re: being butch and transfem is weird sometimes
so my last writing on this topic (or on this blog in general, whoops) is over two years in the past now. figured to commemorate me reaching the 7 year-milestone on estrogen i might revisit this whole topic with all the insight i’ve gained since then.
since then, a lot in my own performance of gender has shifted – where two years ago i was agonizing myself over the thought of getting a buzzcut or not for months (until i just did it), these days i’ll just go visit my barber to get a fresh fade cut every 2 months or so; where i was in discomfort over being percieved “masc” or showing male-associated behaviour, i am now freely calling myself masc, presenting more stereotypically “masculine” and feeling good about it, feeling like this is a genuine expression of my gender and identity.
also, a lot of the fears i had about presenting more masc and butch haven’t really come true – first of all i stopped concerning myself with how palatable or understandable my gender expression is to random cis people i encounter on the street or something, so i’m not really keeping track of how and when i pass, and even then if someone percieves me as male, there is a palpable air of percieving me as lesser-male, akin to how they’d interact with a teenage boy. certainly something butch lesbians of all assigned origins of gender can relate to i guess.
over that time i definitely found a new way to view my own masculinity, and found to a new one, instead of the one i grew up with, that was forced upon me. the years of trying to be a woman, with my first years of transitioning carrying the wish to one day really be a woman deep in my heart & simultaneously the years of reconfiguring my body with hormones, cleared up the way for me to re-discover masculinity not as something forceful (both in how it was applied to me, but also in how it wanted me to act), but as something that can also be kind, gentle and caring. This certainly isn’t the same masculinity the cis-hetero-patriarchal matrix tried to induce upon me, and it certainly isn’t the same masculinity usually portrayed in media.
i’m still trying to find a way to aptly describe this other, decidedly non-male masculinity; is it neutered? Sublated? Destituted?
nontheless, it is at it’s core a take on masculinity informed by lived experience as a woman (or, if we’re being completely deconstructivist and butlerite here, lived experience of trying to perform a societal ideal of womanhood), of inhabiting a body outside of the sphere of male bodies, of trying to take typically masculine ideals and subverting them and deterritorializing them, trying to give them some kind of spin to make it a masculinity not built on devalueing other less-male subjectivities or based on harmful and toxic core beliefs.
all that being said, over dropping the femme thing and becoming butch, i feel like i lost some community with other transfems. there’s no longer this instantaneous thing of recognizing each other as part of the same group, while i still usually clock other transfems, they – if they don’t already know me – rarely do so back, i still get read as queer & some kind of gender-fuckery, but i’m usually approached with the same carefulness and unease i too reserve for queers i assume to not be affected and targeted by transmisogyny, there’s definitely a reason why we do that, and i do understand why other dolls do that in regards to me, but no longer being recognized by them as basically one of them does sting a little sometimes. not sure what to do about it, i think this is just something i kind of ended up with now, and have to find a way to deal with it – usually, dropping hints in a conversation that i’m on E & prog does help to warm the situation up though. most (femme) transfems are still kind of confused about what exactly the deal with my gender is though. i kinda get it.
maybe the next time someone’s confused about my gender i’ll just tell them something like:
i’m a butch; i get gender euphoria from using power tools, lifting heavy things, building up furniture and having sore muscles; on the average day i look like yet another antifa-macker with a kink for sports brands, except i got huge tits; at this point no one even knows what gender i could have even been assigned at birth, and on multiple occasions have people assumed that i’m transmasc & that i’m on T; most men are lowkey scared of me (and kinda don’t really know why they do themselves) & i dig that; 7 years on estrogen made me go from boy to girl only for me to circle back to boy-ish (but lesbian about it) and i love everything about it.
god is trans and she gave us cross sex hormones for a reason.
transsexualism is sacred.