#atp this blog just runs itself. all i have to do is sit here and the examples start flooding in

[lycandrophile]

how can you claim to be a man when you never even grew up as a boy?

you were never raised a boy, you have no idea what it's like to grow up as a boy. you were raised as the female that you are.

by what standard did i not grow up as a boy? did i not get dirty enough or pull enough ponytails or play enough catch with my dad? is it that my hair was too long or that my clothes were too pink, or maybe that i was friends with too many girls or had crushes on too many other boys? should i have built with blocks instead of playing house, or liked dogs more than cats, or wanted to become a firefighter instead of a vet? if my grandpa gave me handshakes, not hugs, would that be better for you? if the tears bad been beaten out of me, would i get to be a man?

what of the men who grew up decades or even centuries ago, or somewhere across the world from you? surely, their boyhoods looked different than yours. have they lost their right to manhood too in your eyes, because they didn’t grow up quite right? or is it just us that you expect to live up to one stereotypical concept of what it means to grow up as a boy?

and what if you were right? what if my childhood was girlhood after all? i’m a 22 year old man with a partner of 6 years and a job in the same field as my degree and an adult life that i’m building for myself. how much of myself can you really expect me to define by who i was when i was a child? i would hope you don’t define your life by the way you grew up either; maybe your childhood was good enough to be worth basing the rest of your life on, but that would make you one of the lucky ones. the rest of us will be defining our adult lives for ourselves, thank you very much.