So on to my update. I have not gone off T, as I thought I might, mainly because I really like my body and sex drive on T, I don’t want to get full on PMS and periods, and I don’t really want to stop passing as male, even sometimes. I wouldn’t mind a more androgynous face, but I also am getting increasingly used to and comfortable with the face I have. So I’ve gone on what for me is about a half dose – an amount which I believe will allow me to stabilize at where I am while slowing or (ideally) stopping further changes. Sometimes, I think the changes just happen so rapidly that it’s good to pause and just get used to how one looks and functions in the world.

During my last post, I was feeling a bit uncomfortable with being read as a cis man in most spaces. I am not out to my students as trans this semester, and at times (when talking about trans issues, for instance, or about female masculinity) this felt dishonest or strange. But now, I have grown more comfortable with it, and I feel that my personal life is none of my students’ business. This is partly just me getting used to teaching – I no longer even find it necessary to let my students know that I am gay or queer identified, though I think they’d have to be pretty stupid to not pick it up from the way I look or how I discuss things is class. If they choose to see me as a straight cis man, though, that’s their decision.

Sometimes, of course, in super cisgender and heteronormative spaces, I feel uncomfortable being read as cis, but then again, I would be uncomfortable regardless of my presentation in such spaces. It is strange to be witness to transphobia and to sexism (because I’m assumed to be a cis man) in a way that was less likely to happen when I appeared to be a gender nonconforming female. I get righteously pissed off on these occasions just as I would before, but feel as if I’m not permitted to speak from a place of personal injury. This is difficult sometimes, but there’s a way in which intervening on transphobia or sexism as someone presumed to be a cis male can, sadly, be more effective than it would be for someone who is either female or is known to be trans. I am aware now, that when I call out or explain transphobia or sexism to someone, I am not seen as just “an angry feminist (woman)” or “a man-hating lesbian” or “an angry transsexual,” but as a judicious, clear-headed, remarkably empathetic (cis) man. On the one hand, this has positive effects, as I can make my critiques heard more easily than I could before, and I can get people who might have otherwise dismissed me to swallow what I am saying. On the other hand, I am benefiting from the belief that (cis) men are disinterested, objective, and logical when they express feminist positions, whereas feminist women are irrational, hateful, and resentful when I do this. It is uncomfortable, but in every case, I have felt that it would be MORE uncomfortable were they to know that I was trans, since generally, I see such people as the enemy and would not want to make myself vulnerable to them.

At these moments, it is very clear to me that, though I do identify as male, I identify as trans male, not cis male, and I do not feel like I am “just one of” the (cis) guys. Sometimes, this worries me and makes me wonder if I really had the “right” to transition in the first place. But in any case, I don’t feel any more comfortable with or a part of groups of cis women. I really am, I suppose, a third gender, and I feel most at ease with genderqueers, butches, and other trans people.

Increasingly, though, I am comfortable with my position as someone who appears to be a gay cis male but who identifies as trans (with friends) and (somewhat secretly) as third gender. For me, I suppose, every social position would be a compromise position, there is no way to to appear 100% of the time as what I identify as, and even if there were one, it would often feel uncomfortable and dangerous to occupy this position (which, again, is why I find trans men who never go on T to be brave and alluring). Nor am I even one of those trans men who regularly outs himself with groups of sympathetic cis people. Even with cis friends who know that I’m trans, I prefer for my transness to subtend things without ever really being brought to the surface. Of course, with my inner circle, I speak openly about being trans.

One thing that amazes me when I think about it is how much T changes people’s perceptions of you and thus, your perceptions of yourself. I suppose that I’m one of the lucky ones in that I began passing consistently very soon after starting T, in spite of the fact that I was androgynous rather than butch beforehand. I know people far more masculine than I who still don’t pass consistently as male 2 years or more after starting T. Which goes to show that passing is not a matter of how masculine you are but simply of body and facial shape. Interestingly, my body did not really change that much. I just “filled out” a bit in the torso to look the way I feel I was “supposed” to look. It was more a natural maturation than anything else. My face changed subtly as well, but in the face, subtle changes make a huge difference. It is the facial changes that took me from androgynous to male in the eyes of others and of myself. Lastly, it is a great relief now to hear a resonant, warm bass when I speak. It sounds authoritative and mature (gender stereotyping again), and increasingly, I feel authoritative and mature. The best part is that I no longer feel disconnected from the sounds I make during sex, as they are the sounds of an aroused man rather than a woman. Interestingly, I think that my vocal changes have healed my relationship to sex as much or even more than my bodily changes.

The result of these changes is that people see, without the slightest degree of doubt, a man when they look at me, and I see a man as well. Whereas before, I constantly worried about whether this or that faggy gesture, way of sitting or standing, or vocal intonation came across as female (and sometimes a gesture or vocal intonation would make my feel dysphorically female), leading me to police my gestures, now I comfortably engage in the faggiest of gestures whenever I feel so inclined. It makes me feel hot, not female, and moreover feels like the appropriate way for me to interact with women – showing them that they can have certain interactions with me that they couldn’t with a straight man – with men – showing them that I am a potential sexual object for them – and with butches – flirting with them and letting them know that I bow before their greater masculinity. Whereas these gestures and vocal intonations used to be a subtle bane on my existence, now they fit me like a fine linen suit. This, more than anything, is how I know that transitioning was the right decision for me.

The other odd effect is that being on T makes me feel like I am maturing and growing up, since the masculinity my body portrays now looks and sounds older than the one it portrayed before. Again, it seems oppressive that certain physical characteristics should read as more mature, or that one can feel more mature due to being on T, but that is my experience. It’s true that part of why I transitioned is because, as a professor in my 30s, I was beginning to feel really age-dissonant (more so even than gender-dissonant). I love that the space of non-transitioning trans-boihood exists, and I enjoyed that space and found it enabling for a while, but now, this body better fits where I’m at in my life. On the other hand, I’m afraid of aging too rapidly. I’m not ready to (and may never be ready to) look like a 32-year old cis man. Appearing much younger than my age has become a way of expressing my identification as third gender, not cis, of being visible as trans to queer people in the know, and of expressing my disidentification with cis men. I think that what it also shows is my goal was never to have a cis male body. Like SCB, I wanted to transition in order to look like a trans man, not a cis man. I have gone on a lower dose of T to preserve the youthful transness that I have now.

The final effect of being on T and passing as cis is that I feel perfectly happy with my body as it is. Whereas before, I would have looked at this body and wanted to get chest surgery and to eliminate the still visible (when naked) curve of my hips, now I look at it and feel perfectly happy. Clothed and lightly bound, it looks like a cis body. Naked, it looks like a trans body, a bit surprising, but still hot, and I like that. I really have zero body dysphoria now (though I think it would be great to have a cis penis for sex). I don’t even want to get chest surgery anymore, because my chest expresses my trans maleness (though I would never go unbound, as some trans men do to out themselves as trans). It’s funny, I glanced at the image at the top of my blog today and noticed how much I really do look like it now. I have arrived.

You know, it’s odd. Sometimes I wonder if I could have continued without going on T and think that this would have been possible. The problem was not that I had such intense gender dysphoria. It was that living as a male pronouned person in the body I had before was really uncomfortable to me. Being mis-pronouned, having to “prove” my maleness, and wondering whether others found my maleness believable was not my cup of tea. And living as a female, even a butch female, really did not fit the way I felt anymore, since the butches I know accept being Ma’amed and interpellated as women and even “ladies.” I think it’s cool that certain butches (like my Pops) really do occupy this in-between space and really are sometimes Ma’am and sometimes Sir, sometimes mom and sometimes pops, sometimes she and sometimes he, but I knew that I wanted to be only one of those.

So that’s that. I transitioned for atypical reasons, perhaps, but I now live in the world with a far greater comfort and ease. I have a debonair, pretty, and cultured masculinity. I like fine whiskeys and exquisite colognes, and am looking for an ascot. I am an angry feminist, an angry trans person, and an angry queer. I don’t identify as cis or feel totally at ease with cis people, male and female. I am a traitor to the male sex. I have sex with gay cis men (mostly) and don’t feel that they should have a problem with my body. I am more comfortable being assumed to be cis than not in public. Yet I do not come across as a typical man. I call my butch lesbian mentor Pops and sir and he, and I recognize and get both her masculinity and her comfort functioning in the world as a woman. T has allowed me to experience and to claim my right to be a man and to explore exactly the type of non-normative man that I want to be. Sometimes, just sitting around or lying down or standing up, I take a moment to feel to immense sense of comfort and confidence I have in my body. I don’t have to worry about whether it’s male or female, whether it is coming across as male or female in that moment, whether I need to do something different to make it look or feel more male. It just is. And it is a man’s body.

Looking back, I can see that this may have been building for a while now. Really, it’s a matter of learning more about my identification as I have transitioned. And in fact, it’s something like a return to my original plan: transition until my voice drops and my face becomes more masculine, then go off T or reduce my dose. I never felt like I needed a typically male body, and I was never certain that I wanted to look like a cis man my age; I went on T because it was intolerable to be seen as female.

I know that I wrote recently about feeling unequivocally male, but now that I’ve had some time to get accustomed to being seen as a cis man, I’m wondering if I really feel simply “male.” What I’m realizing is that while it’s very comfortable for me to pass and to interact with people as a man, I feel that being seen as a cis man only allows people to know part of the story. Increasingly this part of the story feels false. I don’t have any regrets, because it would be more false to be seen as a female, but I’m starting to wonder once again whether there might be a third option for me.

I mentioned that a couple things have been leading to this realization. One is that I am increasingly disenchanted with gay male culture. I am disappointed with how apolitical, consumerist, classist, misogynistic, and racist mainstream gay male culture is. I identified strongly with gay male effeminacy, abjection, and faggotry, but these forms of queer maleness are precisely what one does not see much of in mainstream gay male culture, which idolizes hard muscles, hard penises, and masculinity. I am behind the times, yearning for the fairies of the 1920s. Contemporary gay male culture is not my cup of tea. Mainstream lesbian culture, of course, is not exactly my cup of tea either. But I think most lesbian coming-out stories at least involve some element of critiquing or rejecting female gender roles and rebelling against sexism, particularly as it plays itself out in heterosexual culture or in lesbophobia. It is difficult to be a lesbian without developing some basic critique of sexism and some rudimentary feminist consciousness; and often, this is tied, in lesbian culture, to a an orientation toward social justice, accessible events and spaces, celebrating diverse bodies and critiquing the culture of youth and beauty, and attempting to live in a more environmentally sound manner. Of course, such tendencies can produce an annoying and in its own way, apolitical “granola” culture, but at least they manifest some rudimentary form of social consciousness.

Being away from lesbianism and lesbian culture for a time has allowed me to appreciate certain things about it, and to realize that, to a certain extent, it has shaped who I am now. This must be why I have never, in my adult life, felt truly intimate with a cis male. The ones who have become my closest friends, the ones I’ve fallen deeply in love with have been female-assigned or female. Now I’m not saying that there’s no escaping gender socialization. Certain trans men I would never feel close to either, perhaps because they really are more cis identified and have taken little or nothing from lesbian culture. Certain trans women, I am sure, I could also feel close to. But experience intense intimacy with a cis man – I’m not sure that I ever will.

I went on an Ok Cupid date last weekend with a gay cis man. We were sitting over dinner having getting-to-know you conversation, and he ended up recounting to me his late-blooming “gay adolescence,” which consisted of him going to clubs and bathouses, getting really drunk, and spending lots of money trying to get male strippers to take off their g-strings. After this brief blow-out, he settled into an absolutely normal gay adulthood. This didn’t resemble my coming out in the slightest, and it isn’t just because I was trans and he wasn’t. There I was, someone who he presumed was a cis male as well and who he probably expected to have had a very similar period of gay adolescence. I really had nothing to tell him. This was the moment when it really clicked for me, that I was not really that similar to gay cis men – but it took me being accepted as one of them before I could have this revelation.

Now that I know more about gay male culture, I am starting to feel that my outer appearance really doesn’t tell an important part of my story. By knowing I am a gay man, people really don’t know all that much about me (I thought that would actually let them know a lot about me). As part of my disillusionment with gay male culture, I am starting to feel less satisfied with appearing to be simply a gay male.

I have a crush on a butch academic right now and have been having long political and personal conversations with my butch Pops as well. The concurrence of these two intimacies is making me think more about my connection to butch as something that I would like to render visible. Really, I feel extremely close to certain butches. They are my people, although we obviously have important and significant differences of gender expression, identification, and sexuality. For me, in spite of these significant differences, the experience of female-assigned gender strangeness, and the kind of feminist critique and fighting spirit that engenders, is enough to make us comrades.

Before I transitioned, I was plagued by the desire to prove the ways in which I was different from lesbians and from butches; now I want to emphasize our similarities. I’m not being wishy-washy here. I think I’m just moving farther along the path of attempting to communicate who I am – what my gender is and what my affiliations are – through my body. Before, when I looked like a butch, it was important to disidentify with butches and to emphasize the ways in which I was really a gay man. Now that I look like a gay man, it is becoming important to me once again to affiliate with female-assigned queers, ideally via my body.

And the fact is, I don’t think that I particularly need the biological markers of maleness – rougher skin, hair on my stomach, veiny arms, a thicker neck, an aggressive sex drive. I don’t need to look and feel as dudely as I do, and in fact, I might feel more like me if I didn’t. What I do need is to look in away that broadly evokes non-femaleness. All I really ever wanted was to be read as a trans man, not a cis man, and not a lesbian. And I think that if I went off T now, that’s what would happen. My body would become slimmer and smoother and my features more delicate, but my new male jawline and deep voice would remain, and I would clearly be a trans man. This, I think, is the most accurate and most truthful option for me. A visible third gender – clearly not female, but not conventionally male either. Someone who you would refer to as “he,” but that is nevertheless different from cis men. An elvin genderqueer boy perhaps.

Of course, the actual process of going off T is scary. How will I feel as my muscles melt away, as my face changes, as my body loses its hair, as my hips grow more pronounced? Will my gender dysphoria return? How will I manage getting periods again and suffering from PMS? Will I begin to feel more emotionally like a woman? Will I sometimes not pass? Will people look at me strangely? Will I confuse people once again?

These are all scary thoughts. I may not, in fact, succeed at going off T. I think that I might start with simply lowering my dose for a several months and then decide where to go from there. But I hope that being on T and passing as cis has given me a certain insight that will prove permanent, and that, in the future, I will not need the crutch of testosterone in order to feel male. Now, after all, I know that, in certain ways, I am not male. Perhaps, in the future, I will be able to embrace confusing people, not being treated as a cis male, and being visibly gender strange because actually, that’s exactly who I am.

I hope that, after I detransition, I will be transformed enough to not look female, to not look like a butch, and to not look like a lesbian. But I want butches and lesbian to be able to see that I am trans and not cis. I just want a slight separation from butches, so that our similarities across difference will be visible without me appearing to be a butch. Likewise, I still want to look like a beautiful gay boy. Just not the same type of gay boy as cis men. A recognizably different and unique version of gay masculinity, with a different gender history. This, I think, would be perfect for me. To be visibly neither one nor the other, sharing similarities with both and able to relate to both across a tiny, but significant visible gap of difference.

One year after starting T, where am I?

I have pretty much exactly the type of body I envisioned. Lean, muscular, small, and mostly smooth. I ended up growing longer hair than I anticipated on my legs, and growing a light happy trail. While, initially, I was not particularly pleased with these developments, over time, I grew to love them. Seeing as how my lower body was already pretty lean and muscular before starting T, the hair is the major visible change – but somehow, it signifies totally as male. I love looking down and seeing my “male” (i.e. slightly hairier) lower body now.

Otherwise, I have a perfect gay boy body. I feel really lucky. I love it. It’s really only slightly different than how it was before, since I didn’t have much fat to shift around to begin with and the muscle mass that I did put on was lean rather than bulky.

But I move it differently than I expected. I think, partly, because my changing muscles have affected my phenomenological experience of my body. I can feel the strength and the mass of my pecs, shoulders, and upper-body, for instance. I enjoy it, and this makes me move in a way that emphasizes their mass, strength, and stability. I have ended up not being one of those flexible waisted, butt out, back arched gay boys, and this is not because I’m trying to hide my chest. Overall, my enjoyment of my sense of my new muscles leads me to project strength and stability in my posture, along with the potential for lightning-fast movement. For me to take on the flexible-waisted, butt out, back arched posture, I would have to let go of my muscles’ desire to experience their strength, and so I haven’t been able to do it.

The result is that I don’t think anyone who knows me would call me effeminate. In fact, my femmy genderqueer trans friend said the other day that he considered me butch! BUTCH!!! I was completely astounded. A few days later, I went to queer choir practice and was told that I was a bass! A BASS!!! A BUTCH BASS! Will wonders never cease?

In all seriousness, I honestly didn’t believe him at first. That is, I thought that he must have woefully loose standards for what a butch was if he thought that I was one! It just didn’t make sense. I knew that I was nothing like a real butch such as my Pops. We have completely different gender styles, embodiments, ways of moving, ways of relating to women. I was not butch. I was also nothing like the many butch straight trans men I know – again, totally different gender styles, embodiments, ways of moving, and ways of relating to women. (I realized recently that, though I think of myself as someone who has many good trans male friends, actually, I don’t tend to relate so well to straight trans men. My intimate friendships are all with trans men who are or have been primarily into other men). Only such an extraordinarily femmy friend could believe that I, of all people, was butch.

But it’s true that with this friend, I behave as the butch. This friend, along with other feminine people I know, also make me realize that there are certain ways in which I’m quite a bit “butcher” than many others around me. I am a realist. I shoot down ideas that don’t seem feasible, and I don’t know how to do it in a sweet way. I am direct. I don’t play games, I am not coy, and I am as incapable of feigning interest, niceness, and enthusiasm as I am of expressing my strong opinions in more polite and inoffensive language. I believe that life is hard, and that people ought to be tough to survive. When my more sensitive or idealistic friends tell me about their problems and disappointments, my instinct is to tell them that that’s life and to advise them to toughen up, to assert themselves, and to take a more cynical or adversarial view of how the world works. When something really awful happens to me, I turn inward. I don’t seek out friends or try to express the hurt immediately until I am a little more in control, a little less broken, a little less vulnerable. I err, in general, toward appearing more confident than I actually am, because I don’t fully trust many people, and even when I do, I don’t usually like to show them my vulnerabilities. It just feels unseemly to me. Finally, I tend to express myself in more economical language than many more feminine people. There are all masculine, one might even say butch traits.

But these character traits were all present before I started T as well. Somehow, though, with the body and sweet face I had then, they really didn’t register as butch or even as very masculine. Rather, they were cute. A sweet, slender, pixyish young genderqueer pretending to be a grumpy old granddad – that must have been the effect. Now, the effect is butch but definitely very very gay. A butch gay man, in other words. Among straight trans men and butch women, I stand out as GAY, but not, for that matter, as effeminate.

I was surprised and disheartened at first. Partly because I imagined that I would still be extremely visibly genderqueer (as in flaming fairy) once I transitioned.  This is not how I am at all. In part, I have realized that it feels more dangerous and more vulnerable to be a flaming gay man in public than it did to be a butch genderqueer, and I feel more frightened now being publicly intimate with a (male) lover than I did then. I feel more comfortable not drawing excessive amounts of attention to myself. But it is also because I actually do prefer expressing masculinity to expressing effeminacy or femininity, and the satisfactions of this far outweigh my earlier fears of coming across as a regular guy.

And I get publicly cruised and even asked out by really cute queer men enough that I know for a fact that, to the even slightly trained eye, I do not come across as a heterosexual. So I decided, recently, not to worry about not having become the effeminate faggot that I envisioned. It is interesting how little one can know oneself, and how much one’s body can influence one’s (and other’s) perception of oneself.

Finally, something rather stupendous has happened. I have started dating an absolutely gorgeous gay black cis man who is himself an effeminate bottom and who sees me as his big strong (potential) top. This is something of a feat of the imagination considering the height difference between us, and the fact that I am not only smaller, but also skinnier than him. But it works. I have not been so turned on by someone in a very long time. It is partly him, his beauty, and so on, but it is mostly the dynamic – the fact that he makes himself my lady, that during our first kiss, I was the one putting my tongue into his mouth and not the other way around, that when I put my arm around him, he sinks into me as if I am so much bigger and stronger than him, that he really reacts when I dominate him while making out, and that he lays his head on my shoulder in a way that makes me feel totally strong and totally protective of him. He has commented on how strong I look, how it looks like I work out, how I seem a lot taller than I am, and how I have a certain swagger about me. In other words, he makes me feel like a gay butch top, and I love it. More than that, he makes me feel like a Daddy; and I’m afraid, that if this gets going, I will find myself in another Daddy/Boy relationship (he referred to himself as my “babyboy” in his text tonight), but only afraid because they’re so intense and emotionally vulnerable for me.

This is making me realize the extent to which I am actually a top. The sex that I’ve been having – either in a double top situation with other tops, or as a pretend “bottom” with a service top – has been satisfying, but not outrageously hot, because actually, what turns me on are effeminate male bottoms (this one talks about his “bosom” and doesn’t even like to have his dick sucked – I think he’s somewhat genderqueer without using that word). However, my assumption that these kinds of fags would only want a “real man,” and would not want to be topped, even if they were attracted to me, by someone without a cis penis, that I didn’t even really consider it a possibility. Until I came across someone so beautiful that I just couldn’t help myself. And now I can acknowledge that, the truth is, I really enjoy being the penetrator with someone who is significantly more feminine than me (and this is actually not that easy to find, with the contemporary gay male primacy on masculinity). And I want him to give me really long, really great blow jobs, but I don’t particularly care about being penetrated by him. This seemed, however, like too much to wish for, so I didn’t.

I guess, overall, this post is about how one can not really know one’s gender as well as one thinks, because the gender we think we have is often based on the chance appearance of our body as well as fantastical ideas in our head. Our body is the part of us that knows the real story. Secondly, it is about how one can know one’s sexuality but deliberately obfuscate this knowledge because parts of it seem unfeasible.

I am clearly not butch in the same way that butch women and certain straight men are butch. But perhaps I’m moving toward becoming a somewhat butch gay top, and I should just embrace it. It certainly feels good in my body and in my sexuality.

Afterword: Because of certain incompatibilities having nothing to do with gender, topping, or transness, it looks like this relationship with the gay bottom may go nowhere, but it was worth it for the revelations it helped me have.

The fact of the matter is that as trans people, we are lightyears ahead of most cis people in our understandings of gender. In many cases, disclosing the full truth of our gender histories and identifications would only serve to confuse cis people and lead to inappropriate interactions with us (in which their impulse to see FTMs as girls in disguise would be given full reign, for instance). Sometimes we have to acknowledge cis people’s limited gender experience (and our own limited energy for teaching them about gender) by circumscribing what we disclose. We are not being dishonest; we are just being realistic about people’s capacities.

Also, cis people need to be checked on their desire to know everything about trans people. They often try to make it sound as if understanding our stories is going to help them come to terms with our transness, help them understand us better, and help them learn to treat us properly. But actually, the only things they need to know in order to interact properly with me is that I am male and I identify as male. Learning how I got to this point is not going to help them treat me any better, but it might lead to them treating me worse. Cis people need to understand that any time a trans person tells their (trans) story, we are at once trying to establish legitimacy for our existence as our gender and seeking acceptance, whether we want it to be this way or not. Under such high-stakes and asymmetrical circumstances, sometimes it is best for trans people not to tell our stories and for cis people to learn to bite their tongues instead of asking inappropriate questions.

For trans people, this means coming to terms with not being fully understood by many people in our lives.

The right to privacy is a trans right just as fundamental and just as endangered as our right to be treated as our genders of choice, our right to change our IDs, and our right to access caring and sensitive medical care.

Approximately one year after starting testosterone it is hard, and indeed, astonishing for me to remember how not obvious it was to me that I might be trans, how using male pronouns did not initially feel natural to me, how I did not grow up thinking of myself consciously as a boy or hating feminine things, and even how, for I time, I saw the butch women I was with as the masculine ones in the relationship and thought that I had to appear androgynous because I was with them. (Some of these women, incidentally, are my facebook friends and probably think that either I or they are crazy now that they can see that I’ve transitioned). It surprises me that when I was in my late teens, in my “bi” years before I was in my first relationship with a butch woman, being “mistaken” for a boy made me feel traumatizingly embarrassed and ashamed – it felt far worse than being seen as queer or as a lesbian. When I was mistaken for a boy, I felt like I had crossed over some line into strictly forbidden, unthinkable territory. I was a freak. It wasn’t until after my first relationship with a butch woman when I moved to a (small) city with a lively queer women’s culture and its own drag king shows that I realized that masculinity could be a source of pride, something sexy, a gendered style that it could be safe and exciting to play and experiment with. At this time, I began to feel brave and thrilled and happy when I could look in the mirror and see something like a boy reflected in it and when I could defiantly project that to the world. I remember initially feeling self-conscious and a little afraid whenever I entered what I assumed to be a normative, straight space. I thought that people would challenge me or treat me differently – and certainly, I drew my share of stare, suspicious and hostile reactions, and the occasional verbal gay-bash – but the walls did not crumble around me and the world didn’t end. I had simply gotten over my fear and my shame. And, in a rather circular way, what helped me get over my shame at my masculine gender expression was precisely the masculinity I was discovering. The more uncomfortable I felt, the tougher and more confidently I tried to walk, the bigger I sat, the more of a defiant of a boy I became. Some of these behaviors have become ingrained in me now. Who knows to what degree the masculinity and eventually the maleness that I came into was some core part of my gendered being and to what degree it was the gendered form that my defiance of queer shame took. This association of masculinity, rebellion, shame-pride, and empowerment has certainly fundamentally shaped how I feel about my gender, and I think that, to some extent, it also explains why I identify partially with butch women and butch history. Cis-men, gay or straight, do not have quite the same associations and feelings around their masculinity as what I described above (they have others). But when a butch swaggers, looks unapproachable, or walks big, I get it, and I respect it.

What makes me different from butches (I think) is that, in some strange way, femininity is now what has become a problematic, thrilling, and shame-ridden experience. Femininity feels forbidden and dangerous and shameful to me for one obvious reason – because I’m trans. When it comes to my own gender, the possibility of femininity – female femininity – fills me with distaste and horror. There is, however, one group of men that also has to deal with complicated feelings around femininity – gay men. For them also, feminine expression has an aura of danger and shame… which might, with a certain unpredictable volatility, turn into camp pride. I can’t do it as a general way of being, but every now and then, I can let out a convincing camp flourish. In this way, I am exactly like many non-effeminate gay men, whose controlled release of drama queen moments is considered humorous and reaffirms their belonging within a gay community without permeating their behavior overall (they are not constantly feminine or effeminate, just for the occasional flourish or dramatic word). I think that, for me, there’s a kind of unstable transference between my horror and distaste for any expression of femininity on my body as a trans man, my identification with gay male feelings of shame around feminine expression and attempts to hide and to control it, and my attraction to gay male strategies of reclaiming feminine expression (my emulation of these strategies, on occasion, but more significantly, their erotic charge for me). My feelings toward femininity and strategies for dealing with it are thus a strange combination of butch and gay male, but cannot be fully understood as either one or the other.

Interestingly, both aspects of my gender – my maleness and my gay femininity – ultimately have a lot to do with queerness, shame, and pride. I don’t remember being ashamed of my femininity before I became masculine. But once I did become masculine, even as I was dealing with shame at my masculinity by transmuting it into pride and, therefore, into a more masculine masculinity, I began to feel ashamed of my femininity. I am not suggesting that I should have, instead, gone to therapy in order to find self-acceptance rather than work out my feelings of queer shame through my gender. Gender is a viable and valuable way of working out and expressing all sorts of things – childhood conflicts, relations to the world, relations to social norms, strong feelings around queer and trans stigma, desires to project empowerment, toughness, strength, self-sufficiency, and fearlessness, as well as whatever their feminine corollaries might be (the fact that I can’t think of them at the moment shows to what extent I am wedded to the values culturally associated with masculine expression). One thing to point out is that my feelings of shame in my masculinity, and later, my femininity led me to go further into that gender, to throw myself into my shame, rather than totally closing it off or moving away from it. I don’t, however, see myself going fully into feminine shame-pride as I have into the masculine. Perhaps I have simply found the combination that suits me.

Another thing to underline is that I did not, as many lesbians seem to fear, transition because I couldn’t handle the shame and stigma of being visibly gender deviant. To the contrary, I learned to enjoy being gender deviant. It gave me a powerful charge and became an important part of my self-conception and my attitude toward the world. No. It was something else that carried me into transition. It was a gender identity as effeminate fag coalescing out of shame-pride in masculinity and shame in femininity as well as some other things, notably sexuality. Could it be that an identification powerful enough to give me gender dysphoria and make me transition could have emerged, in part, out of my ways of understanding and working through complicated feelings around gender transgression? Could my gender be one of queer shame’s flowers? Certainly, if I focus in on the feelings I have around gender and how they have changed throughout my life, it seems quite possible.

These feeling have intensified now that I have transitioned. Masculinity is obviously no longer a cause of shame but rather of a very rare and special pride. My masculinity is beloved to me. I treasure it. This explains why I feel so delighted when I look in the mirror and see how masculine and male I look. I still feel transgressive and defiant in expressing masculinity, as if I am mischievously poaching on the domain of others.  But I identify as male, so masculinity is my domain, not that of others, and masculine expression, on me, now ratifies, rather than seeming to contradict my sex. And I do, in fact, feel proud of how well my gender expression accords with my body (that I may come across as butch and/or gay, but never female).  I delight, almost constantly, in feeling myself to be masculine and male in my body and in seeing this confirmed in relations with others as well as in the mirror. This feeling of almost constant gender elation is what I normally call “feeling very comfortable in my body.” It also explains, in part, why I have not ended up being as effeminate as I thought I would be when I first started transitioning. I am not (yet?) ready to give up my delight in the feeling of masculinity to be effeminate.

Also, the feeling of shame associated with femininity has intensified. Now I don’t mean “femininity” in any monolithic sense. I can be gentle and sensitive and sympathetic and kind and all that business, as long as it reads as “sensitive man” or “sensitive gay man” or is balanced out by butch characteristics. In other words, as long as I don’t think it reads as “woman” or “girl” or “man who was once a girl.” Much of the shame is specifically around femininity as it is associated with femaleness, but there is also some fear of drawing attention to myself, of becoming the object of attack or hostility, or simply of not being taken seriously as a flaming faggot. I hadn’t realize how intensely I try to force people to respect me until I transitioned. I also haven’t found a way to be defiant, fabulous, and strong in femininity the way that camp queens and femmes are. This is why I admire them so much more than ordinary women and men.

Finally, I have now become ashamed of my female past. First of all, I find it unseemly to talk about it. I would be scandalized, for instance, if someone I knew made reference to the fact that I was once female and identified as a girl. I believe that, unless they know the person prefers otherwise, people should have the common decency to discuss a trans person’s past as if they had always been their preferred gender. (This is different than acknowledging that a physical and social transition has taken place, which is fine by me in private settings). I don’t really talk to my friends about how my internal sense of gender itself has transitioned.

But why not, if it’s true? For me, it’s very much related to my sense of dignity and authenticity as a trans person and a male. Even though it is true that how I came to be this trans person and male is a complicated story, I don’t want others to know or acknowledge they know exactly how complicated this story was. Let them perpetuate the fiction that I was always a little boy, even when everyone thought I was female. Because I fear that if they knew that I ever identified as female or as a girl, they might not treat me correctly – that they would treat me as a genderqueer or a butch or just female rather than as a trans man, for instance. My authenticity as a man or as a trans man might be questioned, and my sense of dignity would be undermined. This isn’t a hard and fast rule; I have told at least one person of my female-identified past, and I could tell others if I felt the situation was right. Otherwise, I feel that everyone should have the common decency of assuming, unless informed otherwise, either that a trans person never identified as another gender and that, even if they did, they likely don’t want this identification acknowledged.

But it’s also true that I have become ashamed of this history. I find it confusing and absurd now to think of myself as ever having been a girl. I just can’t identify with it. It feels like another person’s childhood, another person’s youth. I can’t believe that those images were me, and I didn’t have a problem with it, not really. What’s even stranger is that I am fully capable of looking at images from the past or having memories from the past and feeling genuinely sorry for that poor little boy receiving female socialization or wearing girl’s clothing or thinking he was a dyke, even though I know that I didn’t identify as a boy at the time. On the other hand, the pictures of me pre-physical transition at the time that I identified as a fag which used to distress me because I thought I looked hopelessly unlike a boy now appear totally congruent to me. I can clearly see the trans fag in them, and they don’t inspire any shame in me (though they did before). What’s happened is that I now feel so clearly male, and so comfortable and elated in being, looking, and feeling male that I literally can’t believe I was ever anything else and can’t really remember what it felt like to be another gender. I know that it isn’t true, that I didn’t feel like a boy in my youth, and that I wasn’t a poor little boy who didn’t know he was a boy yet. But my past as a girl is so utterly incongruent with how I feel now that it really is much easier and more comfortable to imagine myself (and see myself, in pictures) as a little boy trying to be a girl. Even though I know the story of how this happened (because it is my story and I have written it down here), it is very difficult for me to hold the two parts of the story together in my consciousness in anything I can experience as a non-contradictory way.

I am also no longer really Third Gender identified. For the most part, I feel totally, unequivocally male, and this feels like a fantastic relief. I am a male with a complicated history, of course, and I don’t deny my identification with butch women, for instance, but I certainly don’t feel like some mixture of male and female or like some gender in between the two (even though, objectively, that’s what my body is). I do, however, feel like I am a different type of male than most cis men. I can sense that, though we may both be male, we have different histories and different relations to our genders. That is not to say I feel totally comfortable with all trans men, since trans men express widely variant types of masculinities, have a series of different histories, and have different emotions around their gender as well. We may not be the same type of male either, but we are at least in the same general category (though I may in fact, be and feel closer in my gender to certain gay cis men than to many straight trans men). So why do I no longer feel Third Gender? I think that taking testosterone and seeing my maleness reflected in the mirror and in the way people treat me has tremendously ratified my sense of being male. It has given me permission to feel unproblematically male, without fear, or guilt, or a sense of untruth. It’s too bad that I couldn’t feel this way without testosterone, but it’s also understandable.

Unlike with my history of female-identification, I don’t mind others knowing about my trans identity, and I don’t feel that it undermines my maleness or my dignity (though I know that for some people, it actually does – when they know I’m trans they see me as a freak or a female in disguise or a passing butch). Regardless of what they think , it gives me pleasure to show them what a good man I am – how handsome and good at being male – pleasure in making people respect my gender identity and call me “he.” It’s none other than my previous sense of masculine defiance carried into my physical transition. It makes me very angry, however, when cis people talk to me about my trans history or when trans people refer to it in the presence of cis people (angry, not ashamed). This, I feel strongly, is an enormous breach of privacy. I want complete and total control over if, when, how, and to what extent my transness is discussed. In my ideal world, then, everyone I interacted with regularly would know I was trans, but no one would talk about it unless I brought it up first. Other people, trans and not, unfortunately don’t have the same standards of behavior.

That’s why I articulate these thoughts in an anonymous blog. I don’t tell any of my friends about them, and certainly not my Pops (who I am trying to get to understand me more as a transsexual and less as a butch). I would never allow myself to be interviewed by those sympathetic researchers or journalists who want to tell a trans person’s story. Because I don’t want my trans story out in public, attached to my name. This is very sensitive information, and, in most cases, I would rather forgo sharing with a friend who may have had a similar experience that I once thought I was a girl.

I don’t think this is dishonest. It is the most honest way to get across the way I feel now about my gender. Because if I can’t even fully comprehend how my girl-identified past fits with my male-identified present, I certainly don’t think I can expect others to. Unless I treat them to a long verbal dissertation, which I would prefer not to do.

As you have probably divined, I have no patience for the kinds of guys who assert that testosterone made them suddenly like and understand all culturally “male” traits and activities like science, fixing engines, and remaining stoically taciturn as if hormones were wholly determining of mental and emotional life. Sex hormones do not change one’s personality, likes, dislike, and intelligence. Transition, as a whole mental-physical-social process, on the other hand, can change these things, insofar as it involves a gradual discovery of what it means like to be seen as male, what people’s expectations are of someone perceived as male, what strategies one can engage in to keep feeling pleasurably male, and so on. Because for many, having a solidly male social identity brings both comfort and pleasure. There are pleasures to being seen as “really” male and to feeling “really” male that can prompt manifestations of “typically” male behavior in trans men who were not inclined to such behavior before they began transition. The rewards of gendered identity, I would argue, are, in fact, the primary reason for changes in personality and behavior during transition. People begin to treat us differently as their perception of our gender changes through our physical transition. We, in turn, consciously or unconsciously modify our behaviors in response to what we like and dislike about how we are being treated.

That said, I do believe that sex hormones affect sex drive (naturally enough) and, to some extent, emotions. Some guys say T makes them rage. I have not experienced this, but I’m willing to believe it. Some guys say T makes it all but impossible for them to cry. I have experienced a diminished ability to shed tears since starting T, though I have the same emotional range as before. (This might also vary from person, as I have and FTM transsexual friend who is a cry baby!) One thing T certainly does is cut out female hormonal cycles and, with them, any emotional side-effects of PMS (this I’ve certainly experienced). In addition, many trans men report feeling more emotionally stable, overcoming depression, and even feeling elated when they start taking T. These feelings are easily understandable as responses to taking positive steps to overcome gender dysphoria and to being seen how one wants to be seen.

I am sick, however, of trans men shoring up culturally specific sexist stereotypes about what constitutes “male” and “female” along with the notion (itself sexist) that sex hormones dictate every aspect of gendered behavior. Testosterone will only make you the man you already are. You do the rest.

I am, essentially, the same person I was when I started T. Just one year older and wiser, and all but free of gender dysphoria.

Given that top surgery is not a necessity for me, here are some of the ways in which not having it is an inconvenience:

I do bind every day. This isn’t painful or uncomfortable, but it is a bit constricting, and hot in the summer. It’s bearable, because I don’t bind when I’m home alone. But then, I have to rush for the binder if a friend is dropping by or if a delivery person knocks on the door. Things that would be totally fun – like hosting an out-of-town visitor or sharing a vacation house with friends – become less fun when I have to bind every minute (except when I’m sleeping). Also, it restricts my clothing options. I’m very exacting. I don’t like it when any bit of binder can be seen under a pale or white t-shirt. I don’t like to wear shirts that are too tight or sheer, because I think that binder lines are visible or that my torso doesn’t look male enough. I can’t wear v-necks, tank tops, or summer T’s with wide armholes, because my binder would show. I get hot at dance parties and can’t strip to an underlayer. I hate sweating, because there’s nothing worse than a tight, soaking binder. And I can’t walk around shirtless showing off my cute torso. I’m a fag, and if I had top surgery, I would be extremely scantily clad most of the summer, not looking all butch in high-coverage, not tight muscle T’s.

I am ok having sex with guys who get my gender, but if I’m picking up a cis guy from the internet or a dance party, there is always that moment of discomfort if and when he takes my binder off, a discomfort that he can make worse or better (and I’ve experienced both). Sometimes I think a certain gay guy is cute, but flash to me taking off my shirt in front of him and refrain from doing anything further. Lately, I’ve been letting cis guys pursue me. I would feel more comfortable pursuing them if I had a chest that I was sure wouldn’t traumatize either of us.

I feel comfortable going to the beach with my friends, but what about with my family (who live, after all, in Puerto Rico)? What about in a foreign country (such as X, where I might go with my Pops)?

I feel comfortable looking at my chest in the mirror now, but let there be no doubt: I’m sure I would love to look at it if it were a male chest.

I feel male now, but I think that there would be a relief and certainty attached to not having breasts. Breasts are such a potent symbol of femaleness. It’s one thing to have a male-looking chest in spite of them, or to resignify them in your head so that they don’t mean femaleness; it’s quite another thing to not have them at all.

I can’t go to gay saunas or walk around a men’s locker room with a towel around my waist.

Those are all the negatives about not having top surgery that come to mind. Sometimes I think that, in the present, restricting certain aspects of my life because I have breasts is fine. I can handle it. It isn’t a big deal. It doesn’t cause me physical pain or major gender dysphoria. But when I think about doing this for an entire lifetime, I feel less sanguine. Who would want that? Why would I choose that when I have the option of having a male chest? It just doesn’t make much sense.

So here are some possible reasons not to have top surgery:

Cost. Of course it’s a lot, and it isn’t covered by my insurance. But on the other hand, I’m a professor now, and I don’t have to provide for a family. I could easily have more than the cost of the surgery saved up by the end of the year without even making an effort to save. In this I’m extremely privileged. So while the initial price tag seems large, I can definitely afford it.

Ties to a history of third-gender compromise. I have to admit, a part of me kind of likes binding and kind of likes having a not typically male chest. That is, I value how binding ties me to a certain historical experience – of passing women, of butch pain, of trans men before the era of physical transition, of third genders around the world who have dealt with less than ideally male chests. I value the historically rich art of resignifying and remapping bodies in which my lovers and I must become adept. I value having breasts that don’t mean “breasts.” I value binding before I go out as a daily practice of self-making. I value unbinding when I come home as an acknowledgement of my own comfort in being a man with the chest that I have. That said, I don’t think this is an experience that I need to have forever. I appreciate having had them, but if I had top surgery tomorrow, I don’t think I would need to “mourn” the loss of the historical experiences above (but I could be wrong).

Guilt in participating in an elective surgery. For a while, my lack of pain and dysphoria regarding my chest held me back from considering top surgery. I know so many people who experience or have experienced major pain and dysphoria regarding their chests. It seemed both frivolous and disrespectful to their experiences to traipse off and get top surgery without having to go through hell first. Surprisingly, talking to my Pops helped me get over this. She’s female-identified and quite large up top (horrifyingly large, actually). She is not trans, does not try to pass, does not bind, and understands her body as female, however, she told me that she was hoping to get a breast reduction. Part of her decision has to do with mild gender dysphoria, part of it is aesthetic, part of it has to do with back pain, and part of it has to do with minor inconveniences – having to rush for a bra when someone knocks at the door, having restrictions from certain types of exercise, and so on. When I told her that I felt ambivalent about getting top surgery because it seemed almost frivolous given the size of my chest, she said, “Well, it rides the line between cosmetic surgery and something else. But if you’re really committed to this [to trans-male identity]… (trails off). I mean, men who have that disorder [gynecomastia] get surgery. If you want to get it done in X, I could go with you.” A totally surprising conversation! Who’d have thought that my transphobic Pops would be encouraging me to get top surgery, much less offering to go with me? I was immeasurably touched. But her breakdown of top surgery for me as an elective surgery that isn’t purely cosmetic because it also effects both gender identity and lifestyle possibilities makes it finally feel within reach for me.

Loss of sensitivity. This, for me, is the the major concern. It is also what I have the least knowledge about. Until I started researching surgeries this summer, for instance, I had no idea the extent to which it was common for those who get the double incision procedure to have little or even no sensation in their nipples, little sensation in their chests, and no erotic sensation. I, however, would get the less common periareolar procedure done. Periareolar surgery is an option for people who have small chests and good skin elasticity (another reason to do it sooner rather than later). Its major advantages are that the scars, which are right around the nipple, are not easily visible and that, since the nipple itself isn’t removed and regrafted, there is little chance that the nipple will fall off and a good chance of maintaining sensation. Sensation in the nipples, however, might be weaker than before and less erotic, and sensation in the chest could still be patchy. At least, this is what I’ve gathered. I really don’t like the idea of numbness or patchy sensation in my chest. After all, one of the points of top surgery would be to allow me to feel reconnected to my chest and enjoy sensory experiences like not binding, feeling the sun and breeze on my chest on the beach, and baring my chest without discomfort to a lovers’ touch. I can’t imagine the disconnection of not having sensation in my chest. And maintaining sensation but losing erotic sensation in my nipples is definitely something to think about. I guess I would have to be prepared to lose a whole erogenous zone! It isn’t a necessary erogenous zone – I rarely touch my nipples when I jerk off, and I certainly don’t need nipple play to get turned on. I also think that, in spite of my being “comfortable” with nipple play, I’m also a bit uncomfortable with it and unconsciously try to move past it to other things. In sum, having the same degree of erotic sensation on a male chest would be ideal; losing an erogenous zone entirely gives me pause, but may not be all that significant to my sexual practice, considering my slight discomfort with certain types of nipple play; losing sensitivity entirely is something I’m not sure I can get past. If any of you have gotten periareolar and keyhole surgery and want to share your how you feel about sensitivity or lack thereof in the chest and nipples afterward, I’d really appreciate it. You can respond in the “comments” section of this post or email me privately at faggtboi@gmail.com. Actually, I’d appreciate hearing from anyone on any of the issues I raised in this post.

In sum, I have more research and thinking to do, but a part of me is beginning to think that it’s only a matter of time before I decide to get top surgery.

I did it! I made out with a guy at a queer dance party – a big, sweet black man – who wanted to go home with me immediately. It was hot: we locked eyes in a narrow corridor by the bathrooms. I had noticed him staring at me at a dance party once before. We said a few words and, magnetically drawn together, began making out. I could feel that his dick was immediately hard against me. He was a good kisser, and we only stopped when his hand went for my crotch and I swiftly moved to dodge it (when will I learn that I have to wear my packer to anything gay that involves dancing?). I gave him my number and made my exit a bit later, ignoring his seductive offer to come home with me right then. When I got home I texted him that I was transgender, female-to-male, and asked if he still wanted to get a drink next week. He texted back that he wanted to come over immediately. I made him wait, but was pleased by his response.

We had a date later, in which I was charmed by his sweetness, flirtation, and wit. I also liked that he was huge and muscular, but also obviously faggy. We didn’t mention me being trans again, except one more time, just before heading for my place, when I asked if he understood and whether he’d ever dated a trans man. The answers were yes and no, respectively, but he didn’t seem concerned, so we headed to my place. At my place, we made out again. He was just as good a kisser and, once again, his dick got immediately hard. He took off my clothes, binder, and boxer briefs himself, and had no problem with what was underneath, sucking on my nipples, jerking me off, and even giving me a blow job without any prompting on my part. I gave him a blow job too, and he kept on saying how good it was. When we were both pretty turned on, I asked him if he wanted to fuck me. He said yes, of course, and I asked “in my front hole or my back hole?” He asked me which I preferred, and I said “front,” so that’s what we did. (I sometimes like being fucked in the ass, but it doesn’t get me off like being fucked in the front hole, and when I’m turned on – which is all the time now – I want to get off bad. Still, I figured that a gay guy could be nervous about this, and had resolved to go with ass sex, get a guy hooked, then try front hole sex with him. It was great, though, that I didn’t even have to do this). It felt awesome for both of us, and I now have this guy at my beck and call.

One of the great things T has done for me is allowed me to feel fully male, even when I’m stark naked being fucked in my front hole by a cis gay guy. This is something I never would have tried before, and I’m grateful that I can experience it now with a minimum of dysphoria. I’m just a gay boy who likes to be fucked, and this is the hole I prefer. I’m still boyish, thin, and androgynous, but I think a lot of the big gay tops prefer this, especially on an Asian guy. Overall, though, T has just subtly shaped and filled out my muscle, so that I can look at myself fully naked and see a man. The voice also helps a ton, as I can now issue orders and groan during sex and hear a male grunt, not a much-feared female scream. In addition, T has made me enjoy front hole sex even more than before, which I hadn’t necessarily anticipated. I think now that, if I wanted to, I could feel comfortable having anonymous front hole sex with a gay guy from Manhunt or some other such site.

I like that this particular gay guy is more of a service top than an actual top. He’s very into pleasing me, I’m on top for most of the show, and I’m able to dictate position, rhythms, and so on. This helps me feel male (I know, it’s fucked up, associating maleness with sexual agency), and it’s also more my sexual style. The best thing about him, though, is that he hasn’t himself said anything about me being trans, the ways in which my body is different than other guys’ bodies, or anything else of the sort. Which is how things should be.

It’s apparent to me that she, in this situation, is more cowardly, paranoid, and afraid of scandal than I am, even though she has much less to lose. This makes her a terrible ally when it comes to anything regarding extended family or wider-circle coming out. Unfortunately, she thinks that she’s helping me by relaying her paranoia, giving me useless advice on how (not) to handle things with them, and asking me to wait a certain amount of time before telling them or seeing them at all. Acting as if it is reasonable to ask me to absent myself from any family affairs (not just her home) when her husband is present, (that coward didn’t even have the guts to talk to me directly), or to absent herself when she fears something uncomfortable might occur is the exact opposite of supporting me, and certainly does not help me respect her more as a person.

It is apparent to me that I’m going to have to throw out everything she’s told me about family, and possibly go over her head in some cases. I still feel grateful to her for accepting me at all, and therefore have the impression that I should bend myself to whatever she requests in terms of the rest of the family. But I know that doesn’t give her the right to demand things that are not helpful. Since she’s putting the onus on me, I’m going to just have to go about this as I see fit.

So what changed? The only person she’s talked to my transition about so far is her husband, who obviously must have said some awful shit, in addition to “not in my house”! I can only surmise that this was a painful and uncomfortable conversation for her, and that afterward, she decided that she would never again put herself in the position of being an intermediary with any friend or family member. She must have also began to really dread what others in her family might think. Since she’s arranged her whole life so as to appease social convention and lived in constant dread and ignorance of what might lie outside of social norms (she is what you might call prissy and a prude), it is only natural that she would grossly overestimate our family’s potential for a negative reaction. She has, however, agreed to talk, a couple months from now, to the mother of a trans friend of mine, and I am going to try to arrange a conversation between her and my aunt before then. (She knows that my aunt and her sister in law from a previous marriage knows that I’m trans and that she’s offered to talk to her, but her shame is so great now that she doesn’t want to talk to her). Hopefully this will give her a different perspective that just that of her husband. Though I’m sure talking to the family won’t be easy, I think that once I do, and once she (hopefully) sees that their reaction is not as negative as she feared, she will be able to be much less fearful and more supportive.

On another note, though it wasn’t the end of the world, it did feel really weird to spend days with someone who was referring to me by my given name with female pronouns and (in Spanish) feminine adjective endings, who plainly did not consider me a man. She told me that she wasn’t ready to switch yet, and I told her that was understandable and fine, but still it felt… very unpleasant, dysphoric, and depressing. I felt like I did at the beginning of my transition, when it seemed like my gender and my right to be male were in doubt and I constantly had to “prove” who I was. On a brighter note, though, even on the first night, she did throw in some masculine adjective endings without visibly pausing and trying. It would seem that, though she says she still sees me as a woman, my maleness is nevertheless coming through to her subconsciously such that she can’t consistently linguistically categorize me as female. Finally, though, again, it wasn’t the end of the world, I find it really unpleasant to have to tell my transition story to someone, to explain the effects of testosterone, and to allow them to comment on precisely which body parts seem to have changed and which still appear female just because that person is a family member. Normally, I would only have this conversation with people I trust. Again, though, I suppose I accept that mothers have the right to certain intimate commentary.