The best thing about transitioning has been the relief of no longer having to perform masculinity.
Lately, I've been reflecting on why I feel so much better. I'm just over a year and a half into my transition now. Even though I'm still pretty androgynous and spend a lot of time boymoding, I'm not really treated as a man anymore in any of my social circles. And when I do dress super femme (or atleast try too), I just feel like me. I've never felt more certain of who I am.
Now that I've allowed this feminine side of myself to exist openly, I realize it was always there. I just didn't have the words for it. It felt vague, distant, and difficult to grasp. It was buried so deeply beneath years of suppression that I couldn't see it clearly.
What I didn't realize was how much I hated performing masculinity.
Not just the expectations placed on men, but the role itself.
It felt like I'd been put into a box that never quite fit. A box everyone else seemed perfectly comfortable with. A box so normal that nobody questioned it. Everyone silently agreed that this was just how things were supposed to be, and if someone didn't fit inside it properly, people reacted with confusion, discomfort, or outright hostility.
For years I thought the problem was me.
Then one day I tripped, fell, and knocked the box over.
Wait. There's more outside of this?
There's a whole world out here.
Because it turns out I wasn't comfortable in that box at all. I was suffocating in it. I just didn't realize it because I'd spent so long convincing myself that struggling to breathe was normal.
The freedom that came with stepping outside of it is difficult to describe.
Even when I encounter transphobia, I still feel lighter. The way I carry myself now is unmistakably queer. Most people read it as gay or feminine, or at the very least not traditionally masculine. And that alone brings me relief, because no matter how someone perceives me, I'm no longer being seen as a cis straight man.
And that's important because those were never things I was meant to be.
I spent so much of my life trying to force myself into an identity that wasn't mine, believing that if I just tried harder I'd eventually become comfortable with it.
What I discovered instead is that living inauthentically drains you in ways you don't even notice. It becomes background noise. A constant exhaustion that you mistake for normal life because you've never known anything else.
And you realize how heavy it all was.
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