#also i just measured myself and found a pretty reliable method and got exactly 5’10”

[la-principessa-nuova]

It’s weird being 5’10” and transfem

because, like, my older relatives are all like, “Wow, you’re so tall!” but then relative to people my own age, back when i was judged as a guy, i was average height (according to whatever i read at the time 5’9” was average, and 5’10” if you only looked at younger adults).

but i’d hear shallow girls talking about how anyone under 6 feet tall is short, so I always thought of myself as “technically average, but unfairly called short, and that’s fine”.

but i always had this weird feeling when i was in a room with only women (especially a large one like a storeh, and i was so much taller, that i think Taylor Swift described well with “and I’m a monster on the hill”

but like a (figurative) voice in my head was like, “You should be fine with this because you’re supposed to be a big, tall man”, but, like, i wasn’t okay with it at all.

and then if a guy walks in, i feel like i want to throw up or cry or something bc it’s like this immediate recognition over the heads of all the women in the store that there is some similarity between us and that just felt wrong in a way i did not understand.

but if a tall woman walked in, i did feel that kinship that i “should have” felt with the men who walked in. And especially if there were a few tall women, or a mixture of people of various heights with enough that i no longer stood out as tall, i felt so much better, like i could breathe in the anonymity of it.

i felt this a lot recently (except understanding what it was now) when at Habitat for Humanity ReStore looking at the used furniture, and it was entirely women in the store, mostly older women (and maybe some short kings blending in), and i was by far the tallest person in the whole store as far as i could see, and i just felt so other. but then a couple women about my height walked in and i felt so relieved to not be the monster in the room.

but yeah, now my older relatives are right, and i’m a bit taller than average now, but also i don’t feel, like, freakishly tall. like, i know plenty of cis women my height and taller, so like, compared to other traits that technically overlap with ranges for cis women but are so extreme, this one just isn’t a big deal. it only makes me feel weird in the same way it makes many cis women feel weird when you happen to not have any other tall friends around.