trying and failing to stop explaining my gender on the internet || (Co-host Reupload)
08/27/2023 - Republished 02/03/2026ok understanding/relating my gender thru online means is no longer possible nor desirable since everything just devolves into awful discourse and arguments and misinterpretation. i will simply be over here doing my thing and while i can explain what’s up this is only information you can unlock by asking me irl. online i simply do not care anymore as long as you use my pronouns
anywho. time for a messy gender ramble, enjoy. again, kind of stream-of-consciousness and only very lightly edited, gets more thought out as i go but none of this is exactly a "take" or a position i hold, just a reflection on my feelings at present moment.
i like to say i'm "effectively a gay man." even with a beard i don't reliably pass as male, but when my outward presentation is interpreted "correctly": i am: he/him, a man, into other men, maybe just short but probably trans. that's kind of just the mode by which i am most comfortable being seen as by strangers/the world at large. it's more complicated than that, if you could imagine.
i don't tell people this really because it opens up lines of questioning i don't enjoy but i am pretty much one of those "i used to be a girl" FTMs. in that, i used to consciously identify as female, and then that changed later. i had "signs" from a young age if you wanna call them that, but i don't really. not signs of being a trans man, anyway. maybe signs of being gender-expansive, or signs of not understanding the social cues well enough to know that i liked "boy" things.
(in that last paragraph i called myself an FTM. i do that sometimes, but not usually publicly. it's an accurate descriptor. it's complicated by the fact that i really would rather obscure my assigned sex, for dysphoria reasons yes but also because "AFAB" as a descriptor, while true in that that was my sex assigned at birth, means very little now. i have medically transitioned. also, before even that, i am hormonally intersex. it tells you very little about me, i feel like it's rather irrelevant unless you are a doctor or a lover of mine, i find that people tend to use one's ASAB in ways that are unhelpfully reductive)
i was a girl! i was a gay girl, bi-identified at the time but looking back that was compulsive. i was a lesbian for a few years, but i didn't really care for that word personally, i think for the same gender-expansive reasoning as when i was a 4th grader complaining to a teacher who didn't understand why i was upset that a classmate called me "girly," or why i never liked being called "lady." i didn't like other people putting me in boxes based on what they saw.
i found myself to be genderqueer at some point, and then a trans man after that. now trans man and genderqueer/nonbinary/genderfuck/whatever, but again, it's more complicated than that. i hadn't heard of nonbinary lesbians at the time (i was like, 14) so that was never me, but i certainly wasn't straight, so for a long time there i was identifying variously as bi/pan/polysexual, both when i was genderqueer and when i was a binary-ish trans man. didn't want to simplify it too much, again, boxes and assumptions.
i was like 16 years old when i had an "oh shit, i do like men actually" moment. i realized the answer to the eternal question of "do i like men or do i want to be one" was now "yes to both." around 21 years old i started to settle into "i like men as a man." at the risk of repeating myself to annoying degree, it was and continues to be more complicated than that.
i've talked a lot with friends and my lover about the reality of "no matter who i like, it's gay." not in the way nonbinary people like to joke about (it is NOT universally applicable, let's be clear about that) but in a way that defines my attraction. i have little diagrams i like to draw about it. it's a lot to do with my multigendered reality, the one that people don't know about me from looking at me.
when i like men, my attraction to them feels like as a gay man. when i like women, my attraction them feels like as a gay woman. when i like others, i like them as other. the attraction feels different, and i can't describe it any better than "same-gendered" or simply "queer."
i'm man and a woman and something else, and everything between all three. i only like the male and something else terminology, because i prefer to keep a distance between my sex assigned at birth and myself currently. "female" is still a part of my gendered whole, both presently and historically. i used to be a girl and that lived experience is relevant to who i am, always.
another thing i've talked at length about with my lover, in a lot of ways i also feel like a mirror. my gender is similar to that of who i am attracted to. lately i've come to settle on a gender of and largely an attraction to: queer masculinity. i'm not saying i'm masc4masc at all. but like, queer men of all kinds, butches, masc women, nonbinary people who play with masculinity. and that's where i sit genderwise these days.
i think if i had found butch community before i found trans community, i would be coming at this from the opposite direction than i am now, which i think is more talked about from what i can find. i think i would've made a home there, and found myself in trans spaces later when my attraction shifted away from primarily women. i think the progression would've looked something like this: gay girl, futch, butch dyke, butch4butch, wait can butches like men?, transbutch?, faggy butch?, butch trans man???, help???.
i've been reading articles and blog posts lately by butches-as-a-gender, butches with dysphoria, butches who transition, butches who are or who became trans men, trans men who were/are butches, and butches and/or transmascs who live somewhere in the grey area in between; and i feel really seen by these experiences. i think it's about where i am too, even though like i said i feel like i'm coming at it from the other direction.
i'd like to call myself butch, because it really feels like it fits and i want to honor the connection i still hold with my experience of and solidarity with queer womanhood. but i do worry about overstepping, about making people uncomfortable. i found home in the LGBTQ community among queer women. my home now is primarily among fellow trans people, for comfort/safety/understanding, and i love that, but i do miss that first (?) home i found.
well. i guess in reality, and i do think this is relevant now actually, my real first home in the LGBTQ community was my high school GSA. a small group of outcast gay kids of many types with not too much else in common, but who came together to be together nonetheless, even if we were all very different as people and specifically in how we identified. i know high school GSAs are largely regarded as kind of cringe now that a lot of us are done with them, but i'd be lying if i said that my experience there didn't save me. they saved a lot of us, and i feel like that needs to be reaffirmed.
speaking of GSAs, i stopped most of the way through writing this to start reading a collection of essays by S. Bear Bergman, one of the founders of the first GSA. i'm reading Butch Is A Noun, and i'm only a few essays in, but already i feel the tension that pushed me to write this resolving. just from the first piece in there, I Know What Butch Is, i feel seen in the contradictory definitions that Bergman plays with.
this might all change in a month, a year, or five, like my gender and orientation have before, and that's fine. but to wrap this up before i do five "and another thing!"s (because i could talk about gender for 5 times the length of this post), i think i'll come to a conclusion here. i think i want to spend this period of my life living in the borderland between "butch" and "trans man." some people call that grey area "transmasculinity," and yeah that's an apt description of what i've got going on, but i'd rather be notably on the spectrum between. a butch or a trans man, and butch and a trans man, a butch trans man.
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