Uh Oh! Gender Time!
Let's do something fun that everyone loves.
Let's talk about GENDER
As a preface, though: This isn't an essay or even commentary so much as it is structured navel-gazing/word vomit that's more of an attempt to structure my thoughts than anything else. I'm going to say a few things that will, at first glance, scan as accusations or condemnations. While they do come from a place of earnest frustration, though, the intent isn't hostile so much as it is irritated; shockingly enough, I don't think it's a crime for 21 year olds who've been out to themselves for a grand total of 11 months and two weeks to be kind of annoying and/or wrong about things.
Now, anyone who's known me for a long time has known that I've bounced around identities... A lot. One of my oldest online friends in these circles jokingly claimed that they've been around to see me use every non-neo pronoun in the book, which is undeniably true; I've been around the block. Despite my incredibly capricious nature, my endless turns on the gender merry-go-round were born of completely different circumstances. To give you a bit of background, as of August 16th 2026 I'll have been out to myself for 16 years. In Trans Years this makes me significantly older than almost all of my friends regardless of biological age. In practical terms this means that I came to the realization after the internet had slowly started to get tired of 4chan-level 'ironic' bigotry but before the first initial Digital Social Justice push that would come in the years to follow.
Being trans online in this period - let's just say 2010-2014 for sanity's sake - was... Weird. Both at the time and in hindsight. The 'trans community' as people call it nowadays didn't exactly exist, it was moreso disparate and highly insular enclaves that sometimes intersected but not often. Fellow transfemmes were rare enough that I often did make friends with them purely on the basis "we're both trans" but all of these things had unpleasant knock-on effects. The most obvious one being that, to put it bluntly, cis people had too much influence over these spaces. I typically keep this stereotype private, but whenever my friends mention they're in a queer Discord server with a cisfemme mod, I have to ask if they're a bisexual IT administrator/technician who gets really mad at you if you don't shave. This 'stereotype', actually just a reflection of the people who were hosting the IRC/mumble/whatever chats that my nascent queers years were spent in, arguably did more to set back my gender journey than any of the stuff we'll get to later. I hate to psychoanalyze randos I met online, but we sorta have to understand their psyche before proceeding. Even in my earlier, angstier babyqueer years - mercifully swept out to sea by the tides of link rot and space collapse - I was much, much cooler with masculinity and engaging in the social pantomime of boyhood than many of my peers. For these people, friendly or not, they were absolutely obsessed with womanhood. Which is fine! Transfemininity is perhaps defined by the pursuit of womanhood. But the pitfall they fell into, while also dragging me in with them, was the equation of womanhood with femininity.
Humans are sponges by default; being young, hormonal, ostracized and autistic are all force multipliers individually let alone altogether. I'm not ashamed to admit that I went into those spaces as someone comfortable with their masculinity and then developed a complex about it from exposure. For several entire years I dealt with a strange form of dysphoria that, to my absolute befuddlement, seemed to get worse when I engaged in the performance of femininity. In the middle of this time period was the relative Boom of trans people online - misrepresented as a social force and not, you know, trans people gradually finding spaces they feel comfortable being in - and with this brought its own problems. Alongside this was a strong push to "kill gender" by well-intentioned but ultimately misled people who were smart enough to understand societal gender roles as an oppressive (in every sense of the word) force but still too much of a neonate to really grasp why gender persists even in deeply marginalized communities. What was ultimately a bunch of jaded activists saying "kill gender" as a way to vent frustration to their 16 Tumblr followers - 13 if we discount pornbots - quickly became an earnest rallying cry for the aforementioned neonates. The result, which mercifully dissipated fairly quickly, was that actively enjoying the gender pantomime became taboo.
I debated excising this segment but ultimately decided against because, muddy as it is, it's still very important. Put simply, I got very unlucky with a lot of my early queer friends. They were predominantly cis people who had no real idea how to behave around trans people and in turn their behaviour betrayed their biases, though this was only truly apparent in hindsight. To them, if you were cis then femininity was something you could simply do. A guy could decide to grow his hair out and wears poorly-applied eyeliner and he was seen as being feminine. A cis woman cuts her hair short and starts wearing pants to work and she's doing a masculinity. For trans people, though, they explicitly treated femininity and masculinity as something that they had to go on a journey to attain. That they could do wrong. I used to hold a lot of resentment over this - targeted specifically at cis people who were genuinely scandalized that I and several others had no interest in doing voice training - but time has dulled that. See, I've come to the conclusion that the behaviour they displayed is not unlike the behaviour able-bodied or neurotypical people exert towards the disabled. When you're visibly or knowingly disabled, there's a marked shift in their attitudes which sees them treat everything as part of some 'journey'. It's just infantilization, and they don't even know it.
The actually dangerous part of this, though, is that for the first 4 entire years of my queer life, my friend circles were mostly populated by cis lesbians, and boy howdy if you think gold star lesbianism is a myth that nobody is really into, I'm here to break your heart. I'm skipping over a novel's worth of text, though. The relevant part is that, for a demographic that was explicitly trying to escape the real world and the men in it, trans women posed a genuine crisis to them. The ones that genuinely considered themselves 'woke' would still nonetheless experience visibly discomfort if a trans woman flirted with them and for the most part only considered trans women "real" if they were aspiring to an almost assimilationist ideal of femininity. The others were essentially crypto-TERFs waiting to crack, clearly seeing trans women as "male invaders" and were always keen to remove or ostracize them. These ones aren't really the damaging ones; the former were arguably much worse due to them putting in far, far too much effort to get babytranses to chase cisfemininity as the ideal. That you, too, could be a gold star lesbian if you completely excised your 'inner man'. That one isn't me dramatizing; it's a real quote.
The other biggest obstacle to my butch apotheosis was, put plainly and perhaps coldly, other trans people. I already understand why: When your egg cracks you're incredibly likely to develop an aversion to whatever gender performance you were doing before and all associated signifiers. For trans women this more often than not manifests as hatred of things like facial/body hair, "male hobbies" (a laughable term) and the like. In private I call this "woke cooties" for various reasons. I feel bad even saying all this even though it's demonstrably true. But the part that stuck with me for ages was the burgeoning transfemme stereotypes. These stereotypes, often positing trans women as socially anxious losers with such poor emotional regulation that they need a stuffed animal to offset it, who only play games made during or before 2010 and just want to be dominated by a strong woman who conspicously performs all the same roles as a male authority figure, kinda repelled me. They triggered... not dysphoria, but a distinct sense of unbelonging. 'Community' was now a thing I could find online by just posting about Selvaria Bles in a milking machine, yet it was anathema to me. Two magnets with the same polarity.
I'm skipping over a mountain of kvetching about my loathing for the terms "AMAB", "AFAB", "TME" and "TMA" to get to the point: Ironically, it was my umbrage with the way younger queers keep using "butch" and "femme" that prompted me to lock in. Mostly. I love butches and femmes, make no mistake, it's arguably one of the few queer-related parts of my Self that hasn't changed much since its inception. But the way "butch" and "femme" are deployed has kinda... struck me the wrong way, you know? I see people use "butch" not as a term to refer to someone who is a butch, but to refer to an extremely specific identity of a withdrawn dominant masculine figure who also acts like an 'owner' or predator in the bedroom. A 'femme' conversely is a dainty maiden who essentially fulfills every outdated stereotype of "arm candy" and exists mostly as a prey animal or like, a trophy. Or, even worse, people just use "butch" and "femme" to mean "man" or "woman". If you've known me for ages you'll likely be familiar with how much the vibe tangibly gets more intense when someone uses "top" and "bottom" as personality signifiers and this is a far, far more destructive version of that. Thing is, I could forgive people being annoying about "top" and "bottom" because those weren't really that important. "Butch" and "femme" are real people's identities, man. Do you know how fucking bad it feels to spend years befriending people who identify that way and then slowly come to realize that a lot of people think that all butches are predator and all femmes are prey?
If we're being serious, though, what kinda skeeves me out about the contemporary application of those terms is that they're applied to other people without their consent at all. It's not inherently wrong to say that butches trend masculine and femmes trend feminine - these are quite literally the definition of the terms - but like... They're opt-in identities. Using them as stand-ins for "masculine" or "feminine" rubs me the wrong way because they're subversions of 'standard' masculinity and femininity. A femme is engaging in femininity but they are not engaging with it the way every other feminine person on earth is. A butch can be your daddy, but he's doing masculinity the way Yer Da is. Even if they dress the same. I'm not going to pretend I have the same understanding of butch-femme as someone who's spent a decade or more mired in that culture, but I know enough to cringe all the same.
To tell you the truth: Before the butch enlightenment, I was considering socially detransitioning. The way queer people online talk about gender and identity has backslid so heavily from the optimism of 2016 that it's often hard to tell it apart from radfem rhetoric. People have started defining transness not by any form of joy or comfort, but by torment. I mentioned that I loathed "TME" and "TMA" and part of it is because those terms triggered a crisis. Again, I am quite comfortable with my masculinity. Even to those I'm out to, my social performance isn't tied to my gender and any attempt to 'misgender' me just provides lefthanded euphoria. So, in short, I don't really experience transmisogyny, but the rhetoric about people who self-identify as "TMA" is that they're the 'real' trans women. Meaning: If I don't experience it the way they do, am I not real? Have I just been doing a bit for 16 years? I can act flippant in text but make no mistake: These are foundation-shaking questions to ask myself.
Alright. I lied. You got me. It was Don Quixote that made me unsheathe the butch sword. You may've noticed that I keep saying shit like "gender performance" and "gender pantomime" and that's not just me being fruity with it. In my long path to butchness I came to understand that gender is inherently performance, and even choosing not to play is still engaging with it. But, further to the mission statement of this word vomit, this understanding also made me realize that I'd been doing the routines of butchness for most of my queer life, and that my worst mental states usually correlated to the periods where I was trying something else. Alonso Quijano looks at the world he occupies and comes to an intuitive understanding: That it's all performance. Nobles act like nobles to maintain their nobility, priests act as priests to fulfill their role as a priest, kings act as kings to enforce their own legitimacy, so on so forth. So he, in his understanding, dispenses with Alfonso and becomes Don Quixote. And everyone laughs at him. They think he's an idiot. But when they jeer, they jeer at Don Quixote. They don't jeer at Alonso. His self-perfomance becomes so all-encompassing that even engaging with it negatively is still engaging with it.
And that was the key that unlocked the madness vault. I could angst about "doing butchness right" yet that's a waste of time compared to simply doing butchness to begin with. I realized at some point that, honestly, my mistake was thinking I had to chase femininity to attain womanhood. But womanhood is malleable. It's all just play, and while I could spend hours soaking in my own confused tears it's actually much more efficient to just throw on my sunglasses, leather jacket and boots before going up on stage. Even if I dance the wrong dance and make the wrong moves, I'm still dancing all the same. In college, my statistics professor told me something that's applicable to much more than Microsoft Excel: If you write a shitty first draft, you can fix it later. Someone else can go through it with a red pen and help you out. It can, with enough elbow grease, stop being shitty. If you spend weeks agonizing over the first draft, there's nothing to fix, so it'll always be shite.
So yeah, gender is a lot like Don Quixote.