for consensual sex with women after-the-fact on the basis of transness (these cases are all, one doesn't really like to comment given how fraught both cissexism and rape convictions are; but let's just say that the precedent is clearly there in law, and very frightening)

Growing awareness of trans men as a subculture leading to the rise of "misgendering" and pregnancy kink/porn specifically featuring trans male characters (with the side note that both trans and cis men are involved in creating this content. This isn't bad per se - kinks are kinks - but does respond to cultural messaging about trans men, in the primal and obvious way porn tends to reveal; and is likely to come up in intimate encounters with partners)

Community expectation that trans men tend to be bottoms, don't top - can't top - or are inherently non-phallic

Quiet-yet-recogniseable chaser subcultures exist among both men and women for trans men ("chaser" is here defined as a person who is specifically attracted to trans men, but expresses it in ways dehumanising, disrespectful, or bringing cis privilege to bear on the encounter as a tool of control).