choosing transsexual manhood

it did not feel like a blessing for what felt like a very long time. well, to be more precise, being a man did not feel like a blessing. in this writing, I plan to specifically address my personal experience as a white, progressively-raised, medically-transition-oriented, binary trans man. if you aren't me and you relate, I hope this writing offers you comfort, even advice. if you aren't me and you don't relate, please know it is not designed to reflect your own personal experience, and i encourage you to share your own experience to reflect the vast diversity of trans life.

the denial, for me, came not in the fear of being transgender as a concept, but in the fear of becoming male. my parents raised me a feminist: to believe that all genders were equal, but that men oppressed women categorically, so that dynamics between men and women interacting weren't always equal in comparison. the greater context of patriarchy as a system needed to be addressed. in an example, it was acceptable to complain about men being the reason i couldn't go take night walks alone, but an equal complaint about not being able to walk behind a woman at night without scaring her would be inappropriate. i still agree with this feminist concept. i always did.

but in the mind of a child who hasn't really formed complex, nuanced beliefs of their own yet, it was easy to fall into what I now understand as biological essentialism when comprehending my place in the world. men, the other, are predators. women, myself, are prey. men have power to wield, and often will. women are victims to that power. yes all men, and always a man. in this reductionist view, it was simple to make the conclusion that being a man was not a good thing to be.

in early childhood, gender was of little consequence. I had boy and girl friends, equally enjoyed hot wheels and littlest pet shop, and roleplayed online as boy, girl, and animal in arenas such as animal jam or club penguin. but my childhood gave way to adolescence. gender became relevant. my friends tended to be girls who were raised similarly to me, and as I reached puberty, i found that my in-group was with girls. i was in girl scouts; i had "girl power." boys that I found myself around often were misogynistic, using words I found offensive, violent, rule-breaking, or simply annoying. if they weren't, I developed a crush on them, but the heterosexual framework with which i viewed my crushes showed me that boys were a species separate from mine. boys were to be interacted with as something other than myself. i had no kinship with them. i was not supposed to.

so when i had a piecemeal realization that i was not a girl alongside the more surefooted realization that i was not heterosexual - when the progressive women and girls who surrounded me supported the exploration of my orientation, but awkwardly hesitated with my gender - i took the wrong message home. surely it wasn't being transgender that was the issue, among these supposedly well-intentioned and liberal friends. it was being a man! the girl scouts would kick me out if i was one of them, but perhaps i could skate under the radar if i watered down my identity into "girl-like." i nervously put myself forth as a demigirl, or nonbinary, or genderfluid, various labels with which i framed myself, hoping that these identities could trick cisgender peers that i was different but definitely not male. i remember literally keeping a diary of what label felt the most correct to me every day, and that "boy" came up half the time, so i decided i identified as nonbinary. it wasn't all the time, and unless i was purely one hundred percent a boy, i could escape having to call myself one.

there was a brief time in my later teens that i figured it out and called myself a man. i did traditional boy things that made me immensely satisfied - all-boys camp, carpentry, cargo shorts. there were a few key moments that stood out to create this time. i was pre-HRT, dressing only vaguely androgynous, and i met some new people playing dungeons & dragons at a makerspace. later, my new friend texted me. "sorry, are you a boy or a girl? i think you're a boy, but my dad isn't sure." shortly after, on an educational summer trip to a week-long carpentry course of which i was one of a mostly-male crew, another man gave me the "bro nod" as we passed each other in the doorway of the men's bathroom. something clicked in those moments. i needed to be seen as a man. it was something i could have known much earlier, but it was so difficult for me to admit to myself.

how could i reconcile my place in the world as my birth name, my assigned gender and sex, and the place i so desperately wanted and needed to occupy? even as i grew more educated on queer history and politics, i struggled. the more i learned about white men's role in wielding the power of white supremacist patriarchy, the more i feared becoming one. i started compartmentalizing my identity to try and make it more palatable to liberal friends. i wasn't like other boys, you see. i dressed in high femme petticoated outfits with makeup. i called myself nonbinary, or a demiboy, or transmasculine. i identified as gay, as in attracted to men (and not women - my sexuality was still forming), and i fashioned myself as queer as possible so that i could be safely friends with the queer girls i surrounded myself with. look at me! i'm transgender first and feminine second and a boy last! i fought to have people use he/him pronouns for me while i dressed in drag. in some way, i did and still do like presenting feminine, and petticoats have always appealed to me. but at the time, it was a shield to hide behind so i could differentiate myself from other men. i was under the complete conviction that it was in fact radical and political for me to present this way. all the while, i was blind to the facts that my identity did not need to be political, and even then, the most radical thing i could do was be myself - be a trans man.

when i was sixteen, i had been repressing my physical dysphoria for years. it reared its ugly head usually around my period, which, due to undiagnosed PCOS, only happened a few times a year. the doctors who treated my eating disorder regularly monitored my cycle to make sure it was returning as expected, and it wasn't returning with my weight gain; i dreaded every time i had to report "no period yet" in front of my mother and doctor. i loved not having my period. the intense dysphoria and depression that i experienced every time i saw blood on the toilet paper was literally incomparable to any dysphoria i had otherwise faced. the longer it took to come back, the better, in my opinion. but other than my rare periods, i told myself i didn't want anything else; i denied HRT, top surgery, bottom surgery, even binding. somewhere deep down, i wanted it, but i couldn't articulate it until a sudden realization at sixteen that i needed HRT.

i was lucky. the system was kind to me. they checked my hormone levels, diagnosed me with PCOS (and ended the period tracking reports), started me on period-suppressing birth control, and gave me testosterone. i stayed on it for two years. it transformed me, and as opposed to the stories of detransitioners complaining that it corrupted them, i felt like it didn't do enough. my voice could be deeper. my facial hair could be less patchy. i started young - why didn't i get taller? despite the acne and the off-the-charts libido, i loved it. and then when i was eighteen, i stopped.

why did i stop? i was struggling to access it, for one; for another, i was in a major depressive episode, and when the kitchen sink was filled with filthy dishes and the dirty laundry pile crept across the floor, i couldn't muster up much energy for self-care, much less hunting down doctors and prepping injections. but i think the subconscious reason i stopped was because i was still terrified of what it was doing to me. during that depressive episode, in a combination of bad eating choices and medication, i gained eighty pounds. i had gone from a sickly, underweight child, to a stick-thin teen, to a truly fat adult at my short height. i felt out of control and clumsy in my body, and it didn't occur to me that perhaps not taking my testosterone was compounding this. i still had that belief somewhere in me that maleness was something i could do and not something i wanted, even needed. despite all the online rants and in person speeches i'd made before about how i was still a boy no matter how i dressed or looked, i clung to the idea that testosterone modified me into something i wasn't. i could not view it as something that enabled me to be the man i wanted to be.

we can talk all day about whether being trans is a choice or an immutable fact. i subscribe to the belief that everyone is a little more malleable than they think they are, and saying that anything about you is immutable is dismissive of the great triumphs of the human mind and body (look at me - i changed my sex!), and that transitioning is a choice. i also believe that it is cruel and damaging to try to make a trans person cis, and most importantly, i believe that everyone who would benefit from transitioning should make that choice to do so for their own good, and don't try to stop them, including if they are you.

we can believe something and not really practice it, though. i chose to transition. i'd already made that choice when i was thirteen and first came out, starting the process, but i was dragging myself kicking and screaming through all of it. it was an immutable fact about my being. i knew when i was four years old that i wasn't supposed to look the way i did. i knew when i was sixteen that i was growing into a man, whether i liked it or not, and i needed my body to reflect the puberty i should go through. why was it so impossible to accept that i needed, for my own good, to choose to transition and choose to accept myself for it?

it would be possible at this point to conclude that it was my progressive family or peers who told me that men were evil, and that the answer to make me happy is to cast off progressive values. if you made this conclusion, you are wrong. basic feminist principles are not in opposition to transsexualism, and nobody ever told me that men were evil. i made that up. i came to my own conclusions about the ethics of manhood, and those conclusions were wrong. boiling down the traits of chromosomes, genitals, hormones, or any other sex indicators and saying they mean literally anything about the moral standing of that person leads to some deeply disturbing places, the same places that birth eugenics and race science, as well as transphobia and anti-feminism. being born with an estrogen-dominant body and a vulva doesn't make me a better or worse person than anyone else. the ideas i synthesized in adolescence were incorrect. the things that make me a good or bad person are my choices towards other people, not my choices about what hormones i want in my body.

when i was twenty, i started taking testosterone again, in the form of gel and later back to injections. my facial hair filled out, and my body continued to masculinize. despite this appearance of confidence, i flirted with detransition. i expanded my accepted pronouns to she/they as well as he/him, encouraged my girlfriend to see me as more feminine, labeled myself as a man who was femme. this was spurred on by the idea from multiple partners that they preferred women and therefore weren't as into me because i was not a woman. it was the same idea i had gotten from the girl scouts of adolescence. while i left girl scouts, i kept the true friends through to adult life as a man. one partner didn't stay, but one partner's gender preference was another fiction by my anxious imagination, and she loves me as the man i am. the people who truly love me do not love my womanhood, they love me for the thousand things that make up who i am, and for the pride i take in accepting myself as a man.

the real values instilled in me by my family and peers were not values specific to gender identity, or about certain individuals and their genders, but it certainly can help me build a view of my own masculinity. i want to be a man who is curious about the world around him, interrogating the truth of transphobic arguments. i want to be a man who lends protection and strength to those who need it, and my status as a white man in a world that listens to white men means i have more privilege to use in benefit of others. i want to be a man who leads, showing others by my example to make choices in truth to oneself. i want to be a man with integrity, both in the sense that i stick to my principles, and in the sense that i approach myself as a whole person, and my gender isn't something to be suppressed or excised for others' comfort.

if you are like me - if you fear and desire manhood in the same way that i do - i encourage you not to dilute it. you will not gain the respect or trust of others by claiming proximity to women, whether that is by identifying yourself as AFAB anywhere but at the doctor's, or "female socialized," or "born a woman." these things reduce you down to how you were made, not how you make yourself. you are more than the letter on your birth certificate. choose to be more. it can be incredibly challenging to move on from your old identity, especially if you did not transition as young as i did. it can be tempting to cling to the idea that your experience with womanhood made you better, in some way, and that you have to keep it to remain morally clear. but your actions speak louder than your identity - your parts, your hormones, and your gender do not prescribe your politics. choose to be better. choose to be a good man, like i did, and do, every day, from now until forever.