Wanting vs Being

Consider the following three statements:

1. I wish I was a boy.
2. I should have been born a boy.
3. I am a boy.

Do these all mean the same, or something slightly different? That’s where I’m stuck at, in my gender-questioning process. I can say with absolute confidence that I believe I’d have been happier if I’d been raised as a boy instead of as a girl. I’ve been saying it for years, and while there’s no way to go back in time and perform the experiment I do strongly believe I’d have been a much happier, better adjusted child, adolescent, and young adult if I’d been born and raised a little boy and seen as male consistently.

Mind you, I never thought this at the time, at least as far as I remember. When I was a kid I thought of myself as a kid, not as a boy kid or a girl kid. I had a range of interests that didn’t particularly conform to any gender, and had no interest whatever in clothing- I dressed in whatever my mom picked out for me, which were generally pants and shirts, probably in neutral-to-girly colors. My genitals never distressed me (they still don’t- a fact I clung to stubbornly in my denial that what I was feeling couldn’t possibly be the same thing that trans people were talking about).

But after my personality began to take shape, and after my adolescence went spectacularly badly, I began to speculate about the ways in which I might have done better if I’d been raised a boy. An example: I learned relatively late to regulate my own emotions with stereotypically-male self talk. So, it followed that if I’d been hearing “toughen up” or “shake it off” from childhood, I could have avoided a lot of hardship that was only alleviated after I learned that this approach to emotion (more associated with boys than girls, at least in my experience) makes me feel strong and safe, while being gently encouraged to “talk about my feelings” makes me panicked and anxious.

For that, and for many other reasons, I now think that I’d have been happier being raised as a boy. But, does it follow that I want to become one now? As a masculine woman, how would this differ from the way people already see me and relate to me? Is being treated as an unofficial “honorary guy” by most people good enough, or is there some reason to seek official man status? I just don’t know. Sometimes I think “I want to be a guy” and it sounds right to me. Sometimes it sounds vaguely ridiculous.

And then there’s that last statement: “I AM a boy” which still seems as though it would sound pretty nonsensical if I were to say it. But, is that really what I mean when I say things like “my personality would have been better suited to being raised a boy”? Is there some essential maleness or femaleness inside of me that can be discerned if I put in enough concerted mental effort? I wonder, and I doubt, and then again I wonder. I continue not to fully understand what its supposed to feel like to be male, or to be female, and I feel frustrated by my lack of a clear signal in one direction or the other.

Bound/Unbound

I always knew I wasn’t exactly keen on having breasts. I didn’t obsess about it, or anything, just preferred that area to look as flat as possible. Although I had some idea that I might like wearing a binder, month after month I put off buying one. It seemed like buying a binder would be making too much of a fuss over a minor inconvenience. Instead, I wore sports bras and wore my men’s clothes a little baggy and in layers, and anxiously looked sideways at my chest in mirrors or store windows when I thought no one was looking.

Once I began asking myself if I might really, truly, rather be a dude (something I spent a long time carefully NOT asking myself, and sometimes wish I’d never asked myself- whole lotta worms in that there can), the first action I took was to order myself a binder. (I got this one, by the way, in case you’re interested). It was an obvious first step because I already dressed as male, and because I knew my wife, Ask, was already okay with it.

(My binder came last Friday. Ask helped me into it. I’ve since learned to put it on unaided, but man, is it a challenge. The trick, I found, not to let the material bunch up while you’re pulling it over your shoulders. This is easier said than done while you’re struggling with all your might to get your arms into the damn thing.)

I figured I’d like binding, but I was not at all prepared for how strongly I responded to it. When I looked at myself flat-chested in the bathroom mirror I wasn’t just pleased, I was downright giddy. My chest looked like a man’s! I looked FANTASTIC! With clothing on, it was even MORE amazing! I was over-the-moon about the difference, and I never wanted to take it off again.

Perhaps the biggest change was that when I look at myself while I’m binding I don’t think I look fat. Not even a little bit. This was a revelation because, before binding, I could never look in a mirror without thinking that I ought to lose some weight and worrying about how fat I was. I always thought I understood the reasons for this- I had a severe eating disorder for many years and, though I considered myself fully recovered, I figured these stray negative thoughts about my weight would always be with me. While I had some idea that my anorexia and bulimia might have had more to do with gender than I or anybody at the time had recognized, I didn’t expect binding to cure a body image problem I’d assumed was permanent. It felt like magic. It still feels like magic. I’m not fat- I just don’t want to have breasts on my body.

Man Pride

When I consider the possibility of transition, I worry about that that I could go from being seen as a masculine woman only to become a markedly effeminate man.

I understand that this can be a touchy subject. We live in a highly sexist culture, one which devalues femininity, even insults men by calling them women. In such a climate it’s hard to celebrate masculinity in oneself and others without participating in age old tropes of male supremacy and female inferiority. So, let me just say right now that I’ve got nothing but love and respect for effeminate men. There’s nothing wrong with femininity in men, or in women, or in non-binary genderqueers, and the fact that our culture teaches us differently is abominable.

That being said, I have an idea of who I am as a person, and that person is not an effeminate one. My youthful heroes were always men of a particular type- intellectual, but almost obnoxiously masculine. The archetypal example would be Hemingway- although I’ve always preferred Vonnegut. Here’s another good example: Sam Waterston’s character, Jack McCoy, from Law and Order. I goddamn love Jack McCoy- he’s exactly the man I wish that I’d grown up into.

When I was younger I kinda thought I really would grow up to be someone like Kurt Vonnegut or Jack McCoy- but I never pictured myself specifically as male or female. I guess I figured that being Jack McCoy was perfectly compatible with being female, because my femaleness was a biological reality, while my Jack McCoyness was a psychological reality, and I didn’t fully realize that other people might be unable to see it.

I had a tough adolescence and young adulthood (maybe I’ll write about it one day, but not today). For now, suffice to say that I was not able to successfully launch myself as an arrogant, casually sexist, domineering-but-brilliant TV lawyer. What I eventually settled on was a masculine presentation in a female body- a butch lesbian woman.

A butch lesbian woman’s masculinity is the most obvious thing about her. It’s the sole reason that she differs from other women, so people notice it. Even if she’s got some feminine mannerisms or vocal tics, a butch’s masculinity remains clear and unquestioned. But men are expected to be masculine already, which means you have to be pretty damn masculine to be seen as a masculine man, while being seen as an effeminate man doesn’t take all that much femininity. As a person who considers my masculinity to be a defining characteristic, the fear of being seen as an effeminate man is the fear of being seen as something vastly different from the way I see myself. I don’t want to be an effeminate man, but I worry that I wouldn’t make a very masculine one.

My name is… something, and I’m a… something.

What does it feel like, to be male or female?

That’s the question I keep going back to. What does it mean to be one or the other? What difference does it make, what clothes a person wears, or what their body looks like?

A datapoint: When I first put men’s clothes on, it felt as if my whole life I’d been wearing an uncomfortable, ill-fitting costume and never realized it.

I’ve often joked that I would like to be a disembodied intelligence, a transhumanist uploading myself into the computer and living forever as pure information. For the past four years I’ve lived as a butch lesbian, and I’ve been happier and more comfortable that way than any time in my life previously. My wife and I have talked at times, most often when we had been drinking, about my gender and whether it might be more complicated than most peoples. But, I resisted actually seeing myself that way or even thinking too hard about what it all might mean until more recently.

More recently… ugh. Let’s just say that there were several things that led me in the direction of finally confronting myself, of asking what I meant when I said things like “I’d have been happier being raised as a boy” or “I think if I’d been born a boy my whole life would have been easier”. A friend asked me to join a trans group on Facebook. Someone told me that I should say “cis butch lesbian” to distinguish myself from trans butch lesbians, and I rebelled against that designation because it seemed to me that no one who was a butch lesbian could actually want to be a woman. This seemed obviously transphobic, so I thought harder, and I wondered if maybe what I really meant was that I wasn’t a cis butch lesbian, and never had been.

A datapoint: Wearing a binder makes me ridiculously happy. I never knew I hated my chest so much until I saw myself without it. I never want to wear a bra again.

So now I’m one of the questioning people. One of the people who don’t know who they are. One of the wishy-washy people who use words like “evolving” and “my journey” without irony. Good lord, what I’d give not to be. To know, and always have known, exactly who I was and what I wanted. But so far, all of my revelations have come after the fact. After I put men’s clothes on. After I tried wearing a binder. After I ordered a soft packer, and tried wearing it. I don’t know what I am. I might be butch. I might be trans. I might be agender, or genderqueer, or transmasculine, or a trans guy. All I know right now is that I need to keep going.