#is transmasc but in the sense where i still connect w butches/etc hard out but am also perceived as a dude

[inkmaze]

this might be niche as hell but some nb transmascs 🤝 some butches ?

[laundryandtaxes]

Hi Julia, I know u receive a lot of asks so its ok if u dont answer (cw gender dysphoria) ive struggled with my gender since I was a kid but I tried to be femme for a long time. Last year I started iding as trans masc but I have a hard time referring to myself as a man. Ive just been thinking lately maybe i should have experimented being butch but i already asked my friends to use he/him pronouns. idk if it’s too late w/out everyone thinking I faked it or was being dramatic or something

idk I kinda miss the solidarity in being a lesbian but I also really wanna get on testosterone and I also hate being referred to as a woman… it’s complicated I guess haha. sorry for sending two messages :/ 

I’m getting a couple of messages coming through here, so let me try to tell you first what I’m hearing and then what I think that means, and if I misinterpret something feel free to send me another anon. The absolute first thing I’m getting here is that you, on some level, believed that being masculine indicated that you were trans, or otherwise that sort of trying out masculinity meant trying out social transition to some extent. Throwing off femininity does not have to mean leaving connection with women behind at all. That’s a very common issue right now- a looooooooooot of women right now are being fed the message that being gender nonconforming means they are not or should not be women, a lot of women are disidentifying for that particular reason, a lot of women have a hard time uncoupling this idea of what women are supposed to be from femininity. Anytime someone tells me “I wish I had options other than disidentifying” that sounds to me like you’re coming from a place that’s more reaction to being hurt than positive identity exploration. And almost all the reidentified women I know (including myself) and detransitioned women I know believed similar things at one point and no longer believe them now. Many of us used they/them pronouns while reidentifying, some of us continued to use he/him while reidentifying, some of us STILL use they/them, etc. As for your point about pronouns and being referred to as a woman, those are both common among dysphoric women because of the social weight attached to them- when "woman” and the generally related pronoun “she” refer to a person, in the social imagination, who is feminine and heterosexual but also less intelligent than men, less valuable than men, less capable of real thought than men, less useful than men, etc, who in their right mind would feel comfortable having all of those notes attached to them? This is why the whole concept of “comfort with your assigned gender” was nothing but misogyny from the outset- no woman is or should be wholly comfortable with what women are understood to be, being referable to her. When you run in circles where these pronouns are arguably even MORE closely tied to femininity than the general population (I would bet that, like me, you have seen that most people who look and live the way you might want to look and live don’t call themselves women, don’t use she/her pronouns) it makes sense for you to have even more strongly observed and internalized these messages. What does “she” mean to you? Does it sting to think about? That’s a good sting! It’s a meaningful sting! It’s a sting worth honoring and exploring. All that being said, should you decide that using she/her is just too painful for you, so be it! If using other pronouns helps you continue to keep your connection to women, that’s a small price to pay.

The second thing I am hearing from you is that you feel like it is somehow too late for you, and it is not and will never, ever be- womanhood will absolutely always be here for you if you want to claim it, there will always be women with your same experiences, etc. I know women who had transition related surgeries, used testosterone for years, got legal name changes, and still detransitioned- some are happy with the decisions they made, some are not, most have mixed feelings, some are still mostly passing, some pass mostly in the same sense that I often do, etc. It is never too late, and I don’t want to send you away still thinking it is too late. If your friends were accepting and welcoming and loving when you changed your pronouns, they should be accepting and welcoming now as you are figuring things out again.

I don’t believe there is any categorical line between butch and transmasc except what term you like and sometimes a common set of experiences like a generally positive relationship to transition, and I think that whatever you call yourself in the meantime is totally fine and absolutely up to you. But when I hear someone tell me they want really hard to retain ties to other lesbians, my answer is always going to be, “So hang onto those ties.” I don’t think literally anything you could do would mean you no longer were connected to other lesbians in at least some sense. 

I would generally include asks like this in my “dysphoric women” tag, which I only started officially keeping very recently, but I get your discomfort with that word and won’t pop it into the tag for that reason. BUT much love to you no matter what, and please really do feel free to pop into my inbox on or off anon anytime, and please feel free to look at that tag for some experiences other people have sent me.