Transmasculine Femininity
There's something I've noticed a lot in the transmasculine people in my circles. I've probably seen this over 20 individual times by now and I'm honestly very interested in it, I've had a couple conversations with people who feel like this and this is what I've gathered.
There's this phenomenon I see time and time again where I meet someone who was socially assigned female for a good chunk of time, usually most of their lives, then they socially transition masculinely and eventually get on hormones. After about a year or more, they start questioning their genders again, wondering how much masculinity really fits with their senses of self. They start reexploring femininity, playing with feminine pronouns and sometimes partly or fully identifying as women, potentially for the first time or maybe for the second.
I've seen a lot of discussion on this, some say transmasculine people are just trying to identify with femininity again to avoid being seen as having male privilege. While that may be the case some of the time, I also meet transmascs who do earnestly identify with femininity and not so much with masculinity anymore, in a way similar to many of the transfeminine people whose gender journeys I've had the pleasure to help navigate.
I've had curious thoughts on this for a while, noticing many expressed fear about being labelled "detransitioners" or "reappropriating transfeminine experiences", something that the large contemporary wave of detransitoned grifters, transmisogynists and discourse has made a greater concern.
I can't speak to this personally however with what the people I've talked to have said, I suspcect that what these people really feel is an incongruence (or discomfort) with traditional female cisheternormative gender norms. The ones that determine you must have a specific body (breasts, a vagina, feminine appearance, a functioning uterus, etc.), identify a specific way (identify as a [cis] female and use she/her) and relate to people a specific way (to partner with [cis] men and be passive intimately). To me, this is different from femininity and womanhood as many women tend to experience it, many women don't entirely embody all of these standards, cis and trans. I, for example, see the parts of my body often considered masculine femininely, such as my genitals. Real women in this way vary, they identify a myriad of different ways and have millions of different-looking bodies. Any woman who falls short of these standards though is punished, typically with misogyny though trans women are additionally punished with transphobia.
I notice some transmasculine people don't identify with these standards and in the beginning of their gender journeys, they may believe this to be a general discomfort with femininity and womanhood though later, once changing their bodies and their social position, they feel more comfortable embodying femininity and/or womanhood. It's my theory that their discomfort has more to do with what's expected of a cisgender woman, rather than all of what can be associated with womanhood. It's not exactly something you can express pretransition because if you're socially assigned female, any expression of womanhood or femininity will be associated with the female standard you're held to everyday. Once that social assignment changes, once people see you more masculinely or neutrally, your expressions of femininity are no longer held to the same standard. People don't expect "cis" from you anymore which is freeing for some.
While I've seen some trans women with mixed feelings on this matter, it makes me personally feel a lot better about my own experience with womanhood to see people embracing it openly in a way that's different from cis women's. While I don't think of myself as very different from a cis woman, socially I've had a pretty different experience. I often feel ashamed of that experience though people who teach me womanhood can look many ways help me build my confidence back up again.
This is all to say if you relate to any of this, I have a lot of appreciation for you. Regardless of what you choose to identify with, how your sense of self evolves as you figure out your gender journey, I love you quite a lot. Different ways of exploring transness are beautiful and make me very hopeful about the future of our community.
I have noticed a somewhat similar phenomenon among transfeminine people though much less common, there are many reasons for this that I might go over another time.
