#'not a woman' is the absolute fundamental part of my gender identity as a transmasc nb

[bitchking-of-angmar]

I sometimes feel like I came into my queer identity... “wrong”?

When I read texts about historic transmasculine people, read theory or talk to other trans people in my local community, I always feel like I missed some steps in my development that are fundamental for the way a lot of other people experience trans-masculinity.

I keep reading, especially here on tumblr, that trans-masculinity cannot be separated from lesbianism or from lesbian gender-nonconformity. I keep seeing historical figures that describe experiences that are very similar to mine, that to me read explicitly transmasculine, described as lesbians and I keep feeling this disconnect.

I have always felt attracted to people of all genders and never once in my life identified as a wlw or any form of lesbian. I never even knew a lesbian by name until my mid twenties, I was never part of the community for any extend of time. I honestly feel more connected to cis gay or bisexual men then to the cis lesbians I meet. I know I’m not alone in this, a lot of my online trans friends have similar biographies to me in “skipping the lesbian stage” and most of them are exclusively attracted to men/masc people.

But being in contact with IRL trans communities makes me feel deeply weird about that, almost? As if I did something wrong? As if I could have had this important formative community experience among queer women and instead skipped that stage, leaving me now feeling 100% disconnected from womanhood altogether. Not sure what to do with that.

[pokegyns]

the deranged lgbt spaces post is so true. I used to be supportive of lgbt spaces and rights when it was easy to understand for cishet people. lgbt involved sexuality at most back then and the idea was simple, it's okay to have sexual attraction of any kind, hetero or homo. But now I don't see the sexuality spaces much, it's cluttered with gender stuff and trans stuff. The number of terms and definitions have increased so much even tho I have been in these spaces for a while now, I don't know what half the terms means. What's the difference between transmasc and transman? transwoman and transfem? Why does every experience need to have a term, why can't an experience just remain that. When you define an experience, you give it a box in only which it can exist. And that's sad, experiences can be varied and undefined - relatable or unrelatable. Idk where I'm going with this lol but guess I have a lot in my mind :-| correct me if I went wrong

personally i feel like the real way it goes wrong isnt having terminology to describe experiences; its the way its handled.

when i was trying to desist and just see myself as a dysphoric woman and not express myself as some shade of nb and let myself feel comforted by various terms and pride stuff i really did just feel like i was inhibiting myself and basically trying to train myself out of seeing my sex incongruency as as fundamental to me as it really is. And for me personally, having ways to communicate my experiences without a whole mouthful, a "sort" of person that it makes me, is really helpful. honestly even just for the fact im a very "i like sorting things into boxes that make sense to me" autistic.

and like, honestly. identities and forms of self expression that could be considered sorts of "gender identities" has always been part of lesbian communities, and even just, other sorts of identity labelling too.

the problem arises when; 1, everyone is supposed to know what these things mean lest youre hatecriming them 2, people try to project these experiences onto others, insisting it MUST be something every person on the planet has an equivalent of "just like sexuality" when it really *is not* 3, it turns a corner into being dissociated from reality and claiming that entirely unrelated concepts have to do with """gender""" and thus obscuring the experiences of sex dysphorics while also promoting a sense of disreality in the community. this then circles back to problem 1, or ig a modification of it where "that doesnt make any sense" is similarly a hatecrime and, the original spirit of such means of expression honestly was not like this at *all*. these terms were meant as a way to chill the fuck out lol. like. actual self expression, not the existential crises i see people have over these things

also im not sure if youre actually asking about transmasc vs transman etc, but generally transmasc is an umbrella for females who either have gender identities or are transitioning and is less specific than "transman" in order to cover the "grey area" as well as the experiences both collectively have. like; i personally feel "transman" insinuates expecting to be exclusively referred to as male pronouns, etc etc etc. but there is, and always has been, a grey area between living as "fully" trans, and not having any sort of gender fuckery experiences at all.

like i definitely beyond see all the problems with how people of these sorts of experiences have ABSOLUTELY been derailed by the mainstream and emphasizing concepts in the worst possible ways, and i can totally appreciate what ur saying, but i dont necessarily thing putting words to our experiences is inherently the problem as opposed to the compulsory, over-self-analytical and dissociative nature of it all -mod glaceon

[tinolqa]

just kind of shouting out into the abyss because my brain has been trying and failing to gnaw on this particular bone

but I think a part of my experience as a trans man that I’ve managed to talk to one other person about is the unpleasant dance of performing attraction/lack thereof to cultivate a version of yourself that is gendered correctly by other people

as an adult who socially transitioned 10+ years ago and passes fairly consistently, I can be relatively open about being bi. this was not the case when I was still in the closet and it was so much more difficult in the early years.

I knew from a pretty early point that I was attracted to girls and to guys. I also knew I had some Gender Business long before I had the words and knowledge to know that trans men /existed/. And the third thing I knew was that if I wanted my masculinity to “count” and for people to treat me and react to me in a way vaguely consistent with my gender identity, I had to vehemently deny my interest in men.

So I accidentally backed myself into toxic masculinity and internalized homophobia before I had the vocabulary to even articulate that I was a man. It was like this: I knew if I had a boyfriend, he would expect me to be a girlfriend, and I would rather have boiled myself alive than be in that dynamic. It was easier on me to act like One Of The Guys and vehemently deny feelings, to lean harder into claiming exclusively I had no interest in relationships or only interest in girls. Of course it was the 00s and I was going to be treated like a weird little freak for it, but that was the point. Being treated like a weird little overly-masculine freak was closer to “me” than being seen as Clearly Normal And Feminine Gender-Conforming Because Look, A Relationship With A Boy. Being in middle school and high school in that era, people could barely conceive of trans identity let alone the idea that being trans wasn’t just the Extreme version of being gay.

So my baseline was, basically up until the point that I was both out and starting to be treated as a guy by online friends, that I wouldn’t admit attraction to irl men or pursue relationships until they’d treat me as a man and see the relationship as a queer one.

I wonder if I was self-sabotaging or protecting myself. This is still hard to talk about, because I worry that the importance to my identity that my sexuality has makes it seem like my attraction to women was a “beard.” But that’s the thing. It’s not. I’m bi, I’ve been bi the entire time! I’m just also a bi dude who knew from early on that I had to play up my attraction to women and downplay my attraction to men if I wanted my gender identity to not be totally ignored.

Probably, there’s a timeline where I got further trapped in that by the “support” of others invested in me being sexually available to them. It nearly happened with my ex, and it’s why I’m extremely fucking wary of a lot of discourse on here. It just seems like a counterpart to the scenario I avoided, of scorning men I was interested in because I could not survive being seen on a fundamental level as “girlfriend” instead of as me. It’s no better coming from a woman or from a transmasc who refuses to be separated from an orientation label, y’know?

It just kind of sucks that I had to use such a maladaptive survival strategy because I had absolutely no support or information until I was in my mid/late teens.

[nothorses]

Hey if you're up for talking more about transmasc problems I've been thinking about some things lately. My partner is a cis woman and I'm a transmasc enby and basically identify as part nonbinary, part male/fluid between the two. And we both used to be very much caught in the hating-men kind of feminism (which held be back from transitioning for a while, for sure, but I've learned better since then and am getting more comfortable with the idea of being partly a guy).

I came out as trans before we started dating, and she's made a real effort to learn more about trans issues and we've talked a lot about it. But thus far she's basically just switched from talking about hating men to talking about hating cis men, or sometimes about hating cis straight white men. Which sounds like it would be better, but I still don't feel great about it? Maybe I'm just being insecure, but it kind of feels like she has me & other transmascs in a separate category from cis men? Which, I guess I am nonbinary but still I feel like it's kind of invalidating to the very real and masculine part of myself?

I really understand where she's coming from because I used to feel the same. And I don't want to sound like I'm invalidating her anxiety when she talks about being afraid of cis men either. I don't know, have you encountered that kind of attitude anywhere before? I feel like I've run into the same problem with a dear (cis fem) friend of mine who was my college roommate for a few years, who has talked about how she wouldn't be comfortable living with men in her dorm building--but she lived with me knowing I was trans. Like, the culture at our school was such that the trans guys who lived in the mens dorms had problems with harassment and I wouldn't have wanted to live there either but it was still like, well I'm a guy too, you know?

Any thoughts on acknowledging that cis men (esp. cis straight white men) often hold more power than transmascs in society without making it sound like their gender is fundamentally different than trans men?? I feel like it could help to talk about systems of power instead of individual identity but I don't feel like I have the words to make that argument

Oh god, no, you’re absolutely not “just” being anything. As much as I advocate for specifying cis men when you mean cis men, I don’t think that doing the same “man-hating feminism” stuff, but just dis-including trans men from the “man” category, is much better.

@canadianwheatpirates​ once put it really well when he said that every one of those “kill all men” refrains comes with the implication, for trans men, that we should detransition.

In my opinion, it also comes with the implication that these people believe they can tell. They know exactly who’s a cis man and who’s trans, and they know, always, exactly who deserves their hate and toxicity. If they can’t tell, and if we don’t want to be hated, distrusted, and harassed by them, all we have to do is out ourselves as trans. All we have to do is disclose our trans status for the sake of cis women’s comfort.

Making trans men The One Kind Of Man That’s Okay is not helpful to us, because the difference between cis men and trans men is not our gender- it’s our experience with and relationship to gender.

I don’t think folks need to just change their language to sound more inclusive. I think they need to actually sit with their feelings before they say those things; to consider what they’re actually feeling, what groups they’re actually mad at, and what they want to accomplish with the things they say.

The patriarchy doesn’t work the same way other systems of oppression do, and we can’t just copy + paste frameworks for discussing those other systems onto the way we discuss the patriarchy. We need to put more work and thought into it than that, and that includes actively considering trans men when discussing men as a whole.

[what-even-is-thiss]

The thing is, early on in discovering myself I read about a lot of varied experiences. People who medically transition but don’t consider themselves trans and don’t transition socially. People who consider themselves trans but never transition. People who use neopronouns. People who detransition later in life because they feel like their needs changed. People changing their gender identity after being out for decades. And none of these people saying that they regret their decisions.

And now what are people hearing? Absolutes, I guess. Why are people bashing neopronouns? In 2013 I didn’t even know that they/them pronouns were an option. Neopronouns were all I saw. Nobody even talked about dysphoria much from what I saw. Trans people were what they were and made the decisions that they did. Now I guess people are trying more to appeal to the mainstream?

I guess this is especially a problem for transmasc people. Transfem folks have it rough and have their own debates I’m not going to comment on because it’s not my place, but the main difference between trans men and woman and what causes tension between the communities at times is our difference in visibility. Generally in The past the strategies of trans people that transitioned and didn’t just stay in the closet or live as gays or lesbians or drag performers fell into two different categories. Conform and aim to be invisible or reject conformity and live on the fringes of society. And there are trans men and women who have chosen either path, but in general, Trans men have opted for conformity and invisibility. Not all trans men can pass even with medical transition, but those who can have most often opted to vanish.

However, in the new age where trans rights is a meme and at least two transgender celebrities exist, transgender men have slowly started to realize I think that conformity isn’t always a necessity. And that, I think, scares some people.

A lot of early stories that influenced me were by transfeminine people. Not necessarily people like me. It’s very possible that I’m wrong but from what I’ve seen transfem folks (or at least the ones in the spotlight) more often see rejection of societal norms as inevitable and that’s historically how they’ve survived. How Trans men have survived is fitting into societal norms. But now that we no longer have to conform and be invisible we’re kind of caught in a weird spot. Generational trauma is a thing with trans folks I think. Unless there’s a better term I don’t know about. Other people’s stories and pain affect the way you think, especially if they’re like you. And trans men have had problems. Emotional pain from performing femininity, bullying and abuse associated with sexuality or gender performance, high rates of substance abuse, high rates of being sexually assaulted, other problems associated with being raised as a girl experienced in a uniquely transgender way.

So with all this collective trauma floating around as transmasculine people’s voices finally start to bubble to the surface a bit I think some of us are starting to cling to the community’s old coping mechanism. Conformity. Because if we’re trying to be visible now then cis people might want to hurt us. So how do we stop them from hurting us? By trying to be cis. By acting like being cisgender is the ideal. If we try to look like cisgender men then they won’t hurt us, right?

Except that’s not really how that works. Even if you live as a cis man you’re going to be surrounded by transphobia anyways and know that you’re always one locker room incident away from being found out, because for the most part even with surgery and prosthetics we do not pass the locker room test most of the time. And when they find out you may be tempted to hold yourself up as not like those weird transtrenders but transphobes don’t really see a difference between you and gnc trans men and non binary people on a fundamental level. You’re the trans community’s version of the two conventionally attractive white gay men making a nuclear family in their big house. A poster child. Not necessarily representative of the majority. But it’s hard to accept that. It’s a lot easier to believe that everyone else wants to conform to survive too. But that’s not how it is.

So you get all these trans men striving for conformity and everyone else striving to just... be themselves basically. Not necessarily aiming to show a middle finger to society (although that is a valid goal) but not aiming to conform either. Then in the wake of all that we get the focus on dysphoria, the shaming of neopronouns, the backlash against feminine trans men and sometimes even gay or asexual trans men in rarer cases. And it stems from fear, I think. A fear we all have. Of rejection, violence, resurgence in mental illness. I think almost everyone who’s been in contact with other trans people for a while knows at least one person who has died for one reason or another. But at the end of the day, and what I think a lot of people don’t see, conformity doesn’t really fix any of our problems or make us more acceptable to cis people. Most cis people have no idea what dysphoria is. Even cis people with transgender loved ones. They really don’t understand it or care about it. In my experience medical professionals don’t even ask you about it. I told my doctors that I use two sets of pronouns and they didn’t bat an eye.

So like... I dunno. I just wish we focused less on conformity and more on exploration. We’re coming out of the shadows now. Who are we as a community? Unwelcoming? I sure hope not. With my experience talking to trans people irl everybody’s just kind of like whatever. They don’t care as much and I just wish that the Internet would catch up.

[mortuarybees]

Okay, I'm probably one of those that thinks of butch as the wrong thing so...please explain to me what exactly counts towards butch for a person? If you don't mind ;u;

under readmore bc she long

there’s no like. one way of being butch? there are as many ways of being butch as there are butches but ultimately it’s

complete and utter disinterest in The Male Gaze^TM and *distorted philosophytube voice* cisheteronormativity and gender conformity

masculinity that has absolutely nothing to do with cis men

i think, but definitely this is a personal thing, a butch is not part of the capitalist class. a gnc capitalist isnt butch. butches take care of each other and their community and a capitalist fundamentally does not do that

the part that is going to get me Blessedly Cancelled: at least a tangential identification with lesbians as a community and identity and experience. i say tangential and do not want to hear about it from anyone who isnt butch or butch-adjacent bc i am not talking about the complexities of gender and sexuality and community on this wretched site with anyone who has a carrd with all their Discourse Hot Takes. if you can read this without telling me he’s Actually A Gay Transmasc then we can talk fldsja

alison bechdel said in a nyt article about butches and studs (i know it sounds as if there could be nothing more insufferable than a nyt article about butches and studs but i pay the new york times $2 a month so im getting my moneys worth) “It’s a lovely word, ‘butch’: I’ll take it, if you give it to me. But I’m afraid I’m not butch enough to really claim it. Because part of being butch is owning it, the whole aura around it.”

a butch isnt necessarily violent, or mean, or crude, or hates men. it’s not any woman who has short hair jfls;a there are long haired butches And There Are Many Butches Who Are Not Women. it’s a certain capability and quality. a gender and a presentation and a sexuality and a way of living. i think it takes a degree of self-confidence to self-identify as butch, an ability to be your own moor and a desire to moor others who are vulnerable and feel like they dont make sense. not every gnc lesbian is butch

and all of this Ineffability and talk of like, metaphysical butchness doesnt discount the importance of presentation jf;ldfsja there isnt by any means one way for butches to present but it’s not feminine. all of these are butches or studs or for lack of a better term butch-adjacent (from the same nyt article bc i have it pulled up lmao) but as Not All GNC Lesbians Are Butch, All Butches Are GNC

and i think all of that is probably why theres not really butch rep on screen dlsjaf;a there is a complete inability to comprehend those things for a lot of people, esp masculinity that is independent of cis men

(and while we’re on the subject: apparently gnc lesbians on tiktok are basically just substituting the word stud for butch and gnc and im gonna assume for a lot of them it comes from a place of genuine ignorance but at this point yall should know: stud is specific to black and latinx lesbians. you cannot be a white stud.)

anyway because butch means something different to everyone and like alison bechdel i am not butch and dont think i identify enough with lesbians to be one, would love to invite people to talk about what ButchNess is

t*rfs dni as always

[amitylesbian]

thanks for your response! i genuinely appreciate hearing about your point of view, even though i disagree. since i disagree though, i'm going to rebut the points that you're putting forward

implying that transmascs can benefit from the same systemic privlige that cis men do is incorrect.

i'm not trying to imply anything, i'm saying that men (as a whole) can benefit from misogyny, and that marginalised men (not specifically transmascs) can benefit from misogyny within their communities:

those men (including marginalised men / masculine people) are still capable and usually more than willing to use misogyny to target women / feminine people (often within their communities, but not always)

i probably should have said "almost always" instead of "often", but aside from that, misogyny within marginalised communities is a very real thing (see misogynoir as an example of a framework used to analyse this within the Black community)

Secondly, is it not systematic when transmascs and trans men are denied reproductive care or denied insurance to cover it, because of the M marker on their documents? You can't say it's because they're lacking femininity, it's literally because of their male/masculine identity.

this is definitely a thing that happens and it's awful! but again, that's transphobia - they are being oppressed because of their trans identity, not their masculine identity, even though being masculine is a core part of their transness. if a transfem / woman was in that same situation, that would also be transphobia, because the discrimination is targeted at their trans identity, not the fact that they are women.

the 'lacking femininity' example was part of an analysis of a specific type of discrimination and harrassment directed and transmascs, not an overarching statement about being transmasc.

"Those men are still capable and usually more than willing to use misogyny to target women / feminine people". This is just bad faith. saying "trans men aren't systemically oppressed due to their masculinity because they can be misogynistic" is just. What.

i'll be honest this part of your argument is a little bit confusing for me - if you have an axis of oppression (gender, race, sexuality, etc), and someone is able to benefit from that type of oppression (in this example, men), then i makes sense that they cannot at the same time be a victim of that type of oppression. while this is lot more nuanced with other axis' gender is fairly simple to analyse as patriarchy is meant to help one specific class, which is men.

i understand this comparison can be uncomfortable (as well as "imagine if this but a different thing" usually but not always being a really terrible argument), but genuinely, try comparing what you're saying to what MRA-type cis men say. the idea that men of any kind can be uniquely oppressed under patriarchy (an idea present in both the motivation for transandropobia as a term, and "mens rights") is fundamentally anti-feminist. i'm absolutely not trying to say that these are identical movements, but the similarities should hopefully help to illustrate the point i'm making.

And again, transmascs and trans men do not benefit from this in the same way cispatriarchy does.

my point that you're rebutting here is that trans men and mascs can benefit from the patriarchy, specifically within the trans community-

(often within their communities, but not always)

-not that they benefit from patriarchy in the same way that cis men do.

Everything you wrote there just ignores basic intersectionality and how it works

i'm not sure if... you know how intersectionality works? intersectionality isn't saying "this person is [x type of oppressed identity, e.g. trans], and in the course of their oppresion on this axis the fact that they are [y identity, e.g. masculine/a man] is targeted. because of this we can conclude that they are being oppressed because they are [y identity]".

it's a way to analyse what happens when two or more pre-existing types of oppression combine and to make a form of oppression that is unique and distinct from its component parts.

in all honesty that's a relatively simplistic description of it, but the keywords there are "unique and distinct" - you can't use an intersectional framework to analyse transandrophobia because "androphobia" isn't a real thing (again, systemically, disregarding interpersonal interactions).

Let me ask you, are you a trans man?

i assume this is rhetorical because the fact that i'm a trans woman is readily available information on my blog.

You cannot tell me that my experiences haven't been affected by the fact that I am masculine, because they have.

i'm not trying to say that your experiences haven't been affected by the fact you're masculine, i'm saying that your oppression is not based off the fact that you are embracing a masculine identity, it's based off the fact that you are going against gender norms by being transgender - something you would be oppressed for whether you were embracing a masculine identity or not.

My experiences aren't "people wanted me to be more feminine", they are "people have treated me differently because of my masculinity alone". In a lot of these cases, I wasn't out to anyone that wasn't my partner (as in, they didn't know I was trans at all, I was "passing"). But the longer I transitioned, the more masculine I appeared, the more people treated me differently. And no, it wasn't because I suddenly turned into a raging misogynist because I was a man now and that made me "usually more than willing to target women". It was because of my perceived masculinity.

if you've never had someone say or imply that they'd think better of you if you detransitioned (i.e. became more feminine) then i'm very happy for you, genuinely! however, being treated differently for being masculine is not the same as being oppressed for being masculine. if there is a form of oppression you experiences as a stealth transmasculine person that was specifically because you were masculine, i would love to know what that was (again, genuinely, i'm aware the written tone will probably come across sarcastic).

So, like, if you want to try to tell me about MY own experiences, sure, go ahead, but you're wrong.

i'm not trying to say you're lying about things you've experienced, but your experiences (interpersonal, a conclusion i've reached purely based on what you've said, so again please tell me if there are times you've been genuinely oppressed for being masculine, not because you're trans) do not constitute a framework for systemic oppresssion that cannot be covered by transphobia.

also your tags:

tell me you dont listen to anything transmascs say without telling me

are just kind of funny because i've learnt about as much on this topic from transmascs/ men as i have from transfems/ women so...

people who treat transmisogyny (and other things, but this is what inspired this post) as just 'a way to describe oppression that transfems experience' instead of a framework to analyse systemic harm that transfems experience are some of the stupidest people in the world