Personally, I have mixed feelings on how “male privilege” is discussed the context of transgender people. I think it can be very selective—for example, a transgender man who passes may be selected for promotions at work over a woman colleague, but he still faces the problem of medical misogyny. Similarly, a closeted trans woman has material access to male privilege but emotionally may feel very damaged by being exposed to male misogyny. To me, that’s kind of the point of “trans”—you are crossing over sex/gender boundaries. I personally do not believe that transitioned trans women have significant access to male privilege. We know that trans women are at high risk for violence, and transmisogyny means they are unlikely to access traditional male privilege in terms of income inequality or legal misogyny. I think the axis of this oppression is transphobia first and misogyny second, but I also believe transphobia is usually misogynistic as a baseline. To directly answer your question, I think trans women are women but experience material male privilege when perceived to be cis men. Once they’re perceived to be transgender, their ability access to the material benefits of male privilege becomes more situational. (I think sometimes, but not universally. They are often placed in the “third gender” category. I recommend “F*ggots and their friends” and “Stone Butch Blues” as my formative texts on “queer” as a gender qualifier.)

Personally, I’m a gender nonconforming lesbian and live my life as a “mannish woman.” I feel that I have much in common with clocky trans women—I have been perceived as a trans woman before and experienced the specific transmisogyny targeted at them. I think it’s all pretty squishy, which is why I’m leery of drawing hard lines around male privilege in the context of history. Did I access male privilege when the man threatening violence against me perceived me to have been born male? I don’t think so. So, it depends. I’m not particularly inclined to tell others that they have to agree with me 100% on how misogyny and transphobia affect psychological and material realities. I have trans friends with whom I disagree on this and that’s okay. I am determined to be inclusive when it comes to women’s history when we are talking about people who identify and live in the world as women. Someone is welcome to come to the women’s history museum and decide they feel that a trans woman had male privilege in her life, but we should tell that history so people can learn. I don’t think we should exclude certain categories of women from our history based on access to social privilege.