onycha.monster

I didn't just want to "be a boy". I never really wanted that, at any point growing up. I saw their privileges, and feminism explained to me why those annoyed me and made me feel envy. But I didn't want to be a cis boy.

What else was there, then? Being a girl, I guess. So once again, even after periods of feeling either alienated or conversely very close to myself, I'd give the game of Successful Female Presentation & Socializing another shot. Trying to be armed with feminist boundaries, which in the Deep South was a challenge in itself.

And these repeated girl-attempts, starting when I was 12 and continuing through to 37 or so, did bring me some things I really loved!

So when I started seeing trans men in the media in my early 20s (late 1990s), I figured -- that's not me. I love sparkly nail polish and lacy tops and dancing to techno, and those trans guys on tv are like in tie or sportswear, doing their best Normie Bro.

You know where this is heading.

What I needed to know about, the misconception that held me back, was the existence of nonbinary guys.

#trans #transMasc

Probably if I'd lived in a more progressive urban area, or felt like investigating queer stuff (that I was drawn to) had any practical point, I'd have figured this out earlier. There was a lot of gatekeeping around queer things in the late 90s -- you either Were, or you Weren't. And basically, the proof was in who you slept with. I knew I didn't really want to sleep with women, I'd tried messing around but wasn't into it. And I was living in like, Tallahassee Florida. Or rural areas nearby. Not a lot of opportunity.

You had to really know who you were, and where to find community, and know you belonged in it, and then you'd have a chance. And I didn't have any of that mentality. The scene demanded either "I am a gay man" or "I am a lesbian" to belong.

And I was more of a wafty "I'm a Something", so all I got to do was go to 80s night at gay bars with the other open-minded straights. I stayed in my lane. The straights all ended up getting married and popping out babies. I didn't.

Also, right around the time in the late 90s that I could have been most influenced to genuinely discover shit -- aside from the LGBT gatekeeping and geographic misery -- I fell into an abusive relationship that blew up my life. The 2000s began with me crawling out of that and committed to being as normal and stable as possible for awhile.

There was kind of a bisexual-emo thing in the late 2000s that maybe I could have listened to, because bisexual was as close as the discourse came to what I felt like I was. But I thought I was too old, that it was a scene for kids to be figuring themselves out. That a 30-year-old woman even trying to explore it would be pathetic.

Anyway. Fast-forward to Tumblr in 2015. People finally started excitedly sharing about nonbinary identities, and through that, I met a trans guy who openly embraced a "Yes, And" version of gender. He wasn't transitioning to be a boy instead of a girl. He didn't want to be masculine instead of feminine.

He wanted to be a masculine male with feminine attributes and styling.

The idea that you didn't have to choose, one or the other.

That there were options in the type of man you could transition into. It didn't just have to be suit-man or basketball-shorts-bro. That other types of trans men might not exist yet...but they COULD.

It probably seems elementary now. But feminism taught me there were tons of different types of women. It didn't teach me anything about types of men, sadly. Neither did wider culture. Even the gay male scene subdivides dudes into this narrow (and to me, uninteresting) taxonomy.

#trans #transMasc

I have yelled for 7 years now about trans guys' right to invent masculinity for themselves, if they don't see one they resonate with.

When I started transitioning, that perspective still wasn't common. The FTM world was still crawling out from under that boulder of "gotta look straight!"

When coupled with society's more-limited options for masculinity, it has felt weird and hard sometimes, keeping my hair long and painting my nails occasionally, and wearing jewelry and more decorative clothes than most cis dudes wear (until the last year or two). I've gone through a lot of "am I not trying hard enough to present as male" and "am I really trans", and embarrassingly enough I've had to heal a lot of secret belief that nonbinary people are less than either of the main genders. That I was never a girl, but that I'm also sub-man.

So to summarize, the main misconceptions that I'd internalized from society, that held me back from realizing (and still sometimes prevent me fully expressing myself) are:

[X] there are only two genders -- if you're not one, you ARE the other

[X] if you are not drawn to one of the limited number of straight/gay masculinities, you're invalid and doing it wrong, and need to fuck back to girl-land for your own safety

[X] other people know more about what you are than you do, especially if you are confused or culturally unsuccessful

All bullshit.

💅

#trans #transMasc

@erosdiscordia I had a long talk with Tek Jr about this kind of thing. IMO, the most masculine (and really, just plain “adult”) thing you can do is whatever it is you please. I have pink shirts because they look good. I order umbrella drinks because they taste good. I lift weights because I like being strong. I get mani/pedis because I like to be pampered. You wanna paint your nails? Man up and paint ‘em! Doing what’s right for you with confidence is where it is.

@tek @erosdiscordia yep yep. "Macho" was a big thing when I was a kid, and I didn't like any of that. Macho men were jerks. I decided I was as comfortable as I was gonna be growing up as a man, but I would decide what that looked like for me.

Identity's not a binary or even a spectrum, but some funky hypersphere. I'm just always glad to meet people who've examined themselves all the way to ana and kata.

@erosdiscordia @tek I'll admit I was pretty proud of that one after I typed it out.

Sometimes I word-vomit gold.