Did you always feel like a man?

When I was a kid, I never thought I was a boy, and never necessarily wanted to be a boy. I was very comfortable in ‘boys clothes’ and happy doing ‘boy things’ like play video games or run around in the woods climbing trees and building forts.

I never felt like a boy though, I always felt like a child, which I was. Although I of course grew up with female pronouns and a female name, and occasionally had to put on a dress for the yearly Christmas concert in St. Ignace (despite my loud complaints) my parents did a pretty amiable job of raising me as gender neutral as possible.

This was not because they were super liberal, nor because they were conscious of my eventual queerness/transness, but rather because as far as Catholic families were concerned, sexuality was not something that existed except for procreation. Thus, in as far as gender pertains to sexuality, gender expression was irrelevant, since I would be a heterosexual female regardless of whether I liked wearing dresses or not.

It’s worth noting that I also grew up in a very rural part of Michigan, where gender expression for women has a lot more flexibility than it does in a city. It’s hard to explain, but if you’re interested in this concept, I’d take a look at ‘Female Masculinity‘.

As a child, I didn’t really have any feelings about my gender. I wasn’t frustrated about being a girl, or angry that boys got to do certain things, because my parents didn’t put those restrictions on me. I could play basketball, I could do karate, I wore the clothes I wanted and had the friends I wanted. My friends (regardless of gender) could sleep over without my parents worrying that anything would happen, because I was a good girl.

A major part of this unfortunately was that we never talked about sex, and I was more or less an asexual creature until college. That’s just how things were, and why people often call themselves recovering Catholics. Despite even having many queer female friends, I had no idea I was queer until college, because my sexuality in general (let alone my queer sexuality) was so repressed.

I only started to have some frustration with my gender at the end of high school, when I needed to learn how to put on make-up and do my hair for singing auditions. This was a crucial part of my development as a female musician, and I will be forever grateful for it. I still didn’t feel like a ‘man’, but rather an awkward girl who had never put on make-up before. It never registered to me that I might be trans, but I did understand that I wasn’t like other kids in a very visceral way. I wasn’t feminine, nor particularly masculine. My only priorities were being valedictorian, getting a scholarship to college, and doing singing competitions.

Something I’m going to note here, and perhaps it’s a bit of a spoiler but: I don’t identify as a man. When you look at me, you see a man, and you use he/him pronouns. I do use he/him pronouns, but almost no one ever asks anymore, even though they know that I’m trans. They assume he/him because I have taken testosterone (read more at MantalityDirect.com) and have had top-surgery. None of those things mean that I identify as a man, and they don’t mean you can assume that my pronouns are he/him. Always, always ask for pronouns.

Back to the story though. The nuances of my gender a topic for another, much longer article.

When I was in college and just starting my degree in voice, I felt very comfortable with my awkward female gender as it was. I was happy wearing dresses that I liked, happy to put on makeup on my terms, and happy to do my hair. Nothing about that really bothered me. Sometimes I felt that I had an inferior femininity to other women, and that bothered me, but I never had an inherent sense that my femininity was wrong or not real.

Sophomore year (second year of uni for you non-Americans), I came out as a gay woman. That was a very comfortable, exciting, and terrifying place to be. I felt so accepted by the community, and my person-hood made so much more sense in the context of the queer community. I read Autostraddle and Effing Dykes, just like every good little baby queer, and felt at peace. Not everything fit into place though.

Something about the balance of my femininity and masculinity frustrated me. People expected me to act more masculine in certain scenarios than I was comfortable with, and some people expected me to be more feminine in certain scenarios than I was comfortable with. I would want to put on heels and not be butch enough for the types of girls who would want me, and then when I put on a tie I was too butch. The decisions I made were necessarily informed by the lesbian community around me, and I followed the rules. I wasn’t always comfortable, but having a code to follow made life a lot easier.

This particular instance of my sexuality and gender I find interesting, because it has nothing to be with ‘being a man.’

There is a subset of people in the world who are both very transphobic and homophobic, and will lead you to believe that I ‘transitioned’ because I wanted the ‘power’ that came with being male, and because my ‘natural desire’ for women made itself apparent, by way of me ‘transitioning’ to become a ‘man’. None of this is true. It’s all bullshit. My sexuality and my gender is much more complicated than ‘straight’ and ‘gay’ desires.

I had one person ask me how I felt to now be a ‘straight man’ and I almost spit my drink out at them.

One thing I was never comfortable with as a lesbian, was the fact that I knew I wasn’t really a lesbian. Somewhere inside of me, I knew that I wasn’t just attracted to women. I was attracted to men, trans people, and non-binary people. The scariest thing was finding myself sometimes attracted to men. In a way, it felt like a type of ‘closeted’ feeling, because it would be much too embarrassing, and possibly socially suicidal to admit that I was bi, especially presenting as a sort of masculine woman. My experience up to that point was that only femmey women were bi. Bi women didn’t look like me. More bullshit, for the record.

What did that mean for me a lesbian? It’s something I needed to keep to myself. Biphobia in the lesbian community at the time I was in college was a pretty big thing. Even some of my closest friends would say offhand things about bi women who would ‘just leave you for a guy’ and were ‘untrustworthy’. Bullshit that luckily most of them have grown out of.

During this time that I was out as a gay woman, I also later started to identify as genderqueer, but didn’t talk about it with many people. I started to play with my appearance, and felt comfortable having that internal identity, and didn’t feel it was necessary to share it. Who would I share it with?

The rest is, as they say, history…But history which you can read in this post about My Second (Very Public) Coming Out.

TL;DR I don’t identify as a man, I identify as non-binary with he/him pronouns. I used to identify as a woman and was very happy until I wasn’t happy anymore.

Like this post? Yeaaaah you do. Want more? Head over to my Patreon page to support me. Every €/$/£ helps me create more content like this, and supports me as an activist and artist.