I found Rubin’s “Of Catamites and Kings: Reflections on Butch, Gender, and Boundaries,” to be actually fairly ill-informed of transgender people in general, which was disappointing to me since Rubin does make some good, worthwhile points in her essay. Throughout the essay, Rubin suggests that there are very strong similarities between butch cisgender lesbians and transgender men. She states that, “the boundaries between the categories of butch and transsexual are permeable,” which, to me, seems grossly inaccurate (Rubin 476). In stating this, Rubin seems to confuse gender expression and gender roles with gender identity. A masculine and/or butch person as well as a feminine and/or femme person can be of any gender, and Rubin only equates butch cisgender lesbian women with all transgender men of any orientation and gender expression, which fails to factor in feminine transgender men. As a trans* person myself, it is my understanding that “butch” and “femme” are words used to describe one’s self with regards to gender expression and possibly the gender roles they subscribe to, whereas gender identity is reserved for deeply personal and innate categories such as male, female, genderqueer, agender, bigender, genderfluid, etc. A transgender man can be butch, femme, somewhere in between, or not identify his expression as anything specific.
Also, Rubin seems to have a fundamental misunderstanding with how exactly transgender people, binary-identified men specifically, identify and what it means to socially and physically transition. She says that, “some butches are psychologically indistinguishable from female-to-male transsexuals, except for the identities they choose and the extent to which they are willing or able to alter their bodies” (Rubin 476). The notion that transgender people somehow “choose” their gender identities is just flat out wrong. This idea is part of the larger misconception by cisgender people that when transgender people socially and physically transition, they are actually becoming another gender. This is understandable, since cisgender people only actually see what occurs on the outside and often assume that a transgender man used to be a woman and is now becoming a man, instead of what is actually true, which is that the transgender man has always been a man, and has just been socialized and treated as a woman by society before his transition.
Rubin feeds into this notion by saying that, “a woman does not immediately become a man as soon as she begins to take hormones” (Rubin 477).  This is actually technically true, however, a woman never becomes a man regardless of the type of hormones pumping through her veins. I was assigned male at birth, and once I started to take estrogen as part of my hormone replacement therapy, I did not “become” a woman, I have always been one.
Finally, Rubin touches on the feelings of the partners of transgender men, saying that, “the partners of FTMs do not necessarily or suddenly become bisexual or heterosexual because of a lover decides on a sex change,” (Rubin 478). While I agree with this statement, I know of far too many transgender men that feel completely invalidated by their cisgender lesbian partner’s insistence on calling themselves homosexual despite being with a man. It feeds into the notion that transgender men are actually just a different flavor of butch lesbians and not really men, “Men-Lite,” if you will.