#i know there are some who are non-binary and not transmaculine

[fatsmyname]

Not a troll, I’m just curious what your experience is as a he/him lesbian? I’m also trans (Demi boy) btw. I guess, what about the term lesbian and dyke feel good for you? And are those words entirely devoid of gender and therefore not invalidating you as a man? Or is it something entirely different? Feel free to ignore! I’m just wondering bc I know there’s been a lot of criticism of he/him lesbians but not much sharing the experience of he/him lesbians. Happy holidays!!

Thanks for asking! It’s a little complicated for me but I’ll try my best to lay out the gist of my gender and how I choose to reconcile it ^_^

Lesbianism is fully liberating for me and is my home. My butchness stems from my masculinity, but without finding lesbianism I wouldn’t be the butch I am today. I owe a lot to lesbians and lesbianism, and am proud to call myself one. Reading stone butch blues was extremely eye opening to me, because it proved to me that I can be as masculine as I want, as internally male as I feel, and still find a home in lesbianism.

Most days, I do feel like a man. I experience gender dysphoria and find that a lot of my experiences also align with that of ftm folk. I look in the mirror and see a man already (on top of the fact that I just literally think I already am a man), so at the moment I haven’t decided to start hrt for that reason. I know it must sound odd to hear me say I’m a man, but I simply have no other way of putting it. I resonate deeply with butches who pass completely as men; I resonate with lesbians and butches who medically transition. My internal gender just feels very binary male. So I reconcile all of these complicated feelings by using he/him pronouns. Being called a lesbian or a dyke makes me happy. I embrace my dual identity, which is why I call myself a boydyke. It brings me so much joy to call myself that!!

There are plenty of other he/him lesbians out there that I know who share similar experiences as mine. Some of us just have such complicated genders that it even throws *us* off. Gender variance and gender fuckery has always existed in lesbian spaces. You don’t see this kind of policing in gay male spaces at all. But years of lesbian separatism and t*rf bs will regress the community to the point of people calling me transphobic for just existing as a trans person lol

#anon #the point is I use the words I do because they make me happy and make me feel seen #i wouldnt call myself these things if they hurt me #i am a boy and i am a lesbian #simple as that #and i know other ftm folk won’t resonate with this at all #im not trying to push this idea that all trans men are lesbians #that’s horrifying #but is it so bad if *im* that trans boy who is a lesbian? #why cant i be many things at once if they all feel good to me #if they all bring me joy why pick just one? #i love being a butch #and i love being a boy #anyway thanks for asking #also not all he/him lesbians feel this way #i know there are some who are non-binary and not transmaculine #i am not non-binary #i am he/him in the most binary male way possible Lmfao

[glitterock]

tbh i get kinda annoyed at the “femmes need to stop treating masc/butch lesbians like men, they’re still women, treat them as women!” thing because like first of all i think there’s a difference between calling yourself a masc lesbian and a butch lesbian. Butch is a historical term that has to do with community and yes, somewhat rigid roles. Masc literally just means masculine presenting and isn’t a term that directly correlates with the lesbian community or should have roles attached to it. I don’t think masc and butch can be used interchangeably.

Second, I don’t even know what treating someone like a “man” even means. I’ve never been in a relationship with a man so I don’t even fully understand what that dynamic would be like let alone how I would treat one. So no, I don’t think I treat butches like men.

But if i’m being honest, I don’t ever really think i’m treating them like “women” either. I treat them like butches. Most butches i’ve been with are transmaculine, non-binary, or old school butch women who would honestly feel uncomfortable if they were treated like a “woman” or would not enjoy me using feminine words (pretty, beautiful, princess etc.) to describe them. So I call them handsome, let them carry my things for me because they genuinely enjoy it, let them act tough in front of me and let them express their masculinity in a way that affirms their butchness. Now this doesn’t mean that me treating them like a butch means that i treat them like a “man”. As a femme, I always want to be a safe space for any butch I’m seeing to be soft. not “feminine” or “womanly”, but soft. Softness shouldn’t be inherently gendered. I want them to feel like they can relax with me, cry with me, let me hold them in a way they may not usually be held in. This is what butch/femme is all about. There are roles yes, but I never think of how I treat butches as how i’d hypothetically treat a man.

I can understand how someone who only considers themself “masc” and not butch, someone who has no knowledge of butch/femme roles and maybe is only masc in the way they dress, could see this as gendered treatment. I can see how the use of roles can be seen as gendered by some, but that’s just not how I see it in the slightest. I don’t treat my lovers like men, I just treat them like butches.

#idk rant i guess #lesbian #femme lesbian #wlw

[astriiformes]

Hey Nate - I know this is a heavy question, so please feel free to ignore it or circle back around to it whenever you have the headspace. I was wondering if you had any advice on how to frame/think about masculinity in a positive way, or wanted to talk about how you think about masculinity in your experience? I know it's not bad to be a guy, obviously. But it just... isn't something I've ever heard people talk about, and I'm trying to untangle it myself.

Oh, oof. This is a hard one to unpack, partially because I honestly can’t say I feel like I’ve arrived at any kind of helpful conclusion myself. I’ll give you what I’ve got though

I actually really struggle with feeling like it’s bad to be a guy, personally. With social justice-oriented communities being all I really had for years – and in particular, with them being the places I learned to feel like it was okay to be queer, which is obviously relevant to the discussion of me examining my relationship with masculinity – the amount of rhetoric about men as hurtful, men as insensitive, men as bad that floats around in those same circles has made it really hard for me to feel like being even guy-aligned is okay. And those statements aren’t really things you can just backtrack on. If people start saying that oh, only cis men are like that, oh only cis men do those things, there’s an undercurrent of saying trans men are an entirely different gender than those guys, and it’s also just plain wrong. Transmaculine communities also run into some serious problems with toxic masculinity, not necessarily because the guys in them grew up steeped in it the same way cis men do, but because they’re so desperate for approval/acceptance as men that acting like men are “supposed” to (at least, as the media would have it) seems like the easiest route to passing and becoming “one of the guys”

I know I shouldn’t let every little text post or angry comment get to me, and if I try to talk about how there are exceptions I understand it can get a little “not all men” in vibe even if not in intent, but all that has definitely been a perpetual struggle for me. I’m in an additionally weird spot, because in my personal life, the majority of the people who’ve been really toxic and harmful to me (over extended periods of time, of course) have actually been women – my mother and her mother and my dad’s mother are the root of a lot of awfulness in my family (though not the only ones), I’ve been bullied mostly by girls over the years, including at least one TERF who did it in the name of a twisted brand of feminism, and due to the way things get gender segregated within church circles, all the youth leaders who did real active damage to me with their opinions and doctrine and all my peers that agreed with them were in girls’ groups. Throw all that together with the insecurity of being trans and it can suddenly be very easy to feel like you’re being attacked on all sides – where being a dude is obviously a bad thing that will make me hated, but where not only do I feel like I’m not a girl, but where I don’t really find any solace in femininity either and feel like I almost have to defend myself against it because of the way it’s been twisted against me (which, of course, has by and large been a byproduct of being trans and queer, but that could be a whole different novel and is less relevant to this conversation). Which not only is exhausting, but is impossible to build any kind of positive identity on.

Realistically, I would actually say I’m pretty agender. I don’t use that word so much any more because I realized I was leaning on it as sort of a crutch, odd as that may sound, to keep myself from having to explore any of the scarier side of being trans. Which is not to say that being non-binary is any easier! I’d say I’m still some flavor of nb, and it absolutely introduces complicating factors to my approach towards life and transitioning. But hiding behind gender-neutral names and a more androgynous appearance was, for me, the way I lied to myself about how I really wanted to present and be perceived. Because I feel very little connection to gender as a concept, it was easy for me to say I didn’t actually want to do anything “drastic” or “scary” like look into HRT or a legal name change or coming out all that publicly by hiding behind saying I wasn’t technically a dude. Figuring out that, despite how I felt internally, a lot of what I want really does align more with the binary FtM experience and approach to transition was a scary step – especially when, like I said, I had sort of been instilled with the idea that being More Like A Man was a bad thing.

The best advice I think I can offer about thinking about masculinity positively is to think about it personally, if that makes sense. I don’t think there are any two guys – or for that matter, people who have a relationship with it, because I know there are unaligned nb folks and even butch women who I see talk about their own exploration of the concept and how it relates to their identity, even if they’re not men or necessarily male-leaning – who experience it the same way, and I think a lot of toxicity related to masculinity comes from assuming that we do. It can be a little weird at first to think of masculinity as “I’m masculine and I feel like this/present like this/like this thing, so that makes it masculine” as opposed to “I’m masculine and so I should feel like this/present like this/like this thing because that’s what masculine people do,” but reframing it that way has been pretty helpful to me. 

I honestly personally really don’t like sayings like “let boys be feminine” or “let girls be masculine” because they feel very gender essentialist to me. That may be a little hard to break down, but look at it this way – I had a friend in high school who did a speech on toxic masculinity as his original oratory in speech and debate one year. In it, he mentioned how he liked a lot of non-traditionally masculine things, like having an interest in fashion, but also a lot of traditionally masculine things, like following football. Now, you could frame that and say that he likes some feminine things and some masculine things and get weirdly gender essentialist about it, I suppose, but what happens when you introduce me, for example, into the picture? – I could care less about sports, which isn’t very traditionally masculine of me, and is the opposite of my friend. I also have never been interested in fashion, at least not in the same way he was – I like sewing, and some degree of creating outfits, but I don’t follow trends or have any insightful commentary on the fashion world at large. I just like interesting clothes, and mostly poke around at thrift stores. So who is  “more” masculine? Me, the guy who doesn’t have the “girly” interest but also lacks the “guy” one? My friend who likes both the “guy” thing and the “girl” thing? I don’t think it’s either of us. I think we’re both guys and we both have personal interests and hobbies. And I think those say more about who we are as guys – two people who both try to eschew toxic masculinity and really throw ourselves into our own personal interests – than trying to really label the things we like or do.

This is, I acknowledge, probably a pretty nb approach to answering this question, which I guess further illustrates my own gender weirdness. You might get a different response from a guy who aligns himself more with the binary, and that one might be more useful. I don’t know. But I do think that critically examining what you want out of gender is a good way to figure out how to make it more positive for you, and I also think it’s a good way to pull away from the portrayal of Masculinity As The Toxic One in a way that simultaneously doesn’t deny toxic masculinity is a real problem. For me that’s involved a lot of examining of who I want to be as a person, which has resulted in my own personal take on masculinity involving a lot of domesticity/nurturing/desiring to help and protect others, and asking the question of how best I go about that. As silly as it sounds, I actually started feeling much more positive about my own relationship with masculinity when I began pointing at male fictional characters that had always meant a lot to me, acknowledging that some of that was wrapped up in personal gender feelings, and going “Oh, I want to be that kind of a guy” – which can lead to some kind of funny stuff, like having a weekend of gender euphoria over people telling you that they love the way you embody Luke Skywalker during a long weekend of cosplaying him, but hey. I don’t think that’s the silliest approach to anything. It’s at least been working okay for me.

#transblogging #Anonymous