CW: some discussion of sex
This is a bit of a ramble but I don't have anybody to talk to about it, so here goes.
I am a cis woman. Over the years I've slowly gone from being quite feminine – although I always said "girly" since I had an alternative fashion sense that didn't feel like what I would see called feminine or even femme – to butch. And I fucking love it! For a while I wondered if it might be a phase but I feel so comfortable and happy this way. Two things that clinched it was letting my hair grow out for a year because I was trying to save money and trying to wear makeup again (I stopped in 2020 but I still have all my old stuff). I used to love my long hair and lipstick, but now they felt like some kind of dumb cosplay. The more masculine features of my body are also the ones I find most attractive and want to emphasize. I have a thin, natural mustache that I stopped shaving, I started working out to build arm muscles, I even looked into getting a binder because I have a big chest and wish it were smaller. I have wondered if I wanted to pursue low dose T. I thought about using a more masculine nickname and only decided not to because my name is a family one that means a lot to me. I bought a soft packer and honestly I love it. Sometimes I will wear it, flatten my chest (temporarily!) with tape, and just hang out like that and even though I'm too shy to go out in public, it's super satisfying. I'm considering getting a binder, packing, and just hanging out like that at Pride this year to see what it's like.
So obviously at this point I would be silly not to wonder if I am trans. I live in a relatively liberal area and work in a young workplace, so I showed up and many of my coworkers defaulted to using they/them for me despite the fact that I had she/her as my pronouns in my email signature and Slack. I decided not to correct anyone and treat this as a natural experiment with they/them and the conclusion I came to is that it feels wrong every time and I hate it. However, I do not infrequently get called he/him, sir, or a guy by strangers and I love it! So I spent a while wondering, am I a trans man? But despite the fact that I really like the men in my life, the idea of being a man seems like another kind of cosplay. Being anything except a masculine woman feels like a real downgrade. Being female has never been a particularly meaningful identity to me until I thought about changing it.
One of the pieces that I haven't mentioned here is that I used to have a wonderful circle of queer friends and be very connected to my community, but after the pandemic and then moving home to help take care of my elderly parents, I just don't anymore. Lately I've been thinking back to how in the 2000s it wasn't uncommon for people to identify as bigender, or to ID as genderqueer but use the pronouns of their assigned sex at birth. Some of those people have since transitioned or changed pronouns, but some haven't. I also thought about how common it is for gay men to use she, or girl, or take about having an inner woman. Again some of them eventually transition but some of them don't. When I've considered if I want to transition it sort of felt... Rote, I guess? And remembering that there are so many different ways of being, but also that when I was younger I was in spaces where I might have been able to talk to people about this or try stuff out but now I'm not was really helpful for me. I love drag kings and would love to be one, except that I'm a middle aged person with a bum knee who can't dance. I had an ex who IDed as female at the time but would sometimes present as a "male alter ego" with a different name. (Full disclosure, my ex has since transitioned).
Now we get to the most awkward thing which is that masculinizing my body, getting called a man, cross-dressing, etc is uh, hot. It's sexy. A huge part of my fantasies involve me being called a man, me cross-dressing, me being taught or forced to be more masculine. Obviously I don't only do it because it's sexy but I can't pretend it's not also hot. And part of me is like so what if I'm a woman who wants to be a man sometimes during sex! Would that be so bad??? I read Miss Vera's Cross Gender Fun for All and a lot of it really spoke to me. But then I get very self conscious. Trans people have done so much work making the world understand that it's not a kink it feels disrespectful for me to show up and be like "But actually it is a kink for me!" Also uh, the one time I tried to connect with someone to explore this, he was definitely weirded out by the fact that I didn't ID as trans. And female-to-male cross-dressing is definitely a rarer kink than the other way around even if I think the appeal, for me, is similar.
I don't really know how to wrap this up, I know it's rambly and there is a lot going on. Has anyone gone through a similar experience or had a friend who did? Do you have thoughts, suggestions for other avenues of exploration, or anything else?